What’s going on inside Putin’s mind? His own words give us a disturbing clue
“They have only one objective: to prevent the development of Russia. They are going to do it in the same way as they did it before, without furnishing even a single pretext, doing it just because we exist.”
These were Vladimir Putin’s words on 21 February, in his now notorious speech on Ukraine. They repeat the argument already formulated in his speech on Crimea in March 2014: “The politics of the containment of Russia, which continued throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today. There is a constant attempt to push us back into a corner because we have an independent position, because we stand up for ourselves.” Putin’s vision of Russian history is one of an emergence continually blocked by enemies.
The contemporary “west”, in this vision, battles to contain Russia out of jealousy. Europe has collapsed into decadence, crushed by the weight of its humanism and political liberalism: tired, divided, at the mercy of every passing wind. The United States, mired in an instrumental, materialist culture and the contradictions of its own history, is in the process of losing its preeminence. Russia, by contrast, like its emerging ally, China, is on the rise in civilisational terms.
Putin leans here on a strange theory advanced by the 20th-century historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilev. The son of two of Russia’s most famous poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev maintains that every people possesses a distinct life force: a “bio-cosmic” inner energy or passionate substance that he calls passionarnost. Putin may have known Gumilev in St Petersburg at the start of
the 1990s. At any rate, he has embraced his ideas and never misses an opportunity to refer to them. In February last year, he said: “I believe in passionarnost. In nature as in society, there is development, climax and decline. Russia has not yet attained its highest point. We are on the way”. According to him, Russia carries the power and potential of a young people. “We possess an infinite genetic code”, he has said.In addition to Gumilev, Putin relies on another thinker – a minor figure in the history of Russian thought. Last October, he spoke of regularly consulting a collection of political essays titled Our Tasks, the major work of Ivan Ilyin, who died in 1954. In one of the president’s preferred essays, “What does the world seek from the dismemberment of Russia?”, Ilyin denounces the country’s “imperialist neighbours”, these “western peoples who neither understand nor accept Russian originality”. In the future, he suggests, these countries will inevitably attempt to seize territories such as the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, central Asia and, especially, Ukraine. The method, according to Ilyin, will be the hypocritical promotion of values such as “freedom” in order to transform Russia into “a gigantic Balkans”. The final object is to “dismember Russia, to subject her to western control, to dismantle her and in the end make her disappear”.
It is necessary, then, to understand that what is actually happening in Ukraine is the result of a vision of Russia that is deeply embedded in the mind of Putin. In 2008, he punished Georgia for its desire to leave the orbit of the old imperial power. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and prevented Ukraine from joining Nato by starting the Donbas conflict. But that is not enough for him. He wants a confrontation with – and a victory over – a west that he holds responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, for the weakness of Russia in the 1990s, and for the autonomous tendencies of the old Soviet republics.
Why now? In the years following his re-election in 2018, the patriotic exaltation that followed the annexation of Crimea faded. Everyday problems for ordinary people – declining living standards, increased poverty, inflation, a healthcare crisis – have become worse year by year. Meanwhile the US has become more preoccupied with China than Russia. So in July 2021, Putin published the infamous article in which he proclaimed the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. The Ukrainians, he maintained, could not be left to suffer indefinitely under an illegitimate government, which came to power in what he described as a coup d’etat in 2014. Putin massed his troops on his neighbours’ borders from the spring. He intensified military preparations in the autumn and issued his ultimatum to Nato and Washington. He set a carefully laid trap for the west, knowing it was impossible to accept his demands. Everything was ready for what followed.
As in 2008, Russian state media echoes Putin in evoking the risk of a genocide. In place of the Ossetians, supposedly menaced by the then Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, this time the victims to be defended are in Donetsk and Luhansk. The manufacture of this humanitarian crisis may, for Putin, carry a pleasing element of irony. He has never forgotten Nato’s bombing of Belgrade in the spring of 1999, a few months before he became prime minister. By parodying the language of ethnic cleansing and genocide (the Russian-speakers of Donbas this time, rather than the Kosovars), Putin wishes to cancel out the affront caused by that episode in the darkest way imaginable.
What should we think of this perpetual sense of victimhood that allows the Russian president to artificially create situations in which Russia appears humiliated and insulted? Are these the actions of a rational leader? The answer is both simple and worrying. Putin has developed, over decades, a vision of the world that is paranoid but coherent. According to this vision, Russia has for centuries been the victim of an attempt to contain and dismember it. These attempts must be resisted. The logic of this is based on a belief that Russia’s passionarnost must not be constrained.
For Putin – in stark contrast to the tired westerner, lost in the search for profit and material comfort, “the Russian man thinks first of all … in relation to a superior moral principle”. And he is prepared to die for it. Putin often cites a well-known Russian saying: for Russians, “even death is beautiful”. There may, therefore, be no limits to the quest to avenge perceived humiliation. The president’s worldview paves the way to extremism.
Michel Eltchaninoff is editor-inchief of Philosophie magazine and a specialist in the history of Russian thought. He is the author of Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin. This article was translated by Julian Coman
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