When headlines broke about Russian spy Maria Butina last week, I caught myself obsessively trying to figure out why she seemed so damn familiar to me? Why would I, a writer in St. Petersburg, FL have anyone or anything in common with an alleged Russian spy? Racking my brain, I recalled attending panel that featured a young Russian woman with long red hair who was advocating for gun rights. That panel was hosted at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs, at USF St. Petersburg, in February of 2016. That young Russian woman with long red hair, advocating for gun rights, was Maria Butina.
I confirmed Butina’s participation in the conference thanks to the trusty online conference archive. Sure enough, there she is smiling in a photo above her long and illustrious bio. Quickly, I located the notebook where I’d taken notes from her Friday-morning lecture. Like most old handwritten notes, only some of it made sense. There is one note I made, “liberty & meatballs,” which I have yet to decipher.
So yeah, this is about that one time Maria Butina, an accused Russian spy and NRA advocate, spoke at my university just a few months before Donald Trump’s election. Her lecture, maybe conveniently, haunts me after the fact. Even the title of the panel she spoke on fills me with dread now; “Russia: Imperial Aspirations on a Beer Budget.” Her co-panelists included: Howard Simon, Richard Miniter, and Kees Boterbloem, Ralph S. Clem; the panel was moderated by Bob Noun.
A Siberian redhead advocating for gun rights — sounds enticing, right? To my 26-year-old graduate student self it sure as hell did. At the podium, Butina wasted no time comparing Trump and Putin, stirring the crowd into nervous laughter and whispered talk amongst themselves.
“There are similarities between Trump and Putin,” Butina explained. “Trump says to his supporters that he will make you great again. That is the same as Putin, this is what he is telling his people too. They are both building empires.”
I remember jotting it down and nodding somewhat in agreement, which makes the next comment from Butina even more concerning.
“Russian and American should be friends,” she coaxed.
Nikita Khrushchev once commented, “We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.” He also stated repeatedly, that “the press is our chief ideological weapon.” Maria Butina is a woman who knows all too well what the press is capable of in the right hands. In her talk, she challenged journalists in particular: “There is no reporting critical of corruption in the government. The international press has a responsibility to tell those stories, to foster critical opinions of Russian government.”
But she reminded, “the joint enemy between us is global terrorism.”
According to what prosecutors are alleging, the conspiracy was already well underway when Butina spoke at USFSP. In the final moments of election night, in a bar in Celebration, FL, on assignment for the New York Times, I couldn't help but think of what that Russian redhead said back in 2016. Putin’s rise tied to Trump’s, “empire-building,” and making a nation great again. It did not provide me comfort then and it certainly does not now. Hell, maybe that’s what she (or I) meant by liberty & meatballs. I guess I’ll never know.
This article appears in Jul 19-26, 2018.