We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
— W.H. Auden, “The Age of Anxiety” (1948)
The persistence of pro-Kremlin sentiments on either pole of the American political spectrum, even after more than two years of non-stop atrocities perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine, is one of the more perplexing phenomena of our increasingly unsettled age. We encounter it in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene can be found citing the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Russian state-sponsored propaganda outlet, or offering nonsensical amendments demanding an American withdrawal from NATO or the Ukrainian closure of “all bio-laboratories.” And while the backbencher from Georgia remains an embarrassing outlier in Congress, similar views have become widespread in the information space, where figures like former United Nations Special Commission weapons inspector and convicted sex offender Scott Ritter, self-styled “MAGA communist” social media influencer Jackson Hinkle, and a host of other clout-chasing misfits spend their days projectile vomiting pro-Russian (as well as pro-Hamas, pro-Assad, pro-Houthi, and pro-Iranian) agitprop. Even Tucker Carlson has gotten in on the act, doing his best Walter Duranty impersonation by conducting a softball interview with Vladimir Putin and then claiming to have been “radicalized,” in his words, at a Moscow branch of the French grocery retailer Auchan, where he encountered the technological marvel of a shopping cart coin deposit system and became positively giddy at the prospect of spending a mere ₽9,481.37 ($103.32) on a trolley full of provisions.
George Orwell, in his Sept. 1, 1944, article of the “As I Please” Tribune series, cautioned his fellow journalists and intellectuals against imagining “that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.” Today, as Russian missiles, bombs, and drones rain down on peaceful Ukrainian cities, and as mass graves and torture chambers proliferate in Russian-occupied regions, there are those — thankfully still a minority — who seem to revel in the sort of mental indecency so eloquently condemned by Orwell. These dynamics typically play out more in social media channels than in real life, where you seldom meet a genuine Kremlin shill, but there are a few intrepid souls who have put their skin in the game; for example, the Canadian farmer and YouTuber Arend Feenstra and his wife Anneesa, who moved their family of 11 — minus their oldest son — from Saskatchewan to Nizhny Novgorod to get away from western “left-wing ideology,” only to be find themselves in a bureaucratic nightmare when their new Russian bank froze their “suspicious” accounts. In a (since-deleted) YouTube post, Anneesa Feenstra declared herself to be “very disappointed in this country at this point” and “ready to jump on a plane and get out of here.” The family’s next video, recorded after the Russian authorities caught wind of their understandable complaints, was titled “We Are Sorry and Will Do Better.”
At this very moment, we are reliably informed, a village is being built in the Moscow region, intended to house approximately 200 families fleeing from the United States and Canada to the purported traditionalist utopia of the Russian Federation. The Russian attorney Timur Beslangurov, speaking at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, claimed that many of the anticipated immigrants will be “conservative Catholics” who “very strongly believe in the prophecy that Russia will remain the only Christian country in the world” [очень сильно верят в пророчество, что Россия останется единственной в мире христианской страной]. I am unaware of the origin or theological basis of this particular “prophecy” and find it pretty hard to credit, given that public religiosity in Russia is practically non-existent, and actual Catholics, alongside other religious groups, are presently being brutally persecuted in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine like Zaporizhzhia, where the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and Catholic ministries have been completely liquidated, and the Knights of Columbus have been targeted as part of the “intelligence services of the United States and the Vatican.” Perhaps there are 200 families in North America sufficiently deluded to follow the Feentras to Putin’s promised land — very little would surprise me at this point — and, if so, we can only wish them the best of luck and a hearty schastlivogo puti.
