Bleak and Full of Promise: Echoes of the Late Soviet Union

REVIEW ESSAY
Patriot: A Memoir
by Alexei Navalny
translated by Arch Tait and Stephe Dalziel
Knopf, 2024, 496 pages

Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in early 2024, desperately wanted to make Russia a “normal country.” A leader of the opposition to Vladimir Putin, Navalny had long argued that Russia should be free and happy—but more than anything else, just be normal, like the West.

To achieve his goal, he sought to create a wide-ranging political movement—involving everyone from nationalists to conservatives to communists to progressives—to oppose the autocratic rule of President Vladimir Putin. Navalny believed that Russia’s future lay with Europe, with the West, and with democracy.

Navalny was a proud patriot, as the title of his posthumously released memoir, Patriot, indicates, deeply religious, and he fervently believed that Russia could be a great country. He was an optimist, thoughtful, persuasive, and funny—all traits which seep through the pages of his book and helped propel him to international prominence.

Navalny employed no ghostwriter; the entirety of the book was written in Germany, while he was recovering from a poisoning, and from various Russian prisons. Just under half of the book is comprised of prison diaries, which end shortly before his death.¹

Navalny’s memoir begins with the story of his poisoning. When flying between political rallies, Navalny was poisoned by Russian special forces with the nerve agent Novichok and came close to death. Under international pressure, the Russian government allowed him to be flown to Germany, where he recuperated over a period of months before planning his return, which he hoped would inspire Russians to come out against Putin’s government.

But he failed. Today, Putin is firmly ensconced in the Kremlin, and Navalny is dead. There is no significant opposition network in Russia, and in addition to prosecuting a war in Ukraine, the country is expanding its influence in Africa and Asia.

Why did Navalny fail to overthrow Putin? His supporters may argue that he never had much of a chance: the Kremlin controls all major media in Russia, clamps down harshly on any dissent, and made life—literally—as difficult as possible for him and his team.

All of that is true. But another, deeper reason for Navalny’s failure may have been his conception of a post-Putin government: a liberal democracy like the “normal” West. The issue with this formulation was that many today do not find the West to be “normal,” at least not anymore. His failure should serve not just as a warning for future Russian opposition figures; it should also serve as a warning for Westerners. Much like the Soviet Union before it, the central ideology of the twenty-first-century West has a time limit. And time is running out.

Generations and Gerontocracy

Alexei Navalny was born in 1976, which meant that he came of age in the late 1980s. It was then that the West seemed to reach its zenith, and the Soviet Union reached its lowest point.

The West had, out of the wreckage of the World Wars, somehow managed to do something no civilization had done in history: combine true political liberties—free speech, peaceful protest, and voting rights—with economic liberties and broadly shared prosperity. Plus, Western leaders—at least, Anglo-American leaders—seemed like they were actually making things better for their countries. Ronald Reagan, who ran in 1980 on the slogan “make America great again,” was reelected in 1984 on the slogan “it’s morning in America,” in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Margaret Thatcher had gotten elected prime minister of the United Kingdom in the late 1970s just to do even better in 1983 and to maintain her massive majority in 1987.

But the West did not just look politically appealing. Culturally, it was booming as well—and ordinary Soviets wanted a piece. The idea of Soviets desiring Western consumer products was parodied in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as far back as the early 1960s, but it was doubly true in the 1980s. Navalny records that his teenage self was envious of the children of Soviet diplomats who, when they returned, brought with them things like bubblegum, something so common in the West that it literally lined the streets of major cities.²

All of this would have been manageable for Soviet authorities if they had been able to fill the hole that a lack of blue jeans and bubblegum left. But the Soviets were increasingly losing faith in their system. In fact, unbeknownst to Soviet leaders, faith in the system had been eroding for decades.

Navalny mentions that, years after the Soviet Union fell, he read a book by Anatoly Yurchak, a Western-based Russian philosopher. The book, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, sought to explain why the Soviet people lost their faith, leading to total systemic collapse.

