Why Putin’s Defenders Are Increasingly American

In mid-September, internet sleuths scoured the website of an obscure Russian organization, the International Club of National Unity. Populated by various Russian politicians, state media propagandists, and security services operatives, the club declares that it was created in “accordance with Decrees of the President of the Russian Federation.” Although the club claims to support “humanitarian missions to the peoples of Ukraine … and other countries facing dire straits” on the basis of “respect, peace, harmony, and mutual assistance,” many of the supernumeraries associated with it are vocal advocates of nuclear strikes against Western capitals and Ukrainian cities.

What makes this instrument of Russian propaganda unusual, however, is that it contains the names of several Americans as members of its leadership team. The most prominent is Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, who has promoted Kremlin talking points that delegitimize the Ukrainian state, including the canard that the 2014 Maidan Revolution was a coup backed by the United States. The recent evolution of Sachs from a widely respected academic to a willing propagandist for a dictatorial regime perpetrating an increasingly bloody and genocidal war cannot be explained without examining the phenomenon of the fellow traveler.

The term “fellow traveler” has a long pedigree. It appeared in the early days of the Soviet Union, when the nascent communist state sought external support and hoped to foment revolutions in the capitalist world. Today, the term has come to describe a range of Western public figures who sympathize with Russia, its leadership, and its war.

Following Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the eastern Donbas in 2014, many of these allies were European. Nowadays, however, they are predominantly American and span the political spectrum. To be sure, one can still find pro-Kremlin stalwarts in Europe, such as former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, who now lives in St. Petersburg. Both used to work for Russian energy companies. However, many of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s former European admirers, such as French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, have become critics of Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022. Ironically, as parts of the European right have tempered their support for the Kremlin, Americans are now supplanting them.

At the annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June, Putin’s American fellow travelers were highly visible, with right-wing podcaster Candace Owens the star of the show. Sachs—who is now a frequent guest on the TV show hosted by Vladimir Solovyov, the most virulent Russian cheerleader for annihilating Ukrainians and bombing Western cities—participated by video from New York. After attending the forum, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who are wanted in Britain on charges of rape and human trafficking, visited a Russian military training ground. They broadcast their positive views of Russia and its military to their predominantly young male global following. Since then, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, who blames the West for Putin’s desire to crush Ukraine, also visited Moscow. Unsurprisingly, the Russian government has used Mearsheimer’s statements to justify its war on Ukraine.

These are not the only prominent Americans in thrall to the Kremlin and its narratives. Others include former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, film director Oliver Stone, Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, right-wing influencer Steve Bannon, and former U.S. National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. During her trip to Russia, Owens was interviewed by another fellow traveler, former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez. He is now based in Moscow, where he hosts the Kremlin’s flagship English-language news program on RT, a propaganda channel banned in the United States and Europe since 2022.

Like Carlson before her, Owens praised Moscow’s supposed cleanliness and safety while insisting that any distrust of Russia is an unnecessary “Cold War hangover.” Both Carlson and Owens unwittingly echo the words of fellow traveler Lion Feuchtwanger, an exiled German novelist and playwright who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s mass terror and genocidal famine, Feuchtwanger mused that “everywhere in that great city of Moscow there was an atmosphere of harmony and contentment, even of happiness.”

To be sure, today’s Russia supporters are a pale shadow of the Western luminaries who sympathized with Moscow in the past, including artists such as Picasso and Fernand Leger, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and writers such as André Gide, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, and even (briefly) W. H. Auden. Today’s Russia-aligned voices may lack artistic and literary greatness, but they make up for it with their vast social media audiences and wide-ranging influence on the MAGA movement.

How, then, should we understand what motivates these contemporary allies of a militaristic, repressive society? One place to start is by examining the Kremlin’s original Western allies. To that end, I recently dove into David Caute’s The Fellow-Travellers, a comprehensive 1973 history of the phenomenon during the Soviet era.

Caute’s book explains that the main impulse of the original fellow travelers stemmed from a belief in progress and the idea that society could be engineered from the top down. Caute also shows that their admiration for the Soviet project stemmed from their deep disillusionment with their home countries and the West in general. Many of these Western intellectuals were concerned about the rise of fascist movements in their countries and believed that communism could serve as a countervailing force.

Consequently, the fellow travelers often overlooked or even justified the regime’s heinous crimes, including the famine-induced genocide that the Stalin regime perpetrated in Ukraine in the early 1930s. At the height of the murderous wave of cultural and political repression known as the Great Terror, many Western intellectuals proudly stood with Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1937, for instance, a conference on “Peace and Friendship with the Soviet Union” in London was addressed by Dean of Canterbury Hewlett Johnson, book publisher Victor Gollancz, members of the British aristocracy, and Labour Party parliamentarians. Influential Western journalists played an especially pernicious role; chief among them was New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who became an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin and whitewashed Soviet crimes.

Just as it did then, today’s Kremlin propaganda seeks to win Western supporters by exploiting their discontents and anxieties. To the Western cultural right, the Kremlin emphasizes Russia’s supposed support for traditional values. To global altruists seeking to avert conflict with a nuclear power, the Kremlin offers Ukraine’s capitulation as the price of peace.

As Caute documents, the Soviet Union’s outreach was carried out by the Society of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which collaborated with Western communist parties, as well as by various Soviet friendship societies that targeted non-communists. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow’s foreign influence mechanisms disintegrated, only to be rebuilt under Russian President Vladimir Putin with fresh resources. When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin used these influence networks to spread its narrative that the invasion was actually an intra-Ukrainian civil war, cultivate critics of Ukraine, and denigrate its Western supporters. RT, as the Kremlin’s global, multi-language TV network, played a significant propaganda role.

