The intellectual origins of Putin’s invasion
There is no Rasputin in the modern Russian court
BY MARLENE
LARUELLE
. Does
Putin listen to the church? Credit: Alexey Druzhinin/Ria Nostovisis/AFP/ Getty
Marlène
Laruelle is Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian
Studies at The George Washington University.
March 16,
2022
https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-brains-behind-the-russian-invasion/
The West
has been struggling for the past three weeks to understand the motivation
behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Was it a rational move or the reaction of a
madman? Some insist he has been inspired by some sort of éminence grise — a
sort of Rasputin figure. But it’s not that straightforward.
There is no
one “guru”. The reality is more complex: there are multiple ideological sources
who have blended to cause the disastrous invasion, all mediated through his
“court” of trusted people and group of
military advisers, and many of whom unite in their vision of Ukraine as a
country that needs to be brought back by force into Russia’s orbit.
During his
Valdai Club address — the Russian equivalent of the elite talkingshop,
Davos – in September 2021, Putin
referenced three influential authors: the emigrant religious philosopher
Nikolay Berdyaev, the Soviet ethnologist Lev Gumilev, and the reactionary
thinker of the White émigré community, Ivan Ilyin. Putin has never given much
away about his Berdyaev readings, but he has been more explicit on the other
two.
Putin has
borrowed from Gumilev his two most famous concepts: first, the common
historical destiny of Eurasian peoples and Russia’s genuine multi-nationality,
as opposed to Russian ethnic nationalism; and second, the idea of
“passionarity” – a living force specific to each people group made up of
biocosmic energy and inner force. As Putin stated in February 2021, “I believe
in passionarity, in the theory of passionarity … Russia has not reached its
peak. We are on the march, on the march of development…We have an infinite
genetic code. It is based on the mixing of blood.”
While
Gumilev has been a commonplace reference of post-Soviet culture; Ivan Ilyin has
remained much more marginal. His recent rehabilitation has been pushed by a
group of reactionary thinkers and politicians who want to decommunise Russian
history.
Putin has,
on several occasions, referred to Ilyin’s vision of Russia’s supposed unique
destiny and the centrality of state power in Russian history. And he has
certainly also noticed Ilyin’s furious hatred of Ukraine. For Ilyin, Russia’s
enemies will try to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit by hypocritical
promotion of democratic values with the goal of making Russia disappear as a
strategic opponent. As Ilyin wrote, “Ukraine is the region of Russia [sic] that
is most in danger of division and conquest. Ukrainian separatism is artificial,
devoid of genuine foundations. It was born from the ambition of its captains
and international military intrigue.”
Yet to
ascribe Putin’s vision of Ukraine solely to Ilyin is to fail to understand that
it is commonplace for Russian thinkers to say that Ukraine is an indivisible
part of Russia and one of its Achilles heels in its confrontation with the
West. The ideological founding fathers of Eurasianism in the Twenties were also
virulently anti-Ukrainian: the prince Pyotr Troubetzkoy denounced Ukrainian
culture as “not a culture but a caricature”, and Georgy Vernasky explained that
“the cultural schism [of Ukrainians and Belarusians] is only a political
fiction. Historically speaking it is clear that both Ukrainians and Belarusians
are branches of a unique Russian people.” This is a brotherly enmity, and one
with many sources.
Among the
contemporary ideologists, Alexander Dugin is also excitedly cited by Western
observers as a strong influence on Putin. And Dugin has, indeed, always been a
virulent enemy of an independent Ukraine (“Ukraine as a state has no
geopolitical meaning,” he wrote in his Foundations of Geopolitics). He called
for its almost complete absorption by Russia, letting just the most western
regions of Ukraine remain outside Russia’s purview.
But Dugin
does not have the ear of the Kremlin. He is too radical in his formulations,
too obscurely esoteric and cultivates a level of “high” intellectual references
to the European far-right classics that cannot meet the needs of the Putin
administration. He was one of the original promoters of a geopolitical notion
of Eurasia and of Russia as a distinctive civilisation in the Nineties, but
these themes became mainstream apart from and even against Dugin’s use of them
in the following decades. He was never a member of any of the many co-opted
civil society organisations, even if he was able to cultivate to some patrons
in the military-industrial and security services circles.
Among the
other thinkers advocating for Russia’s imperial mission are two of Dugin’s
patrons: the Orthodox monarchist businessman Konstantin Malofeev, who leads the
Tsargrad internet channel and the Katekhon discussion group; and Bishop Tikhon,
an influential figure of the Russian Orthodox Church, rumoured to be one of
Putin’s confessors.
Both men
have worked together to advance a reactionary agenda in terms of “traditional
values” (anti-abortion, pronatalism, militarism, cult of Byzantium as the
historical role model for Russia, and heavy ideological indoctrination of
younger generations) and try to get the ear of the Kremlin. Malofeev has become
a central figure in Russia’s outreach to the European far-Right and
aristocratic circles, while Tikhon focuses on bridging the gap between the
Church and the Kremlin and ensuring their ideological convergence.
