Pundits spend much time staring at Vladimir Putin, studying his expressions, analyzing his words (translated words), and evaluating his actions in an attempt to deduce his intentions. Recently added to these deliberations is the question as to whether or not he is showing signs of diminished cognitive functioning. Most such exercises use similar data sets to arrive at rather similar conclusions. One that does not is provided by Timothy Snyder in his book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. It is easy to begin an analysis of Putin with his role as a KGB agent in the Soviet Union. Is he trying to recreate the conditions of the past by reasserting control over former nations of the Soviet Union? In Snyder’s view he is trying to regain control of those states, but his view of the past extends to way before the Soviet Union. In fact, he seems to be most influenced by people who view the communist revolution in Russia as a disastrous mistake, one foisted on his people by the West. The ideal form of government for them is not socialism, it is fascism. To them, Hitler got it right: a supreme leader of a special people who knows that the Jews are the cause of all problems is the natural order of things.
Since his initial rise to power, Putin seems to have changed. Is the transformation merely a revelation of long hidden goals, or does it indicate the beginning of a descent into madness?
“Putin offered NATO Russia’s support after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2002, he spoke favorably of ‘European culture’ and avoided portraying NATO as an adversary. In 2004, Putin spoke in favor of European Union membership for Ukraine, saying that such an outcome would be in Russia’s economic interest. He spoke of the enlargement of the European Union as extending a zone of peace and prosperity to Russia’s borders. In 2008, he attended a NATO summit.”
Somewhere along the way Putin was captured by the writings of an obscure (to westerners) philosopher named Ivan Ilyin. Ilyin began as a typical young man interested in a just and law-abiding Russian nation but would assume darker views after the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution.
“…Ilyin became a counterrevolutionary, an advocate of violent methods against revolution, and with time the author of a Christian fascism meant to overcome Bolshevism. In 1922, a few months before the Soviet Union was founded, he was exiled from his homeland. Writing in Berlin, he offered a program to the opponents of the new Soviet Union, known as the Whites. These were men who had fought against the Bolsheviks’ Red Army in the long and bloody Russian Civil War, and then made their way, like Ilyin, into political emigration in Europe. Ilyin later formulated his writings as guidance for Russian leaders who would come to power after the end of the Soviet Union. He died in 1954.”
“After a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin’s short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian editions, his collected works were published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters. He had died forgotten in Switzerland; Putin organized a reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin’s personal papers had found their way to Michigan State University; Putin sent an emissary to reclaim them in 2006. By then Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to the general assembly of the Russian parliament. These were important speeches composed by Putin himself. In the 2010s, Putin relied on Ilyin’s authority to explain why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine.”
That Ilyin’s ideas became popular with Putin and Russia’s leaders is deeply troubling. One must consider Putin and his nation as at least as great a threat to civilization as Hitler and Nazi Germany. Before going into details about Ilyin’s Christian fascism, we should remind ourselves what fascism entails. Wikipedia provides this definition.
“Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.”
Snyder probes the depths of this new Russian darkness.
“Ilyin regarded fascism as the politics of the world to come. In exile in the 1920s, he was troubled that Italians had arrived at fascism before Russians. He consoled himself with the idea that the Russian Whites were the inspiration for Mussolini’s coup: ‘the White movement as such is deeper and broader than [Italian] fascism.’ The depth and breadth, Ilyin explained, came from the embrace of the sort of Christianity that demanded the blood sacrifice of God’s enemies.”
“Ilyin was similarly impressed by Adolph Hitler. Although he visited Italy and vacationed in Switzerland, Ilyin’s home between 1922 and 1938 was Berlin, where he worked for a government-sponsored scholarly institute…Ilyin saw Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism: the Führer, he wrote, had ‘performed an enormous service for all of Europe’ by preventing further revolutions on the Russian model. Ilyin noted with approval that Hitler’s antisemitism was derivative of the ideology of the Russian Whites. He bemoaned that ‘Europe does not understand the National Socialist movement.’ Nazism was above all a ’Spirit’ of which Russians must partake.”
