Hot Type: Welcome to West Russia

Heidi Siegmund Cuda on the disturbing parallels between Russia in the 1990s and the grim forecast for the US post-election

“Nothing good is going to happen here in a long time.”—filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, at his going away party in Berlin, December 14, 1932

People ask me how I’m doing, and I tell them, “I’m tired”. Like Madeline Kahn as Lili Von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles, “I’m exhausted.”

For more than eight years, I have investigated and investigated and investigated the intersection of mob corruption and PT Barnum stagecraft, and we need to face the music: the criminals won.

In the United States, oligarchs are running the politicians. Donald Trump and JD Vance are the frontmen for this crime spree, but it’s the oligarchs — both foreign and domestic — who put them in power. It’s the Catholic cabal on the Supreme Court that helped them along, as unlimited dark money propped up candidates with greasepaint on their face and corruption in their heart.

The United States of America became a hall of mirrors, where good economies were warped to look like bad economies and decent politicians were made to look indecent and pundits misjudged the clown as Bozo and not John Wayne Gacy.

Democracy was just murdered to thunderous applause, and those who saw it coming were called alarmist, but they were also the people who read history books or have lived experience — who know struggle from their unique perspectives or had fled authoritarian countries.

In the 2015 Frontline PBS documentary, Putin’s Way, we see how it was done three decades ago in Russia. How money was stolen from the people — money that was meant for the starving ended up in the pockets of a deputy mayor from St. Petersburg and his cronies. The theft was never investigated to completion, because when that deputy mayor — Vladimir Putin — became President at the turn of the century, one of  his first official acts was to make it impossible to prosecute a sitting President. The crime spree continued unabated, with his St. Petersburg gang benefitting richly.

The documentary shows his journey from “unemployed spy to modern day tsar”.And the people, who were breathing their first taste of freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union, excited about liberal democracy, got a metaphorical noose around their necks as Kremlin-linked bloggers moved in to ensure the Russian people were mind-hacked online, drawn away from any notions of Western freedom and pointed toward totalitarian rule. 

The Kremlin crushed independent TV and pushed out any political challengers by the mid-2000s. Before taking their hybrid war on the road, they targeted their own people’s minds first and continuously.