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What’s it Like to be Disabled in Trump’s America and Why We Can’t Stay
Ella and Yarr on surviving disability and dwindling access to affordable healthcare in America.
Elle
19/05/2025
What’s it like for my partner and I, as two Autistic/ADHD people in Trump’s America? It’s overwhelming, to say the least.
We have been forced to witness the rise of MAGA, an administration that we did not vote into office. They claim they want to “Make America Great Again,” but it’s clear they only wish to do that for a certain group of people. They have won on a campaign of hate, and now the quiet parts are being said aloud. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unleashed. Due process (the constitutional right to fair legal procedures) is now ignored, and US-born citizens are being mistakenly detained. Now there are even threats of sending citizens to camps in El Salvador. The dehumanization is accelerating and it’s terrifying.
It feels like a nightmare we are not waking up from.
We’re watching billionaires such as Elon Musk, who has donated $250 million to MAGA, gain governmental power without being elected. He heads a newly formed department, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with access to our data. The justification? Cutting “wasteful spending”. However, it looks more like they are targeting our lifelines, programs such as Medicaid, to line their own pockets. These aren’t handouts. We have paid into these systems with our taxes and now they want to strip us of those benefits.
Like many disabled folks in America, I rely on Medicaid to survive. Medicaid is a public health program in the United States for people with low income, old age, or disabilities. Without it, I would not be able to afford the care needed for managing my Autism, ADHD, chronic illnesses, and a heart condition that requires regular medication and monitoring. The private healthcare system here is expensive and even if you are insured through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the out-of-pocket costs can be astronomical. Doctor’s visits, lab work, and specialist care can come with high copays or deductibles, making consistent treatment out of reach for many. A single ER visit can bankrupt a person. It’s very common to find people turning to crowdfunding platforms, such as GoFundMe, just to pay medical bills. The barriers to access affordable healthcare reflect a broken system.
Medicaid is the only reason I can afford the care that keeps me alive, but qualifying for it comes with strings attached. Disabled folks are expected to survive under impossible restrictions such as: strict asset limits, income caps, the crushing costs of healthcare, and rapidly rising costs of living. For example, Medicaid recipients can’t have more than $2,000 in savings or they risk losing their coverage. That means you can’t plan for emergencies or try to build a financial cushion. We’re forced into a poverty wage, choosing between healthcare and financial stability. It’s a system that almost seems intentionally designed to keep folks trapped in poverty.
To make matters worse, healthcare in the United States is often tied to employment, but not all jobs provide benefits. Many folks, especially disabled people, end up in service jobs, gig work, or part-time roles that don’t offer health insurance at all. Even if you can work, the jobs available are often physically or mentally unsustainable, and still leave you without coverage. It’s a system that feels deliberately hostile towards folks like me.
Now, with Medicaid programs being quietly dismantled in multiple states and right-wing politicians threatening it on a national level, I am left wondering: what happens to us? There is no backup plan. No safety net. If Medicaid is taken away, I’ll likely go without treatment, which could lead to hospitalization, or worse.
For many disabled folks, losing Medicaid means losing access to vital medication, treatments, and in-home support services. Without it, managing chronic conditions, staying employed, or even handling daily tasks can become increasingly difficult. Some may even be evicted when they can no longer work. Others drain their savings on out-of-pocket medical costs and fall behind on rent, being forced to choose between medication or shelter.
As a result, loss of care can lead directly to homelessness. Many end up in shelters or on the streets. Others are institutionalized or pushed into unsafe and exploitative living situations to survive. Without stable access to healthcare, housing, and basic support, the issue isn’t just about quality of life, it’s about staying alive.
Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services despite spreading dangerous rhetoric about autistic people. For instance, during an April 2025 press conference, he claimed:
“Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this,” he said. “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
This statement was widely reported and met with significant backlash from the autistic community and advocates who recognize the diverse capabilities and contributions of individuals on the autism spectrum. Robert’s claims are not only dehumanizing and an echo to a dark history, but one rooted in eugenics. One I never thought I would see repeat itself within my lifetime.
The signs are crystal clear. What we have shared in this article, is but a scratch on the surface to the atrocities happening in America right now. I am truly scared for us.
We’ve reached our breaking point. We’re not fleeing out of weakness. We’re leaving for survival. We are seeking safety, dignity, and a chance to thrive.
As if all that weren’t enough, each day is filled with headlines that make it harder to believe in any future here. One recent incident in particular stood out to me: A white woman named Shiloh Hendrix in Rochester, Minnesota was captured on video in a playground using a racial slur against a 5-year-old Black autistic child. When confronted by bystanders, she not only admitted to using the slur but kept repeating it several times trying to justify her actions by accusing the child of going through her toddler’s diaper bag.
After the video went viral, Hendrix launched a fundraiser on the Christian crowdfunding platform, GiveSendGo, claiming she and her family were receiving threats and needed to relocate. Her campaign has raised more than $750,000. Many of the donations were accompanied by openly racist comments, enough to cause the platform to disable the comment section.
This is a chilling reminder of what marginalized communities face in this country and how hate not only spreads, but is often rewarded. It’s a reflection not just of individuals, but of a society that increasingly shows us who it protects, and who it leaves behind. A reality that seems to be mirrored by our current government.
If someone like her can raise over $750,000 fueled by hate, surely an autistic couple simply asking for a chance at safety and stability can reach our goal too — right?
My partner and I are trying to relocate to a country where we can live with basic dignity. Where the system we contribute to offers us a future. Although we have worked hard and have advanced degrees, in America, they don’t guarantee stability. Our disabilities are invisible, but the barriers we face are not. We have been locked out of opportunities because of ableist systems and lack of accommodations. There is no American Dream left for us here.
From our research, I really believe Germany can offer this to us. Plus, this will be a familiar place to me. I spent my youth in Germany while my dad was stationed overseas. Germany offers national healthcare, protections for disabled residents, and a path for self-employed creatives like me to legally work and contribute. It’s not perfect, but it offers stability and structure we simply can’t find here. We’ve researched Germany’s freelance visa and disability rights laws, and this path is both legally viable and humane. Our country appears to be slipping into authoritarianism, and we’ve given up. In order to survive, we need to leave.
Thank you for reading our story,
Elle and Yarr
Elle and Yarr are trying to relocate to Germany and are raising funds to do so. The amount will cover relocation costs, visa fees, healthcare, start-up housing, and the legal and logistical steps required to move two people and two cats abroad safely. You can donate or share here.
Editor’s Note: This article is a response to ‘Is This Fascism? Not Yet’ by Nathaniel Flakin. Read Nathaniel’s side here.
”First they came..”. is one of the most quoted poems expressing the need to fight fascism and injustice. It was written no earlier than 1946, only after Nazi defeat, by German pastor Martin Niemöller who was a Nazi supporter and an antisemite:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The poem highlights that fascism doesn’t suddenly arrive—it happens in steps and that those enabling it recognize it after its total success or perhaps only after its crushing failure.
When I read the article entitled “Is This Fascism? Not Yet” by Nathaniel Flakin, I was dumbfounded by the early conclusion, ‘‘Not Yet’’. Many I spoke to who are in constant confrontation with the German state vehemently disagreed as well. The ‘‘Not Yet’’ part of the article’s title seems to apply only to some of the people in the ‘‘Then they came for…” parts of the poem. It is as though we’re midway through the poem but the people at the outset still don’t seem to recognize it.
People use the term fascism because that’s how life feels here in Germany. For many, it comes from their experiences that match the popular imaginary of what fascism is.
It would be a mistake to undermine that popular imaginary. Indeed there can be no doubt, even to an external observer, that Germany is continuing on that path. The word ‘‘fascism’’ has been established as an incontrovertible evil, and people use it to warn about the trajectory of the continued inaction in the face of illiberal performative democracies or the support of ‘‘fascist’’ measures and rhetoric—even in the absence of blatantly fascist parties.
Throughout history, the making of a fascist regime is rarely labeled as fascism. The naming and framing of a regime as fascist becomes recognizable after the success of their policies, which is the same fundamental error in Flakin’s piece.
In Germany today, we may not have the dictatorship and totalitarianism that the term fascism is historically linked to, but we have a great majority of the accompanying symptoms of fascism, which include support for a single view on some topics, demonization of minorities, glorification of violence, weak institutions, and rampant racism. But what’s more, we have a government building more repressive tools. These are conditions not dissimilar to Germany leading up to 1932.
