A profile recently in The New York Times told the strange saga of Charles Bausman, a fifty-eight-year-old man from Greenwich, Connecticut, who attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Wesleyan University. The headline described him as a “Russian Propagandist” who wore a red Trump hat among the rioters in the Capitol on January 6 and then turned up in Moscow, “where on a far-right television network, owned by a sanctioned oligarch he . . . accused American media of covering up for neo-Nazis in Ukraine.”
“We must understand that in the West,” Bausman said, in Russian, “we are already in a situation of total lies.”
The story was especially intriguing to me because I also lived for many years in Greenwich, and because Bausman’s father was an Associated Press bureau chief in Moscow a few years before I arrived there to report for The Washington Post.
And it turned out that I knew two people well who had encountered Bausman, one at Exeter and the other in Moscow in the late 1980s, where he was doing business as the Soviet Union gave way to its free-wheeling future . Given the ways things are with Russia these days, these individuals asked not to be named.
Here is a picture of Bausman from his Exeter yearbook:
And here is a description of what he was like in Moscow in those years:
Charlie lived in a fantastic little ground-floor apartment in central Moscow, right by the Institute of USA and Canada, which was an important institution in those days and gave the neighborhood an air of grandeur. At the time, most foreigners lived in flats of recent Soviet construction that were issued to us by a department of the Foreign Ministry. The place was charming and rather derelict, which might have described Charlie himself. He had furnished it sparingly, with antiques bought locally. None of us knew whether it was entirely legal to buy those antiques; anyway, we assumed it would be impossible to get them out of the country. But Charlie’s whole existence seemed rather provisional. He was very young, in his 20s, which also made him stand out among the foreign community we knew.
These were the days of “cooperative” restaurants, proto private businesses that operated on the far edge of legality. Charlie belonged to that world. Nothing about what he did or how he lived fit into the established pattern of foreigners residing in Moscow. It all seemed a little precarious.
He spoke Russian, as I recall, and was “advising” Western businesses in the Soviet Union. There were very few westerners doing business in the Soviet Union in those days. It seemed unlikely that he was actually making a living from it, and we assumed that family money was propping him up somehow. He was handsome and gave off a classic preppy air.
He was an alcoholic and a kind of lost soul.
In recent years, according to the Times, Bausman’s increasingly strident views –posted on websites he created and in public statements – tracked the far end of the pro-Putin, Trump-era conspiracy tropes, white nationalism, and anti-Semitism.
Why Bausman has turned out this way is a question, I suppose, that only he can really answer.
My greater takeaway from the story was about a question I have pondered for some time. Bausman is in today’s parlance, ardently “red,” meaning right-wing. In the 1930s and 1940s, though, the color had a different political connotation. In the U.S. and the U.K. there were a significant number of people with elite backgrounds like Bausman’s known as “Red” Communists, pro-Communists, or “fellow travelers.” Countless volumes have been written about people who were “blue bloods” and were avowed Reds. The Wall Street Journal recently described the new Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C., as “A Red Reminder of Communism’s Ills.”
In Britain’s current contest for a new prime minister, the parties are blue (Conservative), and red (Labour), which is to say the reverse of their coloration in the United States.
I had always heard that it was the late Tim Russert of NBC News who popularized the American red-blue divide using a white board to record the numbers in the very close presidential election of 2000.
The wordsmith Ben Zimmer, on his Vocabulary.com blog, helpfully wrote this after Russert died in 2008:
“Obituaries mentioned that Russert has been credited with popularizing the terms “red state” and “blue state” to refer to states favoring Republican or Democratic candidates. Though Russert’s memorable analysis of the twists and turns of the 2000 presidential election no doubt played a significant role in popularizing the “red/blue state” designations, the history of color coding is surprisingly complicated.”
Zimmer’s full account of political color coding back to 1900 explains that when the Chicago Tribune set off fireworks to report on results, in which the conservative newspaper followed a European custom of using blue for its favored Republicans and red for Democrats when that color was becoming associated with revolutionaries and anarchists.
Does the color palette really matter? Well, for today’s American progressives to be called “red” is an unwelcome allegation. For the right, to be called “blue” (wearing a blue hat for example) could get a person in some difficulty in these contentious times.
Another particularly sensitive issue around hues has to do with black and white. In the past these colors were aligned to opposites in meaning, or television and movies before the age of color. Recently, when applied to race, Black (capitalized) has become the standard, and white – referring to Caucasians – is not being capped. Using African American, Negro, and colored is pretty uncommon, although the legendary civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People still carries the name adopted when segregation signs in the South said “colored” or “whites” only.
Now BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) is widely used. Calling someone “colored” is questionable, but “person of color” is acceptable, covering all those who are Black or Brown, including Hispanics and Asians.
On the other hand, white in many circumstances is now aligned with “white nationalism” or “extremism,” or “privilege.” The color white can still invoke purity – in wedding dresses, for example. But as a racial term it carries burdens of the past.
The color black can still be used to describe darkness, gloom, or evil in a literary setting. But to be described as proudly Black carries a sense of honor against a history blighted by racism.
And then there is the matter of Old Glory, the red, white, and blue flag, a major symbol of patriotism. On flagpoles and front lawns these days (I see many of them in southwest Michigan, where I now am), flags in black and white with a blue stripe is the way to show support of the police, and doubtless other red political preferences. The black-white flags also appear on T-shirts worn by people wearing a wide variety of red MAGA or Trump hats.
And then there is purple, associated in the past with royalty and now meant to show political affiliation that is neither red nor blue. “Yellow” in wartime is still cowardice but as a ribbon around a tree is to remember hostages, awaiting their return.
Green is about the environment, but when applied to inexperience it is not usually flattering.
I pass all this along without a proposal or any particular criticism of the fact that the meanings of colors are subject to revision. However, when color becomes your identity or your political affiliation, it is worth keeping up with fashions as they evolve, to avoid misunderstandings.
Interesting article. I always enjoy your comments, but have a small bone to pick. Colors are symbols of many things in our past and present life. However, support for the police is not exclusively the realm of those with “red political preferences.” We learned that after the “defund the police” movement.
Full disclosure. Our youngest son’s girlfriend is a black police officer in Connecticut.
So wise as always. Thank you. MW