Return to Russia

Last year the US government tried to silence me from speaking out about Russia by seizing my passport and criminalizing my speech. Today I have passport in hand and have returned to Russia.

The Author visiting Votkinsk, May 2023

On June 3, 2024, I was preparing to board a plane at New York City’s JFK airport that would take me to St. Petersburg, Russia, where I was scheduled to speak at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. From there I was going to embark on a 40-day tour of Russia, engaging in the vital work of citizen diplomacy—waging peace—that I had undertaken since my initial visit to Russia, back in April-May 2023.

It was not to be.

Three armed Customs and Border Patrol agents pulled me aside and, without further explanation, seized my passport.

No charges were made, no allegations of wrongdoing offered.

They simply seized the same passport that I had used for my two previous trips to Russia.

They didn’t even provide a receipt.

It was clear my visiting Russia was deemed a threat by the United States government—at that time headed by the administration of President Joe Biden.

Two months later, scores of armed FBI agents showed up at my home, carrying a search warrant that empowered them to seize my personal electronics.

No charges were made.

But this time the FBI accused me or serving as an agent of the Russian government.

They accused me of taking direction from the Russian Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov.

And they accused me of taking direction from RT, a Russian media company.

The FBI executed at least two other search warrants during this time, one against Dmitri Simes, a well-known American journalist of Russian origin, and an unnamed RT producer based in Miami.

Together, these three FBI raids were the public face of a campaign being waged by the Department of Justice to counter what it claimed to be a massive effort undertaken by the Russian government to manipulate the 2024 Presidential election.

In short, I was being accused of undermining American democracy because of my work as a journalist.

My speech, protected under the US Constitution, was now deemed a threat to the national security of the United States.

And yet, no criminal charges were ever filed.

The Justice Department did convene a federal grand jury to investigate my relationship with the Russian government and RT.

But nothing ever came of it.

Because, frankly speaking, nothing ever could.

I had committed no crime.

I was a victim of the weaponization of law enforcement and the US intelligence community by the US government, operating at the behest of the Ukrainian government, which had labeled me an “information terrorist” and subjected me to a “black list” which sought to ban my presence on social media platforms (I was kicked off of YouTube, Twitter (X) and Facebook as a result), as well as a “hit list” (the infamous Myrotvorets list) that targeted me for death (Daria Dugina and Maxim Tatarsky, two well-known Russian journalists, were victims of this list, murdered by the Ukrainian intelligence service which manages it.)

In November 2024, the election I was accused of interfering in on behalf of the Russian government voted out the Biden administration (Kamala Harris, Biden’s Vice President, was the candidate for the Democrats), and voted in Donald Trump, who had previously served as President from 2017-2021.

Elections have consequences.

Earlier this month, I was re-visited by the FBI. This time they came to begin the process of returning the property they had seized a year ago. They acknowledged that, because of the election, their priorities had been changed.

Trying to silence the free speech of a government critic was no longer on the agenda.

And last month, after being given the silent treatment by the US government about the fate of my passport, I simply reapplied, listing my passport as having been “stolen”, and naming the US government as the perpetrator.

A new passport was immediately issued.

And now I am in Russia, completing a journey that had begun back in June 2024, but cut short by government intervention.

I am in Russia as a guest of the National Unity Club, an organization which promotes the strengthening of global peace, the maintenance of friendship and mutually respectful relations between peoples while seeking a respectful position of the world towards Russia, its history and its role in key events. The National Unity Club has as part of its mission the creation of platforms for cultural and educational exchange which promote the understanding of the historical, scientific and humanitarian achievements of Russia.

My visit fits well with the mission of the National Unity Club, and I am deeply grateful that they were willing to host and facilitate my visit and work.

This is the visit the US government did not want me to make.

And here I am.

Truth be told, a large part of my wanting to make this trip was to prove a point, to demonstrate to the US government that the tactics of intimidation would never work, especially when it came to limiting the free speech of law-abiding American citizens such as myself.

But there is a larger purpose as well.

We live in a time where the dysfunctional nature of US-Russian relations has place both nations, and indeed the entire world, at mortal risk.

The United States has implemented a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine that has led to further deterioration of relations, to the point that the US has deployed nuclear bombs to the United Kingdom, France and the UK have unified their nuclear posture to counter perceived Russian threats, and President Trump has ordered nuclear armed submarines closer to Russia’s shore. Russia has responded by re-writing its nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for the potential use of nuclear weapons, providing Belarus with its own nuclear deterrence capabilities, and placing a new intermediate range missile, the Oreshnik, into serial production.

The last remaining arms control vehicle that limits the size of the US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals, the New START treaty, expires in February 2026.

And yet there is no meaningful dialogue taking place today between the US and Russia to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

Instead, we are confronted with an escalation of tensions brought on by the threats and actions of the United States, and the war-like posturing of NATO and Europe, all because Russia refuses to submit to the will of the collective west and terminate the conflict with Ukraine on terms it finds unacceptable.

The average observer might ask how my visit to Russia could impact the situation I have just spelled out. To answer this, I’m going to take you back in time, to the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Back in March of 1994, E. Wayne Merry, the head of the political-internal section of the US Embassy in Moscow, authored an unsolicited analysis of American policy toward Russia in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The recipient was the Secretary of State, whom Merry believed was getting bad advice and inaccurate reporting from official channels. Merry took advantage of what was known as the “dissent channel” to publish a cable containing an unvarnished assessment about the absolute failure of US policy in Russia, and what the consequences of this failure could be.

