Russia’s useful internet addicts

“They are lying to us about Russia,” says Candace Owens, having visited St. Petersburg. Yes, Owens has done hard investigative work and discovered that the second-largest Russian city has … nice buildings and … Christian heritage. This will come as a tremendous shock to people who think that it is full of slums and gurdwaras.

Owens is in Russia to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — a kind of Russian Davos. She appears to have had some pleasant family time — taking a well-deserved break from insisting that Charlie Kirk was the victim of an international conspiracy and Emmanuel Macron’s wife is a bloke.

To be clear, I’m sure she has enjoyed herself. You don’t have to like Vladimir Putin to think that St. Petersburg is beautiful. Of course it is! Russia has been a great civilisation and it has spectacular heritage. You’d have to be a moron to deny that. 

But Owens is using the undeniable riches of Russian history to smuggle in apologetics for the Russian government. Everything in Russia, she claims, is “cheaper, cleaner, and more inspiring”. As far as I can tell, Mrs Owens has only been to St. Petersburg. You can’t go to the second-largest city in a nation and hold forth on the entirety of the place. Hell, has Mrs Owens even been outside the centre of St. Petersburg? You can’t go to Parliament Square and draw conclusions about Angell Town, and you can’t go to Palace Square and draw conclusions about the Kolpinsky District.

“Gas is cheaper, food is cheaper,” Owens rhapsodises. I’m reminded of Tucker Carlson going to a Russian supermarket and being shocked by the price of bread. I’m also reminded of when I moved to Poland, years ago, and was shocked by the price of alcohol. The thing is that you can’t only compare prices between nations. You have to compare prices while simultaneously comparing wages. As I wrote in my response to Tucker Carlson:

I’m sure the prices are much lower in Russia than in the US. That said, wages are also much lower. The average monthly wage in Russia in 2023 was equivalent to about $750. In the US it was more like $5,000.

The Kremlin loves this kind of shabby propaganda — which, to be clear, I have no reason to believe that Mrs Owens does not genuinely mean — because it enables the conclusion that Russia, in its war with Ukraine, is on the virtuous side of a clash of civilisations. It represents truth, beauty, and tradition — Putin would like us to believe — against degeneracy and decline.

Well, I’m a supporter of Ukraine’s self-defence — even if I welcome the fragile hope for peace talks — but I don’t think the war represents a clash of civilisations. Above all else, it represents a government — Russia’s — being hubristic and destructive. Still, as much as Ukraine’s supporters can be idealistic about Ukraine’s civilisational virtues, right-wingers who fetishise Russia as an outpost of European tradition are barking mad. Russia has the same declining birth rate as pretty much every other developed country — with generally higher rates of divorce, addiction and crime — and it is importing African and Asian people to enable its pointless killing of Europeans.

Once, it was left-wingers who, frustrated with Western inequality and imperialism, imagined that the Soviet Union was a kind of Marxist paradise. Now, right-wingers frustrated with social liberalism have convinced themselves that Russia is a kind of conservatopia. This is enabled by the hokiest Russian influencers, who hang around a train station trying to convince you that the fact that they haven’t been assaulted within sixty seconds is proof that an entire nation is blissfully safe.

To idealise a foreign country as an imagined alternative to one’s flawed homeland is always dangerous

Hey, again, I’m not denying that Russia can be beautiful. I’m not denying that millions of Russians no doubt love their homeland and are happy with their lives. We can object to Russian foreign policy without pretending that the place has the wealth of South Sudan, the freedoms of North Korea and the cultural riches of the Arctic.

But to idealise a foreign country as an imagined alternative to one’s flawed homeland is always dangerous. If nothing else, we have personal experience of the flaws of our homelands, while it is very difficult to get a clear sense of what foreign countries are like. Moreover, to imagine that because our governments and media lie to us — which, of course, they do — everything that we are told must be a lie is silly. We are told true things and false things, and our job is to determine which is which. Radical cynicism, on the other hand, can make people hopelessly naive about foreign governments and alternative media.

But it is probably too late for the likes of Mrs Owens and Mr Carlson. They have been following rabbit holes for long enough that they have forgotten they are underground. Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Russia is a paradise. Demons rule the world. 

One of my favourite authors is the Russian Nikolai Gogol. In his “Diary of a Madman”, the narrator descends into insanity without realising it. He becomes convinced that he is the King of Spain. 

“Now it is all clear,” he says, “And as plain as a pikestaff. Formerly — I don’t know why — everything seemed veiled in a kind of mist.” The fact is that our sense of what is true and false must always penetrate “a kind of mist”. If something is “plain as a pikestaff” you might just have convinced yourself that demons are lying to you about Russia, or that you are the King of Spain.