Yurchak’s core argument relied on a concept known as Lefort’s paradox, named for the French philosopher Claude Lefort, and it concerns an inherent problem in post-Enlightenment ideologies.³ Pre-Enlightenment ruling philosophies were more straightforward than their post-Enlightenment counterparts: the divine right of kings, for example, allowed for the strongest person to be in charge. Simple.

But Lefort contended that modern ruling philosophies are trickier, because they contain a paradox: they claim to derive from an objective truth which exists outside the present. The king can prove his strength immediately, with the power of his armies or the content of his treasury. But modern ideologies stake their claim in the “truth” of a far-off paradisical future. If that truth is questioned by the governed population, the power of the governors vanishes. Only through a “master”—one who stood above the governing institutions—could the paradox be obscured.

Yurchak applied this to the Soviets. There, a group, the Communist Party, claimed to be able to lead the people to a unified, peaceful world in which all individuals would be free to develop themselves and pursue their interests. But to get there, all individuals had to submit themselves entirely to the Party, which would tightly control everything they did until (in some far-off future) the Party would, seemingly at random, loosen its grip and fade away. The goal, true freedom promised by Marxism, and the method, absolute totalitarianism, would eventually prove too incongruent. A belief system like Soviet Communism could sustain itself only if a “master” stood above the system—and the party ruling it—and could act as an arbiter. When Yurchak applied that paradox to the Soviet system, he found his “master” in Joseph Stalin, who was in a sense beyond all Party and political structures. He was able to critique the Party—indeed, any aspect of the system—and, as a larger-than-life figure, could not be questioned.⁴

But when Stalin died, Yurchak argued, the ability to “hide” the paradox went with him. Over the following decades, the “last Soviet generation”—which Yurchak pegs at being born around 1960, as they were the last to mature and reach middle age fully within the USSR—became aware that the system often did things which simply did not make sense. In Yurchak’s telling, it was “increasingly more important to participate in the reproduction of the form . . . than to engage with . . . constative meanings.”⁵ The results of meetings at all levels of society, from universities to local associations to the Kremlin itself, were predetermined, with attendees only snapping to attention when asked to vote for whatever had been discussed. Content was irrelevant; it became important to simply be seen performing the ritual.

This difficulty was not just a problem for average Soviets; top party leaders too increasingly found themselves in a maze of slogans and phrases which they had difficulty escaping. Late-era Soviet leaders, such as Konstantin Chernenko, wrote speeches with large teams, all very careful “not to . . . [write] something irregular.”⁶ All speeches needed to conform to party doctrine and language and had to carry specific phrases. As a result, Yurchak notes that these texts were essentially meaningless: they could be read with the paragraphs entirely reversed, and they would fundamentally say the same thing. Instead of a text which told a story or progressed to a point, they were simply slogans stapled back to back to back.

But late Soviet leaders were not just poor speechwriters; they were poor leaders in general. In contrast to the inspiring figures in the West, Soviet leaders were objective failures. In the 1980s, three—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Chernenko—died (in 1982, 1984, and 1985, respectively). All were colorless, aged, and failed to leave the USSR better off than they found it. Chernenko’s successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, did not even leave a USSR behind at all.

There was also a persistent sense of confusion among the Soviets as to why they seemed unable to connect with other, noncommunist countries. They believed Marxism was fundamentally international, yet they and their country had trouble connecting to the parts of the world not already in the Soviet bloc. Even countries which, on paper, should have been allies—like the People’s Republic of China—found themselves drifting closer to the West than to the USSR.

When the late-era Soviet Union did go on globe-trotting adventures, those adventures often went extremely poorly. The Soviet Union spent the 1980s bogged down in their war in Afghanistan, where the Soviets suffered tens of thousands of casualties to protect a Marxist dictatorship in a place most Russians did not even care about. This was particularly humiliating, as the Soviet Union had long held that its military was superior to the West’s—and certainly to that of some rural mountain sheepherders.

