The best freedom money can buy: How the Party of Reagan became the Party of Putin

The Mary Sue presents a guest essay by journalist and screenwriter Andrea Chalupa, author of the graphic novel In the Shadow of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones illustrated by Ivan Rodriguez and published by Oni Press.

At a party, a doctor noticed my grandfather’s hands shaking and, assuming it was Parkinson’s, decided to strike up a conversation to offer help. The doctor was an expert in Parkinson’s, eager to engage with someone who might benefit from his knowledge. But my grandfather, who mostly spoke Ukrainian and had only broken English, corrected him with a wry smile: “Not Parkinson’s. KGB.”

This brief but telling encounter encapsulates my grandfather’s extraordinary life—a life lived through the very events George Orwell allegorizes in Animal Farm. He witnessed the Russian Revolution unfold on his farm in Donbas, Ukraine, barely survived Stalin’s genocidal famine known as the Holodomor, and endured brutal torture as a young father during the Great Terror. After emigrating to the United States following World War II, my grandfather threw himself into the anti-Soviet movement, becoming a staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan, like so many Eastern European immigrants. How often I have wondered what my grandfather, who inspired my film Mr. Jones and the graphic novel adaptation In the Shadow of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones, would think of Reagan’s Republican Party today.

On June 8, 1982, in London, Ronald Reagan gave a defining speech of his presidency. Addressing the British Parliament, Reagan broke with conventional wisdom and challenged the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union, pledging to strengthen democracy worldwide to protect the Free World. He even went so far as to make a bold prediction that would come true a decade later: the demise of the Soviet Union on the “ash heap of history,” a line Reagan personally wrote. Over forty years after a speech that stiffened the spines of America’s allies and rattled the gerontocracy of the Kremlin, Reagan’s Republican Party has joined the “ash heap of history,” replaced by a pro-Russian movement that violently tried to overthrow our democracy on January 6 and promotes Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for turning America into a dictatorship.

How did the Party of Reagan become the Party of Putin? The transformation was inevitable, brought on by Reagan’s own policies, which are overlooked or willfully ignored by a media environment dominated by politically exiled former Republicans bemoaning their party’s demise. Instead, Reagan is held up as a shining saint, a buoy in a storm of rising authoritarianism, which the old party faithful cling to. They seem unwilling or unable to grasp that the Reagan Revolution—fueled by a destructive culture of “greed is good,” a dangerous rollback of government regulations, attacks on voting rights and our social safety net, and other steroids that unleashed the jungle laws of hyper-capitalism and crony corruption—empowered the Kremlin to infiltrate our democracy through our own laws. “The real scandal is what is legal and what you can get away with legally,” investigative journalist Craig Unger, author of the bestselling books House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, told me on my podcast Gaslit Nation. “I think the Russians have figured that out to a huge extent.”

Following the demise of the Soviet Union that Reagan predicted as inevitable, a swarm of Americans, from private consultants, developers, government officials, and prospectors, descended on Moscow and St. Petersburg to help birth a new capitalist democracy and triumphantly dance on the ashes of their enemy. The shock doctrine of privatization was unleashed, as the toughest dog in the fight won control of former state industries and natural resources. The 1990s in Russia, following the demise of communism, saw a period of staggering poverty and instability that became colloquially known as “the car bomb 1990s.” It was a time when proxy battles over industry control produced actual body counts. It was an era that gave birth to the Russian oligarchy and organized crime—instruments of the Kremlin that would remain under the security services, formerly known as the KGB. When asked who won the Cold War, historian Timothy Snyder, author of several bestselling books on the Soviet Union, said, “Oligarchy won the Cold War.”

A friend who traveled from Texas to make his fortune in Moscow in the 1990s once asked me to read his thinly veiled novel—a shocking memoir of his escapades. The story reads like many accounts: a young Western man with a ferocious appetite bedding desperately poor, beautiful young women while striking it rich owning a nightclub for the growing oligarch jet set. I asked him once whether he believed the denials of Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames that their raunchy misogynistic book full of rape jokes about their time in Moscow, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was a work of satire, and not non-fiction, as originally published. “They were pseudo-intellectual bad boys enjoying Russia,” he said. “And being really disgusting in the process. Misogyny. Racism. Imperial attitude.” It was Reagan’s dream come true: Freedom. Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” and the Wolf of Wall Street showed the way for Russia’s ruling oligarchs and their mega-yachts: The best freedom money could buy. 

All of this hedonism seems in sharp contrast to the evangelical movement that originally elected Reagan. Some of Reagan’s most powerful speeches were reserved for his evangelical admirers. It was on March 8, 1983, that Reagan delivered his famous “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, calling the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Reagan won his first term in office in 1980, on a landslide built by a united bloc of evangelical voters. President Jimmy Carter was a Bible-quoting, church-going evangelical, married to the same woman all of his life, who lost to a divorced Hollywood film star. The evangelical vote united behind Reagan because they understood that the Republican Party would finally deliver their agenda of “traditional” family values, banning reproductive healthcare, and protecting a white patriarchy that challenged civil rights for people of color, women’s liberation, and LGBTQ+ equality movements. Evangelicals learned with Reagan’s victory that when they united their vote behind one party, they expanded their political power, and that brought results, turning Sunday sermons into legislation and executive orders.

The Evangelicals shared Reagan’s ideological war on the atheist empire. Their churches and leaders long held missions to Soviet-occupied countries. They met with priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, unwittingly serving an arm of the Kremlin as many of the priests were KGB agents, tasked with spying on their flock and foreign dignitaries who wrongly assumed they were oppressed religious martyrs. The Kremlin studied Reagan’s administration and its evangelical base, noting the religious fervor. When Putin became the anointed successor of Yeltsin, chosen by the state security services, now known as the FSB, this former atheist KGB agent transformed into a man of God. Putin was often seen at Russian Orthodox Church services, giving speeches on the importance of religion and moral values that could have been written by Reagan.

It is impossible to overstate how much the Russia that rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of history has reincarnated itself in the image of the Reagan Revolution. “In greed we trust” has become the creed. “Traditional” family values are promoted within a white patriarchal society that torments immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. The domestic agendas of the Republican Party and the Kremlin are now nearly identical. Russian state TV was once described to me by a Russian friend as “Fox News on acid.” America’s historical enemy undermined America by mirroring what Republicans envision us as, and by capitalizing on Reagan’s free market steroids. As a result, Russians endure an ongoing poverty crisis that remains endemic. We are still grappling with the consequences of the Reagan Revolution, marked by historic levels of income inequality and tax breaks for the very rich at the expense of everyone else. 

Americans are not witnessing a normal election. We’re watching the oligarchization of our country, which began with Reagan and may soon be completed by Donald Trump, the inevitable product of the Reagan era’s hedonism and greed. 

Andrea Chalupa is a Brooklyn-based journalist, author, and filmmaker. As the host and producer of the Webby Award Honoree civic action podcast Gaslit Nation, Andrea passionately addresses the threat of fascism globally. Andrea is the writer-producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones, directed by three-time Academy Award-nominee Agnieszka Holland and starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, and Peter Sarsgaard.  Her books include the graphic novels In the Shadow of Stalin and Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think.

Read an excerpt from In the Shadow of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones, available everywhere books are sold on September 4.