As far as we know, Vladimir Lenin never used the phrase “useful idiots.” But he certainly recognized the concept. Throughout the Soviet Union’s baleful seven-decade existence, there were plenty of Western leftists prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Most infamous is New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who determinedly shut his eyes to the evidence of Josef Stalin’s reign of terror: the arrests, the show trials, the collectivization of agriculture. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” he wrote in 1933, when the deliberate starvation of the kulaks had claimed at least 7 million lives.
Many distinguished men made the same mistake. In 1931, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was granted an interview with Stalin, and fell for him completely: “He was charmingly good humored. There was no malice in him, but also no credulity.”
Useful idiots were not, as a rule, corrupt. They didn’t need to be paid to take the Kremlin’s line. Rather, they were motivated by a peculiar blend of idealism, coldness, and vanity. They believed that the end justified the means, that any progress made by The People was bound to cause individual suffering, and that they — unlike most Westerners — were smart enough to put that suffering in context. Being human, once they had picked their side, they genuinely struggled to see it in a bad light, unconsciously screening out facts that might challenge their belief system.
Who are the Kremlin’s useful idiots today? We can spot them easily enough. They are the people telling us that the E.U. caused the war in Ukraine; that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s militiamen had nothing to do with shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17; that Russian interference in the U.S. election is a CIA fabrication; that the attempted murder of the Skripals in England was the work of British spies. Above all, they are shrill defenders of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, arguing that the evidence of his atrocities is likewise some sort of MI6 plot.
Like Shaw, these people think they can see what we gullible rubes cannot. They have taken to heart the slogan of RT, Putin’s risible propaganda channel: “Question more.” While a certain skepticism is wise when dealing with intelligence claims, it is actually quite rational to put more faith in democracies with open media, where governments are scrutinized and deceits exposed, than in Putin’s autocracy. The Russian leader, after all, lies quite barefacedly. In March 2014, he insisted that there were no Russian troops in Crimea, claiming that “anyone could buy” their uniforms. Within a month, he publicly thanked the troops that had participated in the annexation. He pulled the same trick in eastern Ukraine in 2016.
The sophists tell us, with a knowing look, that we are fools to fall for propaganda just because it happens to come from our own nations. But most of us are simply applying a bit of common sense. Does it seem plausible to you that the British state has, as Russia claims, abducted Yulia Skripal — having first, for some reason, nearly killed her with a Russian nerve agent, and then cunningly nursed her back to health?
One change since the fall of the U.S.S.R. is that useful idiots are now found more commonly on the extreme Right. France’s National Front, Hungary’s Jobbik, Bulgaria’s Ataka — these are the parties closest to the Kremlin, likeliest to spout its lines uncritically, to provide “election observers” or talking heads on Russian media when called on.
Sure, there are still useful idiots on the far Left, including Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, men for whom everything wrong in the world is the fault of Western imperialism. But look, for example, at where Assad, Putin’s client, finds his international supporters. Alongside one or two hysterical anti-American Leftists are a gaggle of European ethnonationalists: Jobbik, Ataka, the Austrian Freedom Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Spain’s Falange — plus America’s David Duke. All of them lining up, let’s remember, behind a notionally socialist Ba’athist regime.
For all their rhetoric about standing up for Western values, these parties don’t much like those values. They don’t care for individualism, free markets, or open societies. They are drawn to the Führerprinzip that Putin represents: The belief that a strong man can offer an antidote to what they see as debased, commercial, Jewish, multi-ethnic, gay-friendly Western societies. And their patriotic slogans don’t stop them taking Russian cash.
Come to think of it, “useful idiots” may be too kind a term for them. Let’s go with “useless idiots.”
