Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
Lingua Franca-Circular Icon

Lingua Franca

Language and writing in academe.

Idiots, Useful and Otherwise

By Ben Yagoda March 21, 2018
latest
Lenin

  • “Alex Salmond will present his weekly show on Russia Today again on Thursday, despite calls for him to quit the Kremlin-backed broadcaster. The former First Minister has been accused of being a ‘useful idiot’ for President Vladimir Putin.” —The Scotsman, March 19
  • “In the words of Russian spyspeak, [Mark] Zuckerberg now counts — like our president — as a ‘useful idiot.’ He has contributed, and apparently continues to contribute, to the corruption of our democratic process.” —The Wrap, March 18
  • “To make matters worse, the leader of the [British] opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, is behaving like a useful idiot, parroting Russia’s skepticism and calling for hard proof [of Russia’s attempted assassination of a former double agent in London].” —Maclean’s, March 15
  • "[Former Trump adviser Carter] Page happens also to be highly sympathetic to the Putin regime. The Russian phrase for such characters is … useful idiot.” —Bret Stephens, The New York Times, February 2

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

latest
Lenin

  • “Alex Salmond will present his weekly show on Russia Today again on Thursday, despite calls for him to quit the Kremlin-backed broadcaster. The former First Minister has been accused of being a ‘useful idiot’ for President Vladimir Putin.” —The Scotsman, March 19
  • “In the words of Russian spyspeak, [Mark] Zuckerberg now counts — like our president — as a ‘useful idiot.’ He has contributed, and apparently continues to contribute, to the corruption of our democratic process.” —The Wrap, March 18
  • “To make matters worse, the leader of the [British] opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, is behaving like a useful idiot, parroting Russia’s skepticism and calling for hard proof [of Russia’s attempted assassination of a former double agent in London].” —Maclean’s, March 15
  • "[Former Trump adviser Carter] Page happens also to be highly sympathetic to the Putin regime. The Russian phrase for such characters is … useful idiot.” —Bret Stephens, The New York Times, February 2

The phrase “useful idiot” seems to be everywhere. The Oxford English Dictionary definition: "(originally) a citizen of a non-communist country sympathetic to communism who is regarded (by communists) as naïve and susceptible to manipulation for propaganda or other purposes; (more widely) any person similarly manipulable for political purposes.”

The person to whom it has most often recently been applied is Donald Trump. The first such reference I’ve been able to find was in July 2015, the month after he announced his candidacy for president. A columnist for the British newspaper The Telegraph wrote that Trump — whom everyone assumed had no chance in the primary, much less the election — was the Democrats’ “useful idiot": “By shouting so loudly about issues that the Left presumes the Right is obsessed with, he becomes a stick with which Democrats can hit Republicans.”

After Trump secured the nomination, the Times columnist Timothy Egan was one of the first to state (in September 2016) what has become a commonplace: “Trump is Russia’s useful idiot, dismissing its international aggressions and human rights violations. Putin can do no wrong because ‘if he says great things about me,’ as Trump said, ‘I’m going to say great things about him.’” Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright applied the term to Trump the following month.

ADVERTISEMENT

Former CIA chief Michael Hayden, writing in the Washington Post five days before the election, cited his onetime colleague Michael Morell’s accusation that Putin had “cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” Hayden went on: “I’d prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That’s the useful fool, some naïf, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

When and by whom was “useful idiot” coined? The answer is murky. The OED’s first citation is a 1948 Times article quoting L’Umanita, an Italian “right-wing socialist newspaper” as saying, “the Communists would give the ‘useful idiots’ of the left-wing Socialist party the choice of merging with the Communist party or getting out.” However, after Zbigniew Brzezinski used the phrase in 1987, the Times language columnist William Safire investigated and found that it was commonly attributed to Lenin, to (in the words of a 1981 Times article) “describe left-liberals and Social Democrats.” But Safire couldn’t locate it in Lenin’s published works, and neither has anyone else.

The investigation led me to wonder whether “useful idiot” has any relation to “holy fool,” which in the Eastern Orthodox tradition refers to asceticism or other unconventional behavior in the service of Christ. I asked my neighbor Sibelan Forrester, a professor of Russian at Swarthmore College, and she responded that it’s a whole different thing.




A holy fool is yurodivy, and it’s sometimes used about someone who’s not a holy fool per se. For example, some character in The Brothers Karamazov refers to Alyosha as yurodivy — the Anglo equivalent might be be “exalted,” “not on this planet.” It’s a masculine adjective; the feminine would be yurodivaya. Also in Brothers Karamazov, Stinking Liza is referred to that way. Her mental condition marks her as one of God’s fools, and the local community tries to take care of her and is aghast when she turns up pregnant — they all suspect old Karamazov. And a court jester fool has yet another term, shut, pronounced more or less as “shoot.”


Then there’s “village idiot,” which apparently was coined in an essay of the same name that appeared in The St. James Gazette in 1883. It begins:




Every village has not got its idiot, though many villages can produce one. He is regarded with unfeeling contempt in noisy industrial villages, where there is a continuous whirring and a running to and fro of persons earning wages. They will not give the time to understand him; or when they do, they prefer to pack him off to a large home in their county-town, with high walls and windows gazing upon vacant blackness.


(Update: Richard Bleiler, of the University of Connecticut Library, informs me that the term long predates that article. He reports finding it in “an issue 32 of Smollett’s The Briton, which was published from 29 May 1762 – 12 February 1763. ‘The shameless scribbler, like the village-idiot, when the clock was silent, still continues to strike sedition, from the force of habit. . ..’”)

I can’t hear the term without thinking of a scene in Woody Allen’s Love and Death, which seems an appropriate way to say farewell, for the time being, to idiots of every variety.


We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin