Late one night in 1958, a man named Liu Bingshu whispered to his wife, the mother of their four young children, “There is no escape. I could be taken away … If I can come back, we will see each other again.” Liu would soon be the victim of a massive policy change by the Communist leader of China, Mao Zedong. Just a year earlier, Mao had famously demanded that “a hundred flowers bloom,” actively inviting criticism and suggestions from the public. But those who spoke up were soon labeled “rightist” enemies; the party estimated that they amounted to 5 percent of the population. Some half a million intellectuals, including Liu, were ordered to undergo “reeducation.” Thousands were dispatched to three labor camps in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu. The deadliest of them was Jiabiangou, where less than half of the inmates are reported to have survived. Liu’s family never saw him again.

This intimate and devastating nighttime discussion between Liu and his wife has been preserved because Liu’s oldest son, 12-year-old Liu Tianyou, woke up and overheard it, and decades later, in his modest apartment in Gansu, the documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming recorded his memory. Ai spent two years interviewing dozens of Jiabiangou survivors as well as the families of victims. She traveled to the former camp site and filmed the shallow graves with skulls still poking out of the sand. In 2017, 60 years after Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Ai released her seven-hour film: Jiabiangou Elegy.

People such as Ai Xiaoming—Chinese filmmakers, writers, and artists, those who are looking to uncover and expose the darkest episodes in China’s history, often at great risk to themselves—are the subject of the long-time China correspondent Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks. Johnson considers these individuals to be engaged in the ancient Chinese tradition of producing yeshi, or “wild history”—accounts of the past that strayed from official dynastic court history, or zhengshi. In the China of today, Johnson contends, this practice continues with a sparse but committed underground insisting on yeshi in the face of a digitally reinforced version of zhengshi.

The Communist government considers the official narratives of the past sacrosanct, and control over them as essential to the maintenance of power. Attempts to challenge any aspect of the accepted history of Communist rule have become particularly dangerous in the past decade, under the rule of Xi Jinping. Johnson himself was among a group of foreign correspondents who were suddenly expelled from the country in 2020, amid the COVID-19 outbreak and growing animosity between the Trump and Xi administrations. Especially at a time of renewed repression, Johnson argues, the fight against collective amnesia is an important front line. The work of these documentarians is to better understand the past, but it has also become “a battleground for the present,” Johnson writes.

In this sense, Johnson’s work is not unlike that of his subjects: They ask their audiences to shift their vantage point and to reconsider an overlooked group or a sanitized past to truly comprehend the country they live in. Johnson captures a range of grassroots historians carrying out this work, including the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser, who conducted oral-history interviews in order to piece together the destruction of her native land during the Cultural Revolution, and the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, who documented the suffering of peasants in the enduring regional famines in rural Shaanxi province in northwestern China.

Every ideology creates its own origin myths. Mao and his fellow idealists canonized their memory of brotherly love in Yan’an, the Communists’ homebase in the 1930s and ’40s, which in reality was dominated by fierce power struggles punctuated by executions. Americans don’t have to search far to find examples of such airbrushing, like the belief in the unwavering fair-mindedness of the American Founding Fathers, many of whom were slave owners. Recent years have seen a global “memory boom,” Johnson writes, an attempt to correct the record. And in China, this push has its own urgency: The government sees self-reflection and criticism as a form of lethal weakness, justifying its oppressive policies and persecutions. For the country to break free from the cycles of injustice and violence, zhengshi and yeshi have to first make peace.

After the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the mid-1950s, which swept up Liu Bingshu and so many others, Mao launched a series of utopian experiments. The Great Leap Forward, a crash industrialization program, soon led to the Great Famine, from 1959 to 1961, in which an estimated 45 million people starved to death. The Cultural Revolution soon followed; Mao, uncertain of his grasp on power, declared that enemies of the regime were preparing for a counterrevolution. In July 1966, he urged students and other young people to attack authority figures around them. The next month, in Beijing alone, more than 1,700 people were killed. The upheaval ended only shortly after Mao’s death, in 1976.

When Deng Xiaoping rose to power as Mao’s successor, he was confronted with the seminal task of reframing the deadly chaos from which the country had just emerged. In 1980, he convened a committee to work on a draft resolution about this turbulent recent history. But Johnson writes that Deng was reportedly livid when the committee submitted its first draft, because he found the criticism of Mao far too blunt. Deng himself had suffered under Mao: He had been purged twice. His oldest son was tortured and had jumped off a building, becoming paralyzed. However, Deng felt that to reject the legacy of the Great Helmsman so thoroughly would undermine the Communist Party’s own legitimacy.

[Read: The China model is dead]

Ultimately, a more conciliatory version was distributed to a few thousand senior officials that September, triggering complaints that the draft had failed to address the period’s mass fatalities. Deng managed to prevent a full-blown denunciation of his predecessor, and nine months later, the resolution was officially ratified. It acknowledged that the Cultural Revolution was a costly error and blamed it on the “anti-revolutionary” Gang of Four, a faction of party officials who had become notorious during that era. It reaffirmed Mao’s status as “a great leader and mentor,” vaguely concluding that “his contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary.”

President Xi Jinping, who has led the country since 2013, has sanctioned this paving over of difficult history. And he has explicitly pointed to the Soviet Union and what he calls its “historical nihilism” as a cautionary tale. Xi saw the Soviet leadership’s decision after Stalin’s death to allow a degree of criticism of his reign and its bloody repressions as the beginning of the end of Soviet power. The permission to reassess history in this way, Xi believes, opened the floodgates to demands for increased liberalization. To get ahead of this “historical nihilism,” on the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth, in 2013, Xi instructed party members to see Mao in his historical context. “We can’t use today’s circumstances,” he said, “to measure our predecessors.”

Over the years, party commentators have echoed Xi’s thoughts. In 2018, the Central Committee journal Qiushi published an article on “historical nihilism” and blamed Nikita Khrushchev specifically for his infamous 1956 secret speech in which he acknowledged some of Stalin’s crimes. Khrushchev “failed to analyze the historical background,” the article argued. “And disproportionately focused on Stalin’s shortcomings and mistakes.” The author also warned against the subversive “information explosion” that the Soviets underwent. In the 1960s, memoirs from victims of Stalin’s Gulags, petition letters, underground journals, and books by dissidents circulated in a period known in the Soviet Union as “The Thaw.” “We must unequivocally oppose and resist historical nihilism,” Xi said at a Central Committee meeting in 2021. The same year, party theorists called on the public to “dare to struggle against” this “historical nihilism,” which one of them said was aimed at “removing the spinal cord” of the Chinese race.

One of the survivors Ai Xiaoming followed in her documentary was Zhang Suiqing, who took it upon himself to erect a tombstone of sorts for his less fortunate Jiabiangou peers. In 2013, he obtained approval from local authorities. When the modest memorial was finally built, the officials changed their minds and had it dismantled. What happened to Zhang’s project is reminiscent of a passage in Georgi Gospodinov’s 2020 novel, Time Shelter, about post-communist Bulgaria. When a character set about trying to build a museum dedicated to the role of the country’s state security, he met endless obstacles: “We don’t want to divide the people,” he was told. “It wasn’t the right moment,” others said. Finally, he gave up, noting, “You can’t make a museum to preserve something that has never left.”

With charming modesty, China experts from the United States and Europe sometimes call themselves “students of China.” Ian Johnson has been “a student of China” in the best sense of this phrase. In his first book about the country, Wild Grass, published in 2004, he traced the possibility of liberalization at the turn of the century, by pursuing—literally, by train and taxi, or down a hallway—underdog figures who became accidental activists as they tackled problems such as police brutality and the overtaxation of farmers.

Those who have read Wild Grass may feel a wistfulness for it while reading Sparks: For many, the hopefulness of the early 2000s has evaporated. The country feels much further away from the sense of potential he was describing then. Johnson’s writing, too, has changed over time, shifting from the conventions of narrative long-form to a more documentarian style. His cast of characters has grown and no matter how brief the appearance is, he diligently notes each person’s name as if he, too, is fending off erasure. The landscape has widened, and he insists that readers see China the way he sees it: how the sprawling geography, history, and people who animate it are intricately intertwined. In Dao County, one of the worst sites of the Cultural Revolution, an elderly man, Tan Hecheng, showed Johnson around. Tan spent four decades researching and documenting the thousands of local killings. At a scenic spot by a local river, he showed Johnson saber marks on the parapet of a bridge—a sickening trace of the executions. Johnson sees not only the physical wounds of the past but also the psychic toll on the historian: “His mind is overloaded with horrific images. As he gets older, they overwhelm him, becoming more real than ever.”

[Read: How China sees the world]

Authoritarians have an instinct to try to control a nation’s historical memory. This impulse emerges out of fear. They are convinced that their power will be weakened if they allow a more accurate and nuanced vision of the past, worrying that discussions of guilt, accountability, and reparation will be required if they get too far. But such a binary calculation in dealing with a nation’s history is “the opposite of thought,” as the novelist Zadie Smith recently put it in an interview. When Ai Xiaoming’s film was released, she and her subjects were harassed by the authorities. “Aren’t today’s events enough for you to believe the veracity of the Jiabiangou stories?” she asked on WeChat in 2017.

“Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people didn’t starve to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would not have been Tiananmen,” Huang Zerong, who went to prison for publishing an underground journal, told Johnson. In the imprisonment of Huang and the harassment of Ai, the vicious cycle repeats. China’s underground historians use writing like a time shelter: Through manuscripts saved in drawers, informal lectures on tucked-away staircases, and magazines circulated by PDF file to evade the government’s eye, they want to memorialize those who came before them and to deliver a message to the future.

Eugene Stoner was an unassuming family man in postwar America. He wore glasses and had a fondness for bow ties. His figure was slightly round; his colleagues called him a teddy bear. He refused to swear or spank his children. “Boy, that frosts me,” he’d say when he was upset. He liked to tweak self-important people with a dry sense of humor. He hated attention.

A lifelong tinkerer and a Marine veteran, he was also fascinated by the question of how to make guns shoot better. When an idea came to him, he scribbled it down on anything he could find—a pad of paper, a napkin, the tablecloth at a restaurant. He had no formal training in engineering or in firearms design. Yet it was inside Stoner’s detached garage in Los Angeles, during the 1950s, that the amateur gunsmith, surrounded by piles of sketches and prototypes, came up with the idea for a rifle that would change American history.

Today, this weapon is the most popular rifle in America—and the most hated. The AR-15 is a symbol of Second Amendment rights to millions of Americans and an emblem of a violent gun culture run amok to millions more. With a lightweight frame and an internal gas system, the military version can be fired as an automatic, unleashing a stream of bullets from a single pull of the trigger, or as a semiautomatic, allowing for one shot per trigger pull. The civilian semiautomatic version is now the best-selling rifle in the country; more than 20 million such guns are in civilian hands. And it is a weapon of choice for mass shooters—including the white supremacist who killed three Black people last month at a store in Jacksonville, Florida, armed with a handgun and an AR-15-style rifle emblazoned with a swastika.

