Is Putin crazy?
Doubt jumps point blank. And it is not accidental. There are facts. According to Vladimir Putin, the massacre of civilians in Bucha is a “fake”. And his military campaign in the Ukraine? “Noble”. The reality does not seem the same for everyone. The vision of the world is far from being one. The one on the mind of the Russian president may be unique.
But not crazy at all.
This is how Michel Eltchaninoff (Paris, 1969), editor-in-chief of the Parisian magazine Philosophy Magazine, doctor of philosophy, professor and expert on Russian philosophy and history. He indicates it after resuming his (award-winning) work from 2015 On Putin’s head. And update it.
Michel Eltchaninoff, photographed in Paris
So the excuse was the annexation of Crimea. Today it’s time to re-diagnose it. Ukraine obliges. And warn in conversation with The vanguard: “Putin thinks like the man he was until he was 40 years old, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is a homo sovieticus. His heart still belongs to a great multinational and imperial state, in conflict with the US and Europe, repository of the memory of the victory against Nazism; one who misses the smaller countries and who believes above all in power relations”.
On other occasions he has branded him an “ideological patient.” The symptoms are various. And today they speak Ukrainian.
Putin thinks like the man he was until he was 40. He is a ‘homo sovieticus’
“For a few weeks, since the invasion of Ukraine, everything has happened as if he had locked himself in that alternative and fanciful vision of the world in which Russia fights the Nazis supported by foreign forces. His speeches become more obsessive and they converge ideological reasons that he himself worried long ago to remove. He has coagulated in his spirit something like it is time for the great revenge against the West. He may not be crazy, but the thought of him, he has become more of a fan,” Eltchaninoff explains.
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The key, according to him, is in his inside world. In his mind. In his ideas. At the bottom of it. Much more than what she expresses in public, which is more and more but is always little.
And here the details matter. Because “humiliation is a central motif in the world view of the Russian president.”
Photograph published by Vladimir Putin when he was a child, in 1960.
In an authorized biography Putin cited – the humiliation of – living as a child in a humble and difficult neighborhood of St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, “chasing rats”. In it “had to be strong.” Or pretend it.
As a young man, as a mid-ranking agent of the feared KGB, of the Soviet secret service in Dresden, East Germany, he lived in the forefront of the fall of the socialist bloc and reunification (another humiliation).
Putin’s Stasi card during his time as a KGB agent in Germany.
And there is more, for example because his belief in the most solid and effective organs of the State comes from afar. His paternal grandfather, Spiridon Putin, got up close and personal with the full power of the Kremlin as a cook for Lenin and Stalin. Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, his father, was an officer of the secret police, the NKVD, against the Nazis and later a worker in an arms factory.
Thus, when he came to politics, to power, official propaganda for years focused on showing him as a leader attached to force, macho, with judo as a guiding philosophy. It is the image of Putin bare-chested on horseback. And also hunting with bare chest and rifle in hand. Or submerging without blinking in icy waters to fulfill a religious rite.
Putin, rifle in hand, in 2007 on a hunt in the Republic of Tuva.
“It’s true. He has stated that judo, founded on observation of the opponent and the art of taking advantage of his weakness, has been his first philosophy. His practice helped him train and be more reflective. But over the years, during his mandate, he wanted more and more to show himself as a president-ideologue”, explains the French author. Moreover, “for several years”, he quotes, “he considers himself a professional historian. He searches for archival documents and writes long articles; in short, he has strong intellectual pretensions.”
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And what he concludes was expressed on the day of the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, thus:
-“Russia’s policy of containment, which it followed in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today. They always try to corner us because we have an independent position, because we defend it, because we call things by their name and we don’t play hypocrisy. But there are limits.”
Translation: has the will to save Russia from perpetual foreign aggression; this is the essence of his vision, according to this specialist. Although to get to her Putin, who has never been discovered as an intellectual, cites others. To Ivan Ilyin, fervent anti-Bolshevik of the 20th century. Or Konstantin Leontyev, conservative and anti-European thinker.
