The Return of the Enemy

Pascal Bruckner

South Central Review, Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 35-47 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scr.2018.0002

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/690690

Access provided at 4 Nov 2019 15:13 GMT from University of Toledo

THE RETURN OF THE ENEMY / BRUCKNER 35

The Return of the Enemy

Pascal Bruckner

“Death to our enemies. If we lose the battle, we will destroy the whole
world.”1 “Russia is the only country in the world that can turn America
into radioactive ash. That is undoubtedly the reason why Barack Obama’s
hair gets greyer after every call from Putin.”2 “Warsaw is only one thou-
sand three hundred kilometers away from Moscow; our planes can reach
it within two hours and our airborne troops can land there within twenty-
four. Our armies can also get to Berlin, Tallinn, Prague; we already did
it; we know the way. As for London and Washington, it might take some
more time, but we’ll get there easily.”3 Here are a few examples, among
many others, of the propaganda poured out daily by Russian media, il-
lustrated by pictures of missiles looking like giant suppositories coming
out of their silos and of cities burnt to ashes. Vladimir Putin, indeed,
publicly recognized that he had ordered the deployment of nuclear missile
batteries during the spring of 2014, when Crimea was being annexed, so
as to deter any foreign intervention, most notably from the U.S.

The Fall of the Wall as Immune Deficiency

In 1989, as the soviet Empire was exploding, Alexander Arbatov,

diplomatic adviser to Mikhail Gorbatchev, issued a quick-witted warn-
ing to the West: “we are about to do you a terrible favor; we will deprive
you of your enemy.” The disappearance of communism indeed threw
Europe and the United States into a certain state of confusion and almost
amounted to some kind of symbolic disaster. Of course, one must rejoice
that our favorite opponent let us down and that its demise allowed peoples
to be freed from the communist yoke. But anti-totalitarianism was also
a lesson in vigilance and clarity. There was something both comforting
and terrible in the hostility the USSR exhibited against us; because that
land embodied arbitrariness and dictatorship, the East/West divide cut
off right from wrong as neatly as a blade. A terrorist attack in Africa or
the Middle-East, an anti-American riot in Asia, a coup in the Caribbean
Islands could always be, one way or another, blamed on Moscow, the true
brain of global subversion, hidden behind a multitude of smoke-screens
and front organizations (the Russians played the same game, exposing

© South Central Review 35.1 (Spring 2018): 35–47.

36 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

the grip of the Yankee octopus and its dreary Central Intelligence Agency
[CIA] everywhere). Accordingly, the specific interest of a country (be
it Poland, Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan) could always be identified
with that of mankind as a whole; everywhere that the spirit of liberty
fought against the darkness of despotism. But as soon as despotism
itself claimed that it had given up the spirit of conflict in favor of that
of cooperation, a proliferation of threats took the place of a unique, but
nonetheless exhilarating, danger.
At least, with the USSR, one knew what one had to deal with; nowa-
days, troublemakers are likely to multiply, coming from every direction.
Surely, contrary to totalitarian regimes, which are always in need of an
enemy that keeps on changing and reviving according to the situation,
democracies, as a matter of principle, have no enemies other than the
ones against which they defend themselves. Democracies confine, they
contain, and they seldom attack. Yet, the anti-Soviet crusade had numer-
ous advantages: it mobilized individuals always prone to lose themselves
in the comfort of peace; it slowed the apathy characteristic of affluent
societies; and it provided an appearance of meaning to a common proj-
ect. Mankind remained whole in our shared concern, and we remained
supportive of the various peoples trying to shake off the Soviet grip: the
Polish worker, the Vietnamese boatpeople, and the Afghan mujahideen.
Finally, the threat hanging over the very foundations of our social life
gave an unrivaled salience to all that seemed self-evident in our institu-
tions, our rights, and our wellbeing. We cherished democracy as a good
that could be taken from us at any moment, and the need for security
blended itself with the defense of a sacred cause.
Indeed, with the fall of the wall, we have lost the perks of simplicity.
Peace results in a chaotic world deprived of unity, liable to explode in
uneven fragments. Like two twins wrestling against one another, East
and West could neither exterminate one another nor give up the fight
without depriving themselves from their very purpose. We remain today
the orphans of that fundamental division. What Stalinism failed to achieve
was brought about by Gorbatchev’s Perestroika in 1989; the weakening
of a Europe paralyzed by its own victory, victim of a sudden immune
deficiency. Not only was it the case that North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion (NATO) was going through a crisis when the annexation of Crimea
took place in 2014, but Europe itself, despite Washington’s recrimina-
tions, never succeeded in setting up a common system of defense. On the
contrary, Europe disarms although it stands at the heart of the stormiest
of locations, stuck between an Africa in turmoil, a Middle East ravaged
by chaos, and an aggressive Russia. On the continent, only two nations
THE RETURN OF THE ENEMY / BRUCKNER 37

