The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News

by Arkady Ostrovsky

To anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, Trump comes across as a Soviet caricature of the hateful American imperialist: boastful, ignorant, awash with gold. He is a perfect Mister Twister—a character from the 1933 satirical poem about an ugly American racist capitalist. Yet it is precisely this image that makes him so attractive to the Kremlin’s propagandists. They present his election as an important step in an ongoing global fight against their new enemy, liberalism. This war continues in Europe. Trump may see Russia’s projection of military power as a sign of resurgence and strength, but in fact it is largely the result of deep internal weakness and insecurity, a manifestation of what George Kennan described in 1946 as “uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused.”