We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong

Chapter 5: Putin Doesn’t Read Philosophy, and Russia Is Not Mordor

‘But what’s his philosophy?’ I’d been answering questions for almost an hour from a collection of intelligence analysts, in a European country with a fairly pressing interest in Russia. So far, the questions had been pretty specific and practical: which institutions had more power, who was on the way up and who might be on the way down, was Moscow going to push further into Ukraine? This last question caught me on the hop. I started to talk about Putin’s vision for Russia and his approach to power, but this was clearly not what the questioner had in mind.

‘No, I mean which philosophical school of thought does he follow? Is he committed to Dugin’s Eurasianism or Prokhanov’s neo-Imperialism? Do you subscribe to the view that his ideas are shaped by Ivan Ilyin’s writings?’ Oh dear, I thought to myself. I had been so close to getting out of there, but it seemed that I was going to be stuck for a while longer.

Having been caught by surprise by him before, people are often looking for the magic answer with Putin, the key that will somehow unlock his plans and secrets. For some, it’s all about following the money, while for others it’s about rebuilding the USSR. Then there are those like that analyst who, in their quest to try and understand how Putin thinks – and thus what he may do next – seek to identify philosophers, dead or alive, whom they can present as explaining his world view.

Consider the names above. Alexander Dugin is a writer, pundit, philosopher and enthusiastic self-publicist who delights in such Western descriptions of him as ‘Putin’s brain’. He espouses ‘Eurasianism’, the idea that Russia should be the heart of an empire spanning Europe and Asia, committed to fighting Western ‘Atlanticism’ and the liberal values it represents. At various times, he has eulogised fascism, Stalin, Neopaganism and then Putin, saying, ‘Putin is everywhere, Putin is everything, Putin is absolute, and Putin is indispensable.’ In early 2014 his views were useful to provide some kind of intellectual rationale for the Crimean land-grab, and when Putin was toying with either creating a puppet pseudo-state of ‘Novorossiya’ (‘New Russia’) in south-eastern Ukraine, or annexing that land, too. But by summer of that year, Putin had backed away from this idea, and Dugin was suddenly no longer useful. His appearances in the media dwindled dramatically, and his contract at Moscow State University was not renewed.

Alexander Prokhanov was an old-school propagandist from Soviet times, who was called ‘the nightingale of the General Staff’ for his sentimental odes to the bravery and decency of the Red Army, portraying them upholding internationalist values and foiling dastardly CIA plots from Afghanistan to Central America. Now he is an ageing ultranationalist, churning out articles and books calling for a new Russian empire, and making occasional trips to the Donbas to pose with a Kalashnikov in his hand. In 2012 he founded the Izborsk Club, a nationalist think tank that some see as a sinister engine powering Russian policy abroad. Yet while it regularly generates lunatic proposals, such as the idea that Ukraine could be divided between Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, they are distinctly absent from Kremlin calculations.

Finally, Ivan Ilyin was a White, or anti-Bolshevik, émigré who died in 1954. In The Road to Unfreedom, the historian Timothy Snyder paints him as a man who ‘ignored or despised: individualism, succession, integration, novelty, truth and equality’ and at the same time as an intellectual inspiration for Putin. This characterisation of Ilyin as a ‘fascist’ is pretty questionable – after all, this is a man who believed passionately in the rule of law and wrote that ‘freedom of the will is essential’ and that ‘self-determination in spirit is the deepest law of this life’. But regardless of such philosophical debates, the real issue is whether there is any evidence that Putin reads, let alone follows, Ilyin – or any of his other supposed inspirations. It is true that Ilyin’s writings were among a batch he suggested that regional governors read, back in 2014, and they certainly usefully justify his belief in Russia’s unique place in history, the importance of a strong ruler and the role of the Orthodox Church in defending Russia’s soul and ideals.

However, does occasionally quoting from the writing of Ilyin and others truly mean that Putin considers them his lodestars? Moreover, it is impossible to know if these are his or his speechwriters’ words. Instead of shaping policy, this is all about managing the public narrative; when some figures’ ideas are politically convenient they are hyped, and when they become liabilities they fade from view. Even when the ideas seem to chime with Putin’s own instincts, he is enough of a politician to put pragmatism first. Dugin, for example, has called for the Internet to be banned, and given that Putin has in the past described it as a CIA plot, one might think that this at least would get a positive hearing. However, with more than three-quarters of all Russians now using the Internet it is clearly a non-starter, and when the idea has been raised, Putin has shot it back down.

There is, after all, always another grand thesis or eccentric philosophy on which to draw, and a whole gallery of pundits, scholars, authors and know-it-alls are trying to influence Putin – or at least to give the impression that they do. In many ways, we can consider them as philosophical entrepreneurs akin to the political and economic varieties – they pitch their ideas to the Kremlin, locked in a rhetorical arms race with each other for attention and relevance, often by being more strident and striking than the last. But just as there is no one figure who is the power behind Putin’s throne, nor is there any one philosophy or philosopher that shapes his thinking. So, I had to disappoint that eager analyst and tell him that there was no key to this particular lock – or rather, that the answer was at once simpler and more complex.

