Frank: Having known a great many Lefty leaning folk singers in my time I can honestly say that none would ever take orders from the Kremlin. 

Puh-leeeze! The FBI or KGB interrogating/debriefing you, Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger on the finer points of vinyl chloride polymerization would play like the psychiatrist skit in No Time for Sergeants.

Forget the 'Kremlin'... what can you 'honestly say' about your 1939 lefty folkie venture capitalists & label owners and their purchase orders & invoices? If there is a Keynote &c discography, somebody, somewhere, at some time did indeed take an order from the KGB. Indirectly and unknowingly... maybe... maybe not.

The right got their digs in too. Belafonte's manager (and psychiatrist) were both Yank intelligence operatives. Now... H.B. don't know nothing from PVC neither. They were spying on Dr. King and the southern civil rights movement.

Clean-cut, mainstream, acoustic folk was everybody's anti-rock. Dylan going electric was the white flag and surrender to the folk-rock marketplace. The ultimate betrayal.

Bottom line, a modern revival of the Almanac's folk business model isn't going to fly in today's ESG/sanction driven marketplace. Russian capital, on or off the books, is positively radioactive these days.