He never quite says what precisely he thinks Russia gets right.
Tucker Carlson went to Moscow last week and had an absolute blast. He rode the subway and marveled at its clean cars, the fancy tilework in Kievskaya Station, and the lack of booze-drenched hobos. He went to a grocery store and was astonished by what ordinary people could apparently buy. He even managed to meet a local history buff and sit down for tea and conversation. Carlson, who had never previously visited Moscow, declared himself “radicalized” against America’s leaders by the experience. He didn’t want to live in Moscow, but he did want to know why we in America have to put up with street crime and crappy food when the supposedly bankrupt Russia provided such a nice life for its people, or at least those people not named Alexei Navalny.
My former Atlantic colleague Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel a “fool’s paradise,” but not all forms of foolishness are equal. Many commentators have guffawed at Carlson’s Russophilia and pointed out that Russia’s murder rate is roughly that of the United States, and that its citizens are dirt poor, about a fifth as wealthy per capita as the citizens of the United States overall. “I don’t care what some flagship supermarket in an imperial city looks like,” The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg tweeted. “Russia is far, far poorer than our poorest state, Mississippi.” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal suggested that Carlson instead visit the grocery stores of the “10th or 50th” richest Russian cities, and see how they compare with America’s.
In 2019, I visited several large and small Russian cities, and I went grocery shopping at least once in each. Would you believe that Tucker Carlson is on to something? In Moscow (the largest) and St. Petersburg (No. 2), the flagship supermarkets are indeed spectacular. The Azbuka Vkusa branch next to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow is more luxurious than any grocery store within 100 miles of Washington, D.C. Other branches in Moscow vary in quality, and they are usually smaller than American supermarkets. But to some extent that’s just a matter of culture: The U.S. has fewer supermarkets, but each one is big enough to feed the 82nd Airborne Division for a month; in Europe, supermarkets are more numerous but tiny.
Anne Applebaum: The false romance of Russia
Makhachkala (22), the capital of Dagestan, followed a similar pattern to Moscow. One supermarket downtown was amazing, the equal of an upscale supermarket in Washington or Dallas. On the outskirts the quality varied, but not drastically. Local residents were not eating soups made from grass clippings. In Murmansk (71), the cramped bodega near my rented flat had a good wine selection and enough fresh staple foods to prepare a different meal your mom would approve of every day of the week. Only in Derbent (134) did I start to wonder whether the bad old days of the Soviet Union were still in effect. But even that would be an exaggeration. In Derbent, for $15, you could get champagne and caviar with blini and velvety sour cream. If you want to flash back to Cold War communism, go to Havana. There the grocery stores stock only dust and mildew.
With apologies to Emerson, travel can disabuse you of foolish notions just as often as it plants them in your head. An idea ripe for dispelling among Americans at this particular moment is that life in Russia must suck because the frigid depression of the Cold War never ended. In those days ordinary citizens were spied upon and tortured and killed, and the shops were empty, save for substandard goods at prices few could afford. Now Russia is different. The state repression is much more limited, though no less brutal toward those who attract its attention. Until the Ukraine war added a huge category of forbidden topics, the main ones that you could get locked up for discussing were war in the Caucasus and the personal life and finances of President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. Most other topics were broachable, and you could whine all you liked about them.
Equally in need of updating are American expectations about Russian economic misery. Those whose visits to Russia stopped 20 years ago tend to have outdated views of the best the country has to offer. My visits started 24 years ago. Back then, I spent days at a time on the Trans-Siberian, crammed into railway cabins with little to do but talk with Russians and see how they lived. Life was not beautiful. The men busied themselves with crosswords and sullenly browsed pornography. When not in motion, I stayed with Russian friends in single-room flats that looked straight out of a New York tenement building 100 years ago. No one I met was starving, but women sometimes approached me in train stations hoping to rent out their homes or bodies, or to sell me family heirlooms. That type of desperation seems to have subsided, although I would be shocked if any of those people are able to buy the jamón ibérico at the Smolenskaya branch of Azbuka Vkusa yet. On the roads between the big cities, there are still villages so ramshackle that they look like sets from The Little Rascals. Evidence suggests that the Russian military’s frontline troops tend to come from these depressed and benighted lands, the places that really are stuck in the 20th century.