This brings
us to the Moscow Patriarchate, the institutional body of the Russian Orthodox
Church, which has always remained ambiguous in its stance toward Ukraine. On
one hand, the Church promotes the notion of canonical territory — that is, the
fact that the spiritual territory of the Church is broader than the borders of
the Russian Federation and encompasses or encompassed Belarus, parts of
Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. In the Church’s worldview, all Eastern Slavic nations form
one historical nation with Kyiv as its spiritual cradle. The Church has
preceded by a long time Putin’s embrace of the idea of Russian-Ukrainian unity
as he declared in his 2021 article. But because the Patriarchate had so many of
its parishes in Ukraine, it had also to recognise Ukraine’s sovereignty as a
state and tried to avoid the ecclesiastical independence of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church, though this was eventually recognised by the Constantinople
Patriarchate in 2018. While we can’t be sure how genuine Putin’s religiosity
is, he certainly believes that Russia’s own civilization relies on Orthodoxy as
a central cultural kernel.
To this
should be added the notion of “Russian World”, vividly promoted by the Church.
Originally, the term was meant to promote a deterritorialized Russia, for whom
the imperial territory wouldn’t matter anymore, but the notion gradually
transformed to express Russia’s narrative about the mission of reuniting
“Russian lands”, to which Ukraine would belong.
There are
also more underground figures of influence: one of Putin’s closest friends,
Yuri Kovalchuk, is known for his conservative and religious views of Russia’s
greatness. Kovalchuk is one of the most secretive personalities of Putin’s
inner circles, without any status in state institutions. He is the largest
shareholder of one of Russia’s main banks, Rossiya; controls several major
media channels and newspapers; is said to be Putin’s personal banker; he has
built the president’s main palaces. Putin spent a large part of the Coonavirus
lockdown with Kovalchuk, who seems to have inculcated in him the idea that
history matters more than the present and that Putin needs to think of his own
legacy in Russia’s long-term history.
But even if
we could pinpoint the figures who yield doctrinal influence over Putin, that
won’t capture what drives him to action, because ideological worldviews are
always shaped by broader cultural features than just specific readings.
The whole
Soviet culture has produced over the decades contemptuous narratives on
Ukraine’s supposed lack of clear geopolitical identity, painting the region
(not even a country: in Russian, Ukraine means “periphery”) as endlessly swayed
between competing patrons over the course of centuries. It has cultivated the
vision of a deeply entrenched Ukrainian nationalism that was never really
“cleansed” of the stain of its collaborationist tendencies during the Second
World War and its anti-Semitism. These tropes were part of the political
toolkit of the Soviet regime, which repressed many Ukrainians in the name of
their “(bourgeois) nationalism”. They were also shared on a more apolitical
level through jokes about Ukrainians as “Banderovites” —Stepan Bandera being
the main figure of Ukrainian nationalism and collaborationism during the war
period.
These have
been updated and re-weaponised in the current memory wars that pit Russia on
one side against Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine on the others, and
which have been fought over since the turn of the Millennium. On the Russian
side, these memory wars have accelerated the securitisation of history: since
2012, myriad laws have attempted to institute a historical truth of Russia as
the main hero of the 1945 victory, and downplayed the Soviet-German Pact of
1939-1941 and the invasion of the Baltic states along with parts of Poland,
Finland, and Romania. They have also punished any alternative remembering of
the Second World War or any questioning of the legitimacy of the Soviet
leaders’ decision-making.
This
securitisation reached its highest level with its engraving into the
Constitution, whose new 2020 amendments proclaim that the state protects the
“historical truth”. Many state institutions, such as the Military Historical
Society, have been playing a central role in hardening memory wars and, therefore,
in feeding Vladimir Putin with narratives on Ukraine’s supposed Nazification.
It is also
worth remembering that presidents, even authoritarian or dictatorial ones, do
not live outside their own society’s cultural frameworks. Putin has regularly
shared the music and the films he likes to watch — Soviet spy classics and
contemporary bands with a strong patriotic accent — and one can guess he is
watching television.
Like many
of his fellow citizens, he is thus probably saturated by political talk shows
cultivating anti-Ukrainian feelings, as well as by patriotic movies celebrating
the Russian Empire’s greatness and its territorial conquests. There may be no
need then to look for a doctrinal text that would have inspired him, as the
memory of Russia’s empire and the subordinated role of Ukrainians in it
permeates so many components of Russian cultural life.
Putin’s
worldview has been built up over many years, and is more shaped by his personal
resentment toward the West than by any ideological influence. Readings of the
classic works of Russian philosophy which insist on Russia’s historical
struggle with the West, emphasise the role of Ukraine as a civilizational
borderland between both, have simply reinforced his own lived experience.
So Russia’s
decision to invade Ukraine doubtlessly has a highly ideological component, but
there is another side to this war coin: low-level intelligence-gathering on
Ukraine. Both military advisers and security services seem to believe the war
will be an easy win. And it is here that the President’s mask slips. It becomes
clear that Putin is an aging and isolated authoritarian leader surrounded by
advisers afraid of bringing him a realistic assessment of the likelihood of
victory, thereby accelerating Russia dragging a sovereign Ukraine along with
the rest of Europe towards the worst catastrophe since the Second World War.
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