They say the pandemic has increased his isolation. They say that he has cut off most of the contact with co-workers and friends. The news bothers him, says Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist, one of the most attentive observers in the Kremlin. Putin, on the other hand, is obsessed with history. He is interested in people like Konstantin Leontyev, an ultra-reactionary monk of the 19th century, who admired hierarchy and monarchy, and had a contempt for equality. One of the few people Putin seems to have spent time with is Yuri Kovalchuk, a close friend who owns a bank and controls several government propaganda media. According to Russian journalists, the two talked about Putin’s mission to restore unity between Russia and Ukraine. The interesting thing is that Kovalchuk is not just a wealthy businessman. He is an ideologue. His world view of him is a mixture of “anti-American conspiracy theories, orthodox Christian mysticism, hedonism,” writes Zygar. Who knows, Putin might have the same ideas. But what exactly are these ideas?
Exploring his possible cultural broth, one immediately encounters a picturesque type. Aleksander Dugin, philosopher and political scientist, mystical-esoteric-reactionary vein, the Western media have often talked about it. The latest, long and detailed article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Anyone who wants to understand Putin’s geopolitics and worldview, including the Ukrainian campaign, would do better to listen to one person: Aleksander Dugin”. For his part, Dugin, also recently interviewed by Italian media, describes the war in these terms: It is not just a question of denazifying the country and protecting the Donbass, it is a battle against liberal globalism, the West, i.e. the Antichrist “. But are we sure that Putin really listens to him? Probably not. If he were that influential, Moscow State University would not have kicked him out (which happened after some of his outsized claims during the first crisis in Ukraine, it was 2014).
The other guru who often comes up is a philosopher from the past. In 2015, Putin also spent his time repatriating his body. Ivan Ilyin, deported by the Bolsheviks in 1922, died in exile in Switzerland. He admired Nazism and Fascism. Timothy Snyder, historian at Yale, wrote an essay on him: “Ivan Ilyin, the philosopher of Putin and of Russian fascism.” However, other historians dispute this connection. Ilyin did not end up in the Kremlin pantheon for fascist sympathies, but for ideas basically similar to other Russian intellectuals: he thought that a monarch, rather than laws or constitutions, should have absolute authority. But Snyder also traces a more extreme and bizarre ideology in Putin. That of Lev Gumilev, according to which nations draw their impetus from cosmic rays, so the West’s will to exist would be almost exhausted and Russia, on the contrary, would still have the energy to form a powerful Slavic state that embraces the Eurasia. In short, an almost mystical belief in the destiny of nations, the spirit transcends everything and sets aside laws, procedures and physical realities.
What if they were all fragments of a larger puzzle? In fact, there is an ideology that the circle around Putin has been developing since the mid-90s; a new discourse, different from Soviet patriotism and Russian nationalism, which justifies and clarifies recent politics – and not just foreign politics. It is called Russkiy Mir, meaning “Russian world“. Putin made this clearly visible in 2007, with his watershed speech in Munich in which he rejected the possibility of integrating Russia into the West. However, Russkiy Mir’s idea of community and civilization includes not only Russia, but all “compatriots”, all Russian-speaking Slavs living abroad, therefore also Ukrainians and Belarusians. It sounds like a paradox, but one of the pieces of this ideology is anti-communism. Lenin is actually hated (Stalin, on the other hand, is not, because after the victory of ’45 he toasted the Russian people, not Communism). The other element is the Orthodox faith in the Moscow Patriarchate, Patriarch Kirill is one of the main ideological allies. And then there is the contempt for the West, which corrupts, and which is opposed by the idea of an eternal Russian civilization to be preserved. Everything is legitimate in defense of Russkiy Mir, even violence. Putin reminded us a few days ago: “Opponents will be spat out like midges.” This sort of cult finds its most flamboyant fusion 70 km from Moscow. There on June 22, 2020, the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was inaugurated, with Putin and Kirill present. Already from the outside it is quite gloomy, inside the war is celebrated. The floor is made of cast German tanks. A mosaic commemorates the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the role of Russian forces in the Syrian civil war. Soldiers fight, angels bless from above. It is therefore not surprising that Patriarch Kirill views the current conflict in Ukraine as a divine affair – a colleague of his, the priest from Rostov, a city on the border with Ukraine, went down even more heavily; according to him, the Russian army “is cleaning the world of a diabolical infection”.
In this new ideology, the war in Ukraine was reformulated as part of a Western assault on Russian civilization. The secret services, from whose ranks Putin himself has emerged, play a central role. Putin relies on them for information about the world. And in 2005 a section of the FSB (one of the successors of the KGB) sent him a book entitled “Project Russia”. As the Economist relates, the document clearly warned Putin that democracy was a threat and the West an enemy.
It is clear that security concerns related to NATO expansion are an important issue for the Kremlin. But an analysis of the ideology behind Putinism casts doubt on whether this is the real reason for the aggression against Ukraine. After all, at the time of the first Russian blitz in Crimea, in 2014, Ukraine did not want to join NATO, by law it was a neutral country. The truth is that for Putin and his circle, Ukraine is not a real nation, but a founding part of Russkiy Mir. She had strayed too far and was being driven home.