It was not only Soviets themselves who noticed the abject strangeness of it all. Other dissidents throughout the Communist bloc were starting to see the system unravel. One, a playwright named Václav Havel (who would later go on to inspire Navalny’s own dissidence), wrote a pamphlet called “The Power of the Powerless.” In it, he argued that most in Czechoslovakia did not believe in the system, but they went through the motions of doing so purely out of inertia or fear. Most famously, he gave the hypothetical (but at the same time, very real) example of the shop owner who places a “workers of the world, unite” sign in his window. The shop owner does not really think about what exactly it means (unite to do what? How?) but the shop owner knows that if it is not there, he may be seen as disloyal.⁷

When Mikhail Gorbachev announced glasnost and perestroika in 1986, opening the gates to free discussion—the same year Navalny turned ten—Soviets no longer felt obliged to participate in rituals that they had stopped believing in decades ago. All of these concerns, long whispered about, poured out in a sea of recriminations. “Why can’t we be like the West?” was a genuinely motivating question across the Communist bloc, and it spurred the overthrow of those regimes.

Navalny quotes a Russian author who described the country as having been “covered with lies, like a scab.”⁸ But when that scab was ripped away, there was nothing underneath. Five years after perestroika, the system no longer existed.

This was met with understandable glee in the West. America overnight became unchallenged, and its influence grew so great that a new word—hyperpower—had to be created in order to capture its scope. Finally, the long struggle of the Cold War would be over; ordinary Americans would surely reap the benefits.

Russians, meanwhile, were propelled into a fundamentally uncertain future. Navalny was, too—and he became determined to shape Russia’s political future to be like the West which he had grown up admiring.

Yet the disappearance of the West’s primary antagonist inadvertently had the same effect that the death of Stalin had for the Soviet Union: it removed what was covering the inherent paradox at the core of the West’s, and particularly America’s, post-Enlightenment ideology: liberal democracy.

The Paradox of the Modern West

While America began as a liberal democracy, it is important to differentiate pre-twentieth-century liberal democracy from twentieth- and twenty-first-century liberal democracy. For more than a century, America accepted the notion of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. American leaders of all parties saw themselves as liberally minded, in the sense of defending individual liberties. But they did so while at the same time holding true to John Quincy Adams’s oft-quoted conception of foreign policy, that America should “go not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Those who quote him, past and present, often end the quote there, although the speech in which it is found is quite long, and full of prescient, but sadly overlooked, wisdom:

[America] will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.⁹

Even the harshest political enemies—such as Adams and his rival Andrew Jackson—fundamentally agreed on the above maxim. America could “recommend the general cause” by living up to its own beliefs, but it could not force its liberal democracy on other states.

Under this original variant of American liberal democracy, there is no hypocrisy: there is no belief in some global-peace-guaranteeing philosophy, nor is there a need to expand democracy to others. This early liberalism, like the divine right of kings, does not rely on leaders guiding the country or the world along the arc of history to some blissful destination.

But that all changed in the early twentieth century, as America became the largest economy in the world and an empire in its own right. Whether one wishes to attribute this new global outlook to ideological overreach or simply to the effects of technology and modern industry, American leaders became increasingly interested in fighting monsters abroad.

This new approach is often called Wilsonian, though the U.S. acquisition of overseas territory began well before Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, and a U.S.-led “international order” would not be formed until after World War II. But Wilson’s vision largely triumphed in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even Richard Nixon, often remembered as a calculating “realist” today, professed great admiration for Wilson and his foreign policy, while Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush variously proclaimed themselves leaders of global freedom struggles.

In this new vision, democracy had to be spread. A fundamental aspect inherent in this philosophy is “democratic peace theory,” the (erroneous) notion that democracies do not go to war with one another. For a leader in the Wilsonian mode, there must be as much liberal democracy in the world as possible: it is an ideology which must spread to survive. In a way, it is a mirror of communism: the only way to achieve true communism is if the revolution becomes global.

