Luis Lázaro Tijerina says he’s no Russian pawn, though the Burlington resident regularly writes for a Moscow-based website linked to the Kremlin.
The self-described Marxist intellectual has had 16 stories published by USA Really, a website launched in May by the Federal News Agency, a media venture allegedly funded by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week the New York Times reported that USA Really might be part of the latest — and most overt — Russian tactic to manipulate U.S. elections.
The site mostly deals in absurd and inflammatory news and opinion, often written in stilted, strange language that reads as though it’s been fed through Google Translate. It’s one of three Russian publications for which Tijerina has written that are associated with the country’s online influence campaign, according to the Times.
But during an interview last week at a Burlington café, Tijerina defended his contributions to the sites as an expression of his own views, not Russia’s. USA Really “gave me the freedom to write what I want,” he said. “They’ve never told me to write in praise of Putin.”
His work on USA Really includes articles on very local subjects. He has decried gentrification in Burlington’s Old North End and twice supported a nurses’ strike at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Other stories have dealt with broader topics, including the United States’ military budget and what he described as “America’s soccer monoculture.”
Tijerina, who is 72, sported a corduroy coat and neatly combed salt-and-pepper hair. In conversation, he slipped between self-deprecation and condescension. He laughed at the very possibility that he could help the Kremlin influence American elections. At another point, he cut himself off midway through a monologue on Russian history in the 1930s. “This is too complex for you,” he told a reporter.
Tijerina said he is not a Putin supporter. He praised Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and called President Donald Trump “a bourgeois Mussolini.”
Regardless of Tijerina’s intent, Russians with more sinister motives will happily use and redistribute the news he writes, according to Kevin McKenna, a UVM professor of Russian language, culture and literature. Those articles are as useful to them as any covert intelligence gathering. “They don’t need a spy,” he said. “He’s already doing what they want.”
Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, who oversees the state’s elections, said in a statement to Seven Days that he’d never heard of USA Really. He couldn’t speak to whether the site is, in fact, a threat but said any investigation or enforcement would be the feds’ responsibility.
“The prospect of a propaganda website, based in Russia and operated by Russian agents, designed to influence U.S. elections is incredibly alarming,” Condos said.
Tijerina insisted he’s no propagandist. “I’m a writer, a historian, a published poet,” he said. “How am I a danger to anyone?”
Tijerina was born in Kansas to Mexican American parents. His father died when he was 9. The following year, Tijerina read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he said began his lifelong affinity for Russian literature and culture.
He attended Kansas State University on a track-and-field scholarship and met the friends who influenced him to become a poet and a Marxist. He found he spent more time working as a student organizer protesting the Vietnam War than studying, so he dropped out after his junior year.
He lived in Québec for two years to escape the draft but in 1975 joined the Army in an effort “to understand more about U.S. imperialism,” he said.
After his three-year hitch, Tijerina flitted between places and jobs, moving to Hanover, N.H., then to Seattle. He said he married and divorced and eked out a living by doing clerical work, selling oil paintings and coaching soccer.
Luck struck when he moved to Brattleboro in 1990. A mutual acquaintance introduced him to Ruth Dunlap Bartlett, a British actress and an avowed communist who was vacationing in town. Bartlett became a friend and benefactor.
She encouraged him to get his master’s degree at the Vermont College of Norwich University in Montpelier. She even bought him a condo in Burlington in 1998 so he could commute to the school. Tijerina moved to the Queen City and enrolled in the program; he earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in history, in 2000. He wrote his thesis on the Soviet military.
For years, Tijerina and Bartlett talked on the phone almost daily, he said. Her parting gift before she died in 2009 was a bust of Joseph Stalin.
Tijerina began writing for Russian news sites nearly three years ago, he said, first for Katehon, a Russian think tank backed by the Kremlin, and later for Geopolitica.ru, a website that adheres to the ideology of Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian political philosopher with ties to Putin and known for his fascist beliefs. Both websites have been named by the New York Times as part of a larger Russian media effort to support President Trump and interfere with American elections.
Leonid Savin, a former editor of Katehon and an editor at USA Really, asked Tijerina to start writing for the new platform when it launched. The site, originally named “USA Really. Wake up Americans,” publishes divisive content reminiscent of the news that Russian bots circulated on social media before the 2016 election.
It’s intended to bring attention to “problems that are hushed up by major American publications controlled by the U.S. political elite,” according to an April press release from the Federal News Agency.
Articles range from the strange (“Woman Hid Her Mother’s Corpse to Watch the Stages of Death”) and the sensational (“Pregnant Native Woman Murdered by Having Her Baby Cut Out of Her Stomach”) to the politically divisive (“Laughed Off the Planet: Trump Disgraces U.S. at the UN”).