Following the shutdown of RT in the West, Russia shifted its influence operations to social media. The Kremlin boosted influential voices opposed to the “woke agenda” of LBGTQ rights, secularism, and immigration, also targeting those hoping to avert a larger conflict with Russia and thus also susceptible to Moscow’s narratives. To support these aims, the Kremlin devoted extensive resources to a wide range of initiatives, including the Club of National Unity.

As part of the effort to win over the cultural right, Putin issued Decree 809 in November 2022. The document, titled “On the Approval of the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values,” is a broad attack on Western decadence and liberalism, counterposing Russia as a traditional, faith-based patriarchal society. The decree closely aligns with the Russian Orthodox Church, whose purged and infiltrated remnants became a major propagandist for the Soviet war effort under Stalin during World War II—and which has been controlled by the Kremlin ever since.

Enhanced propaganda efforts were also facilitated by the “Foundation for the Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad,” which secretly disbursed millions of dollars to organizations and individuals, primarily in Europe.

The Kremlin’s efforts to influence the U.S. right are well resourced. It has spent millions of dollars on U.S. influencers and podcasters, not to mention the social media visibility boost that Russia-friendly voices get from a vast network of Russian internet bots. In turn, American allies provide a media platform Russian propagandists such as Alexander Dugin, a far-right nationalist who has long been tasked by the Russian intelligence services with wooing right-wing ideologues in the West. American influencers who have platformed him include Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, helping them to propagate the view of Russia as a safe haven for Westerners who reject what they regard as the destructive liberal ideological agenda.

The phenomenon of otherwise reputable Western opinion leaders aligning with and fawning over murderous tyrants has a long pedigree on both the left and right. In the 1930s, the former British king and then Duke of Windsor; the industrialist Henry Ford; the aviator Charles Lindbergh, IBM CEO Thomas Watson, and French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline praised Hitler and the Nazi regime. Similar to Moscow, Berlin built an international network called Auslandsorganisation that sought to win Western public support through various propaganda activities. Fans of Mussolini’s fascism included Columbia University President Nicholas Butler Murray and the poet Ezra Pound. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the North Vietnamese dictatorship could count Mary McCarthy, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir among its sympathizers. Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda visited North Vietnam and expressed support for what they characterized as its anti-imperial agenda. Chomsky would later question the crimes of one of the most vicious 20th century murderers, Cambodia’s Pol Pot.

The through line that connects many of these fellow travelers is that they seem to be consumed by their domestic political or intellectual hatreds—including contempt for political opponents and various aspects of the societies they live in—to the point that they will embrace the most brutal, genocidal foreign regime: The enemy of my domestic enemy is my friend.

As Caute’s book explains, some of the original fellow travelers became disillusioned with Moscow after the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which allied Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the first two years of World War II, facilitating their joint invasion of Poland. Others only acknowledged their disaffection in the war’s aftermath as they witnessed Central Europe fall to communist tyranny. In 1949, several former sympathizers—including Gide, Stephen Spender, and Arthur Koestler—contributed to an anthology, The God that Failed, in which they reckoned with the roots of their support for Soviet rule, described their gradual disaffection, and acknowledged their moral failings. More fellow travelers fell away after Stalin’s death and the revelations of his crimes by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev; still others after Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and 1968 Prague Spring.

Will today’s generation of fellow travelers face a similar reckoning someday? There is little reason to hope for a change of heart. Past generations were aided in their reckoning by the fact that most of Stalin’s mass crimes occurred in darkness. Later revelations led many to reject him. Today’s Putin cheerleaders, by contrast, live at a time when virtually everything is known about the nature of Putin’s regime. There is abundant digital and eyewitness evidence of Russia’s systematic war crimes in Ukraine, including unspeakable horrors inflicted in the regions it occupies. Modern-day fellow travelers ignore these copiously documented facts or dismiss them as irrelevant.

Equally disturbing is their indifference to Putin’s system of censorship and political repression, which stifles free discussion and criminalizes any disapproval of his “special military operation.” U.S. podcasters and pundits who endlessly rail against the alleged suppression of free speech in the United States and present themselves as rigorous truth-seekers have no interest in how this issue is treated by Putin in Russia.

Stalin’s crimes were an order of magnitude greater than what Putin has managed so far. But the current crop of fellow travelers is more reprehensible and dangerous than those of the last century. While support for Stalin by prominent Westerners mattered morally, it had little practical effect—there was no credible way to stop him or avert his crimes. In contrast, the West today has the means to effectively counter Putin’s aggression. Today’s apologists for Putin, by fanning controversy and skewing the public debate, have the power to delay, slow down, or cut off needed aid to Ukraine. In doing so, they are actively contributing to Putin’s war. History will likely judge them far more harshly than their misguided predecessors.

Yet no one will be judged more harshly than the newest member of Putin’s circle of fellow travelers: U.S. President Donald Trump. For years, Trump has glorified Putin and expressed admiration for him while frequently showering Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with contempt. In recent days, however, Trump has gone far beyond expressing personal sympathy for Putin and crossed a geopolitical Rubicon. After initially shifting the United States from an outright ally of Ukraine to a neutral intermediary, Trump has both weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and, by lifting energy sanctions, provided the Kremlin with financial resources that will be deployed against Ukraine. It is disgraceful that he has chosen to do so while Russia is trying to render Ukraine’s major cities uninhabitable with escalating waves of attacks.

Near-universal condemnation of Trump’s alliance with Putin by other Western leaders, as well as substantial support for Ukraine in the Republican Party and its voter ranks, may yet force him to change course. But the cynical amorality of Trump’s latest actions will leave a permanent mark on his already controversial, disruptive, and disgraceful presidency.