In this spirit, Western liberal democrats often seek to expand certain “rights”—corporate rights in the twentieth century, social justice rights such as LGBT rights and abortion in the twenty-first—into countries which do not recognize those rights. They lambaste those countries when they do not comply, even if they are democracies with publics that have voted against those ideas.

This contradiction—seeking to spread democratic self-determination while only recognizing democracy when people vote a certain way, in order to secure a progressive-liberal future—is the Wilsonian West’s variant of Lefort’s paradox.

But unlike the Soviet variant of the paradox, there can be no singular “master” in Wilsonian democracy, no dictator like Stalin. Instead, the “master” here is the threat to liberal democracy. So long as there is a threat, the inherent hypocrisy can be covered up. Once that threat is removed, however, it is not long before these tensions become apparent.

The Wilsonian reshaping of liberal democracy was a massive shift, but this shift was enabled by the threats of World War II and the Cold War. Both events required a globe-trotting America because the threats—Axis world domination and Soviet Communism—genuinely endangered the United States; even those skeptical of American interventionism still recognized the need to fight the Empire of Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.

Those conflicts obscured the paradox of Wilsonian democracy. American leaders preached liberty while supporting regimes and insurgencies, like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or the Nicaraguan Contras, which were often just as rigid and brutal as the Soviets.¹⁰ Policymakers obfuscated this seeming betrayal of democratic principles by using the threat to cover the paradox. Some, such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, may have openly accepted the hypocrisy but believed that it was necessary in order to win the Cold War. Others, such as Reagan, seem to have convinced themselves that there was no hypocrisy. But the end of the Cold War shattered any rationalizations and obfuscations, because it removed the threat.

The Beginning of the End of History

The first signs that Wilsonian democracy had lost its shield were small, and most Americans likely did not notice them because they were initially felt by others. Immediately after the collapse of the USSR, the West—at Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s request—sent economic experts who urged shock therapy to privatize the Russian economy, but these experts only managed to make a few people extremely rich while most Russians were left worse off. While rapid market liberalization was not entirely unreasonable—there were truly no good options for Russian policymakers at the time—the callousness with which successive American governments treated the ailing Russian economy struck many as cold.¹¹

If that was not bad enough, in 1996 the Russians had their first truly competitive post-Soviet presidential election, between Yeltsin and the Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov. The Clinton administration put its entire weight on the scale for Yeltsin, with Clinton getting the International Monetary Fund to guarantee favorable loans to Russia, and sending campaign consultants (who openly bragged after the fact about having won the election for Yeltsin). Yeltsin managed to win, but he did so through fraud.¹¹ Instead of demanding a revote, or even an investigation, the Clinton administration remained silent. Navalny, looking back, argues that there were no real democrats in Russia at that point in time.¹³ But there objectively could have been: in a historic irony, they just might have been the Communists.

At the same time, the West became involved in the Balkans. To this day, this episode still infuriates the Russians, both ordinary people and elites. And while some Russians do engage in major historical revisionism—completely ignoring the genocides perpetrated by the Serbs and the fact that, had the West not intervened, there would likely have been more mass killings—some of their complaints are hard to ignore.

For one, the operation was conducted under NATO auspices even though no alliance member had been attacked by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Yes, some refugees had fled into NATO member states, but refugee flows are hardly cause for war under the rules of the “liberal international order.” Today, Wilsonian liberals sigh with frustration when this is brought up, but its effect on the image of the West should not be dismissed: the fact that NATO, which had always portrayed itself as defensive, went on the offensive in Russia’s backyard raised eyebrows across the non-Western world.

The West soon moved on from the Balkans, as events in the Middle East grabbed its attention. But third-party observers noted that the Western generals and politicians who oversaw the operation to effectively establish Kosovo as a country—such as General Wesley Clark and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—later enriched themselves via investment deals with Kosovo authorities.¹⁴ This would have been normal in a corrupt dictatorship like the Soviet Union, but the West was supposed to be better.

