The visits this week by Candace Owens and the Tate brothers to Moscow, showing the world what “they” don’t want you to know, have briefly set the internet ablaze. Not since Tucker Carlson had his mind blown by a trip to a grocery store have we seen such hard-hitting exposés of Western lies.

That’s one way to look at it, anyway. The other is that Owens, the Tates and Carlson are simply the most recent in a long line of useful idiots to visit Russia for a few days and do an authoritarian regime’s bidding by saying nice things about it.

The Russians are old hands at this game, of course, having pioneered the art of manipulating popular Western figures through hospitality a century ago. As Joseph Stalin discovered, it was incredibly simple. All you had to do to get famous novelists and thinkers to sing your praises was provide free tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre, arrange a banquet or two, take them on a tour of a model factory and flatter them relentlessly.

One of the most notorious examples of this was George Bernard Shaw, who was greeted by Stalin and enjoyed a fancy dinner in his honour on his birthday. Shaw later returned home denying the famine in Ukraine and Southern Russia while singing the praises of the “land of hope”. But there were many others. H.G. Wells met both Lenin and Stalin, and praised the USSR; Sidney and Beatrice Webb spent a few months in the country and upon their return published Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (it wasn’t really a question). The Nobel Prize-winning author Romain Rolland received the honour of reviewing a parade from the tribune of Lenin’s mausoleum, while André Gide was invited to speak at Maxim Gorky’s funeral, although he later grew disillusioned and came to regret his original enthusiasm.

After Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin, the idiots shifted their focus to Red China, where Mao applied the same playbook. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s visit in 1955 resulted in the latter’s book The Long March. André Malraux paid a visit and called Mao an “emperor of bronze”, while future French president François Mitterrand stopped by during the Great Leap Forward and denied there was a famine. After touring the country in the Seventies, Shirley MacLaine made a documentary and wrote a book echoing regime propaganda, including the claim that a physicist compelled to pick tomatoes found the experience just as rewarding as his scientific work.

When we look at the images Owens posted on her X feed, it is clear that in post-Soviet Russia modern celebrities follow much the same formula. The main thing that has changed is that, rather than visit a model factory, Owens toured some Orthodox churches and observed: “The Christian expression and heritage here is unmatched.”

It would be futile, of course, to point out the repression that, say, “unregistered Baptists” or Jehovah’s Witnesses face in Russia, or that even Vladimir Putin has shied away from inviting the Pope to Russia due to opposition from the Orthodox Church. And it would be futile to point out the many other things we know about Putin’s regime, because that’s not the point. The point is to get fresh content to add to the regular diet of tormenting a widow, fulminating about Israel and insisting that Brigitte Macron was born a man.

But if the benefit for Owens is clear, it’s less obvious what Putin’s regime gets from a few pro-Russia tweets from a podcaster. It’s a steep decline from George Bernard Shaw and Romain Rolland to Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Stalin got books and speeches and the praise of some of the leading intellectuals of his day; Putin gets a few social media posts from a handful of notorious bullshit artists. I’m almost embarrassed for him. Idiots they may be, but they are not very useful ones.

---

Daniel Kalder is an author based in Texas. Previously, he spent ten years living in the former Soviet bloc. His latest book, Dictator Literature, is published by Oneworld. He also writes on Substack: Thus Spake Daniel Kalder.

DanielKalder

---