It’s hard to imagine now, but 20 years ago, American and Russian cooperation extended to such sensitive subjects as protecting Russian nuclear weapons and materials from theft or terrorist attack. This had come slowly, starting with U.S. teams going to Russia to help implement something called NMC&A, which stood for “Nuclear Material Control & Accountability.”

In the immediate post-Soviet era, the Russians guardedly acknowledged that they really had no idea just how much weapons-usable material they had or even where it might be located. This was, of course, deeply embarrassing, but more embarrassing would have been the material winding up in the wrong hands, a very real possibility at the end of the 1990s. The U.S. NMC&A experts, supplied by our nuclear weapons labs under State Department auspices, spent years teaching and advising, and by 2005, the situation was much improved.

Of even greater significance, bonds of trust had been created with the preternaturally distrustful Russians. NMC&A had opened the door, but this had always been something of a baby step, having to do more with teaching the Russians how to do nuclear material measurements and how to apply rigorous accounting standards to the management of these materials.

Our experts combined two skill sets — they were at once physicists and accountants. But their work could bear substantial fruit in classrooms and measurement laboratories. Although our experts necessarily gained insight into the physical protection of the Russian materials, their involvement didn’t compel the Russians to acknowledge just how porous their protection systems had become.

Building on these bonds of trust, in 2005, a working-level conference took place that moved from “how to count” to the far more sensitive subject of “how to protect.” I was part of the U.S. delegation, consisting of technical experts from the Department of Energy and its filial National Nuclear Security Administration. I recall very little of the week’s discussions, but what sticks in my mind after all these years was the openness of our Russian counterparts and their eagerness to absorb not just our technical advice, but all that we represented in terms of life in the capitalist West.

These, after all, were not young men and women who’d come of age post-perestroika, but a much more mature set, products of the waning days of the Soviet Union, individuals who’d witnessed firsthand the bankruptcy and then collapse of the communist system. Soviet Russia, after all, had prided itself on exemplifying the full realization of socialism, an achievement lauded by fawning Western scholars.

Indeed, a book entitled The Soviet Achievement had become a commonplace of American contemporary history courses when I was a college student at the end of the 1960s. Out of long-ingrained habit, my Russian counterparts at the conference were cautious in expressing their political opinions. None had anything negative to say about their (then relatively) new leader, Vladimir Putin. But they were clear in their conviction that — to borrow the title of another classic book — communism had been “the God that failed.”

This all came together one night at dinner when several of the American delegation took a break from exploring Russian cuisine to enjoy hamburgers, French fries, and milkshakes at an American-style diner located just behind the famous Bolshoi ballet theater. I remember that the food was excellent, and quite authentic, in a setting that was more “Happy Days” malt shoppe than anything else in Moscow.

I don’t know if the place still exists, and what I’ve found on the internet about “American Diner” and “Bolshoi ballet” doesn’t quite jibe with my recollections of the night — I can find several such diners, but they all seem to belong to the post-Soviet era. Asking about the history of the place that night, we were told by the English-speaking waitress that the place had been founded sometime in the 1970s by an American expatriate, in her telling, someone who’d fled to Russia at the time of the Vietnam War. He’d drifted for some years before coming up with the idea for the diner, and, somehow, had found permission and then support from the powers that be.

But regardless of the backstory, the diner absolutely radiated the Moscow vibe in 2005. Across from Lenin’s Tomb on Red Square, the old GUM department store had become a bastion of western-style consumerism. The stores along the famous Arbat commercial street radiated a New York street scene quality, resting uneasily atop the traditional Russian shops. And affluent young Moscow, glitteringly clad, Mercedes- and BMW-driven, partied nightly in the dance club attached to our hotel.

Perhaps it was all skin deep, and clearly in the years since, Moscow’s embrace of capitalism has curdled, even as it seems to have done in places like the former East Germany. But equally clearly, and despite Putin’s imposition of a weird mixture of Russian nationalism and Stalin-era nostalgia, I suspect that most Russians still understand that socialism had been given every opportunity to succeed — and it had failed, failed utterly and completely.

