“I have seen the future; and it works.” These were the words of American journalist Lincoln Steffens after he traveled to newly Communist Russia in 1919. To him, the budding Soviet Union looked like it had successfully tackled thievery, corruption, prostitution and other social ills. It looked like a model society.

Today, however, people associate the Soviet Union with gulags, omnipresent secret police, mass starvation and profound corruption. Hindsight is 20/20.

The Cold War is long over, and Russia no longer espouses communism. But just as under the Soviet regime, Russia today is doing all it can to influence Westerners upset with their governments. This time, it’s not Western leftists Russia is targeting, but conservatives.

Many in America and Europe are disturbed with their governments’ aggressive pushing of the lgbtq agenda, accusations of institutional racism, climate change and other secularist causes. Meanwhile, they look to Russia and see a society that is apparently pushing back against sexual deviancy and claiming to support family values. Like Steffens a century ago, some look to Moscow and think they see a workable future.

This is a narrative that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has exploited to great effect, deepening societal divides in the United States and Europe, and weakening the resolve of Western nations to stand up to his unlawful aggression. But it is based on easily disprovable lies. Russia is not the freedom fighter for family values that it pretends to be. There is an agenda behind this marketing. Buying into the propaganda will prove catastrophic.

Rubles for Reputation-Building

In a speech in February, Putin said: “Everything we do is somehow connected to supporting the family.” He frequently makes such claims about his regime as he works to convince Russia and the world of his message: Russia is an upright nation, the last champion of traditional family. The West has never treated Russia fairly. Russia should be allowed to absorb the nations around it to protect them from American evil and decadence. Russia is a victim; America, the chief villain. America’s main aim is to destroy Russia, and it is using Ukraine as its pawn.

Within Russia, the majority agree with Putin, thanks in part to his 24 years of rewriting history, manipulating school curricula and suppressing the press.

To reach hearts and minds beyond Russia, Putin invests billions of dollars into mass and social media. In 2021, more than $1.5 billion is known to have gone toward these efforts. In 2022, that amount tripled; it appears to have stayed around that total in the years since. Most goes to official state media outlets such as Sputnik, Rossiya Segodnia, tass and RT (which rebranded from “Russia Today” years ago to avoid what Kommersant called “scaring away the audience”). RT alone is available to 700 million tv viewers in more than 100 nations, including 85 million in the U.S. In 2013, it became the first tv news channel to hit 1 billion views on YouTube. Its website states that RT “consistently and significantly outperforms other foreign channels including Euronews and Fox News.”

Putin also pays millions of dollars to professional and amateur journalists working for a range of other Western outlets—not to mention Western politicians—to parrot Kremlin talking points. He employs thousands of full-time online trolls inside Russia, working in shifts around the clock to post pro-Russia, pro-Putin content on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, TikTok, VKontakte, X, YouTube and even Tinder. These individuals often pose as conservative Americans, under nicknames like USA Gunslinger and Florida Patriot. They leave endless posts and comments highly critical of the U.S., United Kingdom and Israel and champion all things Russian. Putin’s regime also taps into the power of automation, using hundreds of thousands of bots to extend the trolls’ influence. This nonstop frenzy heavily manipulates social media and search engine rankings.

And it is paying off.

“Putin’s latest speech explains how cultural marxism is destroying traditional values,” political commentator Liz Churchill wrote in a 2023 X post. “Why are we being told he’s the ‘enemy’ that must be defeated at all costs?”

In February 2024, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson traveled to Moscow and used his channel to portray Putin favorably and to promote Russia as a traditionalist’s paradise.

In April, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene framed Russia’s war on Ukraine as part of a broader war by a godless West against a defender of Christianity: “The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians. … Russia is not doing that; they’re not attacking Christianity. As a matter of fact, they seem to be protecting it.”

Perversion in the U.S. and other Western nations is pervasive and unquestionably destructive. And it is true that Russia has enacted laws banning “lgbt activism” and “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors.” Some right-leaning Westerners portray these as unique, saying Moscow is a moral compass for other governments. But such laws are common and vigorously upheld throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The truth is that Russian society, like those of the nations in these regions, is not morally upright by any means. It only has a different brand of godlessness from the West.

Russia’s Depraved Culture

Exhibit A is Russia’s staggering abortion rate. According to the World Health Organization’s 2017 data, Russians legally aborted 480 babies for every 1,000 live births. This is more than double the U.S.’s rate of 200, and more than triple Germany’s 135. This is a big part of why Russia has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates at 1.4 per woman—far below the 2.1 needed to keep the population from collapsing.