still have an army worthy of that name: France and the United Kingdom.
But there too, many call for the drastic reduction of military expenses,
even the new elect President Macron who decided to reduce the budget
defense by 850 million euros, provoking the anger and the resignation
of the Chief of staff, Pierre de Villiers.
In other words, Europe makes itself vulnerable whereas risks have
never been so numerous. For an enemy is a supply for the future, a way
for a group to assert itself by opposing something else. It is also the best
way of reforming oneself through the constant rectification of the twisted
image offered by the other. Finally, it is the certainty of lasting through the
hostility of the other that, quite paradoxically, comforts us whilst denying
us. Although nobody can ever be sure of the love of one’s friends, one
can always confidently rely on the hatred of one’s enemies. Who could
claim to provide, as communism once did, an alternative system to our
values? Who could assume a symbolic challenge of that magnitude?
Radical Islam? Even if it abhors us, dreams of putting down Rome and
Washington, to Islamize the whole western world, even if it threatens,
through terrorism, our cities, our transportation system, it fortunately
consumes itself in the long civil war that opposes, from Mauritania to the
Indian border, Shiites and Sunnis, traditionalists and Jihadists, moderates
and radicals. As long as the jihadists (Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Boko
Haram, Hezbollah etc.) and their fundamentalist allies, The Muslim
Brotherhood, the Wahhabis, and the Salafists slaughter one another, we
are at peace. And ISIS, as a pseudo state is about to be defeated in Raqqa
by the Arab and Kurdish armies backed up by the Allies forces, mainly
Americans. The prospect to see Islam as a force of replacement of the
West, as a global proposition of civilization is, for the moment, very weak.
At the beginning of the 1990s, we were almost forced to live by the
evangelical principle: “Love your enemies.” We quickly needed to find
other foes—such was the price of our balance. Let us be happy with those
who want us dead; they might save us. In fact, these Bolsheviks, we ended
up caring for them. We cherished them with some kind of morbid delight,
just like some patients nurture their wounds and swellings. Because of
its complete disappearance, we ended up missing communism, with
no hope that the neo-totalitarian ersatz in Caracas or Cuba could ever
replace it. As for China, it is today the façade of a revived nationalism
allied to a conquering capitalism. It might even be the case that the dis-
solution of the USSR in 1989 had produced in us as much anxiety as its
birth as a state in 1917. The totalitarianism that existed outside enabled
us to feel good, virtuous at home. But where is evil now? Who would
impersonate the Devil?
38 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

Maybe it is it case that the Russians missed the enemy more than
the West. Meanwhile, they mobilized anew against us and displayed an
unprecedented hatred towards the Western world. Or perhaps, the Rus-
sians despise Europe, which they hold to be ravaged by the gay lobby
and parliamentarian decadence, and hate America, which they accuse
of attempting to colonize the whole world. Twenty years later, the old
world, which had succumbed in the mean time to some sort of spineless
skepticism, seems to have rallied two very different enemies: Radical
Islam and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Both share resentment against the
West, charged by the former of being hostile to the Prophet’s religion
and by the latter of having caused the demise of the USSR, the great-
est geopolitical catastrophe of the Twentieth century, as the head of the
Kremlin once admitted to Angela Merkel. In other words, the fall of the
wall, which had freed millions of people from communism, would be,
in the eyes of Putin, the former Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
(KGB) spy who was serving in Leipzig at the time, worse than the First
and Second World Wars, the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima.
But the parallel stops here: whereas Allah’s madmen reject the Western
World as a whole because they judge it to be a sin, Putin conceives of
himself as a hyperbolic westerner; he abhors Europe and its decadence
in the very name of the true values he pretends to embody. He flaunts a
healthy Russia against a perverted West. All the evils that cripple Russia
would come not from the Russian themselves or from the twofold des-
potic legacy of Tsarism and Communism, but from a corrupting Europe,
a malevolent America and a Satanic NATO. From the West, the symbol of
freedom and the critical mind, he fears most all a democratic contagion
and the exportation of a new Maïdan in Russia, although such an event
seems very unlikely given the weak state of the existing opposition there.