These small hypocrisies did not attract much attention in the West because they did not affect Westerners. But that would change over the following decades, as the issues that the last Soviet generation faced—hollowed-out rituals, leaders who followed rather than led, and an inability to connect with the world outside of an established sphere of influence—suddenly became problems for the West, at the exact same time that Alexei Navalny was attempting to convince Russians to take a Western path. This would have the effect of making Western political systems, and Wilsonian democracy, extremely unappealing for much of the rest of the world—and would make Navalny’s work impossible.

The Inversion of Liberal Democracy

The September 11 attacks were an inauspicious start to the twenty-first century for the United States. Afterwards, America was essentially obliged to invade Afghanistan in order to deal with Al-Qaeda. But those measures did not need to take the form of a twenty-year war.

Wilsonian democracy, however, did demand it. Allowing Afghanistan to become some sort of federated Islamic Republic, with a ruling regional council, could have worked. It may not have been at all liberal or democratic, but it almost certainly would have been better than what ensued. America could have then left, promising to come back and blow up anything it needed to if another attack occurred.

But the Wilsonian democrats making policy decided on another course. Instead, America spent over $2 trillion dollars attempting to build a liberal democracy among a population to whom such a concept was completely foreign.¹⁵ But that did not just mean ballot boxes (and U.S. soldiers giving their lives to protect those ballots). It also meant employing a microcosm of the paradox of liberal democracy: forcing a foreign people to accept things they loathed so that they could be free to choose for themselves (provided their choice did not go against what America decided for it).¹⁶ Meanwhile, the War in Iraq, in a sense more successful than the Afghanistan campaign—as, technically, the government created is still standing as of this writing—is widely considered a massive blunder and its original pretext, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, was proven false.

This same story could have been cut and pasted, with Marxist ideology replaced by liberal democratic terminology, from the Soviet experience: the West was seeking to impose its post-Enlightenment ideology onto a fundamentally pre-Enlightenment people. It was no accident that around this time the United States Navy adopted a new slogan, “a global force for good,” as if determined to put a Wilsonian bow on the whole affair.¹⁷ That the West seemed determined to undergo the exact same humiliation the Soviet Union had undergone—war in Afghanistan to impose a post-Enlightenment ideology—was a historic irony.

But the Wilsonians did not just embark on humiliation rituals: they also undercut the very international system they had established. The United States and its “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq without a clear UN mandate. While in 2002, neoconservatives were urging the then newly liberated Afghanistan (and soon-to-be-liberated Iraq) to be normal countries, neoconservatives passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, known more popularly by its nickname, the “Invade the Hague” Act. The bill allows the president to free a member of the U.S. government or armed services who has been detained by the International Criminal Court “[using] all means necessary and appropriate.”¹⁸ In short, it legalizes a military attack on an international court.

From the viewpoint of alliance-skeptical national conservatives, such a bill presents no problems; one has trouble imagining that President Donald Trump or Vice President J. D. Vance will be calling for its repeal anytime soon. But they are not the ones claiming to spread liberal democracy around the world, or preserve the “liberal international order,” as the Wilsonians who passed such laws around the invasion of Iraq did.

But things got even more bizarre at home. During the 2010s, the West suddenly decided to start lambasting itself and its own history. While Alexei Navalny was attempting to run for president in 2018, Americans and Europeans were engaged in extraordinary acts of civili­zational immolation.

Suddenly, in places of higher education and other temples of liberalism, events started beginning with “land acknowledgements,” rituals which involve recognizing the various indigenous tribes who once occupied the land. No one performing these rituals ever had any intent of actually giving the land back. Like their Soviet predecessors, they simply felt they had to be seen performing the ritual. After George Floyd died, black boxes spread on Instagram for “Blackout Tuesday” in solidarity against racism. Not uploading a black box was almost as much of a statement as uploading one. It mattered not whether any action accompanied the box; the box simply had to be there.

Individuals began to self-identify as the opposite sex (or a plethora of other newfound “genders”) without doing anything to attempt to look the part. And in some areas of the West, it became a literal crime to not respect how those individuals wished to be addressed. In the midst of a million culture war battles, the Soviet-level absurdity of this has been lost, but it should not be: it became a literal crime to recognize reality. Much like the whiplash after the Soviets rose to power—or after Stalin made a new decree—things held as true for centuries became utterly contemptible falsehoods.