[Juliette Kayyem: The Jacksonville killer wanted everyone to know his message of hate]

The consequences of the AR-15’s creation have coursed through our society and politics for generations in ways that Stoner never foresaw. He created the gun with a simple goal: to build a better rifle for the U.S. military and its allies during the Cold War. He wanted to protect the country he loved. Now his invention is fused in Americans’ minds with the horror of people going about their daily tasks—at school, the movies, the store, a concert—and suddenly finding themselves running for their lives. Few of the participants in America’s perpetual gun debate know the true, complicated history of this consequential creation—or of the man behind it. The saga of the AR-15 is a story of how quickly an invention can leave the control of the inventor, how it can be used in ways the creator never imagined.

We interviewed Stoner’s family members and close colleagues about his views of his gun. They gave us insight into what the inventor might have thought about the way the AR-15 is being used today, though we’ll never know for sure; Stoner died before mass shootings with AR-15s were common. Later in life, after years of working in the gun industry, he was asked about his career in an interview for the Smithsonian Institution. “It was kind of a hobby that got out of hand,” he said.

As a boy growing up in the Coachella Valley, in Southern California, in the 1920s and ’30s, Stoner was fascinated by explosions. Before the age of 10, he had designed rockets and rudimentary weapons. On one occasion, he begged a friend’s father for a metal pipe and the local drugstore owner for magnesium. Stoner built a primitive cannon and pointed it at a house across the street, but before he could open fire, his father ran to stop him. “I told you to do this at the city dump,” scolded Lloyd Stoner, a veteran of the Great War who had moved the family to California from the farmlands of Indiana in search of a better life.

Eugene Stoner never went to college. He joined the Marines during World War II and was tasked with repairing weapons on aircraft in the Philippines. When he came home, he brought his wife, Jean, an adventurous woman who idolized Amelia Earhart, a special present: gun parts from Asia that he assembled into a rifle. She loved it. The couple often went hunting and shooting together. “He was a very quiet person,” Jean said in an unpublished interview that the Stoner family shared with us. “But if you talked about guns, cars, or planes, he’d talk all night.”

After the war, Stoner got a job as a machinist making aircraft parts. Every day after he came home, he would eat the dinner that Jean had prepared (beef Stroganoff was his favorite), take a quick nap, and then walk to the garage to work on his gun designs. Like other hobbyist inventors of the era, he believed he could move the country forward by the power of his ingenuity. “We were like the 1950s family. It was California. It was booming after the war,” his daughter Susan told us. “I knew from my dad—I felt from him—the future was wide open.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The California dream is dying]

Stoner had the ability, common among inventors, to imagine engineering solutions that others stuck in the dogmas of the field could not. For centuries, gunmakers had built their rifles out of wood and steel, which made them very heavy. At the time, the U.S. military was searching for a lighter rifle, and Stoner wondered if he could build one using modern materials. If humans were soaring into the atmosphere in airplanes made of aluminum, he figured, couldn’t the lightweight metal tolerate the pressures of a gun firing? By the early 1950s, he had figured out how to replace one of the heaviest steel components of a rifle with aluminum. Then he devised a way of using the force of the gas from the exploding gunpowder to move parts inside the gun so that they ejected spent casings and loaded new rounds. This allowed him to eliminate other, cumbersome metal parts that had been used in the past. The first time he tried firing a gun using this new system, it blew hot gas into his face. But he perfected the design and eventually received a patent for it.

In 1954, Stoner got the opportunity to bring his radical gun concepts to life. That year, as Stoner later recalled, he had a chance encounter at a local gun range with George Sullivan. A relentless pitchman, Sullivan was then the head of a Hollywood start-up called ArmaLite, a subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Aircraft Corporation whose mission was to design futuristic weapons. Impressed with the homemade guns Stoner was shooting, Sullivan hired him as ArmaLite’s chief engineer.

The small yet brilliant ArmaLite team worked at a fevered pace, designing a series of lightweight guns made of aluminum and plastic. Most went nowhere. Nevertheless, the ambitious Sullivan set the firm’s sights on an improbable target: the U.S Army’s standard-issue rifle. The Eisenhower administration’s “New Look”—an effort to rein in Pentagon spending and shift it toward newer technologies—opened the door for private companies to get big military contracts. The outsiders from Hollywood decided to take on Springfield Armory, the military’s citadel of gun making in western Massachusetts that had equipped American soldiers since the Revolutionary War. Springfield’s own efforts to develop a new rifle had resulted in a heavy wood-and-steel model that wasn’t much more advanced than the M1 Garand used by GIs in World War II.

Eugene Stoner, wearing his trademark bow tie, holds his creation the AR-10. The AR-15 was a scaled-down version of this gun. (Photograph courtesy of Susan Kleinpell via Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

ArmaLite’s first serious attempt at a rapid-fire rifle made of plastic and aluminum was the AR-10—AR for ArmaLite or ArmaLite Research (accounts differ), and 10 because the weapon was the company’s tenth creation. The rifle combined the efficient internal gas system Stoner had devised in his garage and lightweight modern materials with a design that made the gun easy to shoot and keep on target. In December 1956, Time heralded the AR-10 as a potential savior for the bumbling U.S. military and listed Sullivan as the gun’s inventor, a claim that infuriated Stoner’s wife. Sullivan had also meddled with the design, insisting that more aluminum be used in making the gun’s barrel, a move Stoner resisted. During military trials, the AR-10 fared poorly. At one point, a bullet erupted from the side of the gun’s barrel, just missing the hand of the soldier firing the weapon—and seemingly dooming ArmaLite’s chances of landing a military contract.

But within the Pentagon, a cabal of high-ranking officers led by General Willard Wyman launched a back-channel effort to save Stoner’s gun. Wyman was a legendary military leader who, at age 46, had joined the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach as an assistant commander of the First Infantry Division. He knew that the United States needed better firepower as the Cold War flashed hot. America’s enemies around the globe were being armed by the Soviet Union with millions of rugged AK-47s that could spray bullets in automatic mode and were highly effective in guerilla warfare. Wyman was certain that modern wars would be won not by long-range marksmen but by soldiers firing lots of bullets in close combat. They needed a rifle that used small-caliber bullets so they could carry more ammo. And he was worried that the tradition-bound gun designers at Springfield Armory weren’t innovative enough to meet the challenge. When Wyman’s superiors brushed him off, he secretly flew to Los Angeles and stunned Stoner and his team by striding into the ArmaLite office unannounced. Wyman told Stoner that he wanted ArmaLite to build a new version of the AR-10 that fired a smaller bullet.

[James Fallows: Why the AR-15 is so lethal]

Stoner and an ArmaLite draftsman named Jim Sullivan (no relation to George) set about designing the gun. It was simple, efficient, and easy to use. Early versions of the AR-15 weighed just more than five pounds unloaded, less than the hedge trimmers and handheld vacuums of the era. With all of Stoner’s innovations—lighter material, fewer parts, and the gas system, as well as an in-line stock and a pistol grip—Jim Sullivan found shooting the prototype AR-15 to be easy, even after he flipped the selector switch to automatic. “That made it so well handling,” he told us. “If you’re firing full auto, you don’t want a gun that lifts.” Sullivan found the rifle’s recoil to be minimal. As a result, follow-up shots were quick when he switched it to semiautomatic. “It looked a little far-out for that time in history,” Stoner later said in the Smithsonian interview.

As Stoner and his backers sought to persuade the military to adopt the AR-15 in place of Springfield’s rifle, they were often met with skepticism about the gun’s small bullets. During secret military hearings about the rifle in the winter of 1958, Stoner explained to a panel of generals that the AR-15 had “a better killing cartridge with a higher velocity” than the Soviet AK-47. The generals asked Stoner how a smaller bullet fired from his rifle could do so much damage. “The wound capability is extremely high,” Stoner answered. “It blows up on contact rather than drilling a nice neat hole.” A slower .30 caliber round, similar to the one used by Springfield’s wood-and-steel rifles, “will go right through flesh,” but the faster, smaller bullet from the AR-15 “will tumble and tear,” he said.

Those in the military who wanted Springfield’s rifle to prevail tried to sabotage Stoner’s gun, rigging tests and shading reports so that it would seem like it wasn’t ready for the battlefield. During official trials in Alaska, Stoner arrived to find that the aiming sights on his guns had been replaced with bits of metal that were badly misaligned, causing soldiers to miss their targets. The guileless inventor was caught up in the murky world of Pentagon intrigue.

[From June 1981: James Fallows’s ‘M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story’]

Eventually, through persistence and luck, and with the help of a cast of lobbyists, spies, and analytics-driven military leaders, Stoner’s rifle would be adopted. At a key moment when it seemed that the AR-15 would be killed off by military bureaucrats, the powerful, cigar-chomping Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the U.S. bombing campaign in Japan during World War II, was asked if he wanted to shoot the gun. On July 4, 1960, at a birthday party for Richard Boutelle, the onetime head of Fairchild, the gun’s backers set up ripe watermelons as targets at Boutelle’s estate in western Maryland. LeMay fired, causing a red-and-green explosion. The general marched into the Pentagon soon after and demanded that the military purchase the weapon. It would become the standard-issue rifle—renamed the M16, for the prosaic “Model 16”—just in time for the rise of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.   

A U.S. Marine holds his M16 rifle alert after being fired on by North Vietnamese soldiers in the jungle southwest of Da Nang on April 22, 1969. (Yvon Cornu / AP)

In Eugene Stoner’s and Jim Sullivan’s minds, their work was not just intellectually engaging but also noble, a way to help America defeat the Communists. At school, in the 1950s, the Stoner children learned what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. Sirens and bells went off regularly, and teachers ordered kids to hide under their desks and cover their heads, Stoner’s daughter Susan recalled. For her father, the task of making the best rifle for the U.S. military wasn’t burdened with moral quandaries. Many weapons inventors at the time thought about the technical challenges of their weapons first, and wrestled with the consequences of their creations only afterward. “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead developer of the atomic bomb, said almost a decade after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[From February 1949: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

After Stoner created the AR-15, he continued designing guns and artillery for a variety of gunmakers. Through a company he co-founded, he worked on antiaircraft weapons for the Shah of Iran, before the 1979 revolution scuttled the deal. He helped design a handgun for the venerable gunmaker Colt that the company tried to sell on the civilian market, without much success. But none of his creations came close to the prominence of the AR-15. By the 1990s, he’d become a superstar in the gun world. Royalties from the M16 made him wealthy; Colt, which purchased the rights to the gun from ArmaLite, sold millions of the weapons to the military. Stoner was “a Second Amendment guy,” his daughter said, but he didn’t talk much about the messy world of politics, either privately or publicly. He preferred thinking about mechanisms.

Throughout his life, Stoner was troubled by losing control over the production of his most famous gun. In the 1960s, as the U.S. ramped up production of the rifle for the war in Vietnam, a Pentagon committee made changes to the gun and its ammunition without proper testing. The results on the battlefields in Vietnam were disastrous. Stories of GIs dying with jammed M16s in their hands horrified the public and led to congressional hearings. The shy inventor was called to testify and found himself thrust into an uncomfortable spotlight. Declassified military documents that we reviewed show that Stoner tried in vain to warn Pentagon officials against the changes.

