Russian Election Intervention Is Nothing New

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Russian Election Intervention Is Nothing New

The Kremlin’s history of backing the losers.

December 12, 2016
 
Lloyd Billingsley
 

The CIA is claiming that Russia “intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency,” according to the Washington Post, which identified “actors” with connections to Russian intelligence who were allegedly part of a wider operation “to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.”

The CIA’s “secret assessment,” came one day after Hillary Clinton, in her first speech since the election, decried the “epidemic” of fake news. It was not about “politics or partisanship,” the losing candidate said, but voters have good grounds to believe it is about politics and partisanship.

Recall Clinton’s claim, in the second presidential debate, “We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election.”  As is often the case, the former First Lady and Secretary of State was wrong about that.

Though it held no free and open elections of its own, Russia has often intervened in America, which does hold free and open elections, a hallmark of a democratic republic. It might surprise millenials to learn that Russia had its own political parties in America, and ran their own candidates. Russia wanted those candidates to win and the other candidates to lose.

In 1948, Communist Russia, then under the mass murderer Josef Stalin, backed the Progressive Party. At the top of the ticket was Henry Wallace, a former vice-president and agriculture secretary for FDR.

Communist Russia, part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, wanted Wallace to win. Russia wanted Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey to lose. Truman prevailed over Dewey, and Russian-backed Wallace finished last, behind even the Dixiecrat Party of southern segregationist Strom Thurmond.

Millenials and even baby boomers may be unaware that the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was not like American political parties. The Communist Party was a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR, a division of Soviet foreign policy.

It was tough for the Party after the death of their hero Stalin and Khrushchev’s revelations of 1956. In 1964, however, the Communist Party backed Lyndon Johnson, claiming this was necessary to block anti-Communist hardliner Barry Goldwater. The Democrat Johnson prevailed over the Republican, a victory of sorts for the Communists.

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