Some of this has gone to extreme levels; the most outrageous cases are usually enforced by some sort of committee established purportedly for human rights. Such was the case when Washington state’s Human Rights Commission ruled that a female body waxer at a Christian-owned spa legally had to wax male genitalia.¹⁹ Another example is that of Emo Township in Ontario, Canada, which was fined by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for having refused to proclaim June as pride month.²⁰ This is essentially the inversion of liberal democracy as originally conceived: instead of allowing individuals to choose, liberal democrats are now demanding that individuals both actively choose and that they choose a specific way.

These ideas did not happen organically. Much like Soviet ideology, they were propelled and sometimes enforced by the state. But this ideological fervor was not limited to scattershot tribunal decisions and cannot be ascribed to the actions of a few far-left local governments alone. Symbols—such as rainbow flags and black power phrases—appeared all over America’s local, state, and federal buildings, major corporations, and civil society institutions; sometimes they were even projected on the White House itself and painted on the streets surrounding it.

And while the Wilsonian liberals did not rewrite the calendar as the Soviets did, they certainly edited it. In 2024, President Joe Biden declared Easter to be the Trans Day of Visibility, galling many Christians around the West (and surely those outside of it as well), but that was of a piece with the many new “holidays” suddenly appearing. Transgender Parent Day, the Trans Day of Remembrance, Pride Month (all of June), and a separate LGBT History Month (all of October) all cropped up. There are many others which pop up almost at random; this past December, the Department of Health and Human Services wished Americans a “Happy Pansexual and Panromantic Pride Day.”²¹

This has come with a legally required focus on diversity. Disclaimers announcing a company’s adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion, a concept which was essentially unheard of just a decade ago, were soon plastered on every job posting. Ditto the increasingly baffling-looking pride flags, which in just a period of years went from a simple rainbow to an eye-straining combination of shapes.

Much like Havel’s sign in the shop window, a company did not need to know exactly what DEI entails, nor does a shop owner or a town need to know what all of the shapes on the current incarnation of the pride flag mean. They simply need to display it.²²

And the West’s leaders went along with this, either unwilling to speak against the prevailing ideology or actively shepherding it along. Sometimes, it was not entirely clear if leaders even understood what they were supporting. Mocking comparisons between the aging Biden and Brezhnev (or Andropov or Chernenko) became commonplace. But as in the late Soviet Union, it turned out that it did not entirely matter if the leader was able to fully perform his functions (as Biden was reported to be “dependably engaged” from “10AM to 4PM”)—the government could continue to operate, though the institutions and rituals it upheld would grow increasingly hollow.²³

And while this all happened, the West eschewed its civilizational history: its universities increasingly either minimized or eliminated teaching about Western history. Teaching Western classics is frowned upon because the curriculum is “too white.” Today, openly discussing the notion of “Western civilization” in any positive way implicitly codes the speaker as right-wing.

This is not to make the case that America and the West at large have adopted an entirely Soviet mentality. The Soviet Union, with its system of gulags and totalitarian communism, was far worse. And the election of President Donald Trump to a second term does show that significant numbers of Americans desire to push back against progressive ideology. But the comparisons are indisputable, and they point to why the West is no longer a model to be imitated by many outside of it.

Wilsonian liberals will respond to this by pointing out the fact that the West is still the overwhelming choice for migrants. Practically any survey or poll ever taken confirms this.²⁴ But many of these migrants—especially those from places in the Middle East—are not moving because they love liberal democracy. In fact, many are adamantly opposed to it. Jihad-inspired attacks, and attacks committed by migrants, are also becoming commonplace throughout the West. In response to one particularly brutal attack, Vladimir Putin said, “It doesn’t fit into my head what on earth they’re thinking over there. I can’t even explain the rationale—is it a sense of guilt before the migrants?”²⁵ This is not to portray Putin in a positive light; rather, it is to highlight how absurd this all looks from the outside. Russia had been doomed by geography—with Muslim Chechnya having been a part of the country for centuries—to tussle with Islamic extremism. The West decided to invite it in.