Putin as national-Bolshevik synthesis

According to Slavophile ideologues, Moscow would be the home of

the Third Rome and the cradle of the true Christianity had it not been
confiscated by Rome and the crooked strategies it used against Orthodoxy.
Putin is neither Stalin, nor Hitler, but some sort of a national-Bolshevik
synthetic product, with an extra dose of narcissism and exhibitionism on
top of it, bent on dissimulation, generally followed by brutal showdowns
and insults against his opponents (during the war in Chechnya, he swore
to whack the terrorists “even down into the toilets”; he kept his word). In
the train stations and airports of Russia, you can buy mugs and T-shirts
THE RETURN OF THE ENEMY / BRUCKNER 39

with the face of the president smoking a cigar, handling a gun and a
wearing a cowboy hat—the cult of personality multiplied to infinity by
the culture of merchandising. Some commentators question his mental
health and claim that he suffers from some kind of autism, but nothing
in his behavior suggests any mental condition, quite the contrary. From
his stint in the KGB, he inherited a fundamental principle of Sovietism:
the salami strategy, which allows one to slice the countries one wants to
conquer before swallowing them. These countries included Ossetia and
Abkhazia in Georgia, Crimea and the Donbas region in Ukraine, Trans-
nistria in Moldavia, and maybe tomorrow if nobody stops him, a chunk
of Estonia or Latvia, a fragment of Belarus, the north-end of Kazakhstan
or even the entire former zone of influence of the Soviet Union.
Everywhere there are Russian minorities, he claims for himself
the right to intervene so as to protect them, bringing back unpleasant
memories in the minds of Europeans, most notably the annexation of the
Sudetenland by Hitler (because he drew that comparison with respect to
the annexation of Crimea, historian Andrei Zoubov has lost his teaching
job in Moscow, which immediately prompted the Mohyla University in
Kiev to award him an honorary degree).4 All this was done in the name
of the well-known motto of Stalinist diplomacy: “Everything that is
mine is mine; everything that is yours is always negotiable.” His skill
at dividing many countries of the European Union, at financing certain
sovereignist parties opposed to Brussels, including the Front National,
at buying Hungary, at flattering Slovakia, at cuddling Alexis Tsipras’
Greece, at cajoling both the Far Right and the Far Left, makes one think
that he is, indeed, aiming at breaking up Europe in order to avenge the
offense of 1989. Eager to take his revenge, Putin benefits in the West
from a surprising popularity, especially in the French right, which cur-
rently exhibits some sort of “Putinolatry.”
A Judo black belt and a Karateka, Putin loves to recount his youth as
a thug and as a KGB spy. His authoritarianism fascinates the weak. He
likes to parade bare chested riding a horse, to fiddle with guns, to swim
in the Yenisei River, to fly a bomber, to pose next to a white leopard or
a polar bear in the Artic, to hold a tiger in his arms, and to practice all
sports, from downhill skiing to ice hockey. The body of the new tsar and
its musculature must evidence the resolution of the leader and liken it to
an almost superhuman character. The display of that hyper-masculinity
has turned him into an icon of gay networks, a somewhat funny out-
come for such a compulsive homophobe, and contrasts with the bodily
absence of European leaders. It is hard to imagine François Hollande,
Donald Trump or even Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau in swim-
40 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

ming trunks unveiling their curves in front of ecstatic crowds. The cult
surrounding the Muscovite Rambo in France rallies such diverse figures
as Marine Le Pen and Alain Soral, who worship that Alpha male, along
with Éric Zemmour, and even the Far Left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon and
the Monde Diplomatique, which still believe that Moscow remains the
rightful heir to the USSR and the only power to have opposed capitalism.
There also exists another unifying factor to that craze in the frantic
anti-Americanism of our elites, be they rightwing or leftwing. In France,
many would never forgive the Allies for having liberated us from Na-
zism, and incidentally from Communism. It is an unbearable debt that
backfires into animosity. Hence the need to weaken by all means avail-
able the Transatlantic Republic, the fall of which is awaited year after
year and which is blamed for everything that goes wrong in the world,
from Terrorism to Global Warming. In fact, the call made by Aymeric
Chauprade, a former Front National adviser for international affairs who
once interpreted 9–11 as the result of an American-Zionist plot: “One
must side with Russia so as to counterbalance the USA by way of a stra-
tegic partnership.” Those were the words Putin used in August 2014, in
Yalta when he welcomed in Philippe de Villiers, an inchoate right-wing
politician who runs a historical festival in his native Vendée but who is
also driven by a staunch abhorrence for the United States and whose
brother happened to be the French army chief of staff since February
2014 until he was brutally dismissed by Président Macron. In one word,
it is not the love of Russian civilization, a passion for Pushkin, Gogol or
Rachmaninov that drive the French friends of Mr. Putin; it is love of the
Knout, fascination for brutality, disrespect for the law, and suppression
of the press the Master of the Kremlin adores.

Rebuilding the USSR

Politically speaking, Mr. Putin has evolved. He started as a well-

behaved reformist at the beginning of the 2000s, driven by the will to
slow the demographic collapse of the country and to get rid of the two
evils of alcoholism and corruption, but ended up a hyper-nationalist with
an imperial bent. Such was the consequence of what could be called
the Leipzig trauma, when he was serving as a KGB spy at the end of
the 1980s and was utterly dismayed by the joy expressed by the former
Eastern Bloc peoples at being liberated from Communism and, even
more so, from the presence of the Russian occupant. For 1989 sparked
a great movement of decolonization within Eastern and Central Europe.
THE RETURN OF THE ENEMY / BRUCKNER 41

That is what Putin cannot forgive his closest neighbors for; neighbors he
considers the perennial property of Moscow, just as if France dreamed of
re-occupying equatorial Africa and Vietnam or England wanted to reclaim
India or Malaysia. According to him, there is no doubt Ukrainians and
Georgians cannot willingly leave the Great Russian family. If they do so,
it is with the support, incitation, and financial help of Western propaganda
and, most notably, the CIA and the Pentagon, which covertly conspire
to destroy great Russia. Even in Ukraine, where everybody has a parent
in Russia, speaks both Russian and Ukrainian, that feeling of having cut
the umbilical cord is tangible in all conversations. Kiev wants to find in
Europe a surrogate family, to forge alliances, to root itself in the great
Atlantic momentum. For Ukraine, such a drift towards the West perhaps
feeds a complex with respect to the neighboring big brother from whom
it is now willing to distance itself and whose invasive concerns are to be
stifled by all means available.
As early as 2001, Putin started issuing smothering love declarations to
Ukraine—considered to be Russia’s cradle—that oscillated between cud-
dling and threats: “Our roots go back to Kievan Russia. Our brotherliness
is no legend; it is a historical fact.”5 Russian orthodoxy was in fact born
in Kiev in 987 A.D. under Prince Vladimir, and that was “the christening
of Russia.” Any move towards Europe would be resented by the former
as treason, personal drama, and the heartbreak of the Russian psyche.
And now that Kiev had dared sign a treaty with the EU, Putin, eager to
punish that ungratefulness, would like to reclaim, not only the Donbas,
but also Kharkov, Mykolaiv, Odessa, and Mariupol in order to create a
passage towards Crimea. That is the Novorussia Project, which consists
of reclaiming all the territories given away by the Soviet Power in 1920,
and in trying to recapture the Russian diaspora population. However, it
also over-ambitiously aims at bringing into line Armenia, Bulgaria, the
North of Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kirghizstan, etc.
Faced with that imperial thrust, Ukraine is getting off to a bad start.
On the brink of economic collapse, burdened with an incompetent army,
crippled by corruption, mafias and oligarchs with shifting loyalties,
Ukraine also struggles with ghosts of the past. These revenants include
the haunting memory of Banderism and the legacy of Stepan Bandera,
a fascist and notorious anti-Semite who created the Ukrainian Legion
that was to serve under the German command of the Wehrmacht and
who instigated the slaughtering of many Jews and Poles during World
War Two (although he was imprisoned by the Nazis in Sachsenhausen
after he proclaimed Ukraine’s independence). Bandera, whose name
had been given to an avenue in the city of Lviv, has been the object of a
42 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

