Putin’s Paradise? As Expats Flee a More Soviet America, Is Russia Now More Like 1950s U.S.?

Commentator Tucker Carlson took a lot of heat when, during a February trip to Russia, he said that Moscow’s Kievskaya Metro station was “perfectly clean and orderly” and “nicer than anything in our country.” Yet it turns out that Carlson has some company in his sentiments — American expats who claim they’ve found greener pastures in Putin’s realm.

One, 49-year-old ex-Floridian Joseph Rose, stated when asked about life in Russia, “I often say it feels like our positive vision of 1950s America.”

Another, Peter Frohwein, 62, would like to start a new family but says that he “wouldn’t seriously consider” doing so in the U.S. today. “The U.S. is a political mess. Socially, things are a mess. Spiritually, things are a mess,” he explained.

The Free Press’ Peter Savodnik originally reported on this story, writing Tuesday that he “spoke to twenty American expats, all men, who have moved to Russia over the past four years.”

As for Rose, “I do think it was God leading me to where I needed to be right now,” the expat told Savodnik via telephone. “I would say that Russia is becoming a bastion of Christianity and that America is becoming the opposite of this,” Rose explained.

He added, “I was put in a spot where I could be used.”

“He was alluding to his YouTube channel, which had made him something of a celebrity in Russia,” Savodnik informs.

Apart from the celebrity, Rose well epitomizes what drove the expats from their native lands. As Savodnik writes:

They told me they moved to Moscow or St. Petersburg or the wild east—Siberia—because they no longer believed the one person they once thought could save America—Donald Trump—could still save it. America, they felt, was beyond saving now.

… Rose … and the other Americans flocking to Russia told me they did so to save their children and their children’s children.

… “People are running around in America wondering why we have so many problems with suicide and depression, and they’ll virtue signal and talk about the phones, and it’s this and that, and the reality is children are not allowed to be children,” Joe, a program manager from Texas who moved to Moscow in 2023 with his wife and six (soon to be seven) children, told me. He didn’t want to share his last name for fear of losing clients back home.

In general, the expats did not take issue with President Vladimir Putin, blaming NATO expansion for the Ukraine war, a point which has validity; at least some, however, also see Putin through rose-colored glasses, with Frohwein saying “I think he’s a good man” and that he might not have “ever killed anybody” (ahem. Note: Most leaders are not good men).

While calling Putin “good” will raise some eyebrows, many will nonetheless sympathize with what drove the expats from the West. Just consider a warning issued by Russian-born Rebekah Koffler, an ex-Defense Intelligence Agency officer and author of Putin’s Playbook. “As somebody who escaped the communist regime,” she said recently on Fox’s The Bottom Line, “I’m now concerned that America is becoming more and more like Soviet Russia, that [sic] I fled.”

Nevertheless, Koffler points out while addressing the expat situation that Russia is no paradise, calling it “an authoritarian state where the government holds an overwhelming power over an individual.” Unfortunately, this increasingly describes the “Soviet” West, too, only with a different (rainbow?) flavor.

In fact, this apparently is what drove expat farmer Arend Feenstra and his wife Anneesa to flee Canada for Russia with their 10 children, as the sexual-devolutionary (“LGBTQ”) persecution in their native country just became too intense. (E.g., Canada has punished a man for referencing his own child with biologically correct pronouns.) And while the Daily Mail claims the Feenstras have encountered problems — such as a frozen Russian bank account — their popular video blog seems to indicate they’re now prospering.

This said, if a person is seeking more traditional pastures in Eastern Europe, might not Hungary be a better choice? It also rejects “woke” ideology, but is far less corrupt than Russia, has more robust rule of law, is not currently involved in a proxy war with the West, and should have less anti-American sentiment. Moreover, its leader, Viktor Orbán, is an anti-internationalist head of state, but without Putin’s baggage.

Regardless, the irony here is that while America was founded by people fleeing religious persecution — people who’d been considered troublemakers in their native lands — now anti-woke “troublemakers” are sometimes fleeing to Russia seeking religious freedom.

Of course, it’s tempting to, depending on one’s point of view, call these expats sage or stupid and applaud or assail Russia. Yet it’s important to note that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying, “In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him,” also applies to those large groupings of men known as nations. All civilizations have strengths, and all can learn from each other.

As for Putin, for all his faults, he has defended the family and Christianity and criticized “transgenderism,” homosexual propaganda, and the moral relativism permeating civilization (to what extent this comes from the heart is a different matter). In fact, this may be a major reason the pseudo-elite, sexual devolutionary globalists hate him so (while simultaneously kowtowing to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping).

What’s more, since demography is destiny, America’s continuous irrational, nation-rending (im)migration renders us an unstable land; in contrast, Russia’s demographic stability ensures that it will continue being Russia — even a century hence.

Will the West still be the “West” when that time comes?