Many of the Russians who do bring children into the world end up abandoning them to it. In 2011, Russia admitted at the United Nations that it had more than 650,000 registered orphans. More than 90 percent are “social orphans,” according to unicef, meaning at least one of their parents is alive. The Russian government used to allow Americans to adopt these children for exorbitant fees, but Putin banned this a decade ago to punish the U.S. Now most of the orphans languish in a state care system notorious for neglect and cruelty. An estimated 2 million children in Russia are abused annually.

Also notable is that Russia is one of just a handful of countries where possession of child sexual abuse materials is legal.

Russia is also profoundly misogynistic. Rates of domestic violence on women are in the stratosphere, partly because of the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church. “Church leaders believe that domestic violence is a part of the Russian traditional family,” wrote Russian lawyer Olimpiada Usanova. In 2017, Russia decriminalized battery offenses of family members, signaling open season for wife beaters. One in five Russian women suffer domestic violence, and every year some 8,500 are killed by it. This means 10 percent of all women who die by the hand of a partner or family member are Russian, though Russia accounts for only 1.8 percent of the global population. The culture of misogyny and violence is part of the reason why Russia has the fourth-highest divorce rate in the world. This rate is 60 percent higher than in America.

In a related trend, Russia’s rates of alcoholism and drug addiction are off the charts. This is part of the reason why life expectancy for a 15-year-old Russian male is the same as that of a 15-year-old male in Haiti: just 53.7 years. However, drug addiction rates have been falling since the Putin regime has been sending many addicts to Ukraine to kill and be killed.

Another tragic fact is that Russian military culture is built on a psychotic policy called dedovshchina (“reign of old-timers”). This allows men who have been in the forces longer to brutalize new recruits in a range of ways, including beatings, sexual torture and rape. The abuse is so widespread and so severe that it kills hundreds of young men each year, and causes hundreds more to commit suicide. In 2019, the Russian military prosecutor’s office admitted that dedovshchina was getting worse, with 51,000 human rights violations documented that year.

The war that “family-friendly Russia” is waging against Ukraine has shattered hundreds of thousands of families in Ukraine and Russia alike. Parents are mourning sons, children are mourning fathers, and Russia’s minister of foreign affairs has admitted that the Russian government has deported 700,000 Ukrainian children to Russia since the war began. Many of these have at least one parent or grandparent back in Ukraine, but Putin’s regime has illegally abducted them, moving them deep into Russia and reeducating them to basically become Russians and to help slow Russia’s population collapse. (Read “Not Just for Land.”)

As Putin has worked to safeguard his personal power and increase Russia’s global influence, his conduct has been anything but upright. During his long reign, hundreds of influential Russians who crossed him have been wrongfully imprisoned, killed or have died in extremely suspicious circumstances. More than 130 journalists alone have been killed. In his conquest of Chechnya, Putin flattened a city and killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, for the crime of not wanting to be part of Russia. In Syria, since 2015, he has killed thousands of civilians, including some 2,000 children.

Russia is no bastion of family values. Those who portray it as such should know better—much better.

Persecuting Christians

Russia’s propaganda war has not only convinced people that it is a haven of family values in a godless world, but that it is one of the last national defenders of Christianity itself.

Along with its heartbreaking abortion and divorce statistics, Russia’s rates of church attendance prove otherwise. Currently, only 9 percent of Russians attend regularly, compared to 33 percent in the U.S. Russia has been and remains one of the world’s cruelest enemies of religious freedom. Among the groups that have been maltreated and even banned are Baptists, Pentecostals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. People of these and other faiths have faced persecution by government regulators and have had their organizations liquidated.

Another prominent religion banned in Russia is Falun Gong, the Chinese religion that also endures heavy persecution by the ruling Chinese Communist Party. In 2005, 20 members of Russia’s parliament tried to brand “all religious and ethnic Jewish organizations,” as participating lawmaker Alexander Krutov put it, “extremist.”

This religious persecution has extended to Russia’s occupation in Ukraine. In 2023, the Russian independent outlet Vertska documented at least 109 “acts of pressure on churches and religious figures against five religious denominations.” This included the kidnapping and murder of clergy. “In at least 66 cases,” it found, “the buildings of churches, mosques, religious centers and related organizations were confiscated, looted and destroyed. In their place, the military placed warehouses with weapons, and the pro-Russian authorities opened police departments, the National Guard and offices of United Russia [Putin’s affiliated political party].”

In some brands of Orthodox Christianity, the secular rulers have primacy over the spiritual leaders. For much of its history, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church was the czar himself. Putin’s government considers itself successor to the czars. Whether Western commentators realize it, compared to the worldview Westerners have historically held, Russia’s “Christian” worldview is much more narrow and illiberal.