Fascism is not some remote historical narrative. It continues to manifest itself in different ways adapting to the context in which it seeks to rise. Its newer forms have similar effects on people. Indeed, perhaps this reputation of evil is one of the reasons why fascism today isn’t pursued as explicitly as it was before and is shrouded by electoral shams and diversions only to prove that it is not that evil term ‘‘fascism’’.
Fascism for Palestine
“Then they came for the trade unionists’’
… but what happens when the Trade Unions come for you?
On 22 February 2025, Verdi, one of Germany’s biggest unions, organized a protest called Unkürzbar, aimed at resisting cultural funding cuts. Paradoxically, Verdi banned using the word Widerstand (resist) in chants and speeches. The star speaker, one of the directors of a cultural center called Oyoun, was denied the platform to give their speech midway through the march despite Oyoun being one of the first cultural spaces to bear the brunt ideologically motivated funding cuts. The Palestine block, also protesting the crackdown on cultural spaces, was berated and isolated. Verdi organizers in red and yellow vests, acting as civilian enforcers, kettled protesters till the police stepped in to inflict their repressive measures.
Flakin’s article says, “Yet despite their bureaucratic leaderships, unions still form a foundation of working-class power, and a potential starting point for real struggles.”
Fascism aims to destroy unions by diminishing them as a starting point for real struggles. Hasn’t this already happened concerning Palestine? Isn’t the banning of the word ‘Widerstand’ a worrying sign for any union that would embrace a struggle? This is not the only instance in which Verdi has supported Staatsräson over basic rights. Likewise, many organizations in Germany do not dare to organize for Gaza without being punished by the state’s repressive apparatus.
There have been many definitions of fascism from Mussolini and Trotsky’s to Robert Paxton and Umberto Eco. Within these we see traits relating to the state’s behavior and deviation from democratic norms.
Fascism in today’s reality transcends these definitions. It has become the concerted effort to enforce an exclusive, nationalist state narrative with all of the state’s instruments working in unison, limiting rights and access to justice only to those who subscribe to this narrative, while forcefully subjugating the ability to mobilize for those offering a legitimate counter narrative and framing them as enemies.
Germany’s interpretation of Staatsräson as unconditional solidarity with Israel is an outright expression of German nationalism as a proxy to Israeli ethno-nationalist fascism. It serves to undermine the rule of law and justify the suspension of civil liberties to protect the far Right Israeli government from criticism as they perpetrate a genocide.
Under the auspices of Staatsräson, people advocating for Palestine have experienced the vilification of individuals and groups with smear campaigns that dehumanize them as antisemitic terrorists; deportations of not just Palestinians but those who attempt to stand in solidarity with Palestinian rights; laws for exmatriculation to expel students out of universities; an archive of cancelling and silence to end the livelihood of individuals and organizations; a trade union against Palestinian civil liberties; targeted police violence; unified media propaganda denouncing protests, denouncing events, denouncing artwork without proof; police presence in universities exercising violence and excessive force; political interference in universities overriding university officials; police intimidation of venues that host high profile events on Palestine; crackdown on representing Palestinian voices in public spheres; a crackdown on cultural and academic institutions that would foster debate; lack of due process; house raids; restriction of right to protest; surveillance; device seizure; police carrying orders instead of implementing the law; banning of speaking certain languages; censorship of symbols and slogans; suspension of other civil liberties that include freedom of movement, the right to be free from bodily harm…
…this is not ‘normal’ capitalist repression, this is fascism.
On the foreign front, Germany is adamantly supporting weapons for a genocide in defiance of human rights, international law as well as EU and German law. The German government and their aligned media have offered justifications for breaching international law, bombing schools and hospitals, and the dehumanization of thousands of men, women and children, with implicit and explicit approval of bombing hospitals, killing paramedics, sniping children, forced displacement, starvation and targeting journalists.
But there are many parties and it’s not that violent, so how can it be fascism?
A fascist state traditionally does not allow for plurality of parties, but would we exclude calling a state fascists if the plethora of parties agree on fascist policies? In Germany all the ruling parties are genocide supporters, and the majority of parties that may object to the mass killings are at best genocide deniers. There is no electoral route to change the state’s suspension of civil liberties for Palestine supporters, nor to end the co-perpetration of genocide. There is no possible electoral pathway to end the dehumanization of Palestinians in Germany.