Stoner paid far less attention to the semiautomatic version of his rifle that Colt began marketing to the public in the 1960s as “a superb hunting partner.” Even after Stoner’s patent expired, in 1977, the rifle was a niche product made by a handful of companies and was despised by many traditional hunters, who tended to prefer polished wood stocks and prided themselves on felling game with a single shot. But the rifle’s status shifted after 9/11. Many Americans wanted to own the gun that soldiers were carrying in the War on Terror. When the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban expired after a decade, the AR-15 became palatable for mainstream American gunmakers to sell. Soon, it was a symbol of Second Amendment rights and survivalist chic, and gun owners rushed to buy AR-15s, fearful that the government would ban them again. By the late 2000s, the gun was enjoying astounding commercial success.

AR-15 style weapons are displayed for sale at the 2022 Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an open-carry event to celebrate the Second Amendment, in Greeley, Pennsylvania. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty)

When Stoner died from cancer, in 1997, obituaries hailed him as the inventor of the long-serving military rifle; they made no mention of the civilian version of the weapon. Stoner left clues about his thoughts about the gun in a long letter, sent to a Marine general, in which he outlined his wishes for his funeral and burial at Quantico National Cemetery, in Virginia. He saw the creation of a rifle for the U.S military as his greatest triumph. He didn’t mention the civilian version. The government had wanted a “small caliber/high velocity, lightweight, select fire rifle which engaged targets with salvos of rounds from one trigger pull,” Stoner wrote. “That is what I achieved for our servicemen.”

[Ryan Busse: The rifle that ruined America]

The inventor wouldn’t get to control how his proudest achievement would be used after his death, or the fraught, outsize role it would come to play in American society and politics. Since 2012, some of the deadliest mass shootings in the nation’s history—Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Uvalde—have been carried out by men armed with AR-15s. Now children practice drills to avoid being gunned down by attackers with AR-15s at their school.

The last surviving member of that ArmaLite team, the draftsman Jim Sullivan, was at times haunted by the invention’s later impact. When we visited him at his workshop in Arizona in 2019, Sullivan pulled out the original drawings for the AR-15 and smiled broadly as he described how he and Stoner had designed the gun. He picked up parts to demonstrate how it worked, explaining its functions like an excited professor. He was proud of the weapon and loved Stoner. He said that his years working at ArmaLite were the best of his life. After hours of talking about barrels, bolts, receivers, and Stoner’s gas system, he paused and looked down at the floor. He said he’d grown deeply disturbed by the violence being wrought with the invention he had helped create. He said that mass shooters wouldn’t be able to do what they do without weapons such as the AR-15.

“Every gun designer has a responsibility to …” he said, pausing before finishing his thought, “to think about what the hell they’re creating.”

This article has been adapted from Zusha Elinson and Cameron McWhirter’s book, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15.

For years after World War II, the “liberal consensus”—the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure—was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional tied the federal government to ensuring not just economic equality, but also civil rights. Opponents of the liberal consensus argued that the newly active federal government was misusing tax dollars taken from hardworking white men to promote civil rights for “undeserving” Black people. The troops President Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, didn’t come cheap. The government’s defense of civil rights redistributed wealth, they said, and so was virtually socialism.

[Read: An attempt to resegregate Little Rock, of all places]

This intersection of race and economics was not new to the second half of the 20th century. It reached back into the past to resurrect an argument made by former Confederates during the Reconstruction years to overturn federal protection of Black rights after the Civil War.

Some of today’s Republicans are in the process of making that argument reality. Their insistence that all their opponents are socialists goes hand in hand with their effort to suppress Black and brown voting. When former President Donald Trump insists that the country has fallen to communism and “Marxists,” what he’s really saying is that a government in which racial minorities have a say is illegitimate.

The accusation of “socialism” had sharp teeth in the 1950s, as Americans recoiled from the growing influence of the Soviet Union and the rise of Communist China. But Republicans’ use of the word typically had little to do with actual, Bolshevik-style socialism. The theory that the people would rise up and take control of the means of production has never been popular in the United States. The best a Socialist Party candidate has ever done in an American presidential election was when Eugene V. Debs won about 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912.

Rather, in the United States, the political charge of socialism tended to carry a peculiar meaning, one forged in the white-supremacist backlash to Black civil rights in the 1870s.

During the Civil War, the Republicans in charge of the government both created national taxation and abolished legal slavery (except as punishment for crime). For the first time in U.S. history, voting in federal elections had a direct impact on people’s pocketbooks. Then, in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, extending the vote to Black men in the South. White southerners who hated the idea of Black people using the vote to protect themselves started to terrorize their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.

But in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to protect the right of Black men to vote. Attorney General Amos Akerman oversaw the prosecution of more than 3,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, winning more than 1,000 convictions. Meanwhile, Congress passed laws to protect Black voting.

Suddenly, it was harder for white southerners to object to Black rights on racial grounds. So they turned to a new argument, one based in economics.

They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor, and they would vote for leaders who promised to build things such as roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and most of the people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, although the infrastructure in which the southern legislatures were investing would help everyone, reactionaries claimed that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing.

Black voting was, one magazine insisted, “socialism in South Carolina.”

This argument that poor Black workers were dangerous socialists offered justification for former Confederates to block their Black neighbors from the polls, to read them out of American society, and ultimately to lynch them. It’s a peculiarly American version of “socialism,” and it might have been a historical anomaly had a small group of business leaders and southern racists not resurrected it in the 20th century as part of a deliberate effort to destroy the liberal consensus.

After World War II, most Republicans joined Democrats in believing that the federal government had to oversee business regulation, welfare programs, and infrastructure. They knew what businessmen would do to the economy unless they were checked; they had seen people homeless and hungry during the Depression.

And they scoffed at the notion that the New Deal system was a bad idea. They looked around at their homes, at their candy-colored cars that they drove on the new interstate highways built under what was then the biggest public-works project in U.S. history, and at their union-boosted paychecks in a nation with its highest gross domestic production ever, and they dismissed as a radical fringe the people trying to undermine this wildly successful system.

But the federal protection of civil rights added a new element to the liberal consensus that would threaten to tear it apart. Between 1967 and 1977, a North Carolina billboard urged people in “Klan Country” to “help fight Communism & Integration.”

The stagflation of the ’70s pushed middle-class Americans into higher tax brackets just when they needed their income most, and helped spread the sense that white tax dollars were being siphoned off to help racial minorities. As towns and governments tried to make up their declining funds with higher property taxes, angry property owners turned against the government. Republicans courted white workers by painting the Democrats as a party of grievance and special interests who simply wanted to pay off lazy Black supporters, rather than being interested in the good of America as a whole.

In 1976, former California Governor Ronald Reagan ran for president with the story of a “welfare queen” from the South Side of Chicago—code words for “Black”—who lived large on government benefits she stole. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” There was such a woman, but she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient. Nonetheless, the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy handed tax dollars to allegedly  undeserving Black Americans.

Reagan suggested a solution to such corruption. In August 1980, he spoke to voters in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 16 years and just a few miles from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been found murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan as they registered Black voters during 1964’s Freedom Summer. There, Reagan echoed the former Confederates during Reconstruction: “I believe in states’ rights,” he said.

Reagan’s campaign invited voters to remember a time before Black and brown voices and women began to claim equal rights. His campaign passed out buttons and posters urging voters to “make America great again.”

Voters put Reagan in the White House, where his administration cut taxes and slashed spending on public welfare programs (while pouring money into defense spending, and tripling the national debt). In the name of preventing socialism, those programs began the process of hollowing out the middle class.

In the years since 1981, wealth has moved dramatically upward. And yet, the language that linked socialism and minority voting never ceased to escalate.

Talk hosts such as Rush Limbaugh insisted that socialism was creeping through America at the hands of Black Americans, “feminazis,” and liberals. After its founding in 1996, the Fox News Channel joined the chorus of those who insisted that their political opponents were socialists trying to wreck the country. Republicans insisted that Barack Obama was a full-fledged socialist, and in 2018, Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers used the word socialism 144 times in a 72-page report attacking Democratic politicians. Trump’s press release for the report read: “Congressional Democrats Want to Take Money From Hardworking Americans to Fund Failed Socialist Policies.”

There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time: Since Reconstruction, white supremacists have argued that minority voting means socialism, and that true Americans stand against both. In recent history, that argument has led Republican-dominated state legislatures to make voting harder for people of color, and to rig the system through gerrymandering. Three years ago it led Trump and his supporters to try to overturn the results of a presidential election to keep their opponents out of power. They believed, and insist they still believe, that they had to destroy the government in order to save it.

This article is adapted from Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.

In universities and newspapers, nonprofit organizations and even corporations, a new set of ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation has gained huge influence. Attitudes to these ideas—which are commonly called “woke,” though I prefer a more neutral term, the “identity synthesis”—have split into two camps: those who blame them for all of America’s ills and those who defend them, largely uncritically.

Right-wing polemicists deride these ideas as a form of “cultural Marxism,” which has substituted identity categories such as race for the economic category of class but still aims at the same old goal of communist revolution. They invoke wokeness to oppose anything they dislike, such as sex ed and insufficiently patriotic versions of American history.

On the other side, many people in media and politics claim that wokeness is simply a matter of justice and decency: a willingness to acknowledge the cruelties of America’s past and a recognition of the ways they still shape the country. “Being woke,” Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who became a vocal critic of Donald Trump, has said, “just means being empathetic.”

[Adam Serwer: ‘Woke capital’ doesn’t exist]

Each position mischaracterizes these ideas, obscuring their true nature. Over recent decades, writers, activists, and scholars have melded a diverse set of ideas inspired by postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory into a new worldview that animates today’s progressive movements. It now constitutes a genuinely novel ideology, which has radically transformed what it means to be left-wing.

Amid all the contention, this ideology deserves assessment in a more evenhanded manner, one that weighs what is interesting or potentially useful about its tenets against the ways in which it undercuts the very values it claims to advance. And the key to a more sophisticated understanding and critique of these ideas lies in the story of where they came from.

At the beginning, there was Michel Foucault.

In his early years, the French philosopher was shaped by the fashionable “grand narratives” of his time. When he studied with the Hegelian philosopher Jean Hyppolite, Foucault imbibed the idea that history should be understood as the gradual realization of freedom in the world. When, a few years later, he went on to study with the Marxist thinker Louis Althusser, a passionate defender of the Soviet Union, Foucault embraced the idea that liberation would come in the form of the proletariat staging a worldwide revolution. In 1950, Foucault joined the French Communist Party, which was unquestioningly loyal to Joseph Stalin.

Yet Foucault soon chafed at the Marxist orthodoxy demanded by his comrades, leaving the party by 1953. “Over anyone who pretended to be on the left,” he would later complain, the party “laid down the law. One was either for or against; an ally or an adversary.” He became an adversary.

This combination of a commitment to left-wing ideals and a mistrust of grand narratives that justify coercion, including Marxism, constitutes the core of Foucault’s published work. In book after book, he argued against modern societies’ complacent assumption that they had made progress in the way they punish criminals or treat the mentally ill. Doubting claims to objective truth, Foucault believed that societies had become not more humane but merely more effective at controlling their subjects.

