Mamdani’s Socialism: A Kremlin Punchline

History has a brutal sense of irony, and last week it surfaced in a tweet from Kirill Dmitriev, a Kremlin power broker close to Vladimir Putin. Addressing New York politician Zohran Mamdani, Dmitriev delivered a line that should have stopped the room cold: “Dear Comrade Mamdani—just a friendly reminder that this has been tried before.”

That sentence was not commentary. It was an obituary.

Dmitriev was responding to Mamdani’s call to replace the “frigidity of rugged individualism” with the “warmth of collectivism.” The phrasing mattered. And so did the reply. Calling him “Comrade” was not an insult—it was a diagnosis. Dmitriev was not debating foreign policy. He was invoking memory. Soviet memory.

And that is where the humiliation begins.

What makes this episode remarkable is not “Russian aggression.” It is Russian amusement. Moscow no longer needs to argue against socialism. It can simply smirk and say, “We already buried that ideology.”

Unmistakably, Russia knows collectivism not as a theory but as a catastrophe. It remembers empty shelves, informants in stairwells, labor camps, engineered scarcity, and a bureaucracy that devoured initiative and rewarded obedience. Collectivism did not create equality; it created paralysis. It did not empower the worker; it insulated elites and pulverized everyone else.

That is why the Kremlin does not tremble when new American “progressive” and “democratic socialist” politicians flirt with collectivist rhetoric. It laughs because it recognizes the script. Because it knows exactly how it ends.

For Russians, collectivism is not a campus slogan or a protest chant. It is generational trauma. It is the system that taught millions that the state owned not just property, but ambition itself. Excellence was suspect. Individuality was dangerous. Freedom was conditional. The result was not justice, but stagnation and fear.

Even modern Russia—authoritarian, cynical, deeply flawed—has no interest in resurrecting ideological socialism. Putin’s regime is nationalist, hierarchical, transactional. It governs through power, not utopia.

Plainly, Moscow abandoned collectivism because it nearly destroyed the country. And now it watches Western elites romanticize it like a newly discovered philosophy.

That said, there is also a strategic layer here, and it should worry Washington far more than it does.

Russia no longer exports communism. It does not have to. Western progressives are doing that work for free.

Today, Moscow’s strategy is exposure, not evangelism. Expose the West’s ideological amnesia. Let Americans debate systems Russians interred decades ago and that has killed more than 120 million people worldwide. Let Western cities experiment with policies that hollow out economies, fracture social trust, and weaken state capacity.

From Moscow’s vantage point, collectivist rhetoric in the United States is not threatening. It is advantageous. A distracted America arguing about failed 20th-century ideologies is an America not competing seriously in the 21st century.

And this is the final irony—the one no progressive wants to confront.

A Russian official, representing a regime the West endlessly lectures about history and morality, had to remind an American politician that socialism already failed.

When the heirs of the Soviet collapse are warning you about collectivism, you are not advancing progress. You are advertising decline.

This is what national exhaustion looks like: a superpower recycling the wreckage of dead ideologies while its rivals quietly consolidate power. The danger is not that socialism will succeed. The danger is that America is debating it at all—while others move on.

History no longer repeats itself as tragedy; it repeats itself as farce—retweeted from Moscow.

P.S. Zohran Mamdani says that if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sets foot in New York City he will have him arrested—so now that Nicolás Maduro is in NYC, will Mamdani release “Comrade Maduro”? This is the real hypocrisy of a “true democratic socialist”.