Mick Hartley

What is Putin really after? Waller R. Hewell, author of Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror, offers some clues:

Although Putin’s ambition is to restore Russian control over its former Warsaw Pact captive states, he in no way wishes to restore the Soviet regime itself. Russian history has long been riven by a cultural conflict between those who look to Europe, the West, and the Enlightenment as the path that Russia should follow and those who are loyal to Slavic nationalism, which is deeply religious and not interested in economic prosperity. In literature, this divide was typified by the different outlooks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, which Tolstoy crystallized as the difference between St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the era of anti-Soviet dissidence, this split was typified by Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin is in the Slavophile camp. A devotee of Berdyaev, a Slavophile critic of Marxism-Leninism, Putin believes that Soviet communism was an import of European rationalism that poisoned the authentic Russian soul, which has nourished the country’s national and artistic greatness.

Does the Russian soul really matter to Putin? As I wrote in Tyrants, modern tyrants and conquerors since Robespierre have been bolstered by an ideology. Slavophile thought is crucial to Putin’s worldview, including both Berdyaev and also the modern writer Aleksandr Dugin’s ideology of “Eurasianist National Bolshevism.” Dugin, an academic and popular pundit, tried to rescue what he saw as the authentically Russian agrarian populist impulse behind the original Bolshevik Revolution from its betrayal by Lenin’s “scientific” socialism imported from European thought, calling instead for a “revolution of archaic values” based on the blood and soil traditions of family, rural life, and religious faith. Putin commissioned Dugin to overhaul the Russian education system to remove all traces of Gorbachev-era glasnost and perestroika, which both believed were signs of creeping Enlightenment rationalism and materialism corrupting the Motherland.

Dugin gave Putin the ideology he needed to reject the tainted European strain of Soviet communism while rehabilitating it as a great patriotic people’s movement, including the rehabilitation of Stalin in his role as wartime champion against Hitler. This ideology also enabled Putin to make what is to him a coherent argument that, while the Soviet communist regime will never be restored, the Slavophilic populism that was its true lifeblood can be—a national tribalism extending to all Slavic peoples including Ukraine, Poland, and the Balkans, who must be gathered back into the Russian fold.

Noteworthy also here is Dugin’s fascination with Martin Heidegger, who lent his prestige as Germany’s leading thinker in the 1930s to enthusiastic support for National Socialism. Heidegger viewed the German Volk as placed between the “pincers” of the two global technological superpowers, America and Russia. Out of this struggle, the German people must reclaim its pre-modern destiny and lead all “the peoples” out of the grip of the rationalist global order back to their tribal roots. Dugin transferred this role of the salvational people from Heidegger’s Germany to Russia, whose spiritual values will liberate people everywhere from capitalist materialism.

Here is where Putin’s grand geopolitical map for Russia becomes more clear. Dugin argues that Russia’s salvational role in the world must begin with its gradual recovery of its lost Slavic brethren in Ukraine and Moldova. But that is only the beginning. The long-range goal is world war between Russia and the United States, the leader of the “bourgeois” West. Preparing for that war involves Eurasianism making an alliance with radical Islam. For Dugin, the hostility of Islamists to Christianity is outweighed by their loathing for Western materialism and individualism. In Dugin’s view, Russia’s eventual victory over the United States and the capitalist system will also liberate ordinary Americans from their greedy Wall Street overlords. He addressed an open letter to “the American people” stressing Russia’s solidarity with them.

How much of Dugin’s agenda for eventual world conquest does Putin actually embrace or believe he can realize? It is impossible to tell. That said, his thrust into Ukraine, a sovereign state whose territorial integrity was guaranteed by the United States and United Kingdom, displays a riverboat gambler’s recklessness that seems to be a departure from his earlier preference for biting off a chunk of another country and then pausing to digest it while assuring the West that his demands had been satisfied for now.

Putin is therefore a rational actor only to a point, and in a very different way from how that is understood in the West. His aims are for Russia to be honored, feared and powerful. He is no Hitler or Ahmadinejad, willing to pursue his imperial ambitions to the point where he and Russia risk going down in flames in a final Götterdämmerung, like Hitler in his bunker. But Putin is ready to go a very great deal further in pursuing his ambitions than elected democratic leaders are—a fact that he knows, and which he believes gives him a key advantage in his confrontation with the West. He is willing to march up to the very edge of a general war in Europe, or perhaps even cross that line, and he is willing to put the Russian people through extreme material deprivation rather than settle for a slice of the pie as measured out by foreign powers. Honor and national pride come first.

Negotiation, then, is a waste of time. Putin doesn't live in the world of compromise. He can only win – or be defeated.