*****
It is one thing to cast a critical eye upon our own not infrequently moribund body politic, but to become enamored with the hideous specter of Putinist fascism is something else entirely. Such a remarkable course of action cries out for a psychological explanation, and for better or worse we have been provided with a magnificent case study in the form of Russell “Texas” Bentley, who in the aftermath of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine in 2014 eagerly signed up to participate in the Putin regime’s campaign of territorial annexation and cultural genocide. Born in 1960, Bentley grew up in the Dallas enclave of Highland Park (where yours truly likewise spent some of his most formative years), dropped out of high school, spent three years in the U.S. Army, waited tables, played in a “cow punk” band, and by 1990 was toiling away as a lumberjack and arborist in Minnesota. It was at this point that his life became even more picaresque. He engaged in pro-marijuana activism and ran as a Grassroots Party candidate in the 1990 United States Senate election in Minnesota, garnering a respectable 1.65 percent of the vote. He made his way to Cuba, embraced the ersatz political religion of communism, and started a new career as a drug trafficker. Jailed in 1996 on drug conspiracy charges, Bentley escaped from a halfway house in 1999, spent eight years on the lam in Washington state, participated in the Seattle WTO protests, was eventually recaptured, and served the remainder of his sentence in a maximum-security prison.
When the Russo-Ukrainian war began in February of 2014, Russell Bentley was once again a free man, again working as an arborist, this time in Round Rock, Texas, and was in a relationship with a local yoga instructor. His marijuana activism was behind him, but he evidently pined for his former adventurous existence, while becoming increasingly attracted to conspiracy theories; regarding 9/11, he opined that “you can say what you want about building one and two, but building seven? Anyone that doesn’t understand that that was a pre-planned, pre-placed controlled demolition is either an idiot or a liar.” As an adolescent he had devoured the writings of Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, and in his sixth decade he retained his rebellious instincts, voicing outrage at the death of Muammar Gaddafi, lamenting that “he was one of the greatest,” and scaling Marine recruitment billboards to write “F**k NATO” on them.
Bentley found the direction in his life that had theretofore been lacking in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Fired by a newfound zeal, he initiated a GoFundMe campaign, raised around $2,000 to finance a “fact-finding mission” to Donbas, and headed to eastern Ukraine, whereupon he enlisted with the pro-Russian separatists fighting Ukrainian government forces in Donetsk. After serving with the Vostok Battalion and XAH Spetsnaz Battalion under the call-sign “Texas,” he transitioned to producing English-language propaganda and working as a correspondent for Sputnik, a Russian state-owned dezinformatsiya organ. He married a Russian woman, Lyudmila, was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church in the summer of 2016, became a Russian citizen, and could be found wandering the streets of Donetsk sporting a Soviet-era afghanka hat with a hammer-and-sickle pin, and a t-shirt with the emblazoned with the words мы – Донбасс! (“We — Donbas!”).
The reader may be wondering at this point what any of this has to do with Bentley’s beloved communism. It seems that Bentley was under the impression that he was some sort of communist freedom fighter, helping to “liberate Ukraine from Nazis,” oblivious to the fact that the Russian Federation is not synonymous with the USSR and that his unit was serving alongside other Russian units like DShRG “Rusich,” led by the infamous Alexey Milchakov, who once declared: “I’m not going to go deep and say, I’m a nationalist, a patriot, an imperialist, and so forth. I’ll say it outright: I’m a Nazi.” No amount of destruction, slaughter, rape, torture, deportations, “filtration” camps, plundered museums, shuttered churches, or openly genocidal rhetoric would ever convince “Texas” that he was actually fighting for, rather than against, the forces of fascism.
Despite his avowed international communism, Bentley also adopted a sort of vicarious ethno-narcissism, employing Russian chauvinist rhetoric while rambling idiotically about how his efforts would bring “Ukraine back into the Slavic family where it belongs and has been for 1,000 years.” Attempting to conflate his twin causes célèbres of international communism and pseudo-Orthodox Russo-fascism, he proclaimed that “We got Lenin and we got God on our side. We cannot be defeated.” When Russian troops flooded into Ukraine in 2022, the Texan volunteer was ecstatic: “We’re gettin’ ready to bring the hammer down. These guys are going to save and liberate all the good people of Ukraine. And the bad people? Boom! Kick their ass.” It should be apparent by now that Bentley possessed, as they say in Russia, “a mind that doesn’t shine” [умом не блещет], and that perhaps “nature took a rest while working on him” [на нем природа отдохнула]. At the same time, we can acknowledge that the so-called Donbas Cowboy proved willing to act on his convictions, while most other Western pro-Russian commentators are content to confine their activities to the rank sewer of social media, making him a particularly intriguing psychological case study.
