It feels as if the holiday season has come early in Moscow. The pedestrian streets are festooned with twinkling lights, Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas is playing in cafes across the city, and the elite TSUM department store is already wrapped in red bunting.
In this atmosphere, Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election might seem like an early holiday gift, too, given his record of praise for President Vladimir Putin.
Reports about Trump’s victory have been playing repeatedly on state television, with some broadcasts showing photographs of Trump’s face under the inscription “Kamala, You’re Fired!”
Indeed there is a restrained sense of optimism that Trump’s triumph could lead to a breakthrough in US-Russian relations, and possibly an end to the war in Ukraine, which is almost through its third year.
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Still, the sliver of hope is tempered with wariness, fuelled by the robust US support for Ukraine. Russians are hardly celebrating the way they did after Trump’s victory in 2016, when members of parliament popped open Champagne bottles.
Even as it has congratulated Trump on his victory, the Kremlin has portrayed the United States as an adversary essentially waging a proxy war against Russia.
“There is a hope, a modest hope, that lower level dialogue will at least resume, because it simply does not exist now,” the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in an interview in his office. “But at the same time, we won’t put on rose-coloured glasses. We are well aware that it is one thing to make statements during an election campaign, but when a person enters the Oval Office, everything is different.”
Depending on the people the president-elect appoints, change could be possible, he said.
During the parade of political talkshows assessing the US election, presenters dissect the resumes of potential cabinet appointees, wade deep into the impact of Republican control over Congress, and air voiced-over clips of US TV including CNN and Tucker Carlson’s online show. They also regularly play unflattering clips of President Joe Biden.
“It’s not like Trump is seen as a Manchurian candidate,” said Alex Yusupov, director of the Russia programme at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a left-leaning political foundation in Berlin, referring to a politician whose strings are being secretly pulled by an enemy power. “I don’t think that the overall reaction is, ‘There is an ally in power now,’ or that it is a strategic win,” he continued.
He pointed out that Biden showed a clear sense of restraint on issues like strikes deep into Russian territory, while Trump is considered more reckless and unpredictable.
But in one sense, Trump’s win is a significant victory for the Kremlin, said Yusupov. He cited the increasing popularity in Europe of right-wing parties that are also disrupting the international order established after the second World War. “There is an immense schadenfreude, domestically speaking, that the old western institutionalised world is eating itself up,” he said.
This “allows Russia to push away imminent questions about its economic model and the country’s future leadership”, said Yusupov.
In the short term, Russia is weathering the economic storm inflicted by Putin’s war and the western sanctions it prompted. The International Monetary Fund recently raised its forecast for Russian economic growth in 2024 to 3.6 per cent. That would be higher than growth in the United States and Europe, although inflation in Russia is expected to remain high, at nearly 8 per cent this year. The IMF cut its forecast for the Russian economy next year, with growth expected to slow to 1.3 per cent.
Still, shopping malls are busy and Maybachs, BMWs, Range Rovers and other western cars still clog the capital’s wide avenues during rush hour, along with lesser-known Chinese competitors.
If the war ends soon, as Trump has promised, Russia may be able to weather the economic storm better than the West expected.
“Moscow does think that there may be an important opportunity and they don’t want to miss it,” said Dimitri Simes, the former president of The National Interest, a think tank based in Washington, DC, who now lives in Moscow and co-hosts The Great Game, a show on state television. (Simes was indicted in the US in September, charged with violating economic sanctions against Russia for his work on Russian television. He denies wrongdoing).
One former senior Kremlin official said he had “reserved optimism” that common ground could be found for a ceasefire before the new year and a peace agreement by next spring or summer.
While Trump might be reckless, his opposition is “obsessed with being politically correct”, the official, who remains well-sourced among Moscow’s elite, said in an interview in an upscale suburb. “They repeat with a religious fervour the idea that ‘We cannot let Putin win’, but the world is not black and white.” He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
In one sense, Russians seem to find it easier to understand Trump than other US politicians. He is far more like his Russian counterpart, Putin – a bombastic leader with a tough-guy image, a predilection for Versailles-like decor, and a track record of appointing relatives to key positions.
“Trump is recognisable,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at New York University who also lives in Moscow. “Trump is a palace guy. And Russians like palaces.”
There’s also a shared sense of disdain for what they view as excessively progressive values, and talk of human rights and freedoms that many Russians find not only disingenuous but hypocritical.
Even some anti-Putin Muscovites seemed to favour Trump in the run-up to the election, though their viewpoint holds inherent contradictions. For example, they resent the way western countries cut them off from the global payments system, called Swift, in 2022, even though they blame these same countries for doing business with Putin while he spent decades eroding human rights and democratic institutions.
Travelling to western countries has become not only more difficult for Russians, but much more expensive, and anti-Kremlin Russians feel they have been collectively punished for Putin’s bloody war in Ukraine.
“Shall we block all of their credit cards now?” one anti-Putin Muscovite quipped about Americans who voted for Trump, asking for anonymity for fear of retribution.
Many Americans saw the 2016 election of Trump as an aberration, a result that could be more easily blamed on Russian influence campaigns than the genuine popularity of a populist candidate. While there is clear evidence that Moscow tried to influence this year’s result in Trump’s favour and cast doubt on its validity with disinformation, there is a prevailing sense of vindication among Russians that Trump appears to be genuinely popular with a large segment of the country.
“Trump is ‘poshlost’ incarnate,” said Khrushcheva, using the Russian word for “tasteless vulgarity”. “Every nation gets the government it deserves. Ruled by Trump, who are those Americans to look down on us, lecture us, scold us and pontificate on values?” – New York Times
The Russian ambivalence about Trump is evident at places like the Izmailovsky Bazaar, a sprawling tourist market that looks like a Disney-esque version of a medieval Russian Kremlin.
Row after row of stalls sell the classic Russian Matryoshki, painted wood nesting dolls. Many versions feature Putin, as well as glossy, newly arrived dolls showing other leaders including Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Chinese president Xi Jinping, and a slew of leaders from the Gulf States, reflecting the nationalities of tourists who now come to Russia.
Sergei, a middle-aged vendor, said he had brought his old Trump dolls out of storage. Some had a dusty patina.
“No one is interested in them for now, and I haven’t ordered any new ones just yet,” he said of the Trump dolls, some of which were displayed side by side with dolls of Putin.
“Whether I do or not depends on what he does,” he said, “and if he can fix the mess between our countries.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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