It may be argued that the levels of violence and repression are not as high as they have been historically when fascism emerges, but there are two issues to point out. First, fascism does not need to be very violent if there is not enough resistance, and indeed, there is not enough resistance within German society and institutions to warrant more violence as long as repression is successful. With a high trust in German institutions, their failures are accepted by society, and therefore, there is no need to repress society using violence. Out of European countries, the levels of mistrust of the police in Germany are the lowest. They do not need to exert their ideology with violence, nor justify it when it happens. Any lie they make up will suffice. Having been completely vilified in both state-owned and private media, social media can be seen flooded with the word ‘Deport’ in response to police violence videos against the Palestine solidarity movement.
Second, it’s simply not the intensity of violence as much as the quality of violence. German police are perhaps not as violent as French, Greek, or Italian police, but they are ideologically motivated, selective, and almost consistent in how they apply violence. Police violence alone does not constitute a fascist state, nor a police state for that matter, but the underlying reasons do. People use the term police state to describe Germany, and I don’t contend that. Not because I agree that violence is what makes a police state, but that the description is correct even if the reasoning is not. The practice of making up rules to inflict bodily harm, setting up laws to grant impunity to law enforcement personnel, surveilling and pressuring venues and institutions to cancel events and talks, threatening venues like Kühlhaus, Jungewelt and BUM with permanent closure, raids on activists and notices to forbid them from joining protests—all these are more in line with the police state than the quality of violence, and indeed more aligned with fascist tactics.
Weakened institutions and organizations
The other sign of fascism is the failure of institutions to fight an onslaught of racism. It’s not just Verdi, but many German institutions and organizations charged with fighting authoritarian tendencies that have failed Palestine in the simplest of tests. The Deutsche Presserat has failed to protect journalism and fight the dehumanization of Palestinians and Palestine supporters, the German chapters of Amnesty and Reporters Without Borders (Reporter Ohne Grenzen) have failed to live up to their international mandate. Reporter Ohne Grenzen have echoed the rhetoric and sentiments of the German state when it came to reporting about press freedoms, and Amnesty Deutschland stood by for months and months as protesters’ civil liberties were significantly infringed on systemically and systematically.
Even the courts are starting to fail civilians in terms of acquiring justice or even making sense. We are seeing politicized verdicts such as condemning ‘‘have we not learned anything from the holocaust?’’ as relativizing the holocaust while people chanting Nazi slogans are acquitted.
Is partial fascism not fascism?
Fascism is not a switch, and once it’s turned on, all forms of resistance become futile; it’s a process that is crowned by the success of a fascist regime. If it were true that fascism does not allow any resistance, then what is the point of anti-fascism if fascism doesn’t exist till it becomes totalitarian? We cannot refrain from calling the process of building a fascist state fascism simply because multiple parties exist, judiciary is not yet fully coopted and a cult figure has not yet appeared. Germany is a dormant fascist state that is currently being activated.
The mechanisms used to repress Palestine solidarity such as the resolution on Jewish life (Nie wieder ist jetzt—jüdisches Leben in Deutschland schützen), deportations and exmatriculation will be used to repress whatever opposition comes next, whether it’s climate activists (already bearing the brunt of this), or other minorities not aligned with conservative values.
One of the reasons that upset people I spoke to about Flakin’s piece is that it undermines their experience and resorts to definitions that have an outdated context. The people living through Germany’s policies are experiencing a suspension of their civil liberties and a breakdown of laws, organizations, and institutions in place to help alleviate injustices. To them, there is only one party in Germany: it’s the pro-Israel party. All the papers and media might as well be just one, demonizing and dehumanizing Palestinians and protesters. How can we tell people who have been subjected to immense racism, raided every other month, and deprived of their right to assembly, speech, and believe that this is not fascism?
But perhaps it only becomes fascism when it starts happening to you.
Maybe in hindsight, the success of this trajectory would be called something else by academics and historians, but does it really matter that people call it fascism as it presents all the same symptoms? Calling it fascism now helps us understand what we’re up against. The process of looking into what is not fascist to prove that it is not fascist is not a useful exercise.