Frankly, most migrants moving to America and Europe today are moving for the same reason most “asylum” seekers have come: for economic reasons. Salaries in the West are simply higher than elsewhere, and that is money which can be sent back home. Remittances from immigrants in the United States are responsible for nearly $60 billion being sent to Mexico annually.²⁶ While European salaries are generally lower than American salaries, they are still substantially higher than elsewhere and therefore Europe attracts similar migration. This is a terrible reason to defend an ideology: “People are so desperate they will pick strawberries in the blistering heat for less than minimum wage” is not exactly a stellar advertisement for Wilsonian liberalism.

Which brings us back to Russia and Navalny. Russian salaries are famously lower than Western salaries. But Russia is far removed from the pits of 1990s-era economic devastation. When Yeltsin traveled to a Texas supermarket, he was shocked at the range of produce—from fresh meats to tropical oranges—available to the American middle class. Stores in his home country at the time were either empty or had a paltry selection of goods.

Today, by contrast, Russian stores have oranges. The rampant crime on the streets of 1990s St. Petersburg and Moscow is essentially gone, crushed under an authoritarian heel (and by the fact that the government came to terms with some gangs). It is obviously no paradise: political rights are nonexistent, and the economy is wobbly. But things are “good enough” that people will not risk overturning the cart to adopt the West’s ruling ideology, which currently seems somewhat Soviet, and serves as a reminder of the dying days of the USSR.

Yurchak says the final Soviet generation began detecting that the Soviet Union, by the end, was “bleak and full of promise.” Things had no meaning while, at the same time, they were all supposedly sending the country on an arc of history which would lead them, and the world, to a glorious future. Instead, it led them to the ash heap of history.

Post-Normal

Navalny writes repeatedly about the importance of Russia becoming a “normal” place, like America and Europe. “We have invented all of our existing problems for ourselves,” he says at one point.²⁷ But the West simply does not, inside and out, seem “normal” right now, and most of its problems are self-inflicted.

In the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, America has become bleak and full of promise. There are centuries of achievement, high standards of living, peace throughout Western civilization, and a population willing to work and do great things—but those denizens, caught in the paradox of Wilsonian liberalism, are unable to fully take advantage of their inheritances. Trust in every single governing institution has fallen to practically all-time lows. Gallup has asked respondents for decades to report their faith in various institutions, including the Supreme Court, the Congress, the presidency, the press, public schools, the justice system, and more. In 2024, almost two-thirds of Americans had “some,” “very little,” or no trust at all in every single institution—save the U.S. military and the police. And while it is good that Americans trust those governmental institutions, it is an extraordinarily unhealthy sign that those are the only two that gain majoritarian trust.²⁸ Foreign countries, as Navalny discovered, also lost their faith in Western institutions.

This was perhaps the ultimate irony. Wilsonian liberal democrats fought hard to extend their ideology around the world by inspiration and by force, at the expense of a focus on their own people. Yet they were ultimately rejected by those they tried to “liberate”—abroad and at home—as they were unable to see the paradox inherent in their own ideas.

Alexei Navalny was not wrong for putting his faith in freedom or opposing Putin. But his movement, inspired by the idea of the Wilsonian West, fell victim to its paradox: people will not be inspired to follow an ideology if that ideology is unable to answer basic questions about where it wishes to go or how it will get there.

During the Cold War, opposition leaders like Václav Havel were able to point to the West as a guiding star. Navalny clearly hoped to do the same. But over thirty years after that conflict came to a close, Americans and Russians alike no longer wish to be forced to walk down an imaginary arc of history. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians already learned that such an arc goes on forever, until it is no more. It is a lesson they are unlikely to forget anytime soon. And it is one which Americans are learning today.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 1 (Spring 2025): 144–60.

Notes