Putin and his enablers

In the early days of the Soviet Union, Communist Party leaders would arrange carefully managed tours for sympathetic Western journalists and intellectuals, who would file reports about productive collectivized farms, happy factory workers and kindly comrades in the Kremlin. “I have seen the future, and it works,” was how Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking American journalist, put it after his own visit to the worker’s paradise in 1919.

Usually left out of those reports: the midnight arrests, the summary executions, the gulag, the forced famines leaving millions of victims.

This month brought the same awful juxtaposition, with Tucker Carlson offering Vladimir Putin an interview so fawning that even Putin complained about the lack of “these socalled sharp questions.” As part of his “report,” Carlson also visited a Moscow supermarket, which he compared favorably to those in America.

Ten days after Carlson’s interview, imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny was reported dead in a maximum-security prison north of the Arctic Circle. No cause of death has been given, but the news came just a day after Navalny appeared at a court hearing, sounding in good spirits. Given the Russian security services’ previous ill-concealed attempt to kill him, it’s reasonable to suspect foul play was at work again.

The most outstanding and bravest opposition leader is now dead. May his memory be a blessing. Until proved otherwise, we should hold the Kremlin directly and criminally responsible—and treat Putin’s dupes in the West as his moral accomplices.