Nevertheless, whether we call it fascism or not, there is a need to fight harder in order to prevent fascist success. Perhaps being in the middle of the poem, you may not want to call it fascism yet because of performative electoral politics. But in the process of visiting the experiences of those in the Palestine Solidarity movement one thing is certain: it’s more fascist than most think.
My Grandmother is a Skydiver
Interview with Ukrainian animation activist Polina Piddubna
Negro Matapacos
18/05/2025
Could you introduce yourself please?
My name is Polina Piddubna (she/they), I am an animation director, artist and activist with Ukrainian and central Asian Tatar and Bashqort roots. Originally I am from Kharkiv, the city in eastern Ukraine. I have been living in Berlin since 5 and a half years. I will have a world premiere of my film “My grandmother is a skydiver” at Festival de Cannes soon.
What is your film about?
This is a multilayered film that focuses on many topics. In the main focus is the story of my family emerging into collective experience, and the story of my grandmother who worked as a midwife and did skydiving as a hobby. It is also reflects on my identity, rethinking generational trauma and aiming to decolonize.
Where did the idea for the film come from? What was your motivation to make it?
The first idea I got was in January 2022, when I got interested in the personality of my grandmother, and the feminist stories from the time when she was young. She lived in Tajikitsan, jumped by parachute, and did many other kinds of sports. She moved away at a very young age to study and later on she worked as a midwife.
After beginning of the full scale invasion of Ukraine the story got a deeper subtext. Then I realised that literally every generation of my family had suffered from wars, dispalacments and colonialism. For my grandmother this is the second war, the first one was the civil war in Tajikistan.
In the end I decided to make a film combining all these ideas and statements.
How was the experience of making a film on such a personal topic?
That was very interesting and at the same time hard. I got to re-explore the story of my maternal roots and make new conclusions about my identity. But at the same moment there were many triggers and old traumas which I had to experience.
Did you have to do research on your family history for this film? Have you learned something about past generations?
It took me one year to do research, and I was taking it very seriously and responsible. I conducted interviews with my grandmother and her relatives, travelled to Ukraine already in 2022 despite all the danger, Caucasus and Central Asia. In Tajikistan I went to the places where my grandmother worked and lived, trying to understand the life of Tatar communities in Central Asia by staying with my relatives. And of course I learned as much as possible about life of the past generations connecting it like a puzzle.
You said your grandmother is a progressive woman – how so? How do women’s issues come up in the film?
The parents of my grandmother, as well as their original cultural landscape in Bashqortostan/Ural and Central Asia have a very traditional Muslim background. My great grandfather married my great grandmother at a very young age, and so on. But my grandmother moved away when she was 14 to study in another county. In general her father sent all his children to get high education abroad. She did many sports including skydiving, completed her studies as a midwife and married in her 20s a person of her own choice. Understanding the context of that time for me it is very outstanding.
Has your grandmother seen the film? What was her response if so?
I was showing her the process of the production since the very beginning, and she can really recognise herself from the character. She is very proud and happy that the film is finally finished. I can’t wait to show it to her on the big screen in cinema once I am in Kharkiv, because she only saw it from the phone so far
There’s been quite a big reaction to your film, and it’s been selected for Cannes! How are you feeling about that?
I am really happy and excited that the film receives feedback and attention. I worked on this project for three years alongside with the big team, and we put a lot of love into this film.
What are you hoping to achieve with the film? What message do you hope people get from it?
The main goal is the film is to emerge into global solidarity, bring a cathartic experience; with a yet untold story of Bashqort Skydiver and a midwife in Tajikistan from 1960s and her granddaughter from 2022 Ukraine.
I want to make audiences aware and sensitive on the topic of Russian colonialism in these crucial times.
The year is 1993. British electro-pop duo the Pet Shop Boys are whisked through Moscow in a limousine that Gorbachev, allegedly, used to ride in. These and other thrilling anecdotes puff a recent piece authored by one half of the duo, Neil Tennant; published in March 2025, in Russia’s opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and Britain’s The Guardian. Read a little closer and something creeps out of the shadows; something less about Russia in any concrete sense and more a phantom limb throbbing with post-Cold War dread.