Ilyin died in Switzerland in 1954. During his time there he continued lecturing about a brighter future for the Russian people.
“The essence of these lectures, as a Swiss scholar noted, was that Russia should be understood not as a present communist danger but as a future Christian salvation. According to Ilyin, communism had been inflicted upon innocent Russia by the decadent West. One day Russia would liberate itself and others with the help of Christian fascism. A Swiss reviewer characterized his books as ‘national in the sense of opposing the entire West.”
Hitler merely had his own charisma and concepts of human nature at his disposal, Ilyin and his concept of Christian fascism provided the Russian population and its leader, its “redeemer,” the assistance of God. In his self-serving version of theology, God foolishly created a world that was inherently evil, but Russia and Russian people were somehow spared this fate.
“For Ilyin, our human world of facts and passions is senseless. Ilyin found it immoral that a fact might be grasped in its historical setting: ‘the world of empirical existence cannot be theologically justified.’ Passions are evil. God erred in his creation by releasing the ‘evil nature of the sensual.’ God yielded to a ‘romantic’ impulse by making beings, ourselves, who are moved by sex. And so ‘the romantic content of the world overcomes the rational form of thought, and thought cedes its place to unthinking purpose,’ physical love. God left us amidst ‘spiritual and moral relativism’.”
Ilyin created a theology to his liking, that allowed him to decide all the consequences such as who is evil and who is not, who is to be punished and who is not, and how God is to be served. Russia thus becomes God’s chosen people who are innocent and thus a permanent target for attack by others who are invariably evil. This recognition by God of eternal innocence suggests that Russia and the Russian people can do no wrong.
“As Ilyin saw matters, ‘the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.’ Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia. Facts do not matter and responsibility vanishes.”
“So long as the world is fractured, loving God means a constant struggle ‘against the enemies of divine order on earth.’ To do anything but to join this war was to enact evil: ‘He who opposes the chivalrous struggle against the devil is himself the devil.’ Faith meant war…”
Christian fascism needs a fascist leader. Putin would see himself as exactly what this religion predicted.
“’Power,’ Ilyin imagined, ‘comes all by itself to the strong man.’ A man would appear from nowhere, and Russians would recognize their redeemer: ‘We will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation.’ Emerging from fiction, the redeemer disregards the facts of the world and creates a myth around himself. By taking on the burden of Russians’ passions, he channels ‘the evil nature of the sensual’ into a grand unity.”
Putin would use his name to acquire a level of greatness for himself and begin to think of himself as the redeemer.
“In his first address to the Russian parliament as president in 2012, Putin described his own place in the Russian timescape as a fulfillment of an eternal cycle: as the return of an ancient lord of Kyiv whom Russians called Vladimir…Putin’s first such point was the year 988, when his namesake, an early medieval warlord known in his time as Volodymyr or Valdemar, converted to Christianity. In Putin’s myth of the past, Volodymyr/Valdemar was a Russian whose conversion linked forever the lands of today’s Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.”
Putin and his allies confirm Ilyin’s claims by countering the evils of sexuality and supporting traditional values.
“A confident of Putin, Vladimir Yakunin…published in a long article in November 2012, Russia was eternally confronted with a conspiracy of enemies, which has controlled the course of history since time began. This global group had released homosexual propaganda around the world to reduce birth rates in Russia and thereby preserve the power of the West. The spread of gay rights was a deliberate policy intended to turn Russians into a ‘herd’ easily manipulated by the masters of capitalism.”
“The attempt to put heterosexuality within Russia and homosexuality beyond was factually ludicrous, but the facts were beside the point. The purpose of the anti-gay campaign was to transform demands for democracy into a nebulous threat to Russian innocence: voting = West = sodomy. Russia had to be innocent, and all problems had to be the responsibility of others.”
By the time of his 2012 reelection to the presidency, Putin appeared to have settled on a new foreign politics, one closely tied to the logic of Ilyin. He promoted the concept of Eurasia in which all of Europe should be merged into what would be an expanded Russian empire.