This paved the way for Foucault’s most influential argument, about the true nature of power. Power, he argued, is much more indirect than the top-down model traditionally taught in civics classes. Because real power lies in the normative assumptions embedded in the discourses that structure our society and the identity labels we use to make sense of the world, it is “produced from one moment to the next, at every point.”

This belief made Foucault deeply skeptical about the perfectibility of our social world. People would always chafe against the form that power takes at any given moment in history: “Where there is power, there is resistance,” he wrote. But this resistance, if successful, would itself come to exercise a power of its own. Even the most noble struggle, Foucault warned his readers, would contain within itself the seed of new forms of oppression.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define woke]

Foucault left his devotees with a complicated legacy. On the one hand, they recognized that his philosophy allowed them to question the prevailing assumptions and institutions of their age, including claims to objective truth or universal validity. On the other hand, Foucault’s pessimism about the possibility of creating a less oppressive world disappointed them. As Noam Chomsky told me 50 years after a famous encounter with Foucault for a televised debate at a Dutch university, he had “never seen such an amoral—not immoral, amoral—person in my life.”

In the late 1970s and ’80s, a series of postcolonial thinkers, such as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, set out to resolve this tension. Simultaneously influenced by Foucault and uncomfortable with his fatalistic conclusions, their ambition was to infuse the prospect for political agency back into his ideas.

Edward Said, a Palestinian American literary theorist who taught at Columbia University, shot to fame by arguing that the way Western writers had imagined the “Orient” helped them wield power over it, causing real-world harm. Explicitly acknowledging his debt to “Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse,” he claimed that analyzing the discourse of “Orientalism” was crucial to understanding “the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.”

This “discipline” of Oriental Studies cloaked itself as a scholarly tradition that claimed to be politically neutral, even objective. In reality, argued Said, “political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions.” Historically, Western representations of the East justified colonial rule. Since then, Said argued, a newer set of ideas about the “Arab mind” had helped motivate U.S. interventions in the Middle East. Said’s goal was to free his readers from the pernicious power Orientalist assumptions still held.

This critique prepared the ground for a more politically engaged adaptation of postmodernism. For many of Orientalism’s readers, it seemed clear that the goal of cultural analysis should be to help those who have the least power. They sought to change the dominant discourse to help the oppressed resist the oppressor.

Postcolonial scholars took Said’s work as a model for how to apply discourse analysis to explicitly political ends. A new wave of researchers concerned with such topics as gender, the media, and the experiences of migrants and ethnic minorities quickly embraced their toolkit. In time, the idea that a lot of political activism might revolve around critiquing dominant discourses or labeling certain cultural artifacts as “problematic” went mainstream, finding currency on social-media platforms and in traditional newspapers.

[Franklin Foer: The new Republican battle cry]

Foucault’s legacy left postcolonial scholars with a second obstacle. In rejecting grand narratives, he had not only turned against the idea of universal values or objective truth; he was also arguing that identity labels such as “women,” “proletarians,” and the “masses of the Third World” were reductive. Such generalizations, he claimed, create the illusion that a hugely varied group of people share some essential set of characteristics; this misperception could even help perpetuate injustices. The oppressed, Foucault observed, do not need intellectuals to speak on their behalf.

Spivak, an Indian literary scholar, strongly disagreed. Parisian philosophes, she argued, could take their social standing for granted. But the people with whom she was most concerned had none of their resources and enjoyed no such recognition. In countries such as India, she concluded in her most celebrated article, the “subaltern” cannot speak.

This presented Spivak, who had made her name as an interpreter of postmodernist philosophers, with a dilemma. How could she stay true to her distrust of dominant discourses, including identity categories, while speaking on behalf of the marginalized groups for which she felt a deep kinship? The key to doing better, she argued, was to embrace identity markers that could prove useful in practice even if they might be suspect in theory. “I think we have to choose again strategically,” she suggested, “not universal discourse but essentialist discourse … I must say I am an essentialist from time to time.”

These cryptic remarks took on a life of their own. Faced with the problem of how to speak for the oppressed, scholars from numerous disciplines followed Spivak’s example. They continued in the spirit of postmodernism to cast doubt on claims of scientific objectivity or universal principles. At the same time, they insisted on using broad identity categories and speaking for the downtrodden by embracing what they came to call “strategic essentialism.”

Over time, Spivak’s paradoxical compromise became a political rallying cry. Today, activists who carefully acknowledge that race or gender or ability status “is a social construct” nevertheless go on to make surprisingly essentializing claims about what, say, brown people or women or the disabled believe and demand.

The embrace of strategic essentialism also helps explain the logic behind the rise of new social customs, such as the establishment of racially separate “affinity groups” in many progressive spaces. Spivak came to believe that a commitment to identity categories such as race was strategically useful. Many progressives took this to mean that activists—and even grade-school students—should be encouraged to conceive of themselves first and foremost in racial terms.

Slowly but surely, these ideas gained traction in different parts of academia, including law schools. A new generation of legal scholars set out to question long-held beliefs about the judiciary, such as the idea that judges made decisions based on fine points of legal doctrine rather than on their own worldview or self-interest. But one member of this emerging tradition who proved especially influential argued that it had a crucial blindspot of its own: race.

Derrick Bell was a Black lawyer who spent the 1960s doing heroic work in the fight against desegregation. As an attorney for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, his mission was to win compliance with the major judicial victories of the civil-rights era, such as Brown v. Board of Education. In total, he helped oversee some 300 cases involving the desegregation of schools and businesses.

At first, Bell found his work exhilarating. But the longer he stayed in the job, the more dispirited he became. His lawsuits took so long to wind their way through the courts that many of the boys and girls he represented were adults by the time the school they’d hoped to attend was integrated.

Even then, progress could prove illusory. As Black schools were dissolved, many good Black teachers lost their jobs. And as white schools were integrated, many parents chose to send their kids to private schools, or moved out of the neighborhood altogether. In the end, some of the newly “integrated” schools were still predominantly Black and still suffered from a lack of resources.

[Adam Serwer: Trumpism is ‘identity politics’ for white people]

These disappointments transformed Bell’s thinking. By the time his first major scholarly article appeared, in 1976, Bell had come to reject basic assumptions that had underpinned his earlier work as a litigator. Expanding on an argument that—as Bell himself acknowledged—had originally been advanced by segregationists, he warned that civil-rights lawyers, caught between their clients’ wishes and their own ideals, were trying to “serve two masters.”

“Having convinced themselves that Brown stands for desegregation and not education,” Bell complained, “the established civil rights organizations steadfastly refuse to recognize reverses in the school desegregation campaign—reverses which, to some extent, have been precipitated by their rigidity.” Civil-rights lawyers needed instead to listen to their Black clients, Bell said. According to him, that meant becoming more open to creating schools that were (to reappropriate the disingenuous segregationist mantra) more truly “separate but equal.”

Bell’s skepticism about the civil-rights movement also made him distrust the idea that the racial attitudes of most Americans were improving. “Racism,” he contended, is not “a holdover from slavery that the nation both wants to cure and is capable of curing”; rather, it is “an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.” The civil-rights movement might have succeeded in making discrimination “less visible,” but, he wrote in the early 1990s, racism had become “neither less real nor less oppressive.”

According to Bell, the legal remedies implemented during the civil-rights era, such as school desegregation, would never suffice to overcome the legacy of slavery. It was high time, he wrote in a 1992 paper, for a “review and replacement of the now defunct racial equality ideology.” To win lasting progress, Bell proposed, would require more than nominal equality; it would take explicit group rights that compensated the marginalized. He and his followers called for policies that openly distinguished among citizens on the basis of skin color, so that those who had historically been oppressed would henceforth receive preferential treatment.

Bell died in 2011. A decade later, his ideas are enjoying a second life as an avowedly anti-racist left is embracing his call for race-sensitive public policy. The determination to put “racial equity” before old-fashioned forms of “racial equality” is evident today in many public policies, such as when, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the Small Business Administration prioritized nonwhite restaurant owners for emergency relief funds.

Much of today’s progressive politics is a popularized version of what I call the “identity synthesis.” To a remarkable extent, the ideas, norms, and practices that have become so prevalent on social media and in corporate diversity trainings owe a debt to these four thinkers in particular. They are rooted in a deep skepticism about objective truth inspired by Foucault, the use of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends taken from Said, an embrace of essentialist categories of identity derived from Spivak, and a preference for public policies that explicitly tie the treatment a person receives to their group identity, as advocated by Bell. (Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Black feminist legal scholar who coined the idea of “intersectionality,” which has since taken on a life of its own, might be considered another key member of this progressive pantheon.)

The mainstream influence of these ideas makes all the more interesting the fact that several of these thinkers came to have misgivings about the uses to which they were put. Foucault, who died in 1984, would, I suspect, have been quick to remind his devotees that the impulse to reshape discourses for political ends can, despite the liberatory aim, readily morph into new forms of repression.

Said, who died in 2003, addressed the problem explicitly. “Identity,” he wrote shortly before his death, is “as boring a subject as one can imagine.” For that reason, he admonished, “marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, and not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”

[Graeme Wood: What happens when a carnival barker writes intellectual history]

Spivak, too, was forthright about her dismay at how the idea of strategic essentialism had helped forge a new ideology. Praising the “political use of humor” by African Americans, she lamented its absence among today’s “university identity wallahs.”

The identity-synthesis advocates are driven by a noble ambition: to remedy the historic injustices that scar every country, including America. These injustices are and remain real. Although social movements and legislative reforms can help address them, the practice of politics, as the sociologist Max Weber famously wrote, is the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” It rarely provides remedies as quickly or as comprehensively as hoped—leading some to conclude that a more radical break with the status quo is needed.

The appeal of the synthesis stems from promising just that. It claims to lay the conceptual groundwork necessary to remake the world by overcoming the reverence for long-standing principles that supposedly constrain our ability to achieve true equality. Advocates of the identity synthesis reject universal values like free speech as distractions that conceal and perpetuate the marginalization of minority groups. Trying to make progress toward a more just society by redoubling efforts to realize such ideals, its advocates claim, is a fool’s errand.

But these ideas will fail to deliver on their promises. For all their good intentions, they undermine progress toward genuine equality among members of different groups. Despite its allure, the identity synthesis turns out to be a trap.

As the identity synthesis has gained in influence, its flaws have become harder to ignore. A striking number of progressive advocacy groups, for example, have been consumed by internal meltdowns in recent years. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” a leader of one progressive organization complained recently. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.” As institutions such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU have implemented the norms inspired by the identity synthesis, they have had more difficulty serving their primary missions.

The identity synthesis is also starting to remake public policy in ways that are more likely to create a society of warring tribes. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, a key advisory committee to the CDC recommended that states prioritize essential workers in the rollout of scarce vaccines rather than the elderly, in part because “racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented” among seniors. Not only did this policy, according to the CDC’s own models, have the probable outcome of increasing the overall number of Americans who would perish in the pandemic; it also placed different ethnic groups in competition with one another for lifesaving medications.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Intersectionality is not the problem]

When decision makers appear out of touch with the values and priorities of most citizens, demagogues thrive. The well-founded fears roused by the election of Trump accelerated the ascendancy of the identity synthesis in many elite institutions. Conversely, the newfound hold that these ideas now have over such institutions makes it more likely that he might win back the White House in 2024. The identity synthesis and far-right populism may at first glance appear to be polar opposites; in political practice, one is the yin to the other’s yang.

