A century has now passed since the death of Lenin in January 1924. But “useful idiots” — the term usually attributed to Lenin — are still making the trek to the Kremlin to broadcast Russia’s message back to the west. The latest in this long line of credulous foreigners is Tucker Carlson, a self-styled journalist, whose interview with Vladimir Putin was broadcast earlier this week.
A key characteristic of the useful idiot is insularity. Typically, they are obsessed by domestic political vendettas. They look to a foreign leader such as Putin (or before him, Castro or Mao) to validate their own parochial obsessions. Carlson used his audience with Putin to ask a series of leading questions, hoping the Russian leader would chuck back some red meat for the Maga crowd in the US. Did Putin think that America was a system “not run by people who are elected?” Did Putin regard himself as a Christian leader? Is Joe Biden’s administration undermining the dollar? Did US vice-president Kamala Harris try to provoke Russia into war? Is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy simply a puppet of the Biden administration?
Putin often declined to take the bait. This was not out of solicitude for Biden or regard for the truth. It was simply that the Russian president was busy dwelling on his own obsessions — in particular the history of Russia and Ukraine. One could sense Carlson’s rising panic during Putin’s extended opening monologue, as the Russian leader treated Middle America to a lecture on the crucial significance of Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kyiv in 1019. The whole encounter would have been funny if the background to this bizarre conversation was not so tragic.