But it’s been perfect for Tijerina, who relishes the chance to write without constraints. The website has never turned down a story he’s pitched, nor does it edit his work. Instead, he hires an editor in Philadelphia to review his writing before he sends it in.
He declined to identify his editor or his contacts in Russia and would not say what he is paid by USA Really. One freelancer told the Times that he received between $50 and $100 a story.
Occasionally, an editor will ask for a regional story about Vermont or New England. “They want to know about that specific place for political reasons, economic reasons and social reasons,” Tijerina said.
There may be an explanation for that. When it comes to painting a negative picture of the U.S., “an account about chaos, confusion, malfeasance, complaints, inequalities, written by a local Burlingtonian instead of from Moscow or St. Petersburg — that is infinitely more effective,” McKenna said.
Russian groups may also “spin off the stories” written by people such as Tijerina and “use that in classrooms, use that in labor unions, use that in reporting to consumers in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia — the likely places that will be the next Ukraine,” he said, referring to Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
USA Really has been banned from Facebook and Twitter, according to NBC News.
Representatives from the site did not respond to a request for comment, but in an interview with the Times, the website’s founder, Alexander Malkevich, denied allegations that he is associated with Russian troll farms, the state-sponsored groups that spread misinformation through inflammatory online posts. Malkevich called the notion that Russia could alter American election outcomes “foolish.”
Tijerina is less certain. He acknowledged that “there are those who are possibly agents” and “Russian nationalists” writing for USA Really, Katehon and Geopolitica.
According to Tijerina, journalists from both the Times and NPR interviewed him over the summer about his role with the site. He maintains that his answers were so mundane that they didn’t quote him.
Tijerina describes himself as a free agent and an outsider, moving between cultures and trying to piece together a livelihood. Since moving to Burlington, Tijerina has written half a dozen books, including poetry and short stories, five of which were published by Ra Press in South Burlington. He served as a Spanish translator for a 2003 Seven Days story about Mexicans working on dairy farms in Vermont. He receives Social Security benefits and, to make ends meet, referees youth soccer and rents out a room in his home.
He leaves Burlington to visit Paris or Québec City as often as he can; he has few friends in Vermont, he said, and as a Mexican American Marxist intellectual, he sees himself left on the margins.
Tijerina derided the Queen City’s “anti-intellectual” environment saturated with what he called “undercover racism.” That’s partly why he’s found a home writing for Russian publications, said Alex Gabbrielli, who lives in Virginia and served in the military with Tijerina.
“He’s very resentful of white America,” Gabbrielli said of his friend.
But Tijerina knows what he’s gotten himself into, Gabbrielli said. “Some of them are probably duped,” he said of other USA Really writers. “I don’t think Luis is duped.”
Gabbrielli was quick to say Tijerina is not a Russian spy. But the feds “could still make things a little sticky” for Tijerina because of the sites he writes for, Gabbrielli suggested.
That doesn’t appear to deter the Vermonter.
He has completed an unpublished novel about a Mexican American soccer coach in Barcelona tugged between his Russian sympathies and his love for an American woman working for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The story line is “not real,” he said.
But, Tijerina added: “You have to use what you know, right?”
The original print version of this article was headlined “From Burlington With Love”
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2018.
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Jillian Steyne I cannot understand how a talented, gifted man like Luis Lazaro Tijerina has become a subject for such a blatantly sensationalist article. He is a published poet, a military historian and an artist, but above all he has an open mind. It is a sad day for America when someone as experienced in life as Luis Lazaro Tijerina cannot express an opinion without being pounced on by a naive, sensation seeking journalist with no thought as to how her very biased words will affect his reputation and his life.
Many will remember the era of McCarthyism when many talented and innocent people left the USA because of the slanted innuendos directed at their lives. Among them was Charlie Chaplin who left with his family to return to the UK. Britains gain, Americas loss!
I am conscious that many people are ambivalent about Russia and Vladimir Putins role in international affairs, but really, you wont find Russians behind every tree in the USA! America needs a sense of reality and balance, which this article notably lacks!
Anna Serova I don’t think you can harm your country with your publications. You are trying to objectively understand the current realities and make people think about the causes of what is happening. Of course, this displeases those who are more responsible for creating and maintaining these unfavourable conditions. Unfavorable for Americans. Of course, your articles can cause a public outcry and this is dangerous for the current authorities. But this is only an indirect influence on the political choice of Americans , which they make on their own.
Anna Serova Obviously, you did not fit into the mainstream and had to look for opportunities to engage in journalism outside of their country. Russia maintains relations in the sphere of culture and education with different countries. And if foreigners are supported by the Federal budget within the framework of this cooperation , this does not make them “agents of the Kremlin”. But in the US now goes ” witch hunt.”(the theory of interference in the us elections against the background of the fact that the US has been actively interfering in the domestic policy of other countries for a century, including through military intervention) .Therefore, such accusations against you are not surprising.
Nasir Khan I have read a bit hastily this article, and I was surprised to see the composition of a whole article in such a shoddy and trivial manner. Katie Jickling’s tone throughout her article is spurious and non-serious. If her idea was to paint Luis Lazaro Tijerina in the utter negative light, then she has only succeeded to show her own pranks as a journalist. She works on the assumption that for Luis to write for the Russian websites that are close to the Kremlin or sponsored by any Russian agency means ipso facto some secret foul play! If one can hurl the same sort of abuse back to her then one may say she is no more then a third-rate hireling of some American secret service to attack a person who is a writer and a Marxist in his world outlook. An interview is not a a legal cross-examination of a writer, but an open dialogue to find about the views and opinions of an interviewee, without any hidden agenda to buttress any a priori assumptions. Ironically, she has revealed herself more than what she originally set out to.. Nasir Khan, Norway
Wow I read the article my friend, and while I’m not in line as many of the “intelligence community” I found it very interesting in that they paint you in various lights. They acknowledge your contributions and abilities, yet mock, disparage your choices in life do how you have done things and your beliefs. It is almost as they make you to be an evil person who shouldn’t think this way because you live in Vermont or the USA. It’s their way of mocking you and how wrong you are to live in a state like VT, and in a country, US. Yet your freedom of speech is put in question or beliefs. It. Should not matter who you right for, because we know here in the US you’d never get those points across for fear of causing an “awakening” of the sheep. While you know we have held conversations and we differ in thoughts and opinions, I still read your stories and find them enlightening and gives me a chance to open my mail ND to more diverse thoughts and views. It seems like since his views are not in line with the corrupt political views, whether leftist or right wing, its almost a crime for him to state his thoughts or opinions on what he believes and feels. He has a right just like this so called unbiased journalist to right what he wants a d where he wants
ALL HAT AND NO CATTLE!!! A MEDITATION ON YOUR JOURNALISM MASQUERADE FROM A PRO JOURNO
Dear Seven Days:
I object to your totally unprofessional screed, a vile hatchet -job filled with smug McCarthyesque smears and innuendo against Mr Tijerina –as fine a human being as they make them. Your piece is disrespectful, ridiculous, and insulting — taking a mild-mannered writer, an American citizen, and a n authentic truth -teller who works in the classic freelance tradition as in ‘free lance’ OWNED BY NO ONE, from the days of unaffiliated knights on horses who owed no allegiance or fealty to any king. I a m really relieved you finally unmasked such a grave threat in our midst, all five-foot-three of him at age 73, a co ntemporary Napoleon lying in wait for America to make a fool of itself. How radical!! I am hoping if he indeed really is a Russian spy and Putin puppet, they will bestow upon him a Samovar so he can entertain The Tea Part y, If there’s anything “absurd and inflammatory,” it’s your article. You have defamed an innocent man dedicated to justice for workers and ordinary middle class citizens– economic justice, social justice, and political justice. In Texas we have a saying, “ALL HAT AND NO CATTLE.” You r alleged aspiring reporter is like that. While she may indeed have a paying job which precludes her from “working for the Russians,” apparently she isn’t smart enough to dis cern a friend from a foe. Are you through? Then wipe yourself. Shame on you all. Chuck Selnik, Abilene, TX
It’s really disappointing to see an article which seems to be written from the McCarty times. The woman who wrote it not only seems to be out of time, but also flatly ignorant. She made me laugh when I read this statement: “a Russian political philosopher with ties to Putin and known for his fascist beliefs”, while she was referring to marxism and communism. I have read such an stupidity on a couple of mexican journalist, who asserted that social democracy, communism and anarchism was exactly the same, “because the state paternalism” (and I remarked by the time: “are you sure you are talking about anarchism?”, en they asserted without hesitation “yes”).
It’s really painful to see in a magazine like yours, which I considere usually entertaining and well informed, to see a document like that, which only shows out the envy of the writer, attacking a colleague, perhaps looking for a fame that she has not. I hope you at least give the Chance to Luis Tijerina to respond, as you know the free press has the right to do it.
Best regards and I’m looking forward for your good work.
