Over 100 years ago, Russia became core of USSR and the pioneer of international struggle for workers' liberation, poverty lifting, enlightenment, scientific progress and propagation of socialism and communism.
Now -- in my humble and maybe biased by liberal propaganda view -- Russia is one of the most reactionary, conservative, backward-looking, clerical country. Please excuse me posting some liberal, imperialist shit here, but seems that Kremlin officially admits going far-right: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kremlin-finally-puts-together-ideology
Speaking locally, there seems to be evidence that Polish far-right party PiS (Law and Justice) is backed by Kremlin as well as the extremely influential priest, Tadeusz Rydzyk, founder and director of the ultra-catholic, conservative Radio Maryja station has/had ties with Polish and Russian security services before the end of People's Republic of Poland and USSR (sic!). I have some generally available videos, but in Polish, sadly.
Could you tell me how far this is true? If so, what purpose had the late communist states and today's Russia in spreading far-right propaganda? WTF went wrong?
One thing is certainly not true, namely the allegation that PiS is "backed by the Kremlin". Up until the last election Poland was governed by the PiS party and from the very beginning of the conflict in Ukraine they were one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine in Europe. Without Poland acting as a weapons delivery hub to Ukraine, NATO could never have sustained their Nazi proxy army. PiS pursued an extremely anti-Russia policy, which is not surprising as some of its highest ranking members are personally deeply russophobic.
So you cannot make this blanket statement that Russia backs the European far right, in fact some of the far right parties in eastern Europe are very anti-Russia. Now maybe the situation is reversed in western Europe but so far we have only seen one of them come to power, namely in Italy, and it turned out they were just as pro-NATO and anti-Russia as the liberals.
The situation with Russia is a lot more complicated than the liberal western media makes it seem. There is only one word which fully encapsulates the mess that is today's Russia and that is: contractions. There are a lot of contradictions in Russia's culture, its economic system, its government, etc. It has very pronounced reactionary elements, which you have mentioned and which other comrades have explained quite well, but it also has remnants of the old Soviet culture and system.
Because just as Marx said socialist societies would be imprinted for a while with characteristics of the old bourgeois society, so a bourgeois society that is built on the destruction of socialism will retain some imprints. The peculiar thing in Russia's case as opposed to other eastern European former socialist states which have liberalized more thoroughly, in Russia restoration of the bourgeois system was never fully completed, and in my opinion cannot be completed under present circumstances even though the liberals (including Putin) who have ruled Russia since the 1990s have tried very hard to do so.
Russia is stuck for now in a sort of limbo of an unfinished counter-revolution, partly because of the internal dynamics of Russian society itself and partly due to the renewed hostility of the West toward Russia since around 2008 which has frozen the liberalization process.