Many attacks on so-called wokeness are motivated by bad faith. They fundamentally misrepresent its nature. But that is no reason to deny how a new ideology has acquired such power in our society. In fact, it’s imperative to recognize that its founders explicitly saw themselves as rejecting widely held values, such as the core tenets of the civil-rights movement.

The lure of the identity synthesis to so many people is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of uncritically accepting this ideology is a society that places an unremitting emphasis on our differences. The effect is to pit rigidly defined identity groups against one another in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition.

Critics of the identity trap commonly claim that progressive activists are “going too far.” But what is at issue is not having too much of a good thing. The real problem is that, even at its best, this ideology violates the ardent aspirations for a better future to which all of us should remain committed.

By Beijing’s reckoning, the U.S.-led global order is in turmoil, and a Washington in decline has no answers to the world’s mounting problems. Fortunately for the future of humanity, however, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping does. He would like to replace Washington’s “rules-based” world order with a framework of his own—one whose most sacred principle is national sovereignty, or the right of states to govern themselves, free from outside interference.

In the world Xi envisions, nations will no longer have to endure Washington’s preaching about democracy and human rights. All governments, no matter how repressive, will be equals, with their sovereignty assured. Xi enshrined the protection of sovereignty as the very first plank of his Global Security Initiative, an ideological blueprint for a new global system that he introduced, probably not coincidentally, several weeks after the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

That war has posed a bit of a problem for China’s professed position, however. Russia, China’s strategic partner, trammeled an international border to invade a neighboring country in what could hardly be a clearer violation of that country’s sovereignty. But rather than sympathize with Ukraine’s desperate struggle to preserve its independent existence, Xi cemented his partnership with the Russian invaders intent on annihilating it.

“You can’t be helping Russia conduct this war and say you believe in Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told me. “Obviously, you can’t square that circle.”

Yet Xi has tried to do so. His contradictory stance on the war has forced his diplomats to tap dance, seeking to preserve Beijing’s pretense of principled neutrality even to the point of staging a purported peace mission. Meanwhile, the war has raised serious questions about the place of sovereignty in Xi’s vision for a new world order, and, relatedly, about his ability to achieve his grandiose plans.

In practically every diplomatic statement, Communist China affirms its commitment to honoring the sovereignty of other countries. It expects no less in return: Sovereignty, China’s leaders claim, confers upon the Communist Party the authority to govern as it wishes within China’s borders. Sovereignty, from the Chinese viewpoint, gives Beijing the right to lock up Uyghurs in Xinjiang and democracy advocates in Hong Kong, and it forbids Washington from interfering in China’s internal affairs by complaining about its human-rights record. Beijing rejects the notion of  “universal values” that apply to all people, no matter where they live.

[Read: Xi Jinping is done with the established world order]

Beijing’s fixation on sovereignty is inseparable from its claim that Taiwan is part of China: By so much as interacting with Taiwan’s government, other countries are violating China’s sovereignty, Beijing maintains. Because they believe the country is not yet completely unified, says Maria Adele Carrai, an international-law expert at NYU’s Shanghai campus, Chinese leaders “feel very sensitive and also partly fragile about their sovereignty.”

Xi’s position on sovereignty holds obvious appeal for other autocrats intent on suppressing dissent without interference. But it also attracts adherents in the developing world, where many leaders still contend with the persistent, detrimental legacy of Western colonialism. For those leaders, says Jonathan Fulton, a specialist in Chinese relations with the Middle East at Zayed University, in Abu Dhabi, “when they hear a great power say, ‘We’re not going to do the kind of stuff that the West did to you,’ that resonates.”

The deeper Xi wades into international affairs, however, the more his purported principles come into conflict with his strategic goals. His government routinely intrudes on other countries’ sovereignty; witness the Chinese spy balloon caught floating in American airspace, or the scandal over alleged Chinese interference in Canada’s national elections. But little has challenged Xi’s ideological framework more than the Ukraine war. His choice was stark: Stand with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Xi has called his “best” friend, and sacrifice his supposed commitment to sovereignty, or stand for sovereignty by siding with Ukraine, thereby breaking a partnership that he perceives as crucial to his campaign against U.S. hegemony.

At the war’s outbreak, Chinese leaders seemed ambivalent, even conflicted. Though Foreign Minister Wang Yi asserted that Putin’s security concerns were “legitimate,” he also came out clearly in defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty. “All countries’ sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity must be safeguarded,” he told the Munich Security Conference only days before the invasion began. “This is also what China has been upholding, with no exception regarding Ukraine.”

As the war has ground on, Xi has strengthened his relations with Russia. He has done so without directly aiding Moscow’s war effort but by supplying political and economic support as Russia has become isolated from the West. Chinese diplomats still sometimes talk about sovereignty, but they do so with greater ambiguity. In a March press briefing, then–Foreign Minister Qin Gang reiterated Beijing’s position that all countries’ sovereignty should be respected but brought up Ukraine’s specifically only to criticize Washington: “Why does the U.S. talk at length about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity on Ukraine, while disrespecting China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on China’s Taiwan question?” he asked rhetorically.

[Read: What is Putin worth to China?]

Last February, Xi issued a 12-point proposal for ending the Ukraine conflict. The first entry asserts that “the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld”—but it does not mention Ukraine in this regard. In an April conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Xi stressed—apparently without irony—that “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity is the political foundation” of relations between the two countries, but he did not pledge to ensure Ukraine’s or offer any specific proposal for preserving it, at least according to the official Chinese summary of their talk.

For the Ukrainians, the principle of sovereignty affords no ambiguity. Zelensky told Xi in April 2023, “We did not start this war, but we have to restore the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country.” He added that “there can be no peace at the expense of territorial compromises. The territorial integrity of Ukraine must be restored.”

If Zelensky’s words made Xi uncomfortable, the Chinese leader did not let on. Just days earlier, the Chinese diplomat Lu Shaye had let slip a remark that opened a window on Beijing’s thinking. Then serving as China’s ambassador to France, Lu claimed that the sovereignty of the countries formed from the ruins of the Soviet Union—such as Ukraine—had no basis in international law, because no international agreement had specified their status. They had asserted their own sovereignty, and Lu’s comments suggested that he did not recognize such a path to independent statehood. His words sparked outrage across Europe. China’s foreign ministry clarified that the government officially recognized the sovereignty of those states—but Chinese diplomats rarely stray far from approved talking points. More likely than not, Lu’s ideas carry some currency among the Chinese leadership.

Chinese leaders could possibly see Moscow’s assertion of control over territory once included in the Soviet Union as parallel to its own yearning after lands, including Taiwan, that were once ruled from Beijing under the Qing dynasty. In both cases, earlier political entities claimed these territories, suggesting that sovereignty can be a slippery idea when aggressive or nationalist leaders wish it to be.

Will the incipient allies attracted to Xi’s sovereignty rhetoric be put off by China’s lack of regard for Ukraine? Herbst believes that the leadership’s contradictory stance “certainly makes it harder for them to present themselves as some new sort of power representing something even better than the Western-organized international system.” But he did not think the inconsistency would cost China much in the global South.

Many developing countries lie far removed from Ukraine’s crisis and are not much invested in it. And according to Fulton, the countries of the global South are less interested in Xi’s transgressions of avowed principles than in its promise of counterbalance: Many leaders “want to see a shift in the distribution of power so the West doesn’t get to behave the way it has in the past and the global South has more influence,” he told me.

In that sense, Xi may be onto something. The United States has set aside its commitment to democracy to promote its strategic interests on any number of occasions, but its ideals have still given common cause to a worldwide network of alliances and inspired many of those suffering under oppressive regimes to dream of greater liberty—including within China. Perhaps Xi’s ideological blueprint, no matter how unworkable or compromised, could play the same role: that of a glue binding partnerships opposed to American ideals and American power. Perhaps in global diplomacy, what leaders say can matter more than what they do.

After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, an underground joke from my Moscow youth declared, the Politburo found three envelopes on the Soviet dictator’s desk. The first, inscribed “Open after my death,” contained a letter telling his successors to place his body next to Lenin’s in the Red Square Mausoleum. “Open when things get bad,” read the second envelope, and the note inside said, “Blame everything on me!” The third envelope, marked “Open when things get really bad,” commanded, “Do as I did!”

Things must be really bad for Russian President Vladimir Putin, because he is resorting to one of Stalin’s preferred ways of holding on to power: appealing to anti-Semitism. Recently, Putin has made a series of remarks dwelling on the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. And in a discussion at an economic forum earlier this month, Putin mocked Anatoly Chubais, a half-Jewish former Kremlin adviser who fled Russia after its invasion of Ukraine last year and is reportedly living in Israel. “He is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais,” Putin said, using his former aide’s first name and patronymic. “He is Moshe Izrayilevich, or some such.”

As a scholar who has been studying Soviet and Russian politics for decades; who discusses that subject regularly with friends, family members, and professional colleagues; and who keeps tabs on what Putin’s critics say about him, I cannot remember him publicly trafficking in anti-Semitism before now. Indeed, his seemingly benevolent attitude toward his Jewish subjects made him unusual among Russian leaders. For more than a century until 1917, Jews in the Russian empire were confined to the Pale of Settlement, mostly in what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania, and were terrorized by periodic pogroms. Early in the 20th century, the czar’s secret police propagated (and are widely suspected of sponsoring) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vicious anti-Semitic forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and has inspired generations of violent anti-Semites.

[Gal Beckerman: What Putin’s treatment of Jews reveals about Russia]

Stalin capitalized on that history to consolidate his own control of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1940s, after 20 million Soviet citizens had died in World War II and millions more were starving and homeless, he unleashed a national anti-Semitic campaign, complete with the frenzied unmasking of “rootless cosmopolitans”—whom everyone understood to be Jews—in newspapers. Well-known members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, formed during the war to organize international support for the Soviet military effort, were arrested, tortured, and executed. In what became known as the “Doctors’ Plot,” a predominantly Jewish group of physicians ministering to the Kremlin leadership was accused of poisoning or deliberately mistreating patients; the medics were tortured, some to death, to extract “confessions.” During that period, tens of thousands of Jews were fired from their jobs, and even graduates of prominent educational institutions became unemployable. (My mother, just out of the Moscow Medical Institute No. 2, was among them.)  

Putin’s recent rhetoric has been jarring because, despite everything else he has done, he has not tried to whip up public sentiment against Jews. During his 2005 visit to Israel—the first ever to the Jewish state by a Soviet or Russian leader—Putin had an emotional reunion with Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, his high-school German teacher, and bought her an apartment in central Tel Aviv. He made Arkady and Boris Rotenberg—two brothers of Jewish heritage who have been among Putin’s judo sparring partners—into billionaire oligarchs.

Although he spoke at the unveiling of two monuments to Russia’s penultimate czar, Alexander III—a notorious anti-Semite who encouraged pogroms—Putin not only refrained from wielding Judeophobia as a political tool but upbraided those who did. He ordered the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, to retract a statement by an agency aide who had described the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement as a “sect” whose adherents believed in their “supremacy over all nations and peoples.” (The offending official was fired a few months later.) The Russian president apologized in a phone call with then–Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov opined that some Jews were notoriously anti-Semitic. And even as Russian television and social-media outlets have abounded with mad-dog chauvinists and warmongering propagandists since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin appears to have embargoed anti-Semitic themes.