*****
How is it, then, that a bog-standard leftist marijuana dealer could transform himself first into a raging communist revolutionary and then into a warmongering Russian nationalist, willing to travel to Donbas with the intention of killing, and cheering on the killing of, innocent Ukrainians? In his analysis of the psychological mechanisms of radicalization, Oluf Gøtzsche-Astrup, a researcher at Aarhus University, found strong empirical evidence for the significance of “negative life experiences that put the individual in flux in terms of fundamental questions.” The “experience of fundamental uncertainty or loss of meaning or significance” leads some individuals to undertake a “shift in social identity towards a single social group rather than many.” Struggling with those “fundamental questions,” such a person may undertake a “quest for significance” in which:
A perceived humiliation thwarts the individual’s need to feel valued and significant in the eyes of others, creating motivation to restore significance. This creates the opportunity for an ideology (a narrative) that assigns blame for the perceived humiliation to an external enemy, legitimises violent aggression against this enemy on moral grounds, and constructs a bleak, Manichaean worldview where everything is broken down into good or evil.
Russell Bentley’s quest for significance led him from rebellion against his suburban Texan upbringing to activism, then to leftist protest movements, then to conspiracy theories, a journey which finally ended with complicity in Russian crimes against humanity in eastern Ukraine.
Perhaps Bentley’s issues predated even his stormy Vietnam War–era adolescence. The Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in her “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” first read before the British Psycho-Analytical Society on Dec. 4, 1946, enumerated some primitive defense mechanisms formed by the early ego, including “idealization, denial of inner and outer reality, and stifling of emotions.” As summarized by George Joffé and Catherine Schmidt in their 2010 article “The Psychology of Political Extremism”:
Klein postulates that there is a destructive impulse from within psyche from birth, which thus threatens the individual. This threat — in effect a death instinct — is dealt with by splitting the destructive part off from the good part and projecting the destructive impulse into an external object. Thus the object is experienced as persecutory, hostile and threatening. Such mechanisms can be observed throughout life whenever an individual reverts to a paranoid-schizoid level of functioning.
We can easily see the Kleinian destructive impulse at work over the course of Bentley’s life, which he attempted to redirect at various targets including the United States, NATO, and democratic Ukraine, while ignoring the reality of Russia’s brutal war of territorial conquest and idealizing Putin’s criminal regime. It is unlikely that he would have recognized the “death instinct” or “death drive” manifesting itself in his foray into the war in Donbas, but he may have had some presentiments of his eventual fate. In an early March 2022 interview with Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson, Bentley ranted and raved as usual about how Ukrainians are “genuine, mass-murdering Nazis” allied with “thousands of ISIS cannibals,” all the usual verbal filth, but he ended the exchange on an uncharacteristically contemplative note: “May God protect the innocent, and may the rest of us get everything we deserve.”
*****
On April 8, 2024, a Russian military unit stationed on Avtobazovskaya Street in the Petrovsky district of Donetsk came under Ukrainian artillery fire. Russell Bentley raced to the scene, either to help the wounded or to document the destruction, and then mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind his car, a baseball cap, and a smashed cellphone. A week later his wife posted a desperate plea on her husband’s VKontakte page, letting his followers know that “Texas” had been abducted and “brutally detained” by members of the Russian 5th Tank Brigade from Buryatia. A fellow pro-war journalist, Alexander Korobko, added that the camouflaged men who carried Bentley away had likely mistaken him for an American spy and suspected that he had called in the Ukrainian strike.
The body of Russell Bonner Bentley III, aka “Texas,” aka the “Donbas Cowboy,” the voice of Radio Free Donbas and war correspondent for the Sputnik “news” agency, was recovered on April 19. Margarita Simonyan, the loathsome head of another propaganda outfit, RT, confirmed on Telegram that Bentley was dead after 10 years of “fighting there for our guys,” while pointedly avoiding the fact that he had also been killed by “her guys.” Grisly rumors about Bentley’s demise began to spread. It was variously reported that he had been shot eight times at close range, or that he was kicked to death, or that he was beheaded, or that his corpse exhibited signs of sexual violence, or all of the above. What is certain at this juncture is that he was tortured and murdered by his own comrades-in-arms. Alexander Khodakovsky, head of the separatist Donetsk Vostok Battalion, took to Telegram to request that “those who killed Russell Bentley” be punished but then immediately deleted his post.