“Writing in the newspaper Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced the grand project of Eurasia. Russia would bring together states that had not proven to be plausible members of the European Union (and implicitly, in the future, states that exited a collapsing European Union). This meant present and future dictatorships. In Nazavisimaia Gazeta on January 23, 2012, Putin claimed, citing Ilyin, that integration was not about common achievement, as the Europeans thought, but about what Putin called ‘civilization.’ On Putin’s logic, the rule of law ceased to be a general aspiration and became an aspect of foreign Western civilization. Integration in Putin’s sense was not about working with others but about praising oneself; not about doing but being. There was no need to do anything to make Russia more like Europe. Europe should be more like Russia.”
“In a third article, in Moskovskie Novosti on February 27, 2012…Russia could never become a member of the EU because of ‘the unique place of Russia on the world political map, its role in history and in the development of civilization.’ Eurasia would therefore ‘integrate’ its future members with Russia without any of the troubling burdens associated with the EU. No dictator would have to step down; no free elections would have to be held; no laws would have to be upheld…In the long run, Putin explained, Eurasia would overwhelm the EU in a larger ‘Union of Europe,’ a ‘space’ between the Atlantic and Pacific, ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’ Not to join Eurasia, Putin said, would be ‘to promote separatism in the broadest sense of the word’.”
This is a good point at which to stop and ask ourselves whether Putin is a clever politician who jumped on a bizarre religious notion and took advantage of it to his great benefit, or is his belief in this nonsense an indication of diminished cognitive powers? Before finally deciding, it might be useful to consider the collection of people who contribute to Putin’s worldview.
One of the people Putin indicates in referencing Eurasia is Lev Gumilev (1912-1992) who promoted the notion in the 1970s and 1980s.
Gumilev’s contribution to Eurasianism was his theory of ethnogenesis: an explanation of how nations arise. It began from a specific understanding of astrophysics and human biology. Gumilev maintained that human sociability was generated by cosmic rays. Some human organisms were more capable than others of absorbing space energy and retransmitting it to others. These special leaders…were the founders of ethnic groups. According to Gumilev, the genesis of each nation could therefore be traced to a burst of cosmic energy which began a cycle that lasted for more than a thousand years. The cosmic rays that enlivened Western nations had been emitted in the distant past, and so the West was dead. The Russian nation arose from cosmic emissions on September 13, 1380, and was therefore young and vibrant.”
“Gumilev also added a specific form of antisemitism to the Eurasian tradition…Healthy nations, such as the Russian, warned Gumilev, must beware ‘chimerical’ groups that draw life not from cosmic rays but from other groups. He meant the Jews…Gumilev therefore advanced three basic elements of modern antisemitism: the Jew as the soulless trader, the Jew as the drinker of Christian blood, and the Jew as the agent of an alien civilization.”
And then there is Alexander Dugin.
“To speak of Eurasia in the Russia of the 2010s was to refer to two distinct currents of thought that overlapped at two points: the corruption of the West and the evil of the Jews. The Eurasianism of the 2010s was a rough mixture of a Russian tradition developed by Gumilev with Nazi ideas mediated by the younger fascist Alexander Dugin (b. 1962). Dugin was not a follower of the original Eurasianists nor a student of Gumilev. He simply used the terms ‘Eurasia’ and ‘Eurasianism’ to make Nazi ideas sound more Russian. Dugin, born half a century after Gumilev, was an antiestablishment kid of the Soviet 1970s and 1980s, playing his guitar and singing about killing millions of people in ovens. His life’s work was to bring fascism to Russia.”
These are just two of the alarming collection of characters who Snyder describes as contributors to Putin’s world.
If believing in nonsense was sufficient to demonstrate failing cognitive powers, a large segment of the population of just about any country would be deemed in some state of dementia. The important point about Putin’s beliefs is that he is putting them into action and they allow him to be as brutal as the Nazis his friends seem to so love. And even if he is not the man he once was, he is still a formidable foe. In any event, his avowed goal to create Eurasia should convince us that Ukraine is just the beginning of a war that will engulf all of Europe if he has his way.
Just as Hitler, he must be
defeated!
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