When I was a kid growing up in a small town on the prairie, I was well schooled on the Evil Empire. I went to a small Catholic school and every month or so we would have a bomb drill. This consisted of us hiding under our little wooden desks to protect ourselves from the blast and then afterwards lining up and marching into the school’s bomb shelter in the basement. The nuns would close the heavy doors and latch them by turning an ominously large wheel. We would spend the next hour or so standing in formation and pray the Rosary. We were praying for the conversion of Russia. I remember the first time I walked into that shelter when I was six and the steel drums full of food and potable water that lined the walls were each taller than I was. The shelter had been built in the height of the cold war and this was in the eighties, so they had been there for a long time. As I got older and began to understand what was going on, I wondered what kind of food was in those containers and what it looked like after a couple of decades. I still wonder. Well before I graduated, I began to consider what I came to realize was a well orchestrated charade where we were just the marionettes. If a blast was close enough that we needed to shelter under a desk, it would mean that we would be exposed to significant radiation. What good would it do to lock our irradiated bodies together in a cramped space? If we managed to get into the shelter before we were exposed to radiation, how long could we possibly stay in there before the food and water ran out? It couldn’t possibly have lasted long enough for the radiation to drop to a safe level. I was too young to realize the methods by which governments recommend measures that both stoke fear and create a false sense of security in order to control their citizens, but I was fully cognizant that our monthly ritual didn’t make sense. That didn’t stop me from growing up terrorized by the thought of a nuclear war, it just made me more afraid.
In 1984, when I was in fourth grade Yuri Andropov died and Konstantin Chernenko was elected to replace him. At this point, my teacher decided it was high time that we were schooled in the evil that lurked behind the iron curtain. He spent much of the day outlining Russian history from the murder of the Czar’s family to current day. I was ten and much of it was lost on me. It was not coherent and the closest applicable description that comes to mind is Glen Beck and his chalkboard on Fox News before he decided to not be evil. There was a lot of chalk dust, references to atheists, gulags, and the Bay of Pigs. There was also a mention of Kennedy, followed by “may his soul rest in peace.” (I guess that while he was a democratic president, he was also a Catholic so it evened out). His Krushchev impersonation, when he took off his shoe and banged it on the table yelling out “we will bury you!!!” was also quite memorable. But all in all, in my mind it boiled down to a long confusing day and the vague impression that Russia was evil and all Russians wanted to kill us.
For a child of the eighties, the level to which I was taught to fear the Russians was a bit extreme. It was well past the McCarthy era, but the Cold War was still a thing, and in mainstream America the looming presence of the Evil Empire was a reality. For the Republicans’ Saint Reagan the U.S.S.R. was American Enemy number one, and the American build up of its nuclear arsenal was its main weapon against it. For reasons that are still disputed, economic pressures in the U.S.S.R caused Gorbachev to lay out an olive branch in a move to end the cold war. Reagan accepted, and together they worked to improve relations between the two countries. In 1989, President George H. Bush and Gorbachev declared the Cold War over. Whatever the reality of the situation, Republicans lauded Reagan for winning the Cold War. He was our National hero.
For awhile, the U.S.S.R. became almost a non-entity. We no longer had to fear being nuked, the U.S.S.R. was economically struggling, and over the years slowly fragmenting. When Yeltsin came to power, I remember tabloid articles featuring pictures of him with a blotchy red face and discussing his drinking. The leader of the former Evil Empire was not an ominous autocrat like his forebears, but more closely resembled a perpetually inebriated relative slowly dozing in the corner after a holiday meal. Then came Putin. Putin was not the inebriated uncle, but instead a former KGB agent who consolidated his power under Russia’s version of the Reichstag fire and soon started flexing his Nationalistic muscle. How did President George W. Bush, whose father had gloriously declared the end to the cold war a little more than a decade earlier, respond? Did he express concern over this new ruler who seemed to want to return Russia to its former Cold War glory? No, instead he met with him and declared "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country." Of course he began to change his mind when matters involving Chechnya and Georgia became increasingly unpalatable. However, it is easy to see the first hint of Republican ambivalence towards Putin here. During Obama’s presidency, the Republican party seemingly began to develop a crush on this former commie. His opposition to same sex marriage wasn’t a hate crime, he was protecting the morals of his people, he must be a soul mate! In 2013, the founder of The American Conservative wrote an article asking, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?”
While ultra conservative Republicans were warming up to their ideological “brother” across the sea, news channels across the U.S. were carrying images of young women wearing bright pink balaclavas protesting his repressive regime through a protest collective called Pussy Riot. Their efforts were met with jail time and cossack’s whips.
Fast forward to this past week. We have a President who has been inaugurated following an election in which we know the Russians meddled. There is a dossier floating around containing “kompromat” some of which has been corroborated connecting Russia to Trump. There are multiple videos of Trump himself declaring how close he is to Putin. There are quotes from his son stating that they have significant business ties to Russia. And just yesterday, his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was forced to resign after lying about discussing sanctions with the Russian Ambassador before Trump’s Inauguration.
The list goes on and on, but where is the Republican party? Instead of raising the clarion call, the party that was once proud of proclaiming that it had brought about the end of the Cold War is too busy enabling der pumpkenfuhrer and gloating over future spoils to care. Perhaps, when George W. looked deep into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul, what he really saw was the reflection of the Republican party. Meanwhile, we have droves of women and their partners donning pink hats out protesting this administration, while Republican’s across the country are seeking to criminalize peaceful protest. At least they haven’t brought out the cossack whips yet.