At every turn, Putin seeks to legitimize his war in Ukraine by linking it with Russia’s triumph over the perpetrators of the Holocaust. That Zelensky is Jewish obviously complicates that story. In a discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the moderator Dimitri Simes invited Putin to explain the issue away.

Putin replied that many of his childhood friends are Jewish, and that they all think Zelensky is not a Jew but a disgrace to the Jewish people. He then recounted, from notes, the details of the execution of a Jewish Ukrainian family during World War II, and showed video clips alleging massacres of Jews and ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalists of that era.  

[Yair Rosenberg: Russia is not the first to blame Jews for their own Holocaust]

Earlier this month, though, Putin’s allusions to Zelensky’s Jewishness grew sharper. The “Western sponsors” of the Ukrainian government, he told an interviewer, had deliberately chosen a Jewish president of Ukraine to camouflage the “antihuman” essence of the Kyiv regime. It’s “utterly despicable,” Putin concluded, to see a Jew covering up the “glorification of Nazism and those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine.” While still purporting to be ridding Ukraine of Nazis, Putin is zeroing in on a flesh-and-blood culprit: The Russians and the Ukrainians are killing one another because of a Jewish schemer.    

Last week, Putin found another target: Chubais, his former special envoy to international organizations, who walked off his job a month after the invasion of Ukraine. After some meandering, Chubais, whose mother is Jewish, landed in Israel (which does not require entry visas for Russian citizens), along with tens of thousands of other Russian immigrants. Initially, his departure caused nary a ripple. Yes, Chubais quit on his own accord, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in March 2022, adding, “As to whether he left Russia or not, that’s his personal business.”

Not anymore. Why did Chubais run off to Israel? Putin mused last week, employing a derisive word, udral, that translates to something like “absconded.” Why is he “hiding” there? And by the way, Putin went on: Although no criminal charges have been brought against Chubais, “a huge financial hole” has been uncovered in the state nanotechnology corporation, Rusnano, which Chubais headed until 2020.

Russians steeped in anti-Semitic tropes could effortlessly read between the lines: A cowardly and probably thieving Jewish bureaucrat had bolted, abandoning the motherland in its hour of tribulation.  

Political anti-Semitism—that is, the kind promulgated and encouraged by the authorities—is never just about Jews. It portends rot and insecurity at the top of a government, signifying the need to distract, obfuscate, shift the blame. By twisting Zelensky’s Jewishness into a cause of war and portraying Chubais as a craven deserter, Putin is also revealing the Kremlin’s growing anxiety about its grip on power.

He keeps sinking deeper into the quagmire of a war he cannot win and cannot walk away from. The Wagner mutiny debunked the official myth of national unity in the face of the alleged “Western aggression” against the motherland. To the extent that Putin has a genuine personal aversion to stirring up anti-Semitism, his political needs are now urgent enough for him to overcome it.

In the mosaic of militaristic tyranny that Putin has been assembling, one major tile had been notably missing. He has now begun putting it in place—reviving not only a defining feature of the Stalinist state but also a distinctly ugly part of Russian history.

“Axis Sally” was the generic name for women with husky voices and good English who read German and Italian propaganda on the radio during World War II. Like the Japanese women who became collectively known as “Tokyo Rose,” they were trying to reach American soldiers, hoping to demoralize them by telling them their casualties were high, their commanders were bad, and their cause was lost. “A lousy night it sure is,” Axis Sally said on one 1944 broadcast: “You poor, silly, dumb lambs, well on your way to be slaughtered.”

Tucker Carlson, who also repeats the propaganda of foreign dictators while speaking English, doesn’t have anything like the historical significance of Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose, though his level of credibility is similar. This is a man who famously wrote texts about his loathing of Donald Trump, even while praising the then-president in public; recently, the former Fox News host kept a straight face while interviewing a convicted fraudster who claimed to have smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama. But when Carlson speaks on behalf of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, his words are repeated in Hungary and Russia, where they do have resonance: Look, a prominent American journalist supports us. I don’t know what Carlson’s motivation is—he did not respond to a request for comment—but his words also circulate in the far-right American echo chamber, where they are sometimes repeated by Republican presidential candidates, so unfortunately they require some explanation.

[Read: Tucker Carlson’s manufactured America]

Carlson’s hatred of American institutions, and of many Americans, is the starting point for many of his diatribes. Recently, for instance, he appeared at an event in Budapest, organized by a Hungarian-government-funded organization, where he called the U.S. ambassador to that nation a “creep,” said he was “embarrassed that I share a country of birth with a villain like this,” and apologized for American foreign policy in Hungary.

But what is American foreign policy in Hungary? I asked the ambassador, David Pressman, to describe it to me. Pressman, who is gay, told me that when he first arrived in Budapest, his counterparts smirked at him during their meetings and asked if he wanted to talk about gay rights or other progressive causes. No, he told them. He wanted to talk about Russian and Chinese espionage and influence operations in Hungary, which are considerable.

Some examples: The most important Russian investment in Hungary is a nuclear-power plant whose financing is kept secret by law, presumably because the ruling party doesn’t want to reveal who is benefiting. Chinese interests are also financing a distinctly untransparent railway project in Hungary, have made an opaque investment in an environmentally unfriendly battery-manufacturing plant, and, a couple of years ago, with the help of the Hungarian government, tried to open a university in Budapest too. In 2019, Hungarian government officials also arranged for the Russian-controlled International Investment Bank, an institution set up in 1970 by the Soviet Union and its satellite states, to move its headquarters to Budapest, even throwing in a 10-million-euro subsidy as encouragement. The Hungarian government, which rejoined the bank in 2015 (having left it after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.), owned about a quarter of the shares of the IIB; the Hungarian deal with the “Russian spy bank,” as it is known in Budapest (it was once described by a group of U.S. senators as “an arm of the Russian secret service”), also freed the bank from Hungarian financial supervision, exempted it from taxes, and allowed bank employees to have diplomatic status and immunity in Hungary, an arrangement that could in theory help Russian spies enter the country and from there the rest of the European Union.   

The bank was dodgy enough to raise American concerns even during the Trump administration, which was otherwise more indulgent of Hungary’s autocratic ruling party. After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the Biden administration told the Hungarians, who remain NATO allies, that the bank was a major problem for the alliance. Orbán resisted this pressure until April of this year, when Pressman announced sanctions against the bank and three of its executives, two Russians and one Hungarian. “We are concerned about Hungarian leaders seeking ever-closer ties with Russia, despite its brutal aggression,” he told Hungarian journalists. A few days later, Orbán caved, and withdrew Hungary’s investment. The bank announced that it would leave Budapest.

This was unsurprising. Although Orbán likes to portray himself as a leader who cannot be influenced, a man tough and immovable, in fact he often gives in at the last minute—he is famous in the European Union for doing so. But he needs to tell a different story to his voters about what happened. The invitation to the disgraced former Fox News pundit does that: While in Budapest, Carlson channeled Orbán’s anger and dislike of the United States and its ambassador, while studiously avoiding the real reasons for what is indeed an extremely poor moment for American-Hungarian relations.  

During his comments, and during his interview with Orbán, both broadcast on his social media, Carlson stayed well away from banks and Russian spies. He didn’t mention Hungary’s refusal to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership, or Hungary’s repeated vetoes of European sanctions against Russia. Instead, he denounced the United States for “the imposition of boutique sexual politics” on Hungary. Officials in the Biden administration, Carlson claimed, “hate Hungary not because of what it’s done but because of what it is. It’s a Christian country, and they hate that.” He made what sounded like several references to trans-rights activism, praised the Hungarians for their resistance to the degenerate West, and won applause.

This rant was based on a false premise, for there is no U.S. war on Christianity in Hungary. If American officials are angry at Hungary, that’s not because of what it is, but because of what it’s done. Once again: The conflict between Washington and Budapest over the past several years is about Hungarian corruption, especially corruption in the ruling Fidesz party, and Hungary’s deep ties to other autocracies. (These are, of course, related issues: A major purpose of the deep ties with autocracies is for Fidesz to make money off them.) But Orbán doesn’t want his voters to pay attention to his corrupt links or his autocratic friendships, and he doesn’t want Americans or Europeans to know about them either. And so he hides them behind the veil of a culture war. Carlson is useful to Orbán because his words can help hide Orbán’s agenda at home—look, a prominent American journalist supports us—and abroad. By pretending that this is a culture war rather than a conflict over money and espionage, Carlson helps Orbán escape the consequences of his actions.

Orbán is hardly the first autocrat to use propaganda this way. Vladimir Putin has been directing his citizens away from reality and toward imaginary culture wars for more than a decade. In September 2022, when the Russian president held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he did not speak of the people he is torturing or holding in concentration camps, the children he has kidnapped and deported to Russia, or even the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who have died in his unnecessary war. Instead, he used the occasion to talk about the “satanic” West, claim he was defending Russia from “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction,” and again replace the real war, in which real people are killing and being killed, with a fictional culture war that exists in his head.

Carlson frequently uses Russian propaganda lines too, promoting fake stories (Ukrainian “bio-labs”), repeating Russian justifications for the war, and calling the Ukrainian president a “dictator.” He began doing this when he was still at Fox News, and now he does it in the videos he promotes on social media. Clips of these performances are frequently shown on Russian television, both when he attacks the U.S. and when he amplifies Russian propaganda about Ukraine or about the war. But many of these stories are nevertheless told as part of a larger one: the fake battle between a weak, degenerate America and healthy autocracies with “traditional values.”   

None of this might matter very much, except that, again, a large part of the American far right has learned this rhetorical trick from Putin, from Orbán, from Carlson, and from other propagandists. Ignoring the real world in order to fight the culture war is now common practice. Although Trump was wholly ignorant of economics and foreign policy, his supporters didn’t care, because he got them excited about owning the libs. Ron DeSantis still seems to believe that a “war on woke” is more likely than a comprehensive health-care plan to help him get elected president, and he might be right. A wide range of senators who should know better—including Ted Cruz, J. D. Vance, and Josh Hawley, who used to talk a lot about real issues—have now abandoned policy debates in order to fight the culture wars and attack “elites,” despite their own Ivy League pedigrees.

[Read: What does Tucker Carlson believe?]

You can see why. The real world is full of difficult, hard-to-explain problems; even the best solutions might require difficult trade-offs. Once, Americans did have at least a few politicians who nevertheless sought to find these solutions, and our political system seemed to allow us to have arguments about them. Authoritarians, by contrast, seek power in order to hide the problems, steal money, arrange favors for their friends, and manipulate the political system so that they can’t ever lose power. That’s what Putin did, and that’s what Orbán does too. Carlson is simply the American face, and the English-speaking voice, of that confidence trick.

“Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore.

Then things began to change. Within a few years of her first speech, she was giving lectures in schools quite regularly. She was invited to Downing Street and talked with the prime minister about knowing the Franks, and about her father’s work fighting fascism and his encounter with Hermann Göring. The BBC made a documentary in which my mother met the daughter of a prominent Nazi. She was forever telling her story.

