Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview Is Even More Dreadful Now

Is Tucker Carlson still in Moscow? I wonder if he was lounging in a café with his FSB handlers, laughing at their jokes while savoring a scrumptious pierogi, when the news broke that Alexei Navalny—Russia’s, perhaps the world’s, most famous political prisoner—had died in a Siberian prison at the age of 47.

Carlson had spent the week following his dreadful interview with Vladimir Putin on a guided tour of Moscow’s most sparkling sights. In videos posted on his website, he marvels at the Kievskaya subway station (“no graffiti, no filth, no rapists or people waiting to push you onto the tracks … nicer than anything in our country”), goes slack-jawed in a grocery store (where food prices are so low that he finds himself “radicalized” against American leaders), and admires the Russian capital’s “clean, safe streets.”

Until Friday, these videos seemed merely risible, the work of an ersatz journalist so naïve that he appears startlingly unaware of the long history of gullible Westerners falling for such cherry-picked displays of Soviet majesty. Yes, the subway stations are magnificent. Does Carlson know they were dug by slave labor and designed by British engineers, some of whom Stalin jailed for espionage; that some of the gorgeous marble was taken from the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which Stalin had blown up in 1931? Yes, the platforms, like the streets, are safe and clean, as are most facilities in authoritarian countries, but does he know about their facial-recognition sensors, which have led to dozens of protesters being arrested on the platforms? The groceries at the store he visited are a quarter the price of American food, but even so, they are too expensive for the typical Russian, who earns one-sixth the money that the average American does. Even so, had Carlson ventured outside Moscow’s center, much less into the country’s heartland, he would have found little cause for awe.

But today, after Navalny’s death, Carlson’s paeans to Putin’s Moscow seem still more repellent. Navalny—the last serious opposition leader, the one Russian figure who could coax tens of thousands of anti-Putin protesters out to the streets—will be recorded in history books as the great martyr of modern Russian democracy. Carlson, to the extent he’s remembered at all, will take his place alongside Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter of the 1930s who covered up Stalin’s crimes, romanticizing the murderous dictator as a great leader—though Duranty’s deeds were deliberate, stemming from ideology, whereas Carlson is simply a bumbler. (Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, something Carlson couldn’t even dream of; it was better late than never that the Times disowned the prize in 2003.)

At the end of his embarrassing interview with Putin (which even the Russian president later trashed, saying the questions were too “soft”), Carlson at least asked about the fate of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been in a Russian prison, on trumped-up charges of espionage, for almost a year. However, this seemed only prelude to Carlson’s request to take Evan back home with him—a favor that Putin brushed away. But did Carlson ask about Paul Whelan, another unjustly detained American? Did he ask about Navalny? (The interview, which seems unedited, contains no such questions.)

It is not, and may never be, known whether Navalny was outright murdered, as were other critics of Putin, such as former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, double agent Sergei Skripal, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, and Chechen-war critic Sergei Yushenkov. Either way, Navalny died in one of Putin’s most remote prisons, as a result of horrid conditions in other prisons, where he was placed as a result of challenging Putin’s rule.

In other words, Navalny must be added to the list of Russian citizens who died because they ran afoul of the man who excites Tucker Carlson’s most fervid admiration.

Navalny began his rise as an opposition leader in 2011, with widely publicized broadsides against the corruption of Kremlin elites. In 2013, while running to be Moscow’s mayor, he was arrested on false charges of embezzlement; still, he came in second place. In 2018 he tried to run for president, but Putin banned his candidacy. In 2020 he was poisoned on a flight to Siberia, where he had planned to meet with other opposition politicians. (Later, through a string of prank phone calls, recorded in a riveting HBO documentary about his life, Navalny found proof that Putin’s goons had administered the near-deadly toxin.)

He moved to Germany for further medical treatment but flew back to Moscow in 2021. Some were startled by his return, finding it courageous but self-destructive. Surely he knew he would be arrested—and indeed he was, upon arrival at the airport. He may have thought his jail time would be short-lived, that his followers would rally, that Putin would succumb to international pressure. None of that turned out to be the case. Instead, he was charged with steadily more serious accusations—renewed charges of embezzlement, then contempt of court, and finally “extremism.” He suffered from several ailments, some because of deliberate exposure to contagiously sick fellow inmates. In December, he was transferred to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. He continued to meet with lawyers and to send customarily witty, uplifting messages to his followers. Just this week, he appeared healthy in a video, appealing his 19-year sentence. Friday morning, Russia’s Interfax news service announced that he died after collapsing during a walk.

World leaders mourned his loss and said they would hold Putin responsible. Garry Kasparov, the Russian exile, former chess champion, and prominent human rights activist, tweeted Friday morning, “Is Tucker still in Moscow? He will be amazed by the low price of human life in Putin’s Russia.”