It is tempting to wonder whether, as he was being abducted, tortured, and presented with his imminent demise, it occurred to “Texas” that he had made a mistake by casting his lot among the notoriously bloodthirsty Russian military, or whether he was a true believer right until the end. But a “true believer” in what, precisely? Russell Bentley thought, for whatever reason, that he was fighting for Lenin and God. Any reasonably sane individual would have realized long ago that those are two entirely contradictory ideological lodestones and that, in any case, the Russian invaders of Ukraine are fighting for neither one. How could anyone, even a reformed pothead-turned-communist revolutionary, be so profoundly mistaken?
Putin’s Russia is, in some ways, an empty vessel into which those who despise the west can pour their disparate ideologies. Statues of Stalin are being erected throughout the Russian Federation, and previously removed statues of Lenin are being returned to their plinths in occupied regions of Ukraine, so unreconstructed communists like Russell Bentley imagine they can find an ideological home there. Russian Orthodox leaders like Protodeacon Vladimir Vasilik announce that “Russia will be renewed, cleansed of its sins—abortion, corruption, embezzlement, and the presence of atheists and cultists — and finally of obscenity. Then, finally, Russia will become Holy Russia,” a project that, however unrealistic given Russia’s widespread societal squalor, has led some traditionalists to feel they have a staunch ally in Russia. The Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin advocates “Eurasian integration” to unite China, India, the Middle East, and the Global South against the “Anglo-Saxons” and the “collective West,” thereby attracting those in the developing world who desire increased geopolitical multipolarity.
Putin’s regime appears to stand for just about everything, no matter how blatantly contradictory, when in fact it stands for nothing beyond the perpetuation of the political mafia’s interests. Indeed, the ruling clan looks askance at most ideologues. As Kamil Galeev recently put it on X, formerly Twitter,
One useful concept to understand Russia, for example, is the taboo on activism. Any, absolutely any sort of activism sooner or later ends with the activists’ teeth getting knocked out.
Some of the people whose teeth get knocked out are nuts, yes.
“Any” should be understood literally. “Any” includes pro-war activism, pro-Putin activism, and any activism for any agenda that the authorities currently promote. Yes, they promote it. But they neither want, nor expect your unsolicited support[.]
It will get your teeth knocked out[.]
The communist will eventually wear out his welcome in Russia, because Putin is not a communist. The religious zealot will do likewise, since Putin is not a religious zealot. The same goes for the nationalist, the Eurasianist, and so on. What these ideologues fail to realize is that their respective worldviews imply a future system that somehow improves upon the vast open-air gas station/mafia syndicate/insane asylum that is contemporary Russia, which cannot be allowed. A great many people fail to realize this. Russell Bentley is only the most extreme example.
We have seen how the late “Donbas Cowboy,” who now rests in peace (pieces?) in the greasy Donbas mud, ventured all the way to Russian-occupied Ukraine, one of the most hellish and repressive places on earth, where he formed a bizarrely Manichaean worldview in which Putin’s regime was the only thing standing in the way of hordes of “Ukrainian Nazis” and “ISIS cannibals.” We cannot discount the possibility that he realized, in the last moments of his misspent life, the error of his ways. It is hard to imagine, as he was being tortured by his erstwhile allies because of his accent and some vague, entirely unfounded suspicions, that he found much comfort in the tenets of international communism and Russo-fascism, but the psychopathology of political extremism, despite the best efforts of psychologists and political scientists, remains poorly understood. Still, Russell “Texas” Bentley provided one thing of value, a cautionary tale that some on both the left and right would do well to consider, which might well constitute a valid endpoint for his ill-conceived quest for significance.
Image: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