Danger in Trusting Putin

Putin “is not just an authoritarian leader,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in the cover story for the March 2017 Trumpet issue. “This is a man with beastly power and with a beastly desire to rule the world! He is a vengeful, monstrous friend of the devil with all sorts of anti-God policies. He is steeped in secrecy, deception, manipulation, aggression, intimidation, coercion and force, and there is far more about him that we do not know.”

Mr. Flurry wrote this at a time when some were in favor of compromising and resetting America’s diplomatic relations with Putin’s Russia. A new presidential administration was looking to clean up certain foreign-policy problems left by the previous presidency.

Politicians and journalists have used allegations of “Russian collusion” to smear President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, allegations of corruption have linked Joe Biden and his family to Ukraine. It may be easy for conservative Americans to assume that the threat Russia poses is a deceitful smear as well, and even that partnering with Russia could help combat American Democrats.

But the fact that one side of the political spectrum is dangerous or corrupt doesn’t mean that the opposite extreme is the safe zone. Putin’s worldwide media program isn’t designed to give people “the truth” and save them from the “globalists.” It is designed to sow influence and division. And the more he can divide Americans, the easier a job he has in attacking a geopolitical rival.

One telling example occurred on May 21, 2016. Two Russia-connected Facebook pages, “Heart of Texas” and “United Muslims of America,” called for protests that day in front of Houston’s Islamic Da’wah Center. One group protested against Islamic influence in America; the other protested in defense of it. The result? Americans angrily challenged other Americans on the streets of Houston in an election year. They had no idea the whole conflict was initiated by Russian groups.

“The Russians have a knack for playing on our fears, amplifying our suspicions, and pushing our buttons,” Trumpet managing editor Joel Hilliker wrote in 2018. “They don’t care which side is right or wrong, who wins an election, who is president, and who is the opposition—as long as America loses.”

Putin is not crusading against a globalist takeover in America. He is a part of the attack on America, and he is using a variety of tools to carry out this attack.

There is a deeper danger than geopolitical maneuverings. Putin’s Russia is literally kidnapping thousands of children in Ukraine. It has turned Russia into an anti-family dystopia while marketing it as the opposite. When people reject such easily provable claims as “globalist propaganda,” this not only gives Putin a smokescreen. It makes such atrocities seem normal. It justifies unspeakable evil in people’s minds.

“What will happen to a country that will ‘get along well with Vladimir Putin’?” Mr. Flurry asked. “That’s not just a rhetorical question. The closer our president and our nation gets to Putin, the further it gets from what is good and what is right—the further it gets from God! That is deadly dangerous!” (op cit).

Homosexual indoctrination in Western schools is an evil. Unrestricted illegal immigration from danger zones is a threat to sovereignty. But painting Putin’s model as the antidote to “wokeness” means normalizing the sins Russian society glories in. In biblical terminology, being “unequally yoked together” with Russian propaganda is equivalent to a “concord … with Belial” (2 Corinthians 6:14-15).

The Bible on Putin’s Russia

The Bible actually describes Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A prophecy in Ezekiel 38 refers to “the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal” (verse 2; New King James Version). Mr. Flurry explains in The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia’ that those three names represent the ancestral peoples of ancient Russia. This man is commanding armies of Asian nations “in the latter years” (verse 8).

Strong’s Concordance translates the word “prince” as “exalted one,” with the root word relating to vapors rising to the heavens. The rest of the passage shows him attacking his enemies “like a storm” (verse 9), going out of his way to attack innocent people (verses 11-12). God states of this man: “[Y]ou will devise an evil plan” (verse 10; Amplified Bible). He is an evil-minded megalomaniac who relishes in bloodshed and world conquest. His hubris will lead him to challenge God Himself. And as The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia’ brings out, the Russia he leads will one day set its sights on America.

For over a decade, Mr. Flurry has pointed to Vladimir Putin as fulfilling this prophecy.

Ezekiel 38 shows God’s commission to send out a message about Vladimir Putin, and it’s not a message congratulating him for being a white rider liberating the West from globalism. It’s not how his cleaning up of Moscow is an example for New York and London. It is, as verse 2 states, to “prophesy against him.”

There are few individuals in this end time for whom God has reserved such specific condemnation. There are few individuals God has commissioned His work to prophesy against to this extent. Such biblical focus shows that former kgb agent and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is “not just another authoritarian leader.”

There is a lot of noise in the media over Vladimir Putin. The Russian president knows how to manipulate the narrative to serve his purpose. But the Bible cuts through the fog. It not only reveals who Putin is but what he will do in the near future. As Russia gets more important in world news, the biblical perspective is the most important to have.