dodgy cult in Western Ukraine, even though the local Far-right has been
beaten at every election so far.6 Neither did Kiev overcome the legacy
of communism, whose deleterious effects can still be felt in the eastern
part of the country, which remains nostalgic toward the Soviet Union. It
is impossible to know whether Ukraine wants to join Europe in order to
cleanse itself from these horrible events or to settle its own history. Yet,
it increasingly faces the indifference of most EU countries, whereas it
at least hoped to awake a “Europe of faith,” as Ukrainian philosopher
Volodymir Yoromenko put it. Instead, Ukraine has failed to become a
member of Europe in its own right. Only the memory of Holodomor,
the great famine orchestrated by Stalin in 1932–1933, in the name of
collectivization and Dekulakisation and that resulted in two to three mil-
lions dead, keeps on uniting the various political forces.

The Global Conspiracy against Russia

Putin’s ideology has evolved with time, as the Ukrainians and

Georgians started wanting to get rid of Russian tutelage. Nowadays,
it is a white-brown-red hodgepodge. It blends an imperial nostalgia,
the manipulation of far-right groups put forward when necessary, and
above all, the questionable rehabilitation of Stalin, one of the greatest
criminals of the Twentieth Century together with Hitler, Mao Zedong,
and the despicable Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), a member of the
Polish aristocracy, a Bolshevik agitator who had been jailed for eleven
years, a close friend of Lenin, the founder of Cheka, the secret police
that gave birth to Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (GPU),
the forerunner to the KGB, and the instigator of the Red Terror during
the Civil War that followed the Revolution of 1917 (and which resulted
in 3 to 10 million dead). He was said to have coined that famous saying:
“For those who do not agree with us, four walls are three too many.”
As for Stalin, it is not the Communist leader Putin exalts, but the patriot
who preserved Russia at war with Nazism, the heir of Peter the Great and
Catherine the Second, the man who allegedly liberated Europe and could
negotiate on equal footing with Churchill, Roosevelt and De Gaulle. The
mass crimes he committed are now forgotten, buried, and modern Russia
has not carried out any reflection on communism, in contrast to the kinds
of self-examination that Germany has undertaken with respect to the Nazi
period. What matters is vindicating the historical mission of the Russian
people in the face of the hostility of the West. Russia will have to save
Europe from itself and despite itself, even though it could involve strik-
THE RETURN OF THE ENEMY / BRUCKNER 43

ing the most essential centers of the latter. In the eyes of the Kremlin’s
leaders, the whole world owes a crucial debt to the Russians because of
their struggle against fascism. That fight cost more than twenty million
lives and spared the planet the domination of Hitlerism. Such a claim
is correct but deserves to be qualified: the huge sacrifice of the Russian
people was caused by the foolishness and folly of Stalin, who beheaded
the Red Army in 1937, carved up Europe, in agreement with his evil twin
Adolf Hitler, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (August 23, 1939) and
left his country defenseless, allowing the Wehrmacht to operate a striking
breakthrough in the first months of Operation Barbarossa. All the nations
of Western Europe may thank God for not having been liberated by the
Red Army but by the Allies, who behaved decently most of the time and
did not substitute one kind of barbarism for another.
Putin’s famous quote on the Bolshevik era is quite enlightening: “Who-
ever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back
has no brain’’ (February 2000). Putin is the leader of a grudge, and the
Federation of Russia has become a huge empire of resentment, blaming
the nefarious intentions of the West for all its evils, alcoholism, violence,
poverty, premature mortality, and prostitution. He shows no remorse for
his work as a spy during the Soviet era and probably took part in the hunt
for dissidents. He supported the reawakening of Russian culture, whose
diffusion has been carried out most notably by Solzhenitsyn when he
came back from exile after the fall of the wall, but in a purely spiteful
manner. Putin’s spin-doctors have changed throughout the years. His
special adviser Vladislav Sourkov, his “Rasputin,” has been sidelined
after the 2011 protests. Three characters plaid an important role at his
side: monk Tikhon Shevkunov, the head of the Sretensky Monastery
in Moscow; film director Nikita Mikhalkov; and Vladimir Yakounine,
a Ph.D. in political science who is also staunchly anti-western even if
these personalities have lost their influence nowadays. Accordingly,
Putin’s Zeitgeist is three-layered: a classic kind of conservatism focused
on family values, traditions and religion; an apology of a Russian way
tinged with Messianism; and an imperial dream drawing on a Eurasian
idea, where Russia benefits from the advantage of straddling on both
continents, and therefore, gathers together various peoples, languages
and cultures, including Turkish-speaking communities.
But Putin is above all “the child of a daily militarism.”7 Haunted by
a soldier’s mindset, he considers the frontier between war and peace as
constantly moving and rejects any self-reflection on the Soviet past. Since
the fall of the USSR was an historical catastrophe, Moscow’s duty does
not consist in launching itself into some sort of destructive self-criticism
44 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