No one, however, ever asked Dad to tell his. The interest in what happened to him never came. It still hasn’t come.

Yet my father was the victim of one of the war’s greatest crimes: Stalin’s attempt to eradicate the Polish nation by murdering its elite and scattering its leadership. It was a crime that saw hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their homes and deported to become slave laborers, and saw hundreds of thousands more imprisoned in terrible conditions. It’s a story little told, often denied, and, even now, to most people, entirely unknown. My father’s story is one that history has half hidden.

Decades later, we are living with the consequences of this occlusion.

[Nicholas Burns: The lasting lesson of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact]

In 1938, my grandparents—Dolu and Lusia Finkelstein—moved into a beautiful contemporary house on a hill in the city of Lwów in what was then eastern Poland (today, the city is known as Lviv and is in western Ukraine). The house was a symbol of their wealth, their progressive spirit, and their solid confidence in the future. Finkelsteins had been in the area for hundreds of years; now they had built a home that the family could live in for hundreds more. They would live in it for little more than a year.

Dolu and Lusia had built more than just their own house. They had played a big part in building the city in which it was located. During the First World War, Lwów had been fought over by Austrians, Russians, and Poles in conflicts that had destroyed its economy, infrastructure, and social life. Dolu’s iron-and-steel business and his membership in the city council helped with the reconstruction, while Lusia made her mark in Lwów high society.

They expected their one son, Ludwik, my father, to inherit the business and the social obligations. He would come of age, they anticipated, in a modern European city, liberal in spirit and prosperous.

All of this, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were to destroy. All of this, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was to destroy.

When my nephew Simon was about 10 years old, he took part in a television documentary in which young British people returned to the places their family had come from. The filmmakers took him back to where my dad was born. They filmed him at what had been the Finkelstein business premises and at the lovely house on the hill.

In the film, the narrator informs viewers about the Nazi takeover of the city and how they had killed all the Jews who lived there. And this was indeed a fate that befell many members of my family. My grandmother was one of seven children—and the only one to survive the war.

Yet, on what had actually happened to my father, Simon’s grandfather, the documentary is silent. This silence is typical of so many accounts of the place and the period. Viewers are not told that when the Germans originally invaded Poland, they did so in cooperation with the Soviets. Under the nonaggression pact agreed upon between Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and signed on August 23, 1939, the two powers secretly arranged for the city of Lwów to come under control of the U.S.S.R.

Barely a week later, Hitler’s forces invaded western Poland, and Stalin’s army soon followed suit, taking over the east. So it was that, within weeks, my father’s city was overrun by Soviet soldiers. The Polish officers who resisted were captured and later secretly shot. The bodies of thousands of Poles eventually turned up in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in western Russia. For decades afterward, the Soviets lied about what they had done.

[Jonathan Freedland: The unheeded warning]

The truth of what happened to my own family I was able to learn from the video testimony my father provided after the war and from a cache of letters, kept in a plastic bag, that I found in the study at my parents’ home when they both had died. Scraps of paper with Polish writing all the way to the edge, which had traveled to hell and back. Together with my dad.

Within months of the Soviet takeover, Polish Lwów had become Soviet Ukrainian Lviv, the Finkelstein business had been nationalized, the family had been evicted from their home, and Dolu had been arrested. He was found guilty of being “a socially dangerous element” under Article 54 of the Ukrainian Criminal code, which dealt with “counterrevolutionary” offenses, and sent away to the Gulag in the Arctic Circle to begin a sentence of eight years’ hard labor.

Following my grandfather’s arrest, my 10-year-old father and his mother were arrested too. The Soviets deported all the families of the civic leaders they had shipped to the Gulag. Hundreds of thousands of people were sent to work on state-run collective farms. This was both a means of suppressing dissent and a way of populating the Soviet interior. On the day of my father’s departure to the frozen wastelands, every other person packed into the cattle truck with him was, like him and my grandmother, either a woman or a child.

Many of the deportees died on the journey to the border of Siberia; others died in the fierce winter to come. But living in a hut they had made of cow dung, entirely without fuel and almost entirely without food, my father and grandmother somehow made it through the winter.

They were still alive when, in the summer of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact collapsed. Forced to make a deal with the Allies, Stalin agreed to an amnesty for the Poles he had deported and imprisoned. Told that they were free to go but given no money or help to leave, many Poles remained stranded in the Soviet wastelands. Attempts to reunite families were hazardous and usually doomed. But there was one source of hope.

[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]

Stalin had agreed to the establishment of a Polish free army under General Władysław Anders, a Polish officer whom, quite by accident, he hadn’t had shot. Deportees who got lucky linked up through Anders, and that is what my father and grandmother were able to do: In the fall of 1941, Dolu—by then a second lieutenant in Anders’s army—learned that his wife and son were still alive, and the family was reunited.

Anders somehow persuaded Stalin to let his army leave the U.S.S.R. and come under British command. Thus my family made it to Iraq, and, eventually, after much political argument, to England.

My father died in 2011, but what lessons would he have been able to impart to his audiences if he were still alive and the silence was broken? What would he have said if ever he had been asked to speak about his experiences?

First, that although the fascists and the Communists of the 1930s and ’40s are seen as counterposed, they in fact shared many of the same doctrines and interests. And this was what their pact reflected. Fascists and Communists both believed that the will of the people was being thwarted by elites, and that the individual members of these elites needed to be eliminated by force. Fascists and Communists each had their own particular notion of who these elites were, but many of these ideas converged. The Soviets might regard as suspect the Jewish owner of a shop, because he owned a shop while happening to be Jewish, while the Nazis regarded him as suspect because he was Jewish while happening to own a shop. And for both groups, the concept of the elites was broad enough to encompass my father and mother—even though, at the time the pact was signed, they were under the age of 10.

Second, that the populist idea of sweeping away institutions, denying property rights, and elevating the “spirit of the nation” over the rights of individuals is calamitous. The bombastic claims of would-be dictators must always be resisted and the rule of law upheld.

Third, that because the Soviets found themselves on the winning side in the Second World War, they have never been held to account for their crimes. When the Nuremberg Tribunals were celebrated, on their 75th anniversary in 2020, as the birth of international justice, it wasn’t much commented on that the crimes the tribunal had determined the Nazis were guilty of, the Soviets were guilty of too.

The Nuremberg defendants had been charged with crimes against peace; the Soviet invasion of Poland was a crime against peace. They had been charged with crimes against humanity; the Soviet deportation of my father and the enslavement of Dolu were crimes against humanity. They had been charged with war crimes; the murder of the Polish officers found at Katyn was a war crime. They had been charged with a conspiracy to commit these crimes; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is among the many documents that prove a Soviet conspiracy.

[From the December 1946 issue: Nuremberg in retrospect]

Already under Soviet occupation at war’s end, Eastern and Central Europe fell fully under Moscow’s sway after Nuremberg. Because the Jews of Lwów had been massacred and its remaining Polish residents had been driven westward, the city became Lviv and its population almost entirely Ukrainian. The Soviets smoothly moved into the road where my father had once lived, and closed it off to all except senior officials. They used Dolu and Lusia’s home and neighboring houses as residences for Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and his comrades when they visited from Moscow.

Lastly, I’m sure that if my father were speaking to audiences now, he would explain that the long silence over the Soviets’ crimes had its consequences. My mother and father were never much interested in trying to establish a moral equivalence between what the Nazis did and what the Soviets did. “It’s not a competition,” my mother always used to say. The point is that there has simply never been any reckoning over what the Soviets did. (Even a belated acknowledgment of the Katyn massacre came without an apology.) They have never been forced to see what they did as shameful. This vacuum of historical truth and accountability has allowed Vladimir Putin to write his own version of Russian and Ukrainian history. That in turn has helped him justify, at least to himself, a new war against the people of my father’s city.

The thunder of war in Ukraine drowns out a lot of other news from Russia. A few days ago, however, the Russian foreign intelligence service quietly did something rather odd. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, or SVR (the Russian version of the CIA), unveiled a statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police.

At first sight, this seems another sign of President Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet repression, when an aspiring young secret policeman could live a comfortable life by intimidating his neighbors and tormenting his fellow citizens. But the reappearance of a monument to this hated figure in Soviet history might be related more to Russia’s elite politics than to Putin’s nostalgia.

Before we get into the modern Kremlinology, let’s look back at the early days of the Soviet intelligence services.

Dzerzhinsky was a Polish national with a long history of revolutionary activity. He joined the Russian Bolsheviks, and shortly after the 1917 revolution, Vladimir Lenin put him in charge of creating a secret-police organization. (The czars had one, of course; the Bolsheviks wanted their own.) He became the director of the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known by the Russian initials VChK, soon abbreviated to its last two letters, pronounced “che” and “ka,” which is why the secret police were called “the Cheka.” To this day, Russia’s spooks proudly call themselves “Chekists”—as do their enemies, pejoratively.

[Read: How to repurpose a bad statue]

Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 after gaining a reputation as a ruthless, incorruptible fanatic and setting the tone for his successors in the secret police. Over the years, the Cheka mutated into various Soviet government entities, some of them famous in Cold War lore (such as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the dreaded NKVD). For a time, Joseph Stalin split the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies into two ministries. As with many countries’ intelligence organizations, something of a rivalry existed between the cops who did internal security and the secret agents who operated against the Soviet Union’s enemies abroad. The Soviet military, too, had its own spy service, the coldly brutal GRU, which still exists today. To put this in American terms, think of the traditional tensions among the FBI, the CIA, and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (minus any democratic oversight).

In 1954, the Soviets decided to combine all of these organizations into a giant interagency group called the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, or KGB—an acronym well known to Americans during the Cold War and the organization that Putin joined in 1975. The foreign spies and the domestic goons were in different departments, and worked in different buildings, but they were all under one director.

After the fall of the U.S.S.R., in 1991, the new (and short-lived) Russian democracy decided to weaken the Soviet-era police-state monolith by once again splitting up the foreign and domestic services. The foreign spy agency became the SVR and remained in its modernist digs out in the southern reaches of the Russian capital, in Moscow’s Yasenevo neighborhood. The domestic service—the thugs whom Russians fear on a daily basis—became the Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and it stayed in the old KGB building in central Moscow.

[Read: Is Stalin making a comeback in Russia?]

Here’s where the story of the new statue gets interesting. The original monument—at 15 tons, a hunk of metal so large that Muscovites attached Derzhinsky’s nickname, “Iron Feliks,” to the statue itself—was erected in front of the downtown KGB headquarters in 1958. (The imposing building in Lubyanka Square was also across the way from a big Soviet toy store called Child World, and Soviet citizens would joke darkly that someone in trouble with the authorities had “gone to Child World.”) After the 1991 coup attempt against the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the statue was torn down on the demand of Moscow’s citizens.

So when I read the first reports that a new statue was being raised, I thought it was an aggressive message from Putin to the people of the capital. In 2021, the Moscow city government had scheduled a vote on whether to bring Iron Feliks back to the downtown location or to erect a new statue in its place of the 13th-century Russian saint and hero Alexander Nevsky. The city’s mayor, citing “deep divisions,” canceled the popular poll. To return Iron Feliks to his place of honor in front of Moscow’s most notorious stronghold of repression would have been heavy-handed symbolism even from Putin.

