While the efforts to subvert Clinton’s campaign took place in secret, Russia’s other attempts to undermine American unity aren’t secret at all. They’re just not widely known. Among them are the nascent campaigns for both California and Texas to secede from the United States.

“Texas nationalists” largely reflect a far-right or neo-Confederate worldview. California secessionists are almost uniformly leftists disgusted by conservative hegemony in the heartland. They don’t have much in common when it comes to their views of governance, but they do have a powerful shared ally — the Russian Federation.

Salon’s investigation suggests that for nearly a decade, Vladimir Putin’s government has promoted and funded the efforts of such separatists as part of a larger campaign to promote dissenters from the broader Western world order.

The net effect of these efforts, when you include the successful Brexit campaign for British withdrawal from the European Union — which Russia also supported — has been to elevate the idea of American states going their own way from a laughable fringe movement into something discussed as an actual possibility by politicians and elite journalists alike.

Of course, breaking away from the U.S. has been dear to neo-Confederates ever since the “Lost Cause” of the Civil War. More recently, the secessionist cause got a strange boost after John Kerry was narrowly defeated by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

Bush’s victory stunned many of Kerry’s supporters and, for the first time, many progressives began to openly consider the prospect of breaking up the union. Some of the more embittered began posting images of themselves holding up handwritten notes apologizing to the rest of the world. Kerry backers also widely circulated a meme image depicting the states that voted for Bush as “Jesusland” and those who voted against him as the “United States of Canada.” Visits to the website of Canada’s immigration service increased by nearly 600 percent on the Wednesday following Election Day, more than double the previous record, according to the agency.

Future MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell was an advocate of secession, telling the Washington Times a week after Bush’s re-election that “New York and California, Connecticut — the states that are blue — are all the states that are paying for the bulk of everything this government does.” He and many others saw no reason for these higher-income states to continue subsidizing policies they didn’t support.

For all the public venting and aspirational web surfing, however, nothing really came of that left-wing angst. Barack Obama’s 2008 wipeout of John McCain certainly was a factor. McCain’s defeat — which most observers saw coming a mile away — came as a shock to many conservatives, however. Some of them began wondering if there was something to the secession idea after all. America had become a nation of “takers” instead of “makers,” to use Paul Ryan’s phrase.

Around the time  of the 2008 election, the prospect of breaking up the United States became a hot topic in Russia’s tightly controlled state media as well. Government-owned outlets began hyping the work of political scientist Igor Panarin and his 1998 prediction that America would break up into six separate countries by the middle of 2010. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Russian state news organizations, including its English-language TV network RT, interviewed Panarin as often as twice a day during 2008.

RT and its fellow government-run press outlets have also been remarkably interested in “Calexit,” an invented term referring to California’s hypothetical secession from the United States. A Google search within RT’s site yields nearly 5,700 results for the word; one restricted to Sputnik News, another Russian state property, comes up with more than 6,200.

But the Russian bear has done more for secessionist movements than dole out copious amounts of flattering news coverage. It has also provided money to help their causes through an international nonprofit called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia. According to the group’s president, Alexander Ionov, direct governmental funds amount to 30 percent of its general budget.  The organization also works “on many issues” with Rodina, the political party formerly headed by Russia’s deputy prime minister, Ionov said via email.

These Russian subsidies are typically used to pay for travel costs and conferences designed to bring disparate secessionist movements together. One of these was AGM’s recent “Dialogue of Nations” event that took place in September at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, mere blocks away from the Kremlin, power center of the Russian government. At the conference, separatists from American states and territories mingled with representatives from breakaway movements based in Spain, Morocco, Ireland and Somalia. Notably, there were no attendees advocating secession from Russia. It is a crime to do so in the Federation, one that can yield up to a five-year prison sentence.

In an interview, Texas Nationalist Movement president Daniel Miller rejected the idea that his organization was beholden in any way to the Russian government. While he admitted that the group received some assistance from the AGM to attend the Dialogue of Nations conference, Miller said the funds constituted a tiny portion of his organization’s revenues.

“This idea that there are strings tied to us that are from places outside, not just of Texas but outside of the United States is, frankly, very insulting to us,” he told Salon via telephone. “This idea that, somehow, Vladimir Putin is flying over our office in a helicopter dumping cash out is just garbage.”

Louis Marinelli, president of the most prominent Calexit group, Yes California, takes a more open attitude toward seeking assistance from the Russian government, even as he insists that he disagrees with some of its policies. The group has done more than just attend the Dialogue of Nations conference. It has also partnered with AGM to create an “Embassy of the Independent Republic of California” inside Russia. A conference unveiling the initiative featured posters of foreign leaders representing a spectrum of anti-American opposition, including late Cuban leader Fidel Castro; former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro; Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and, of course, Vladimir Putin.

Yes California intends to open facilities in five other countries as well. In an interview, Marinelli said that his group will be opening one in Germany next.

Marinelli has lived off and on in Russia since 2006 and resides there now, thanks in part to assistance from AGM. In a Skype interview, he defended Yes California’s relationship with Russia and likened it to the collaboration that American revolutionaries received from France via the Marquis de Lafayette. He also said separation from the United States was the best way for progressive Californians to preserve and expand the policies that they prefer.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump called the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage “shocking” and said he would overturn it. Since being elected, however, Trump has seemingly reversed course by calling the matter “settled.”