Sergio R. Melesio-Nolasco
Writer, Mexico City, Mexico
Sergio Ricardo Melesio Nolasco I just post this to the editor, hope he reads it:
It’s really disappointing to see an article which seems to be written from the McCarty times. The woman who wrote it not only seems to be out of time, but also flatly ignorant. She made me laugh when I read this statement: “a Russian political philosopher with ties to Putin and known for his fascist beliefs”, while she was referring to marxism and communism. I have read such an stupidity on a couple of mexican journalist, who asserted that social democracy, communism and anarchism was exactly the same, “because the state paternalism” (and I remarked by the time: “are you sure you are talking about anarchism?”, en they asserted without hesitation “yes”).
It’s really painful to see in a magazine like yours, which I considere usually entertaining and well informed, to see a document like that, which only shows out the envy of the writer, attacking a colleague, perhaps looking for a fame that she has not. I hope you at least give the Chance to Luis Tijerina to respond, as you know the free press has the right to do it.
Best regards and I’m looking forward for your good work.
Sergio R. Melesio-Nolasco
Writer, Mexico City, Mexico
Katie Jinklings piece on Luis L. Tijerina is a bit fantastic and hollow, and it seems that Russians are lurking everywhere according to her and the New York Times.
I have been an art patron of Mr. Tijerina for nearly 30 years, and a combative friend who has had lively discussions with him on many subjects, politics being one of them. While we have ideological disagreements, he is a man of integrity and unwilling to compromise his integrity.
Sadly, the author of the article misses the true essence of Mr. Tijerina; writing through his lenses and experiences as he sees the world. Mr. Tijerina isnt an apologist for anyone or any cause, and his writings on American life are too honest to be published in this country, due to his acurate and critical portrayals of life in the United States.
Respectfully,
Patrick Farren
While Russian influence in our elections via bots on social media and propaganda is a very real and dangerous threat to our democracy, it is equally as dangerous to accuse people of pushing this propaganda on behalf of the Russian government without a real examination of the evidence. This can be not only slanderous and damaging to a person’s reputation, but also lead to a scenario where the real threats slip under the cracks unnoticed and anyone who is a dissident to be labeled treasonous or thought to be conspiring with the enemy. When I read this article I went to the website in question and read several of Mr. Tijerina’s pieces, none of which were particularly scathing, nor advocated revolution, nor seemed to advocate a pro-Russian stance. On the contrary, much of what I read was factual and unbiased, and any subjective analysis was admittedly his own. Hundreds of very similar pieces are written in U.S. media every week. To me there is a lot of salacious smoke here, but very little actual fire.
The article seems rushed and hollow, and I don’t think it’s in the usual standard of Seven Days. I think it should be retracted.
This is the most bizarre comment section I’ve ever seen. Where are these people coming from?
Look at all these Russians showing up in the comments!
Obvious, you had an agenda before you wrote this story on Luis L Tijerina
Dear Katie,
Thank you for a thorough and insightful article. I appreciate the perspectives of Professor McKenna, The New York Times and Mr. Tijerina himself.
Mr. Tijerina is forthcoming about his affinity for Marxism and Russian culture. It isn’t surprising that he is supported by tentacles of the Russian government. It’s important that journalists expose these alliances.
Great job 7 days!
“Mr. Tijerina is forthcoming about his affinity for Marxism and Russian culture. It isn’t surprising that he is supported by tentacles of the Russian government.”
I hate to break it to you, but today’s Russian government is not Marxist.
Soujanya Sinha Roy Seven Days Editors , think most of the people are intellectually so bankrupt that they dont understand the difference between marxism and Putinocrasy, Trumping and democracy. If people like jefferson or lincoln were born today, they also may be charged like Edward Snowden. All you journalists care is about the Pax Americana, which is all about muscle power. Soujanya Sinha Roy, from Kolkata, India
Absolutely a link between Marxism and Russian/Chinese communism…and even North Korea. The idea that all must work for the collective, and all must be equal, and free exchange of goods and services absolutely stifles individual creativity, innovation, and the pure joy of individual accomplishment and seeking advancement. Marxisim is what whips up extreme liberals to take up arms and seek communism and become a Borg. Of this guy hates democracy and a capitalistic society that gives home a nice place to live like VT, perhaps he should move to whatever Marxist utopia he chooses. And Jefferson and Lincoln were not Marxist, nor is Trump a hero of Democracy, anymore than Putin is a true Communist (both just use the systems for personal and family gain). And Snowden is no hero either – he is a criminal who appointed himself as the judge of what to expose or not – not his call…60 Minutes actually did an expose a year before Snowden leaked his info on the NSA data collection room in California -it just didnt get much traction. Clearly this guy has a chip on his shoulder as he keeps posting in support of himself days after the article has run.