From his residue of remembrances Tennant constructs two Russias: the Russia of the 1990s, bathing in the newfound “freedom” to, for instance, dance along to Tennant’s disco whimsy and the Russia of today, depicted as a brutal, warmongering state under a Hitler-like dictator, Vladimir Putin. This latter Russia is the one that haunts the western liberal imaginary. It is an evil so grave that it washes the West clean, and gives purpose and direction to societies that have neither — specifically the trillion-dollar rearmament that will finally drown “Social Europe” in the bathtub of police repression and economic austerity.
There is something weird about the article, spasmodic even. Tennant dispenses disparate sentences, each one containing a supposed fact or recollection that doesn’t easily connect with what follows or precedes it, or whose relevance is opaque. Order is only imposed by occasional meta-paragraphs which impose an interpretive frame on the reader, like a tour guide in a hall of mirrors.
Take Tennant’s recollection of riding in a limo: it only makes sense in light of an earlier paragraph in which he describes, as a youth, reading about the Russian Revolution, where one brutal empire ostensibly morphed into another with supreme villain Joseph Stalin at the helm, who is at the same moment both a “20th-century Ivan the Terrible” and a template for Putin. Tennant unwittingly taps into a stereotype that has congealed all over Western intelligentsia; history in Russia, is not a dialectic, but a loop, with a natural tendency towards authoritarianism. Putin, in Tennant’s gaze, stands as the latest divination of the eternal Asiatic despot.
Again and again, Tennant mourns the loss of freedom in Russia. So it is worth posing the question: what does he think freedom is? There are clues: In one photo accompanying the article, the Pet Shop Boys wear conical hats and onesies as they officially launch MTV in the former Soviet Union. This is Tennant’s implicit vision of freedom: the freedom to have your political struggles harvested, denuded, co-opted, and commodified, and then reflected back in the form of a three-minute music video, sandwiched between advertisements and other three-minute videos, such that politics is voided of the ecstasy and terror of having a life with meaning. Meaning itself is reduced to mimetic novelty. Russia, you’re welcome.
At the very same time as the Pet Shop Boys were launching MTV, Russia was experiencing its most crushing poverty in decades as a result of economic “shock therapy” imposed by the West, consisting of a fire-sale of public assets, the disassembly of social services, and the bludgeoning of Russia into a market economy. Shock therapy wasn’t just economics, it was necropolitics. According to one analysis in the BMJ, there were up to 3 million “excess adult deaths” between 1991 and 2001 based on mortality rates from the last days of the Soviet Union — “surplus” people who might have lived had history forked onto a different path.
It’s worth remembering that the transformation of Russia was neither spontaneous nor home grown; it was pushed through by Western governments, academics and agencies like USAID. The carnage of the ‘90s aligns well with the goals of a leaked Pentagon paper from 1992 which sought to prevent any country from ever becoming a peer competitor to the United States. Tennant seems blissfully oblivious to these unpleasant details.
Five years after the 1993 Moscow MTV junket, the Pet Shop Boys are back and the country is still in the midst of this deadly crisis. We do get a flicker of recognition, but it quickly sparks out:
“It was thrilling for me to be physically present in streets that had so much historical resonance, but it was also impossible to ignore the victims of the economic problems that followed the implosion of the Soviet system — old ladies, for instance, selling possessions on the street.”
Here is Lacan’s traumatic Real breaking through the cracks of Tennant’s fantasy Russia, only briefly, before the texts jaunts compulsively into a distracted reverie:
“Clubs were fun, and there was a wild freedom in the air. Once, when we couldn’t get a taxi, the police drove us back to our hotel from a gay club! We enjoyed hanging out with a few friends we’d made.”
Which friends?
“A young woman who was the daughter of the former Mayor of St. Petersburg, named Ksenia Sobchak, was briefly part of the clubbing crowd.”
This nightlife comrade was the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, a key player in transforming Russia into a market economy through the application of shock therapy. Sobchak helped cobble together the Russian constitution that imposed private property on Russia and condensed power in the presidency. Of course, father and daughter are not the same entity, but both represent the class that the Pet Shop Boys enjoyed fraternising with.
According to Putin biographer Philip Short, Sobchak and his Western advisors unleashed a tidal wave of privatisation that created an oligarchic class by stripping key Soviet assets and handing them over to cronies at rock-bottom prices. Meanwhile, basic services in St. Petersburg collapsed, and for four winters straight, citizens suffered through heating cuts. By 1995, rates of homelessness, poverty, fraud, and suicide in the city were among the highest in the world, and diseases like tuberculosis, diphtheria, and dysentery were making a comeback. Life expectancy had fallen from 72 in 1987 to just 64.
