The American election results were received with enthusiasm in Moscow. President Vladimir Putin, offering his congratulations, seemed genuinely pleased. But it’s not because Donald Trump is seen as a pro-Russian politician or even one of their own — those illusions faded long ago. Nor is it the prospect of an advantageous peace deal in Ukraine, ruthlessly brokered by Mr. Trump. The first reported call between the two leaders, which the Kremlin denies took place, suggests that the incoming administration will be no pushover.
Instead, the excitement comes from something else. It’s that to many in the Kremlin, a Trump presidency might bring about the collapse of the American state.
The idea that the United States is entering the final stage of its history has been kicking around Russia for some time. For years, it was confined to fringe voices. But since around 2020, figures from the Kremlin have been making the argument, too. Leading the charge was Nikolai Patrushev, a former director of the Federal Security Service and one of Mr. Putin’s key advisers. Widely regarded as Russia’s leading hard-liner, he was among the first to claim that America was on an inexorable path to implosion.
In a 2023 interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official publication of the Russian government, Mr. Patrushev detailed what that would look like. The United States would split into North and South, with the South moving “toward Mexico, whose lands were seized by Americans in 1848,” he said. “Make no mistake, sooner or later, the southern neighbors of the United States will reclaim the territories taken from them.”
By then, Mr. Putin himself had laid out a similar view of territorial disintegration. “As a former citizen of the former Soviet Union, I’ll tell you the problem with empires: They believe they are so powerful that they can afford minor mistakes,” he said in 2021. “But the problems accumulate, and a moment comes when they are no longer manageable. The United States is confidently, firmly marching down the same path as the Soviet Union.” This still seems to represent Mr. Putin’s fundamental assessment of the country. He is convinced that America is nearing its end.
For proof, advisers and officials have turned to Hollywood. This year, high-ranking Russian officials eagerly watched the American film “Civil War,” starring Kirsten Dunst. (Curiously, it was released in Russia under the title “The Fall of the Empire,” though the film contains no such imperial theme.) From the Russian elite’s perspective, the movie — which depicts California and Texas seceding, with bloodshed erupting across the nation — reflects how Americans see their near future.
The film generated immense excitement in Russia’s ruling circles. “The disintegration of the country amid deepening tensions between the federal center and states like Texas, Florida and Alabama seems frightening,” Maria Zakharova, the official spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, wrote on Telegram. “But it’s no longer such an impossible prophecy.” Dmitri Medvedev, the former president and now deputy chairman of the security council, took it as proof that civil war in the United States is inevitable. “Hollywood,” he remarked on his Telegram channel, “doesn’t make films about it for no reason.”
How would such conflict come about? The answer, for the Kremlin, is simple: culture war. Again, Mr. Patrushev has given the clearest expression of the theory. “Projects like Black Lives Matter and the rampant promotion of transgender theories are aimed at the spiritual degradation of a population already in a state of apathy,” he said in the same 2023 interview. “Ordinary citizens won’t lift a finger to preserve America’s unity, knowing they mean nothing to their own government. The U.S. authorities, without understanding the consequences, are destroying themselves step by step.”
Russia has been trying to help. As part of a broad assault on so-called woke culture and its supposed threat to traditional family and religious values — which at home has seen the banning of gender transition, the labeling of L.G.B.T.Q. groups as extremist organizations and the restricting of books that mention same-sex love — an army of Russian bots and propagandists promote conspiracy theories, vaccine skepticism, anti-feminism, anti-L.G.B.T. sentiment and anti-immigrant rhetoric on social media. The aim is to deepen the polarization of American society and, eventually, break it apart.
In this worldview, liberal ideology in the United States — encompassing not just progressive values but also the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad — has become like communist ideology in the late Soviet Union. Fewer and fewer people believe in it, more and more find it absurd, and many increasingly lean toward a much more cynical perspective. To the Kremlin, the Democratic Party has become excessively dogmatic, resembling the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its final decade: an arrogant steward of a bankrupt belief system, stumbling toward a fall.
Into this combustible setting comes Mr. Trump, whose victory appears to vindicate Russia’s assessment of America. To Moscow, he looks like a figure who could dismantle the ideology of liberalism at home and abroad, unraveling the country in the process. In this respect, he resembles — perhaps counterintuitively — Mikhail Gorbachev. Just as Mr. Gorbachev fatally undermined communist ideology, so too may Mr. Trump do the same for liberal ideology. (Indeed, in recent days the term “American Gorbachev” has gained traction in Moscow.)
To officials in the Kremlin, mostly former K.G.B. members for whom the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of modern times, Mr. Gorbachev was a self-absorbed narcissist who loved to talk — a man without a plan, a strategy or any clear understanding of his goals, a politician who undermined core institutions that supported the state and left only chaos in his wake. They much prefer Mr. Trump, naturally. But they see him playing a similar role.
Of course, much of this is wishful thinking. Predictions of America’s imminent collapse have no basis in reality. The Soviet Union fell because it bankrupted itself under the weight of excessive military spending and imperial ambitions. Its economy proved to be unsustainable and ethnic tensions emerged, with some Soviet republics pushing for independence. Mr. Gorbachev, for his part, was a reformer within the ruling party who aimed to refine rather than overthrow the system. The differences with the United States and Mr. Trump should be obvious.
But that won’t stop the Kremlin from seeing what it wants to see: an America hurtling toward disaster, with Mr. Trump at the wheel.
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