It’s this history that Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and all the other “Democratic Socialists of America” so completely fail to understand. Government-owned grocery stores? My friends from the conference in Moscow would have hooted in derision. They would also quite likely recognize just how tired the formulas of the progressive “Omnicause” actually are. (RELATED: Mamdani Markets Envy to Sell a Marxist Utopia)

Soviet propaganda, after all, readily embraced every criticism of America. We were racist, our workers were oppressed, the system was rigged in favor of the “plutocrats,” an early term for today’s “oligarchy.” The Soviets were eager to embrace radical Islam — the KGB played in some very dark waters in the Middle East, fomenting hatred for Israel, promoting such proto-Hamas elements as the PLO, Fatah, and the PFLP. Mamdani’s “globalize the intifada” antisemitism drinks deeply from these same dark waters, as our Robert Cherry makes clear. (RELATED: The Hypocrisy of Zohran Mamdani’s Liberal Apologists)

So everything old is new again in New York City, and in the other precincts where “the Squad” holds sway. Too many voters, and not all of them the cliched “young voters,” are willfully ignorant of the fact that — despite protestations to the contrary — socialism has been tried, not just in Russia or eastern Europe, but also, closer to home, in Cuba and, more recently, in Venezuela. Despite his African background, Mamdani evinces no familiarity with such socialist disasters as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or what is now playing out in South Africa. Kleptocracy, after all, has always been the bedfellow of socialism, not its opposite. It has been tried, and it has failed. (RELATED: Venezuela Follows the Classic Path of Radical Socialism)

So what stands in opposition today to the “Democratic” socialists’ desire to reduce New York and other great cities (thinking of you, Minneapolis) to the dour sadness of Soviet Russia? We can’t expect the Mamdanis of this world to come clean about this — they clearly expect to ride high in the old Soviet style, perhaps with dachas in the Hamptons staffed with servants recruited from the new underclass they mean to create. We’ve already seen this in the rise of AOC’s net worth since she became a member of Congress, and it seems to be a common theme: poverty for thee, but not for me.

Sadly, we can’t expect the voters who support them to take the trouble to educate themselves about the failures of socialism, nor can we expect their teachers and professors to offer anything resembling an honest analysis. Information, then, will likely not reach them, and reason, sadly, will likely fail them. If they were well-informed and reasonable, they could never vote for a Mamdani or an AOC or all the others of their dire ilk.

Still, there is reason for hope. After all, one explanation for Mamdani’s primary success lies in the fact that his opponent was the appalling Cuomo. Perhaps what put Mamdani over the top was simply a desire for something fresher and brighter-looking. Maybe someone like Sydney Sweeney. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that Sydney Sweeney should run for mayor of New York, or even move to AOC’s district and try to unseat her (although that’s a race I would truly love to see). (RELATED: Sydney Sweeney Ad Means America Is Hot Again)

And I know that one shouldn’t read too much into the response to the American Eagle “good jeans” ad campaign. Following Freud’s dictum that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” we should be wary of making too much of what Sweeney has come to represent. But Sweeney and her jeans have clearly tapped into something positive and vibrant, a rejection of the Miss Grundy variant of feminism and, more generally, leftist misery-mongering. If we mean to turn things around in this country, sometimes we need not a dissertation, but a smile. I think my acquaintances from the Moscow conference understood this.

Even in Moscow, even in the dark days of communism, it seems that there was a genuine yearning for good burgers, fries, and rich chocolate milkshakes. Today in America, there seems to be a yearning once again for things that make us smile, be it a cheeky ad campaign, a beautiful young woman, or a middle finger insouciantly waved in the face of those who traffic in misery.

I’d like to think that this is something we can build on.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Trump, Putin, and Peace in Ukraine

What Is America’s Role in Africa?

The Meaning Behind ICE Agents’ Masks

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.