The Sobchaks, their class and their western backers were collectively responsible for the economic system that led an anonymous old woman to ruin Tennant’s enjoyment with her abject poverty. Rich Russians were free to party in upmarket clubs, while the rest of the country was free to starve, free to freeze to death in apartments where the heating shuts down in the dead of winter.
How did Tennant miss all of this? Because to see it would rupture the liberal fantasy of innocence. Recognising his complicity and that of his Russian buddies, would be like finding a speck of blood in a line of cocaine — a real bummer.
On reflection the Pet Shop Boys may have always walked this line between naivete and indifference when it comes to political economy. This may have been hard to observe due to Tennant’s translucent lyrical style where camp morphs into a very British form of irony that masks a detached complicity with the way things are. Take their infamous track “West End Girls” — an account of working-class “East End boys” and daughters of the establishment “West End girls” coming together through the shared consumptive experience of clubbing. Appearing in the wake of Thatcher’s detonation of class solidarity in 1980s Britain, the track obliquely shrouds working class defeat in the gauze of social mobility. The vanquishers and the vanquished rub shoulders, strictly on weekends, strictly in the form of commodified leisure for those who can pay to play.
So it’s not that surprising that Tennant is willing to fall into a vision, however subtle, of civilisational conflict between Russia and the West. A few paragraphs after recalling his ride in a police car from a gay club to his hotel, Tennant writes that “being a Russian gay activist is now to be labelled and punished as an ‘extremist.” Russia was a fleeting gay utopia, brought to you by the Pet Shop Boys and MTV, that was then snuffed out by Putin. While it remains true that queer people in Russia live in extreme precarity, hostility to homosexuality was sustained throughout the heady ’90s even if this wasn’t visible to visiting celebrities. The effect of this contrast, whether intended or not, is to weaponize queer precarity in the service of homonationalism.
And when it comes to weaponizing tolerance, the West has game. This justification boosted the military adventurism of the “War on Terror” in the Middle East and Central Asia, with countless deaths and many countries brought to ruin as a consequence.
This brings us to the core menace of Tennant’s article: its heady blend of naivete and binarism falls into a broader miasma of messages giving drip by drip justification for the inevitability of a military conflict between Russia and the West. To his credit, Tennant never calls for war, just a “revolution of attitudes” in which Putin is put on trial and Russia atones for its brutal invasion of Ukraine. Yet even here, the spectre of a demonic Russia and an angelic West appears. I oppose imperial war machines of all stripes and believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine has no justification. That should not conceal that the war has its origins in the creeping expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders, despite US assurances that it would not do so. Nor should it elide that the US sought to prolong the war in order to weaken Russia, scuttling a nearly completed peace agreement in 2022 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and mutilations.
Tennant’s reflections show us that Russia, for the West, is not really a place so much as a screen on which to project whatever fantasies align with your unconscious political commitments, whether that be a neoliberal smash-and-grab or a civilisational conflict. Through gentle, persistent messaging, it has become common sense that Putin will roll into Berlin unless European societies run on a war footing, sacrificing the fight against the existential threat of climate change and crumbling systems of social care. The parliament of Germany, where I live, has just rammed through changes to its constitution that allow the government to borrow vast sums to fuel an expansion of military power. Perhaps soon I will be selling my belongings on a street corner to pay for Panzer tanks and Javelin missiles.
To close, Tennant signs off with a little humility: “I do not imagine that anyone really cares what we think about Russia, but you did ask.” Similarly, you might wonder why I’m agonizing over Pet Shop Boys and their Russian junkets. Indeed, there is nothing special about Tennant’s article–there are hundreds like it produced every month. Nevertheless, the collective force of these and other hapless musings moves at least a few levers in the war machine. In the 1990s, the Boys were just a tiny ripple in a vast wave of soft power that gave a little glamour to the shock therapy that sent millions to their graves. Now, they unwittingly set the stage for war and austerity to engulf the entire continent, as Russia is cast, again and yet again, as the interminable enemy.