Elsässer’s shift from one political extreme to the other suggests that that he is an apparatchik whose first loyalty has likely always been to Moscow. When the USSR represented an authoritarian version of the left, he was a leftist; when the party line of the successor Russian state changed to right-wing authoritarianism, he obediently tacked right—a circumstance which shows that “left” and “right” are often arbitrary categories, particularly when considering the fringes.

This year, the German public television network ZDF produced a documentary tracing the ideological and financial ties between Russia and extreme right-wing elements; among those elements was Elsässer. His own blogs show an over-the-top enthusiasm for the Russian regime, such as comparing Putin’s bombing of Aleppo with the Russian defense of Stalingrad. Whatever the realities of the situation in Syria, Russian intervention in the conflict hardly merits comparison with the decisive turning point of the Second World War.

There were other suggestions of Russian fingerprints on Elsässer’s magazine. It was printed on coated stock, with lots of photos and fairly high production values. Fringe parties generally can’t afford the production costs of this sort of thing—unless they are getting a bit of financial help. The editorial tone was a kind of unholy marriage between Breitbart.com and the Russian-funded website Sputnik, with a little Völkischer Beobachter thrown in for good measure (there was generous use of the term “Lügenpresse”—the lying press, a term popularized by the Nazis.) More to the point, it was written in the breathless, apocalyptic manner of the Soviet anti-NATO propaganda I used to see as a national-security analyst in Congress in the 1980s—with one exception.

Classic Soviet propaganda always treated Democrats and Republicans as essentially indistinguishable and interchangeable components of the bourgeois power structure, both equally worthy of denunciation. Compact, however, had several articles explicitly endorsing Donald J. Trump as an all-around swell guy, with one explaining how a President Trump would improve U.S. relations with Russia.

The propaganda message of this magazine crossed a threshold of sorts. The hacking of the Democratic National Committee that has been attributed to the Russians by the U.S. government is obviously intended to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, but the Russian government, and Vladimir Putin above all, have been careful to avoid being seen publicly praising or attacking either candidate.

Yet Putin, or at least his European allies, apparently see it as worth their while to spend money attacking Hillary and talking about Trump in terms so flattering that Caesar would have blushed, in a country whose citizens don’t have a vote in America’s election in any case. The Soviet Union’s goals in attempting to rouse the European (and above all, German) public against, say, NATO’s deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s was straightforward and understandable, but why would an ideological ally of Russia puff up Donald Trump to a German public that cannot vote for him?