‘I have seen the Future and it works,’ proclaimed leftist American journalist Lincoln Steffens after visiting Bolshevik Russia in 1919. By then, of course, the Cheka, or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption, was already summarily executing presumed enemies of the people in droves. Now, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson is admiring Vladimir Putin’s Russia with equivalent admiration, but a rather different agenda.

Fresh off his fawning interview with Putin, in a series of video shorts, Carlson has marvelled at the Moscow metro, rated the fare at Vkusno – i tochka (‘tasty – and that’s it’), the chain that replaced McDonalds, as just as good, and expressed performative shock at the excellent range of goods at an Ashan supermarket and the apparently cheap pricing.

Of course, it is easy to poke fun at this kind of video tourism. The Moscow metro is, indeed, a triumph of both mass transit and institutional architecture – even the modern stations still being built have a fresh, modern aesthetic, while the older ones tend to be baroque palaces. Komsomolskaya, which Carlson visited, is not even generally regarded as the best, but is still a confection of marble, granite and mosaic. That said, while he acknowledged that it was built under Stalin, and that Stalin was not a nice chap, it does help rapidly to build a metro system when you can rely on Gulag slave labour.

In fairness, though – and especially for anyone who has had to endure the dim, bunker-like confines of the Washington DC metro and its frequently-delayed trains – the metro is worth celebrating. Less forgivable is Carlson’s fixation on the apparent cheapness of Russia. In the supermarket, for example, he declares himself ‘radicalised’ by the way that a month’s shop cost a quarter of what he and his team had anticipated based on US prices. Just convert prices from devalued rubles into dollars, and that seems the case. However, this is every bit as misleading as wondering how Russia can manage to cause such havoc with a GDP somewhere between Italy’s and Spain’s, or a defence budget that until recently seemed close to the UK’s. Direct currency comparisons really do not work.

Carlson is a shrewd political operator, and his end goal is unlikely to be simply to sing Russia’s praises

After all, that food may have cost a quarter of what it would in dollar terms in the US, but average American salaries are something like $53,000 per year compared with the equivalent of $15,000 in Russia – less than a quarter as much. This is why Russians are spending around half their entire disposable income on food, and most have burnt through their savings. Besides which, there is a greater gradient in quality of life between Moscow and much of the rest of the country than, say, London and Grimsby (often reckoned to be the UK’s poorest town).

Was Carlson just a ‘useful idiot,’ like all those leftist visitors who were treated to stage-managed visit to the Stalinist USSR, kept from the hunger and the totalitarian repression, to report back on the glories of the ‘workers’ state’? At the height of the deliberate starvation of Ukraine, for example, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, asserted that ‘any report of a famine… is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.’

Yet Carlson is a shrewd political operator, and his end goal is unlikely to be simply to sing Russia’s praises. Instead, these seemingly-disingenuous video shorts are clearly intended to have resonance in the USA. Beyond presenting sanctions as essentially pointless, not even able to deny Russians their McDonaldsalike cheeseburger and fries, the real message is that Americans are being badly served by their state and their elites. The reason he claims he was ‘radicalised’ in the supermarket is that it highlights that:

If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe, maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a “good person” or a “bad person,” you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country. And that’s what our leaders have done to us.

It’s easy, after all, to poke fun at the supposedly naïve foreigner in Moscow, but this populist appeal to those Americans who do regard themselves assailed by crime and inflation, who believes the interests of a silent majority are being neglected by a woke and self-satisfied elite, should not be under-estimated. Putin may have thought to use Carlson for his own purposes – though he has since, implausibly, claimed that he wished he had been given a harder time in the interview – but Carlson is using Putin and Russia for his own ends.

Besides, in all fairness, the metro is indeed extraordinary, the range of goods available to those who can still afford it both broad and often unconstrained by sanctions, and Moscow works. It’s a dynamic, clean, cosmopolitan and even leading-edge city, where you can just walk through a metro turnstile as facial recognition systems automatically debit your account and where you can use the city government’s app to book a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. It’s just that this is not so much thanks to Putin and his kleptocracy, but in spite of it.