Certain aspects of life remain dismal even in the cities. My flat in Murmansk had surly drunks tottering outside its entrance, and its stairwell smelled like every cat, dog, and human resident had marked its territory there regularly since the Brezhnev era. But the playgrounds were decent, and you could get a delicious smoked-reindeer pizza at a cozy restaurant for $7. Remember, this is in a small, depressed Russian city—not somewhere stocked with goodies just in case an American wanders out of the lobby of the Radisson and needs to be impressed. The “useful idiots” of yesteryear were treated to fake Moscows, which evanesced as soon as the next Aeroflot flights took off. The luxuries of Moscow that Carlson sees, and that I saw, are not evanescent, and they are not (as they are in North Korea, say) a curated experience available only to those on controlled visits.
The stubborn belief that all good things in Russia must be illusory can in turn warp one’s analysis of the country, and in particular of Putin’s durability in power. After all, why would anyone remain loyal to an autocrat who delivered only hunger, penury, and the reek of cat piss? Putin rules by fear but not only by fear. Most Russians will tell you that Russia today is better than it was before Putin. They compare it not with the Soviet era but with the anarchy and decline of the 1990s. Life expectancy has risen, public parks are better maintained, and certain fruits of capitalism can be tasted by Russians of all classes. Who would risk these gains? Like every autocrat, Putin has ensured that his downfall just might destroy every good thing Russia has experienced in the past two decades. This risk is, from the perspective of regime continuity, a positive feature, because it keeps all but the most principled and brave opposition quiet, and content to shut up and enjoy their cheap caviar. Those like Navalny who object do not object for long.
Carlson’s videos never quite say what precisely he thinks Russia gets right. Moscow is in many ways superior to New York. But Paris has a good subway system too. Japan and Thailand have fine grocery stores, and I wonder, when I enter them, why entering my neighborhood Stop & Shop in America is such a depressing experience by comparison. Carlson’s stated preference for Putin’s leadership over Joe Biden’s suggests that the affection is not for fine food or working public transit but for firm autocratic rule—which, as French, Thais, and Japanese will attest, is not a precondition for high-quality goods and services. And in an authoritarian state, those goods and services can serve to prolong the regime.
I confess I still enjoy watching Carlson post videos of Moscow, wide-eyed and credulous as he slowly learns to love a country that I love too. I hope he posts more of them. One goes through stages of love for Russia, often starting with the literature and music, then moving to its dark humor and the personalities of its people, which are always cycling between thaw and frost. Inevitably one reflects on the irony that this civilization, whose achievement is almost without equal in some respects, is utterly cursed in others—consigned to literally centuries of misgovernment, incompetence, and tyranny. The final stage is realizing that the greatness of Russia is part of the curse, a heightening of the irony, as if no matter how much goes right, something is deeply wrong. Maybe when things go right, the more deeply wrong it is. Carlson seems to still be in one of the early stages of this journey.
What Tucker Carlson Saw in Moscow
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16.02.2024
He never quite says what precisely he thinks Russia gets right.
Tucker Carlson went to Moscow last week and had an absolute blast. He rode the subway and marveled at its clean cars, the fancy tilework in Kievskaya Station, and the lack of booze-drenched hobos. He went to a grocery store and was astonished by what ordinary people could apparently buy. He even managed to meet a local history buff and sit down for tea and conversation. Carlson, who had never previously visited Moscow, declared himself “radicalized” against America’s leaders by the experience. He didn’t want to live in Moscow, but he did want to know why we in America have to put up with street crime and crappy food when the supposedly bankrupt Russia provided such a nice life for its people, or at least those people not named Alexei Navalny.
My former Atlantic colleague Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel a “fool’s paradise,” but not all forms of foolishness are equal. Many commentators have guffawed at Carlson’s Russophilia and pointed out that Russia’s murder rate is roughly that of the United States, and that its citizens are dirt poor, about a fifth as wealthy per capita as the citizens of the United States overall. “I don’t care what some flagship supermarket in an imperial city looks like,” The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg tweeted. “Russia is far, far poorer than our poorest state, Mississippi.” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal suggested that Carlson instead visit the grocery stores of the “10th or 50th” richest Russian cities, and see how they compare with America’s.
In 2019, I visited several large and small Russian cities, and I went grocery shopping at least once in each. Would you believe that Tucker Carlson is on to something? In Moscow (the largest) and St. Petersburg (No. 2), the flagship supermarkets are indeed spectacular. The Azbuka Vkusa branch next to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow is more luxurious than any grocery store within 100 miles of Washington, D.C. Other branches in Moscow vary in quality, and they are usually smaller than American supermarkets. But to some extent that’s just a matter of culture: The U.S. has fewer........
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