Make America Russian again Trump yearns to be a tsar

America was not discovered by a Genoese adventurer in 1492. Even the most unenlightened American would struggle to make that mistake now that the very word “Columbus” has transitioned into a verb — meaning to claim something that existed way before you noticed it. Nor was America Columbused by Leif the Lucky, the Viking explorer thought to have stumbled upon the landmass 500 or so years before any other European on an excursion from his Greenland home.

No, the first — and only — humans ever to have discovered America were Russians. They did it 14,000 or so years ago, back in the late Pleistocene, following migrating herds of edible fauna across the landbridge that then connected the easternmost tip of Siberia and the westernmost point of North America. Here were monsters: dire wolves, short-faced bears, sabre-toothed tigers. But there were also huge creatures of abundant dumbness and blubber. It was an Eden of unimaginable plenty. And as with space, the Russians crossed the frontier first.

Now, I realise it is a stretch to call these pioneering Paleo-Siberians “Russian” — existing as they did thousands of years before the idea of the nation state even existed. Still, as a foundation story, this tar-deep history at least lends some much-needed grandeur to the emerging ambition of Tsar Donald’s second reign — Make America Russian Again. How else to read the world’s richest and most powerful nation’s craven subordination to Vladimir Putin and its abandonment of America’s Ukrainian and European allies? The charitable interpretation is that Trump and the boy Vance are avenging the genocide that the native Americans, the descendants of those Siberian wanderers, experienced at the hands of the post-1492 Europeans. Now, they are pivoting back to their true mother country. And if they can grab back Greenland too, well, screw you Vikings — not feeling so lucky now, are you?

As silly as all this may seem, it’s hardly less implausible than the current working scenario, recently outlined by Britain’s former defence secretary Ben Wallace. In this reading, Trump and Vance are “clueless” dupes — victims of Russian propaganda, wilfully naive. They have spent so much time in their MAGA feedback loop that they have come to believe every piece of post-truth fanned their way by Putin’s disinformation machine. Democratic ideals don’t matter; the sovereignty of random backwaters like Ukraine doesn’t matter. The rule of law, the free press, free trade, freedom of speech: all this is so much wokery. All that matters is money and power and the preservation of Trump’s ego as the world’s biggest bully, its Nelson Muntz, haha.

And if you find it hard to believe that the World’s Greatest Democracy could elect a leader that dumb — well the only remaining alternative is that Trump is doing all of this on purpose. He has seen what Putin has achieved in Russia and he wants the same for America — or rather, for himself. Since like a Tsar, Trump is the state, and the richer, the more powerful, the more famous he is, the better for everyone but especially him. Putin has not achieved personal hegemony by strengthening civil society, creating a well-functioning state or improving the lives of ordinary Russians. Instead, he has run Russia like a mafia boss, terrorising his neighbours, destroying his enemies, demoralising his opponents, distorting truths, and basically murdering dissent via conscription — so that the only person anyone has to turn to is him.

Hence, Trump employing his pet oligarch Elon Musk as chief saboteur. The mission of DOGE is, of course, not to make government efficient — remember, we now live in opposite-land, nothing is true and everything is possible. It is rather to get rid of the competent people, the useful programmes, the necessary functions. As the historian of Ukraine Timothy Snyder has argued, a weak state is easier to manipulate. This, Snyder says, is Trump First, a policy of “deliberate weakness” which ultimately puts Musk and Trump’s emotions over the lives of normal Americans.

The great intellectuals of the MAGA movement usually cite Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as a vision of how to dismantle a democracy. But Orbán, naturally, learned most of his antidemocratic tricks from Putin. As with Sputnik, Russia got there first. Chaos, in short, is the point. “For which Russian does not love to drive fast?” wrote Nikolai Gogol in the celebrated conclusion of Dead Souls. “Which of us does not at times yearn to give his horses their head, and to let them go, and to cry, ‘To the Devil with the world!’?”

And here is a point that us cosseted and complacent Westerners often fail to grasp. Russia is habitually portrayed as a backwards country, a place that has somehow failed to meet the demands of modernity. That, indeed, is the reality for millions of ordinary Russians, living in “monotowns” such as Ulan-Ude or Krasnoyarsk, at the mercy of malfunctioning infrastructure, arbitrary police power, local corruption, and a lack of viable futures other than enlisting. Much of Dead Souls is taken up with complaints about terrible roads and weird innkeepers and paralytic peasants. But a land so vast, so unruly, also makes an amazing laboratory for the future — the future never arriving all at once, but sporadically, in jolts and leaps. Russia was and remains the most avant garde place on earth.

