The Secret Source of Putin's Evil
It’s not the K.G.B., or the Cold War. It’s decidedly more Pushkin-esque, or Peter the Great, than that.
BY PETER SAVODNIK
JANUARY 10, 2017 5:00 AM
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Henry Kissinger recently compared Vladimir Putin to “a character out of Dostoevsky,” which apparently delighted the Russian president. That’s not entirely surprising. No Russian writer encapsulates the many incongruous feelings and forces—cultural, spiritual, metaphysical—still coursing through the post-Soviet moment better than Fyodor Dostoevsky. Technically, our current chapter of Russian history began on Christmas Day, 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Soviet Union dead. But, in reality, it didn’t come into focus until 1999, with the outbreak of the second Chechen war and Putin’s rise to power, and, really, it didn’t acquire any momentum or self-awareness until October 2003, when Yukos oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint on a tarmac at an airport in Novosibirsk. That was when Putin signaled that the old Boris Yeltsin configuration—the weakened head of state enveloped by a swarm of self-seeking boyars, or oligarchs—was over and that the once dormant, fractured, fractious state was reasserting its authority and imposing a new order: a new telos. Since then, the question that’s animated all discussion of Russia outside Russia has been: Where is Putin leading his country? What does he want?
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Assuming Kissinger is right, it’s unclear which of Dostoevsky’s characters, if any, Putin identifies with. That’s not really the point. The point is that Dostoevsky very clearly delineates right from wrong in a distinctly Manichaean way. Russia, the old Russia, is good, pure—childlike or diminutive, in a way. The West is bad. It’s not simply that it’s a rival civilization, an economic or geopolitical competitor; it’s that the West is impure and, when introduced into the Russian bloodstream, toxic. A Dostoyevskean vozhd, or leader, knows Russia is good and the West is not, and presumably he has learned by this late date that the only way to keep the West out is to overcome it, to expedite its undoing. The more Western leaders, and especially American presidents, talk about resetting relations with Moscow, the more the Dostoevskian president distrusts them. He hates them, and any so-called Russian president who doesn’t is a traitor or a buffoon. (Exhibit A: Gorbachev. Exhibit B: Yeltsin.)
Putin’s goal is not just a little more turf. Russia has a lot of that. His telos—his endgame—is the destabilization, the overcoming, of the whole Western order. This sounds fantastical to Americans because we’re an ahistorical people. That doesn’t mean we’re ignorant of history, although there’s a great deal of that, too. It means the categories with which we apprehend the world are not defined by the past, and we can’t really understand how it could be otherwise. Russia, like most countries, however, is a decidedly historical country, and it appears to be seeking to rectify a 400-year-old wound. It has discovered, much to its chagrin, that you can’t simply look inward. That was the tsars’ mistake. They thought they could keep the West out. The cost of that mistake was the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, famine, the Gulag, world war, and, ultimately, a failed state, the decimation of a way of life, the economy, their pensions and pride and sense of place in the world.
Putin will not make that mistake. When he bombed Aleppo, it likely wasn’t because of ISIS or Bashar al-Assad. It was because he wanted to assert Russia’s hegemony—and undermine America’s. We can presume this because no obvious Russian interests have been served by the country’s meddling in Syria, but many American interests have been thwarted. Also, it fits a pattern: Putin’s Russia creates chaos wherever possible and then seeks to take advantage of that chaos. (Consider, for example, the so-called frozen conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine.) When he allegedly hacked into the Democratic National Committee, it wasn’t a personal vendetta, as Hillary Clinton suggested, and when he allegedly helped disseminate fake news about the candidates, it wasn’t because he cared, first and foremost, about the election result. It was because he wanted tens of millions of Americans to doubt the legitimacy of their own election. After all, Putin can’t really be sure Donald Trump will serve Russia’s interests better than Clinton would have. That Trump is so erratic must worry the Kremlin. That his instrument of choice is Twitter must compound those worries. What is beyond debate, however, is that Americans losing faith in their democracy—and the institutions that prop up that democracy, like the media—does serve Russia’s long-term interests.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/the-secret-source-of-putins-evil
Amazing.
= new reply since forum marked as read
As fate would have it, and as I keep posting here, :>
-- At the time that 'festivities' begin in DC on Jan 20, I will be landing in St Petersburg, and at the moment mr pee pee takes the oath of office I will be sitting in the Mariinsky Theater Concert Hall watching Mieczysław Weinberg's opera version of THE IDIOT.
Who would have thunk it??
PS.. The next night.. PRINCE IGOR...