Titled “Whose Russia is it Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect”, Merry slammed the US prioritization of emphasizing market reforms over the building of democratic institutions and the rule of law as an “especially virulent case of Washington institutions trying to ram a foreign square peg into an American round hole,” warning that this policy direction ran the risk of exhausting “an already diminishing reservoir of goodwill toward America, assist anti-democratic forces, and help create an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.”

Merry criticized the quality of the experts and advisers the US was dispatching to Russia in the name of implementing reform, noting that “very few of the multitudes of American ‘advisors’ in Russia since the Bolshevik demise [i.e., the fall of the Soviet Union] acquainted themselves with even the most basic facts of the country whose destiny they proposed to shape… Even the most progressive and sympathetic of Russian officials have lost patience with the endless procession of what they call ‘assistance tourists’ who rarely bother to ask their hosts for an appraisal of Russian needs.”

Not every American was useless, however. Merry observed that “serious” visitors to Russia—“those interested in long-term relations and who can listen as well as speak”—were enjoying success. Merry noted that American businessmen who fell into this “serious” category were actually the most effective presence the United States had in Russia.

It has been more than forty years since Merry wrote what is today referred to as “the new ‘Long Telegram’—a reference to George Kennan’s famous missive, written in 1946, which is widely seen as the starting point for the policy of containment of the Soviet Union which triggered the Cold War. The failure of what passed for American policy in Russia during the 1990’s is now historical fact. And since that time, successive administrations have fumbled their way through the same policy trap that confounded the American “assistance tourists” forty years ago—the inability, due to their ignorance of all things Russia—to comprehend that policy designed in Washington, DC which was intended to appease American sensibilities had no chance of success in a Russia defined by Russian realities. In short, for more than four decades Washington institutions have been guilty of, as Merry so eloquently observed, “trying to ram a foreign square peg into an American round hole.”

Moreover, since successive generations of what passes for Russian “experts” within these same institutions have been confronted with the fruit of their ineffectual labor, the very “adversarial relationship” predicted by Merry, having become reality, produced new “experts” whose focus was no longer “fixing” Russia, but rather “containing” and “defeating” a Russia which refused to conform to American expectations. This new generation of “experts” are even more ignorant of the Russian reality than their predecessors of forty years past, instead focusing all of their attention on the figure of one man—Russian President Vladimir Putin—whom they portray in simplistic, cartoonish fashion, characterizing his recalcitrance over surrendering Russian sovereignty to a cabal of western overlords as “authoritative dictatorship”, failing to understand that the root cause of Russia’s reticence toward the West is founded in the American policies of the 1990’s, which undermined Russia’s efforts at building so-called “democratic institutions.” Even today, those who lament this failure ignore the fact that “democratic institutions” that are built on the notion of American Jeffersonian democracy can never succeed in Russia—that Russian democracy can only exist in the context of the Russian reality.

There is a vacuum of genuine Russian expertise in the United States today. Moreover, the ongoing Russophobic posture on the part of American society—the government, academia, the media, Hollywood, etc.—has toward all things Russia means that the average American citizen faces a near impossible task when it comes to deciphering the Russian reality for his or herself. The stringent sanctions that have been imposed on Russia are not just a tool to punish Russia but also to sustain Russophobia in the United States. The American businessman whom Merry rightfully recognized as possessing the appropriate skill set when it came to successfully interacting with Russians inside Russia—that unique trait of being able to “listen as well as speak”—are precluded by law from engaging with Russia.

This leaves the average American citizen as the last remaining hope of instilling a modicum on common sense when it comes to relations between the United States and Russia. This isn’t simply about restoring a sense of decorum in the interaction between our two nations, but rather a national security imperative. The Russophobic poison that has infected the brains of Americans manifests itself in failed policy. This failure, however, extends beyond dysfunctional trade and cultural isolation, and into actual conflict—hybrid, proxy, conventional and nuclear. This failure could very well trigger the means of our collective extinction.

Failure is not an option.

So here I am, back in Russia.

One American citizen fighting an uphill battle against the forces of ignorance, trying to find an antidote to Russophobia so that the American people can think more clearly about US-Russian relations, and demand better policy options from those we elect to higher office.

Thanks to the efforts of the National Unity Club, I will be provided the opportunity to interact with Russians from all walks of life. I will engage in discussions, dialogue, perhaps even debate.

But most importantly, I will listen to what they have to say.

About Russia.

About America.

About the danger of war.

About the prospects for peace.

Bad policy is generated from ignorance.

Ignorance fuels fear.

And politicians exploit fear to promulgate policies that otherwise would not pass muster with a discerning public.

By listening, I will learn.

I will empower myself with knowledge and information about the Russian reality.

I will no longer be ignorant about Russia.

I will no longer fear Russia.

Last year the US government stopped me from travelling to Russia.

They sought to criminalize my rights of free speech to silence my voice when speaking to my fellow Americans about Russia.

And now I am back in Russia.

I will neither be silent nor silenced.

And I invite you to join me on this wonderful journey of discovery and enlightenment.

Read about the danger of nuclear war and the importance of arms control in my latest book, Highway to Hell (https://www.claritypress.com/product/highway-to-hell-the-armageddon-chronicles-2015-2024/).