[Salon] The Embrace of Vladimir Putin By Some On The Right Is Reminiscent Of The Embrace Of Stalin By Some On The Left In The 1930s And 1940s

THE EMBRACE OF PUTIN BY SOME ON THE RIGHT IS REMINISCENT
       OF THE EMBRACE OF STALIN BY SOME ON THE LEFT IN THE 1930s AND 1940s
                                                   By
                               ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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It is sad to see history repeating itself as some on America’s right-wing are now embracing Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he launches an attack upon Ukraine in the same way many on the left-wing embraced Josef Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s.

Putin, a long time KGB agent, is running a country which does not have free elections or a free press. Opposition leaders are in prison. There have been deadly assaults by Putin’s government on Russians who support democracy while abroad, as in the United Kingdom. Why any American would find such a regime congenial is difficult to understand.

Yet, as Putin moves into neighboring Ukraine, in clear violation of international law, former President Donald Trump has called his invasion plan “genius” and has hailed Putin’s “savvy” in sending “the strongest peacekeeping force in the world” to invade Ukraine. What is in Mr. Trump’s mind in referring to an invading army as “peacekeepers?”

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had “great respect” for Vladimir Putin. And Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson is regularly shown on Russian television praising the Russian leader. Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes laments those on the right who embrace Putin. He notes that, “By now, the cast of Putin’s useful idiots is familiar, ranging from Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley to Candace Owens and Maria Bartiromo.”

Alexander Vindman, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. who served as director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, accused some on the right-wing of fanning the flames and encouraging Putin to invade Ukraine. He declared that, “These people will have blood on their hands. They are fanning flames and encouraging Putin to attack Ukraine.” He shared a video of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton received the majority of her financial donations from Ukraine during her 2016 presidential race.

This strange embrace of an aggressive autocrat is, unfortunately, all too familiar. I worked in the U.S. Senate during the Cold War and was involved with organizing hearings about, among other things, religious persecution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The number of people who embraced Josef Stalin is shocking to recall. These were men and women who were intellectuals, clergymen, playwrights and politicians. Consider a few examples.

Lillian Hellman, the respected playwright, visited Russia in October 1937, when Stalin’s purge trials were at their height. On her return, she said she knew nothing about them. In 1938 she was among the signatories of an ad in the Communist publication New Masses, which approved the trials. She supported the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland.

A leading novelist who did his best to promote tyranny was Ernest Hemingway. Discussing Hemingway’s role in promoting the Soviet view of the Spanish Civil War, Paul Johnson in his book “Intellectuals,” writes that, “Hemingway accepted the Communist party line on the war in all its crudity. He paid four visits to the front, but even before he left New York he had decided what the civil war was all about and was already signed up for the propaganda film ‘Spain in Flames’…Hemingway said that the Spanish Communists were ‘the best people in the war.’”

The Quaker leader H.T. Hodgkin provided this assessment: “As we look at Russia’s great experiment in brotherhood, it may seem to us some dim perception of Jesus’ way, all unbeknown, is inspiring it.”

Such naïveté reached our highest political leaders. In 1944, Vice President Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore, professor at Johns Hopkins University, visited Magadan in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Far East, one of the most notorious places of detention and forced labor. Throughout their visit they remained unaware of having been in the midst of a complex of labor camps.

Wallace wrote: “At Magadan, I met Ivan Feodorivich Nikishev, a Russian director of Dalstroi (the Far Northern Construction Trust), which is a combination of Tennessee Valley Authority and Hudson’s Bay Co. On display in his office were samples of ore-bearing rocks in the region.”

Henry Wallace wrote that, “Today Magadan has 40,000 inhabitants and are all well housed…We were taken to an extraordinary exhibit of paintings in embroidery…made by a group of local women who gathered regularly during the severe winter to study needlework.”

Henry Wallace never understood that what he had been visiting was a massive Soviet slave labor camp. Or consider journalist I.F. stone who hailed the new Soviet constitution of 1936. He wrote: “There is only one party , but the introduction of the secret ballot offers the workers and peasants a weapon against bureaucratic and inefficient officials and their policies.” W.E.B. Du Bois, the black intellectual, thought that, “He (Stalin) asked for neither adulation nor vengeance. He was reasonable and conciliatory.”

We could fill,pages with such examples of indifference to tyranny. In the past, this indifference was largely found on the left. Today, it is elements of the right-wing who are sounding like the left-wing apologists for tyranny in the past.   Genuine conservatives must disassociate themselves from this vocal minority within their ranks. If aggression is permitted to succeed in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will only be encouraged to pursue his goal of recreating as much of the old Soviet Union as he can. Ronald Reagan presided over the end of the Cold War. One wonders what he would think of those Republicans who now embrace Vladimir Putin.