In the same way as there is no single detailed strategy behind his attempts to elevate Russia internationally, nor is there is an explicit, coherent ideology in his domestic policy. Instead, within his unemotional exterior there bubbles a mix of very human motivations that generate his policies and responses. In what does Putin believe? As explored in previous chapters, he is a gut-level patriot who believes that Russia should be considered a great power not because of its military strength, its economy or for any other specific index, but because it’s Russia. This kind of primordial nationalism is hardly unique to him, or to Russia, but it bites especially sharply given that he and his generation still remember being a superpower. To an extent, this is about security – the idea that Russia must protect itself in a scary and unpredictable world – but it is also about respect and honour. Outsiders ought to treat Russia right, treat it better than they have previously.

To Putin, security and respect are based on strength, and a strong country needs strong state power. Like his fears about Russia being weak and his resentment at it being disrespected, this feeling is to a large degree rooted in the formative post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. One of his first priorities on assuming power – and, to be honest, one of his real achievements – was to stop Russia sliding further into near collapse and assert the ‘power vertical’, a system of top-down personal control. However, the details seem to matter less to him. He grew up and lived in a state socialist economy, and though he had practical complaints about day-to-day inefficiencies and shortages, as far as we know he didn’t object to it philosophically. Now he runs a capitalist state, albeit one warped out of shape by corruption and oligarchic monopolies, and again, while he may sometimes be unhappy about some of the details, he shows no signs of wanting fundamental systemic reform.

Putin will go for what works. He is happy to read writers like Ilyin and enjoy the sense that his innate bias towards a strong, powerful and centrifugal state has a rich cultural pedigree, to quote the soundbites that work today. But he believes in power and pragmatism rather than in philosophy. As long as he can get what he wants from the existing system, he’s content.

The same utilitarianism applies to Putin’s foreign policy. He is increasingly presented as a leader who is committed to overturning the existing world order and its liberal democratic norms. He will certainly criticise what is, after all, an order largely created by the West, in the West’s image, and for the West’s advantage. He also plays with the role as champion of traditional social values, of a bygone age where men were men, women knew their place, and no one had even heard of transgenderism. But again, this is more instrumental than ideological. He believes that the West is essentially hypocritical and that a mark of a great power – like the USA – is its exceptionalism, the idea that it can ignore the pesky rules when it wants to, which is what he wants for Russia. He is happy to exploit the current fractures within the West, presenting the EU as prey to degenerate ultra-liberalism; if you watch Russian television coverage about Europe – or ‘Gayropa’, as some spiteful propagandists put it – you’d believe that children there are being forcibly ripped from their families and given to gay couples, and that every spare bedroom has to house a jihadist Muslim migrant, by law. Ultimately, this is because these are ways in which Putin can persuade Russians that they don’t want to be more like us, while also dividing, distracting and demoralising us. Above all, though, he is trying to assert Russia’s great power status de facto and to get us to accept that vision. But it’s all politics. If the price of securing Russia a great power get-out-of-jail-free card were to be to bless non-traditional marriages in Europe and gender-neutral bathrooms in the American Midwest, I imagine he’d accept that deal in a heartbeat.

The disappointing truth for the alt-right fanboys in the West who see Putin as their ideal patriarch is that he is nothing of the sort. Yes, he is a tough, even ruthless leader, but in social terms he is hardly the champion of conservatism they think. He upholds gun control and abortion rights, and while he went along with small-minded laws against so-called ‘gay propaganda’ – which can be stretched to almost anything normalising gay relationships – it was not an initiative that came from the Kremlin. He is a confirmed Russian Orthodox Christian, but has demonstrated no hint of anti-Semitism, notable in a country with a dark history of its relations with its Jews. If anything, the opposite is true: he has encouraged the revival of synagogues at home and forged a close alliance with Israel abroad. Although he is happy to engage in horrifyingly sexist ‘banter’ – as such language is so often normalised – including joking about rape, he is again unusual by the standards of many Russians of his generation in listening to, and sometimes even empowering, women. For example, Elvira Nabiullina has been chair of the Central Bank since 2013. She has been carrying out a ruthless campaign to try and clean out toxic and criminal banks. In the process she often comes up against powerful vested interests, but Putin has backed her time and again against men who might have been useful new cronies for him.

This is one of the abiding themes of Putin’s politics: he is happy to play many roles to many audiences, as seems useful, but beyond those primal bedrock issues of power, security and respect, they are simply performances. The same pragmatism applies at home. According to some more hostile foreign commentators, Russia is near enough an earthly Mordor, North Korea with balalaikas. However, walk the streets of Moscow, and you’d find yourself in a modern, dynamic and frankly fun European city. Even out in the provinces, where money is tighter and the new middle class are rather thinner on the ground, there is ample evidence of change. By this I don’t just mean coffee houses, Wi-Fi and branches of Marks & Spencer (thirty-six in Russia so far), but also real debate, investigative journalism and even civil society.

Putin has no ideological commitment to anything, really, and so has no reason to try to impose totalitarianism. Ideologists are, after all, the scariest kinds of rulers, because they want to dictate what goes on inside their people’s heads. Putin is, of course, willing to use propaganda and media control to mobilise support and squeeze out alternative perspectives, but he doesn’t really care what people think – so long as they do what they are told. As I’ll consider in Chapter 9, this creates interesting spaces for unexpected freedoms and even a ‘resistance that dare not speak its name’ inside his Russia. Putin is not a philosopher – and that is something for which we, and Russians, should be thankful.