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Opinion, The Guardian Fri 25 Feb 2022 08.00 GMT

What’s going on inside Putin’s mind?

His own words give us a disturbing clue
Michel Eltchaninoff

The Russian president’s dangerous sense of victimhood draws on 20th-

century ideas of his country’s frustrated potential

“T hey have only one objective: to prevent the development

of Russia. They are going to do it in the same way as they did it before,
without furnishing even a single pretext, doing it just because we exist.”

These were Vladimir Putin’s words on 21 February, in his now notorious

speech on Ukraine. They repeat the argument already formulated in
his speech on Crimea in March 2014: “The politics of the containment of
Russia, which continued throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries,
continues today. There is a constant attempt to push us back into a
corner because we have an independent position, because we stand up
for ourselves.” Putin’s vision of Russian history is one of an emergence
continually blocked by enemies.

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The contemporary “west”, in this vision, battles to contain Russia out of

jealousy. Europe has collapsed into decadence, crushed by the weight of
its humanism and political liberalism: tired, divided, at the mercy of
every passing wind. The United States, mired in an instrumental,
materialist culture and the contradictions of its own history, is in the
process of losing its pre-eminence. Russia, by contrast, like its emerging
ally, China, is on the rise in civilisational terms.

Putin leans here on a strange theory advanced by the 20th-century

historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilev. The son of two of Russia’s
most famous poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev
maintains that every people possesses a distinct life force: a “bio-
cosmic” inner energy or passionate substance that he calls passionarnost.
Putin may have known Gumilev in St Petersburg at the start of the
1990s. At any rate, he has embraced his ideas and never misses an
opportunity to refer to them. In February last year, he said: “I believe
in passionarnost. In nature as in society, there is development, climax
and decline. Russia has not yet attained its highest point. We are on the
way”. According to him, Russia carries the power and potential of a
young people. “We possess an infinite genetic code”, he has said.

In addition to Gumilev, Putin relies on another thinker – a minor figure

in the history of Russian thought. Last October, he spoke of regularly
consulting a collection of political essays titled Our Tasks, the major
work of Ivan Ilyin, who died in 1954. In one of the president’s preferred
essays, “What does the world seek from the dismemberment of
Russia?”, Ilyin denounces the country’s “imperialist neighbours”, these
“western peoples who neither understand nor accept Russian
originality”. In the future, he suggests, these countries will inevitably
attempt to seize territories such as the Baltic countries, the Caucasus,
central Asia and, especially, Ukraine. The method, according to Ilyin,
will be the hypocritical promotion of values such as “freedom” in order
to transform Russia into “a gigantic Balkans”. The final object is to
“dismember Russia, to subject her to western control, to dismantle her
and in the end make her disappear”.

It is necessary, then, to understand that what is actually happening in

Ukraine is the result of a vision of Russia that is deeply embedded in the
mind of Putin. In 2008, he punished Georgia for its desire to leave the
orbit of the old imperial power. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and
prevented Ukraine from joining Nato by starting the Donbas conflict.
But that is not enough for him. He wants a confrontation with – and a
victory over – a west that he holds responsible for the fall of the Soviet
Union, for the weakness of Russia in the 1990s, and for the autonomous
tendencies of the old Soviet republics.
Why now? In the years following his re-election in 2018, the patriotic
exaltation that followed the annexation of Crimea faded. Everyday
problems for ordinary people – declining living standards, increased
poverty, inflation, a healthcare crisis – have become worse year by year.
Meanwhile the US has become more preoccupied with China than
Russia. So in July 2021, Putin published the infamous article in which
he proclaimed the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. The
Ukrainians, he maintained, could not be left to suffer indefinitely under
an illegitimate government, which came to power in what he described
as a coup d’etat in 2014. Putin massed his troops on his neighbours’
borders from the spring. He intensified military preparations in the
autumn and issued his ultimatum to Nato and Washington. He set a
carefully laid trap for the west, knowing it was impossible to accept his
demands. Everything was ready for what followed.

As in 2008, Russian state media echoes Putin in evoking the risk of a

genocide. In place of the Ossetians, supposedly menaced by the then
Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, this time the victims to be
defended are in Donetsk and Luhansk. The manufacture of this
humanitarian crisis may, for Putin, carry a pleasing element of irony. He
has never forgotten Nato’s bombing of Belgrade in the spring of 1999, a
few months before he became prime minister. By parodying the
language of ethnic cleansing and genocide (the Russian-speakers of
Donbas this time, rather than the Kosovars), Putin wishes to cancel out
the affront caused by that episode in the darkest way imaginable.

What should we think of this perpetual sense of victimhood that allows

the Russian president to artificially create situations in which Russia
appears humiliated and insulted? Are these the actions of a rational
leader? The answer is both simple and worrying. Putin has developed,
over decades, a vision of the world that is paranoid but coherent.
According to this vision, Russia has for centuries been the victim of an
attempt to contain and dismember it. These attempts must be resisted.
The logic of this is based on a belief that Russia’s passionarnost must not
be constrained.

For Putin – in stark contrast to the tired westerner, lost in the search for
profit and material comfort, “the Russian man thinks first of all … in
relation to a superior moral principle”. And he is prepared to die for it.
Putin often cites a well-known Russian saying: for Russians, “even death
is beautiful”. There may, therefore, be no limits to the quest to avenge
perceived humiliation. The president’s worldview paves the way to
extremism.

 Michel Eltchaninoff is editor-in-chief of Philosophie magazine and

a specialist in the history of Russian thought. He is the author of
Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin. This article was translated by
Julian Coman