Moscow on the Potomac
This piece come from August 2018, two years ago:
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In 2015, I started visiting Washington, D.C. I began working with the newly launched Kleptocracy Initiative at the Hudson Institute on Pennsylvania Avenue. After years in and out of Moscow, the languid city on the Potomac felt like a breath of fresh air. I could call a senator’s office for a quote and someone would actually answer. Even better: I could meet senior officials who were actually charged with running policy.
It felt so different from Moscow, where if ever I had the chance to visit the Foreign Ministry or speak with Russian lawmakers, we would always have wonderful conversations, but all too often they felt irrelevant. With a nod and wink they would practically admit the obvious. The real power wasn’t there—it wasn’t even in the institutions with grand imposing names like the Federation Council—but in the hands of oligarchs, propagandists, and the president’s friends.
Power had long ago slipped out of formal institutions in Moscow. What mattered most was an unspoken fact: The president’s friends’ financial interests shaped almost everything. I became sick of government officials repeating the lines they parroted from the hate-filled nightly opinion shows on state TV. What I really wanted was to move to America, where it was all so different.
Then Donald Trump was elected president. I moved a few months later and started noticing things changing almost immediately. People I knew began having dreams (actual dreams) about Trump, something that started with Putin in Moscow a long time ago. Everything that felt so distinctively D.C. about how people talked began to fade. All the earnest discussion about policy that I had so enjoyed was replaced by opaque rumors and guesswork about the influence of oligarchs, the ructions of the intelligence services, and the intentions of “the family.” I shuddered as, when discussing politics, people started to speak about “him” and “what he wants” without ever needing to name him. Just like Moscow.
I set to work on my new project at the Hudson Institute doing open-source research on corruption. But what had long been my fringe interest on the nexus of money laundering through luxury real estate, shell companies, and Russian oligarchs no longer felt so eccentric as Paul Manafort was arrested and Robert Mueller started digging into Ukrainian money trails.
Something strange was happening. Offline, living in a Whole Foods–eating, Netflix-watching bubble off Dupont Circle, Washington felt like one of the softest places in the world. Moscow, goodbye. But online, and on TV, it was quite another matter.
I had to pinch myself watching Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on Fox News. These men, railing furiously against plots and traitors, were eerily reminiscent of the propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov on Channel One Russia.
etcetera
By now we know the problem... but it's one that's proving hard to fix by Constitutional means. Because the two sides are not playing by the same rules. It may be that our particular vision of democracy has run its course. We will see in the next few months.
posted by milo
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