but in contributing to remedy that disaster. Once a Kantian and a Lib-

eral advocating close cooperation with Europe, Putin was enraged by
NATO’s intervention in Kosovo and the overthrow of Khadafy in Libya
in 2011. He instigated the second war of Chechnya in 1999, which was
fuelled by attacks in Dagestan that were in all likelihood carried out by
secret services but blamed on Chechen separatists. That war resulted in
two hundred thousand dead and the complete destruction of the city of
Grozny. Inspired by white émigré philosopher Ivan Ilyin, Putin dreams
of a “power vertical” endowed with a quasi-spiritual guide, and he relies
on the Orthodox Church to indoctrinate people.
The Orange revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia convinced him that
it was time to turn to ultra-nationalism. He links the demographic col-
lapse of his country to the emergence of sexual minorities and vindicates
Russian cultural immunity against deleterious foreign influences. He
calls his opponents traitors, members of the fifth column, and orders
the assassination of the most vocal among them (Anna Politovskaïa
and Boris Nemtsov). His conservative turn became complete in 2013
when he exposed a global pedophile attack aimed at subverting the
values of Christian civilization. He has taken up the old debate between
Westernizers, who call for the imitation of Europe, and Slavophiles, like
Dostoyevsky, drawing inspiration from Russian philosopher Nicolas
Danilevski (1822–1885), who conceived of the relations between na-
tions as a Darwinian struggle between species: “the struggle against the
West is the only healthy means both of curing Russian culture and of
furthering Pan-Slavic sympathy.”8
Alexander Dugin is another guru of Putin. He was the founder, to-
gether with writer Eduard Limonov, of the Bolshevik-National Front,
a kind of far-left fascism willing to counter the Euro-American Empire
and to fight the Antichrist to the extent that Russia, according to them,
is a nation chosen by God. Accordingly, Putin’s software blends all
the strata of Russia’s history: it is at the same time Slavophile, Soviet,
conservative, nationalistic and Eurasian. For him, that civilization is a
living organism that has survived the worst horrors of history and whose
genetic code is more resistant than the genetic code of Europeans. Let us
add to Putin’s ideological satellites the far-right theoretician Alexander
Prokhanov, born in 1938, and who maintains that Russia “is by nature an
empire whose borders breathe.” What a wonderful definition, but it begs
the question of the limits of that respiratory capacity and where it will
lead a theocracy led by God. Holy Russia would have to ally with China
and India to fight against the West. It would thus create a global empire
against homosexuality, atheism, cosmopolitanism, and the United States.
THE RETURN OF THE ENEMY / BRUCKNER 45