Vladimir Putin may not be crazy but his thinking has become more fanatical
Ilyin, in fact, envisioned a post-communist Russia led by a guide, a strongman very different from Western-style democratic representatives (and he also saw in the takeover of Ukraine the great gamble of future history).
Sounds very modern.
But the Russian president “especially has affection for a 20th-century historian and ethnologist, Lev Gumiliov,” Eltchaninoff confides. And according to this, “each town has a specific vital force, an energy biocósmica extracted from minerals, living beings and the activity of the sun, which he calls passion and that Putin subscribes to”. A) Yes:
“I believe in this theory of passion. In nature as in society there is a development, peak and weakening. Russia has not yet reached its peak. We are on the march, on the march for development ”the Russian president recounted in February 2021. he is convinced. Even to the point of adding: “We have an infinite genetic code”.
The Russian president dives into the water during Orthodox Epiphany celebrations at Lake Seliger in Russia’s Tver region in January 2018.
Almost everyone who inspires Putin is a specialist in Hegel, continues the Frenchman, and for this philosopher, the State is prior to a system of formal law because it obeys a historical rationality. In turn, although he almost always chooses personalities, or quotes, that express opposition to the West and glorify confrontation with it.
Thus, unlike a Western Europe in full decline, crushed under the weight of its old civilization and its political liberalism, and a US steeped in the spirit of calculation and desire for material domination, Russia would be on the rise. civilizational. Consequence: Russia deserves a prominent place among the nations.
Putin, therefore, would be here rational. (Although as the French intellectual Edgar Morin points out in Lessons from a century of life“any rational theory tends to close itself off and become a dogma when it ignores data that invalidates it and rejects without examining the adverse arguments (…) [A la par,] Reason also implies the risk of rationalization, which is a logical construction but based on false premises”.)
According to the Russian president, his country would be in full civilizational ascent. Consequence: deserves a prominent place among the nations
“Putin sees his historic mission as restoring the greatness of a vanished state,” adds Eltchaninoff. “He came to the presidency in 2000 intending to rid his country of the ideology that had exhausted society in the Soviet period, but little by little he reconstituted an ideology made of Soviet nostalgia, anti-Westernism, conservatism and Eurasianism.”
Hence also his respects to the Soviet opponent Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who treated in the distant 1978 at Harvard University about an alleged Slavic superiority and the “Russian soul”.
Putin is even branded a “Christian fascist”
“Vladimir Putin has created an ideological mosaic but to which he adds the even messianic religious element according to which Russia would not have forgotten its Christian roots and would have a saving role in world history,” specifies the Frenchman. The support of the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow Kirill I for the war affects this.
Some summarize it by calling him a “Christian fascist.” In general, he is recognized as a nationalist, religious, conservative, attached to a neo-Sovietism –reduced to its most repressive security policies– that, yes, from the year 2000 until today has gone from being considered liberal to autocratic.
The Orthodox world has cornered Moscow’s Kirill for his blessing of Putin’s war.
-And today can it change again?, Eltchaninoff is questioned.
He answers clearly: “Putin was not a sincere liberal. He was swept up in the atmosphere of the time, in the early 1990s, in the name of his career and his personal enrichment in the St. Petersburg city council led by the Democrat Sobchak. In the early 2000s, he’s still faking it; he wants to charm the western colleagues of him. But since the mid-2000s he already becomes his enemy.”
Putin has been in power since 2000 and may remain until 2036. His reign would be shorter than that of Ivan the Terrible (50 years) or Peter the Great (42 years), “his model.” But it may be older than that of Catherine the Great (34 years old) and that of all Soviet leaders (Stalin kingdom almost 31 years).
A time “that he uses to design a policy that has the luxury of being unpredictable and consistent”, concludes Eltchaninoff. “Unpredictable because the Kremlin uses all means, legal and illegal, to attack its opponents: interference in the elections of foreign countries, assassinations, destabilization, not to mention their speeches. Coherent because it is in line with the ideology based on humiliation and revenge put into practice for years by Putin. Even if he ends up ruining Russia, Putin only has one obsession: to mark the history of his country in indelible letters.”
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