Why Exactly Does Putin Love Bernie?
On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news that, a month ago, U.S. government officials briefed Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign that the Kremlin was trying to aid his run for the White House. After the Post story, Sanders issued a strongly-worded statement, telling Vladimir Putin to “stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.”
The report didn’t specify what the Russians are doing to help, but if it’s true that they are, it would not be the first time they’ve sought to assist Sanders in his bid for the Democratic nomination. In 2016, Russian state media, which often serves as a barometer of Kremlin sentiment, strongly backed both Sanders and Donald Trump—while trashing Hillary Clinton, whom it cast as committed to starting a war with Russia. In July of that year, WikiLeaks and the GRU hacker Guccifer dumped some 20,000 internal emails from the Democratic National Committee. The correspondence, which we now know to have been pilfered by Russian intelligence agencies when they hacked the DNC’s servers, revealed that the Democratic Party was trying to thwart Sanders’s ascent in the 2016 primaries. The disclosure sowed chaos at the party’s convention and helped to disenchant many of Sanders’s supporters. This time around, it appears that Moscow is still focused on Sanders.
“This Russian support for Bernie is multifaceted, multilayered, and in line with the traditional active measures playbook,” says Marc Polymeropoulos, a recently retired CIA agent who, after the 2016 election, was tasked with pushing back on Russian covert operations around the world.
But why would Russia—which, according to American intelligence agencies, backed Trump in 2016 and is continuing to do so in 2020—also support Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist and seemingly Trump’s polar opposite?
Some observers point to Sanders’s foreign policy positions, like his commitment to non-interventionism, as being potentially beneficial to Moscow. After all, Russia, which loves intervening abroad, has a far easier time doing so when the U.S. withdraws from the world stage. Some cite representative Ro Khanna’s remarks at the recent Munich Security Forum, where Khanna, one of Sanders’s top surrogates, said that a President Sanders would keep Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics, from joining NATO. (Khanna later walked those comments back.) Others recall that Sanders voted against the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on Russians who had been suspected of violating the human rights of a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow jail under mysterious circumstances. Sanders wasn’t the only Democrat in the Senate to vote against the measure, and though Sanders never explained his nay vote, fellow Dems suggest that it was because a free trade provision had been tucked into the legislative package.
Of course, nuance like that rarely makes it across the eight time zones separating Washington from Moscow, where Sanders’s decision not to back the measure that infuriated the Kremlin caught the eye of the Russian government. The move earned Sanders a reputation as “a soft pro-Putinist,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a political scientist who used to advise Putin. “That kind of thing will never be forgotten” in Moscow, he added.
But to plenty of those watching the 2020 race from Moscow and wondering which candidate will be most advantageous to Russia, Bernie’s foreign policy positions really don’t matter much. Helping him earn the Democratic nomination is seen by many there as a way of supporting Trump. “If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, then Trump wins the White House,” predicts Igor Yurgens, president of the Institute of Contemporary Development, and a former advisor to erstwhile Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. “America won’t vote for such a leftie candidate. If you’re sitting in the [FSB headquarters at] Lubyanka and watching this race, you see that helping Sanders helps Trump. At least, that’s what I would do.”
Yurgens, who once told me that the Kremlin sees Trump as “our wrecking ball,” believes that the Putin regime is hoping for a second Trump term, as does Pavlovsky. “Our favorite is Trump,” Yurgens says of how both the Russian elite and mainstream society view the American president. “He shares our ideology and has shown as much sympathy to Russia as was humanly possible. The mainstream and the media support him and will do anything that helps Trump win, including supporting Sanders.”
Over the weekend, trying to make sense of what Russians might be thinking about Bernie Sanders, I also called Andranik Migranyan, who used to run a Russian government-funded think tank attached to the Russian mission to the U.N. Perhaps more notably, he’s also a close friend and former classmate of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “I don’t think anyone really respects or values Sanders here,” Migranyan told me.
“It’s like a knife in the throat,” he went on. “The things Sanders says even Russian communists would be too scared to say. He is a real communist. I always said to Americans, ‘Your brilliant future is our horrible past.’ We collapsed into nothing because of Communism, and now this is the dream that Sanders is offering—and a big part of your country is following him into the abyss.” If Sanders secures the nomination, warns Polymeropoulos, the retired CIA officer, who worked to counter Russian interference after 2016, this is exactly the kind of attack you can expect to see from Russian bots. “Bernie’s socialist credentials is exactly the hot-button, divisive issue that Russia will seek to use to cause chaos,” says Polymeropoulos.
“I suspect that, for our people [at the top], Sanders looks like the mad professor from ‘Back to the Future,’” says Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, who teaches future government workers at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, in Moscow. “Which is why he’s very convenient for starting a pan-American brawl. Let them all fight each other while we lay another gas pipeline somewhere!”
And this, according to everyone I asked, is the central goal.
“The ideal scenario is to maintain the schism and uncertainty in the States till the end,” says Pavlovsky. “Our candidate is chaos.”
“Russian active measures thrive on chaos, and this is what a second Trump term delivers,” says Polymeropoulos. “America is at war with itself politically for another four years. Advantage: Russia. Second, while it’s true that the Trump administration has at times been very tough on Russia with respect to sanctions, strategically, under the Trump administration, Russians have regained a foothold in the Middle East, NATO is weakened by a more disengaged America, and Trump’s disdain for Ukraine is a huge boon for Russia.”
Back in the day, Yurgens told me the KGB worked to infiltrate the Black Panthers and the CIA worked to infiltrate circles of Soviet dissidents. It was challenging back then. “Now, things have been sped up and there are more opportunities, thanks to the internet and social media,” Yurgens said. These days, Russia finds itself in the thick of American politics thanks to some Facebook ads and a few carefully timed hacks, and all on a shoestring budget. “For Russia, it’s genius, either one of them is fantastic for us!” says Migranyan, the friend of the Russian foreign minister, said of Sanders and Trump. “All of this infighting, this cannibalism, they create and deepen the crisis of the American system. For Russia, it’s a very interesting prospect. Because we didn’t dream this thing up, you guys did. Your civil war is continuing! Will the U.S. survive past 2025? Your country is hurtling toward the abyss. I feel badly for you!”
Migranyan is a very pro-Kremlin figure so he is still careful to formally deny that Russia meddled in 2016, or is meddling now—but to leave just enough room for his listener to draw her own conclusions. “Of course, it’s total idiocy. We’re not behind Trump or Sanders,” he said. Then he chuckled and added, “But we’d be fools if we didn’t use this in our interests.”
Julia Ioffe is a GQ correspondent.
They were an all-star crew. They cooked up the perfect plan. And when they pulled off the caper of the century, it made them more than a fortune—it made them folk heroes.
He went from the rumpled bit player of the progressive movement to a legit presidential candidate and liberal kingmaker. But now that Sanders wields such enormous power in Democratic politics, the question is, what’s he going to do with it? Jason Zengerle hit the road with Sanders as the senator grapples with what to do next.
Originally Appeared on GQ