But Feliks isn’t back in his old neighborhood; he’s out in Yasenevo. (He’s also not as tall or as heavy as he used to be; the new statue is a replica of the original, but smaller.) So what’s going on? And who is this stunt’s intended audience?

One clue might be found in the remarks that the SVR’s director, Sergey Naryshkin, made at the unveiling. Instead of celebrating Dzerzhinsky’s harsh legacy, Naryshkin praised his honesty and dedication, and gushed that Dzerzhinsky “remained faithful to his ideals to the end—the ideals of goodness and justice.” He then noted that the statue was facing toward the NATO members neighboring Russia—Poland and the Baltic states—which he identified as the source of foreign threats:

The erected monument is an exact, somewhat scaled-down copy of the famous monument of an outstanding Soviet sculptor, and that’s why we simply didn’t have the right to change the direction of the view of the monument’s hero. And the fact is that threats remain to our country, to our citizens, from the northwest—yes, this is obvious.

Dzerzhinsky is a progenitor of sorts of the foreign intelligence agency, but this bit of theater is strange—something akin to the CIA erecting a statue of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in front of its headquarters and extolling Hoover’s noble struggles against the Soviet enemy. (In case you’re wondering, a statue already stands outside the agency’s Langley front door—of America’s first spy, Nathan Hale, from the Revolutionary War era.) You could argue, I suppose, that Hoover did his part by setting the bureau’s agents on Soviet spies in America, but looking east and facing down the Reds is not really how we remember him.

[Read or listen: How Putin thinks]

Without getting too in the weeds, other clues about what’s going on may lie in recent machinations within the Russian government.

In a February 2020 meeting just days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin humiliated Naryshkin on national television when the SVR chief seemed caught off guard by Putin’s questions during an audience with the president. The FSB, at that moment, was riding high; its spies were supposed to have paved the way for the collapse of Kyiv that Putin expected in the first days of the war.

We all know how that went, and Putin turned his fury on the incompetent agents in Lubyanka Square who had promised much and delivered nothing. Possibly, then, Naryshkin is now making a play for the SVR to eclipse the FSB as Russia’s premier intelligence service. Or he might be signaling his agency’s commitment to opposing NATO as part of fighting the war in Ukraine. Or maybe he’s just reminding everyone that he hasn’t forgotten that his job, regardless of the Ukraine war, is to combat Western spies. Either way, Naryshkin may be doing a bit of “managing up.”

Who knows, though? Perhaps the SVR had a spare copy of the Iron Feliks statue sitting in the basement and just decided to make a day of it. (Or perhaps Dzerzhinsky’s admirers hope it’s less likely to be vandalized out in Yasenevo.)

One thing is certain: Neither Naryshkin nor Putin—nor indeed the FSB’s chief, Alexander Bortnikov, who remains close to Putin despite his agency’s colossal screwup over Ukraine—risked putting Iron Feliks up in central Moscow. Putin’s power is not limitless, and he would have nothing to gain by antagonizing citizens in the capital with a statue few of them would want. And perhaps not even the president wants to see Iron Feliks through his limo window and be reminded of better days, when the Soviet Union still existed, the KGB was nearly omnipotent, and Vladimir Putin wasn’t one of the most hated people in Russia.

In Poland, next month’s parliamentary elections may be the opposition’s last, best chance to stop the country’s slide into autocracy. Along with Hungary, Poland once counted as a paradigmatic success story for a postcommunist transition to democracy. But also like Hungary, that reputation started to sour when far-right populists surged to power in the 2010s.

What happens in Poland is the more consequential because it is by far the largest Central or Eastern European country in the European Union. Its location—bordering Ukraine, Belarus, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and the Baltic Sea—gives it immense geopolitical importance. It has a more powerful military than neighboring Germany. And according to some projections, its GDP per capita is even set to overtake Britain’s by the end of the decade.

The populist Law and Justice party secured a majority in Poland’s parliament, and won the largely ceremonial presidency, in 2015. Soon after, Jarosław Kaczyński, the party’s leader, who is widely understood to exercise the real power in the land, held a long meeting with Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán—and promptly went to work implementing hisplaybook.

A decade ago, most political scientists thought of Hungary as a consolidated democracy, a country whose economic prosperity and political institutions were sufficiently robust to weather almost any challenge. In the country today, few independent media outlets remain, key political institutions are under the control of partisan hacks, and Orbán exerts tremendous sway over social and cultural life.

Following suit, Law and Justice has eroded the independence of the country’s judicial system. First, the party forced several sitting justices on the Supreme Court into retirement, replacing them with loyalists who then commanded a majority (an EU court later found the government’s new retirement rule unlawful). It also increased government officials’ ability to determine which judge would hear what case. Finally, it packed a reformed Constitutional Tribunal, the body charged with judicial review in Poland, with political appointees who have the power to suspend judges who displease the government.

[Yascha Mounk: Poland’s imperiled democracy]

The government also undermined the independence of the media. Public broadcasting channels turned into propaganda networks that dropped any pretense of neutrality. The coverage of senior officials borders on the hagiographic. Meanwhile, opposition figures are routinely smeared as lapdogs of Germany or Russia (or, somehow, both)—or as criminals, perverts, and pedophiles.

This makes the next weeks an especially perilous time for Polish democracy. If Law and Justice somehow manages to win reelection, further democratic backsliding seems almost inevitable.

Both the abuse of the rule of law and the demonization of the opposition have gone into overdrive this year. Prominent businessmen who have criticized the government or otherwise thwarted it are languishing in pretrial detention on dubious charges. “The standards for detaining people have been lowered tragically,” Przemysław Rosati, the president of Poland’s bar council, told the Financial Times last month. “People are spending a long time in prison without taking into account their basic rights, including the presumption of innocence.”

In another move designed to hamper the opposition, Parliament voted to open a commission to investigate Russian influence in Polish politics earlier this year—a move widely seen as aimed at discrediting Civic Platform, the country’s largest opposition party. The commission’s makeup is wholly partisan, and its bylaws do not grant the accused even basic procedural rights. Widespread public outrage forced the government to walk back some of the commission’s most blatantly antidemocratic prerogatives, such as the power to exclude anyone found guilty from public office for up to 10 years, but it remains a powerful means of maligning opposition leaders.

Although the rule of law and the opposition’s ability to compete in elections are deeply compromised, the fight for Polish democracy is far from over. In Hungary, where democratic decline is more advanced, the opposition is reduced to a demoralized rump, and Orbán controls the airwaves. In Poland, independent television stations still draw millions of viewers. A lively set of newspapers and periodicals scrutinize the government’s actions. The opposition retains significant influence in the country’s upper chamber, dominates city halls throughout the country, and leads many regional governments, especially in western Poland.

All of this raises the stakes for the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 15. If the Law and Justice party succeeds in winning a third mandate, the worrying trends of the past eight years are likely to accelerate. By the time of the next election, in 2027, the country’s political system might look like a carbon copy of Hungary’s. If, however, the opposition does well enough to form the next government, one of the most powerful countries in Europe could be back on track toward sustaining a genuine democracy. But can democratic forces manage to oust authoritarian populists from power through the ballot box, as they did in the United States in 2020 and in Brazil in 2022?

After Donald Tusk became prime minister in 2007, Civic Platform seemed to become Poland’s natural governing party: It pursued moderate social and economic policies, deepened the country’s ties to the EU and the United States, and sustained rapid economic growth. But the party also failed to expand its support beyond its traditional strongholds in major cities and the more affluent parts of western Poland. In 2015, Law and Justice surged to power, thanks to the support of the less urban, less affluent part of the electorate.

Civic Platform’s years in the wilderness left it looking disoriented. Tusk, who became president of the European Council at the end of 2014, was away in Brussels. Despite running a spirited campaign, Civic Platform failed to defeat the government in 2019. By 2021, its support sank to a record low of 16 percent. Many party loyalists grew convinced that only Tusk’s return could repair its fortunes.

[Anne Applebaum: The disturbing new hybrid of democracy and autocracy]

Tusk resumed leadership of Civic Platform two years ago, and the party quickly started to recover. But its support, which rose to a healthier 26 percent, has since stalled, and, according to the latest polls, it still trails Law and Justice by five to 10 percentage points. If elections were held today, neither party would be predicted to win an outright majority. Such an outcome might put Poland’s fate in the hands of an upstart movement: Confederation.

So called because it originated in a merger between a libertarian and a far-right party, Confederation has struck a chord with voters—particularly young male voters—who are frustrated with the political establishment. In an election that pits a former two-term prime minister against an incumbent two-term government, the party’s promise of a radical break with the past has proved resonant.

Part of Confederation’s appeal is economic. In 2015, Law and Justice won over swing voters by pretending to have moderated on social issues and promising to increase spending in favor of ordinary families. To win back those voters, Civic Platform has moved left on economic issues, voting with the government to expand child benefits and other welfare measures. This has given Confederation an opportunity to campaign on lower taxes and benefits.

But Confederation’s core appeal consists in its harsh rhetoric about ethnic and religious minorities—rhetoric that outbids even Law and Justice’s frequent resort to bigotry. In a speech in 2019, a Confederation leader named Sławomir Mentzen summed up the movement’s program in five pithy points: “We don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes, and the European Union.” In another video that recently emerged, Witold Tumanowicz, the party’s campaign chief, pledged a national register of gay people.

If neither Law and Justice nor Civic Platform wins a majority, the outcome may hinge on Confederation. Would its leaders enter into a marriage of convenience with Civic Platform? And would Civic Platform be willing to tolerate Confederation’s extremism to protect the country’s democratic institutions from an increasingly authoritarian government? There is no way of knowing.

Another vagary stems from the uncertain performance of smaller opposition movements. Poland’s electoral system is mostly proportional, but a relatively high electoral threshold makes predicting which parties and coalitions will be represented in Parliament difficult. If the country’s decimated left or a new centrist coalition does not clear the bar, votes will be redistributed among the parties that do. Such a scenario could, as happened in 2015 and 2019, help Law and Justice win a majority in Parliament without winning a majority of the popular vote.

A final uncertainty is whether the ruling party would accept the result if it lost, allowing a peaceful transfer of power despite its hold over the country’s institutions. During the campaign, Law and Justice has used all the levers at its disposal to gain unfair advantage. When Polish citizens go to vote, their ballot will include referendum questions tendentiously worded to insinuate that the opposition would sell off state assets to foreign entities, increase the retirement age, and flood the country with illegal immigrants. Such illicit tactics also raise the specter that the government might use its hold over the nation’s electoral commission to cheat if the opposition somehow prevails at the polls.

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After the Soviet Union disintegrated and lost its hold over vassal states in Central Europe, the fates of countries that were formerly under Moscow’s control diverged. Some, such as Belarus, became brutal dictatorships. Others, including both Poland and Hungary, seemed to be on a path to sustaining genuinely free societies.

Three decades later, those assumptions look unduly optimistic. The dream of a successful transition from communism to democracy remains alive in Warsaw, and elsewhere in Central Europe, but whether these countries can withstand the trend toward authoritarianism is now, tragically, very much in doubt.