Certainly, the 20th century was far more Russian in character than American — a point lost amid the Western triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War. Almost all of the West’s artistic leaps (African-American music aside) last century were initially taken by Russians: Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s Rite of Spring; Malevich’s Black Square; Stanislavsky’s productions of Chekhov for the Moscow Arts Theatre. The early Soviet filmmakers Eisenstein and Vertov revolutionised cinema. There has arguably never been a greater concentration of literary talent than the Russian “Silver Age” poets: Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Blok, Mandelstam. The Formalist literary critics — people like Shklovsky and Jakobson — pre-empted the French post-structuralists by decades with their concepts of “defamiliarisation” and “laying bare the device”. Revealing how truth and meaning are constructed, it is little wonder that the worst Soviet artists could be accused of was “formalism”.

But these were just the artistic pioneers. The 1917 Revolutions unleashed the most avant-garde experiments in nationhood ever undertaken. “The streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes,” wrote Mayakovsky in “150,000,000”, his revolutionary poem. The Soviet Union’s rapid industrialisation and collectivisation would be — at the cost of unimaginable human suffering — an inspiration to Chinese communists and Western democrats alike. Free healthcare, social housing, and the advancement of women would soon be offered to Western voters as sweeteners for not turning fully Red. The Russians were also, naturally, the first people to put a dog and then a man and then a woman into orbit. Indeed, the three signature obsessions of contemporary Silicon Valley — colonising space; living forever; and artificial general intelligence — were all core precepts of Cosmism, the quasi-spiritual scientific movement that influenced the Soviet space programme. The Soviet elites were no less obsessed with gerontology than Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. They too dreamed of capturing Mars. Yet if “New Planet”, a 1921 painting by Konstantin Yuon is anything to go by, the Russians would have done so with a lot more style.

The conventional understanding is that all this breakneck pioneering came to a horrible halt with the fall of the Soviet regime in 1989. In reality, though, the ensuing chaos laid the conditions for a new experiment in capitalist authoritarianism of which Donald Trump is now the shining exemplar. This was where neoliberalism economics were pushed to their limits, oligarchs seized state assets, inequality and insecurity flourished, millions died from deaths of despair — and a vengeful strongman eventually emerged as the only person who could be trusted to keep things vaguely together. And, indeed, for all his disinformation experiments and his non-linear wars, Putin has brought a sheen of modernity to Russia. Hence, a dupe like Tucker Carlson can visit Moscow in a strange 21st-century echo of the visits that Western socialists once made to Soviet Potemkin villages — and be absolutely gobsmacked that there are Metro stations and supermarkets and iPhones and tasting menus.

Of course, for most of recent history, the idea that an American leader might envy his Russian counterpart would be absolutely absurd. Russia and America may both be continent-spanning nations with abundant natural resources and deep histories of slavery — but they have long endured like Cain and Abel, as the cursed and blessed sons. America has the dual aspect oceans, the navigable rivers, the benign climate, the easy-going neighbours, the abundant resources. It is playing Civilisation on chieftain mode — to use an analogy from one of Musk’s favourite video games. Russian leaders, meanwhile, are stuck on deity mode, the hardest setting. Russia has trouble on every frontier; it has vast flatlands that make it easy to invade; it has huge tracts of uninhabitable permafrost; and it is shut out of the Atlantic — hence the obsession with Crimea as a window onto the Mediterranean. Russia’s citizens look upon America’s law courts, its civil society, its businesses, its opportunities, its lavishly funded universities, its blue jeans and rock’n’roll — and sigh.

But the politics of envy cuts both ways. There is the more straightforward envy that the have-nots hold towards the haves, for their ease and security and luxuries. A far less examined but more potent political force is increasingly the envy of the haves towards the have-nots: for their perceived virtues, for the poetry in their souls, for their resilience and stubbornness. One of the strangest aspects of modern America is that no class seems quite so consumed with envy as the billionaires who now crowd around Trump, who have benefitted from the easy-setting US economy only to find that their billions do not, after all, purchase them the unbending admiration of the masses, nor the power they desire, nor the immortality they crave. I doubt very much that the average resident of Columbus, Ohio or Gary, Indiana would find much to relish about life in Tomsk or Nizhny-Novgorod. But it’s not hard to see why an American would-be autocrat would look to an actual Russian autocrat and think: damn. Look at his weapons. Look at his gold. Look at the fear he inspires.

Russians have their pride too. Just as Americans tend to see their country, albeit without much evidence, as some uniquely free place, so Russians often cherish an image of themselves as a uniquely spiritual people — the tough ones, the hard ones, the ones who can withstand suffering. The ones who, unlike Americans, are never protected from the consequences of their actions and are a good deal less naive as a result.

Gogol saw far enough into the future to perceive an age in which his backwards nation had finally taken the lead. “Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me!” he wrote at the end of Dead Souls, picturing his homeland as an out-of-control troika, rushing headlong into the snow. “But no answer comes. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!” Whether the rest of American society will stand aside quite so obligingly as Trump and Vance, we shall see.

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Richard Godwin is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics and technology

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