We are at war

Let us entertain no doubt about this: the cold war has resumed, under
the initiative of the autocrat of the Kremlin. Putin pulled off the amazing
feat of reducing the outstanding Russian civilization to three key ele-
ments: militarism, corruption, and organized crime. State kleptocracy
has replaced oligarchic plundering. Against Russian territorial ambi-
tions, Putin has resorted to the old strategy of containment as defined
by George Kennan in 1947. The size of Russia and its military power
forbid direct confrontation. Neither war nor peace, but a continuous trial
of strength, cooperation under tension, and a partnership in mistrust are
possible. And quite predictably there is an imperative need to increase
economic sanctions against Moscow, to supply Ukraine with weapons
so as to balance the forces at play, to strengthen the Eastern borders of
Europe and to threaten Moscow with the harshest retaliations available
in case Poland, the Baltic countries or Moldavia were to be attacked. One
cannot help hoping that one day, Russia will give up its imperial dream
and instead aim to distinguish itself by means of its culture and talents.
In the meantime, one is forced to acknowledge that Ukraine, Moldavia,
and Georgia are the heirs to the great anti-colonialist struggles of the
Twentieth Century.
In any case, let us recognize that this enemy of ours has been born
and it helps us be vigilant. Even Moscow advocates an alliance between
Islam and the Orthodox Church against Rome and the spirit of the En-
lightenment. The enemy puts us in the contradictory position of both
wanting to defeat it and to preserve it so as to maintain the energy it
provides us with. It is both detestable and desirable. It is in the midst of
the greatest hardship that a people reveals herself. Such a conjunction
of threats can destroy us; but it might also force Europe to take control
of its own destiny, the United States to wake up, and these two powers
to cooperate. If America were to collapse tomorrow, Europe would fall
like a house of cards; it would return to the same dithering it showed
in Munich in 1938, and be reduced to a deluxe sanatorium ready to al-
low itself to be torn apart, piece by piece by all sort of predators. But if
Europe were to be dismembered in this way, America’s prospects would
not be bright, either because it would stiffen in a touchy nationalism,
an Orwellian isolationism. On the other hand, every time Europe and
America cooperate on a specific project, like the present collaboration
between the Pentagon and the French army in Iraq, in Syria and Sub-
Saharan Africa, they achieve marvelous results.
46 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

Nothing allows us to expect the progressive extinction of wars, which

are neither caused by climate change or the economy, but indeed by
ideologies. In September 2014, Putin told President Poroshenko that,
“if he wanted it, Russian troops could get in two days not only in Kiev,
but also in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw and Bucharest.” A few days
earlier, Barack Obama claimed that “the defense of Tallinn, Riga and
Vilnius is as important as the defense of Berlin, Paris and London (. . .).
You have already lost your independence once; with NATO, you will
never lose it again.”9 In the long run, Putin might prove a more dangerous
enemy than the guerilla soldiers of the Islamic State, for he possesses
the atomic bomb but without the spirit of dissuasion that generally goes
along with it, acting exactly like Dr. Strangelove, always ready to go
for extreme measures. (Unfortunately Président Trump does not seem
to show more reason on this matter, delivering delirious tweets against
North Korea or Venezuela) The events in Ukraine unmistakably remind
us of the Yugoslavian wars that raged between 1991–2000, as well as the
ultra-nationalist propaganda of Belgrade, which presented the Serbian
people as a victim of a global conspiracy. These are the same tricks,
the same motivations, and the same paranoid megalomania, but Putin
is more of a tactician than Milosevic. He is a first rate despot, whereas
Milosevic, way more boorish, acted like an apparatchik overwhelmed
by the course of history. The Master of the Kremlin is “possessed,” to
take up the title of one of Dostoyevsky’s novels, but in a cold, perverted
way, both an abuser and someone who endlessly lectures others.10 He
started the fight. We must retaliate, within the limits set by reason, but
without being weak or accommodating. We must prepare for the worst
in order to avoid it.

NOTES
1. Eurasian Youth Union, January 2015.
2. Dmitry Kiselyov, RIA Novosti News, Television Interview, Moscow, March 16,
2014.
3. St. Petersburg Channel Five News, Petersburg – Channel 5, Television News,
National Media Group, February 11, 2015.
4. The great Russian-speaking historian Georges Nivat recalled that fact in:
Philippe-Jean Catinchi, “Georges Nivat, la reference,” Le Monde, March 17,
2005, http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2005/03/17/georges-nivat-la-refer-
ence_402019_3260.html.
5. Michel Eltchaninoff, Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine, (Arles: Actes Sud, 2015),
152.
6. On Bandera and the history of Ukraine, one might read: Timothy Snyder, Blood-
lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), as well as the
many papers and blog-posts the author has devoted to the Ukrainian question.
THE RETURN OF THE ENEMY / BRUCKNER 47

7. Eltchaninoff, Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine, 21.

8. Ibid., 98.
9. The White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama
to the People of Estonia,” The White House of President Barack Obama, September
3, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/03/remarks-
president-obama-people-estonia.
10. The author refers to Dostoyevksy’s 1878 novel Demons: A Novel in Three Parts,
also mistakenly translated in the past as The Possessed.