OPINION — As a long-time student of European history and a former SIS officer and senior executive in the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis, I have been following commentary on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the man behind it, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Much of that commentary has been extremely useful for understanding the events underway in what may be a watershed moment in the history of Europe, and, indeed, the world. Yet, for many of us, Putin remains an enigma.
We can see that he is a murderous dictator, who has launched a barbaric invasion of Russia’s neighbor, justifying it with a flimsy set of excuses and disinformation. We can also see that he has isolated himself within an increasingly small set of advisors who either share his warped view of the world or remain afraid to correct or contradict[CR1] it. Nonetheless, we still ask ourselves just what this man intends and how far he is willing to go to achieve that.
I recently came across some material that provides a glimpse into Russian history as Putin sees it, and that can help us understand just where this man is coming from and where he intends to take Russia, and indeed, the world. Sadly, that insight is not an encouraging.
In his 2017 book, The Lost Kingdom, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy relates two comments by Vladimir Putin that are remarkably helpful for understanding Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, and perhaps his plans. In the first, Putin asked a Russian journalist if she had ever read the memoirs of one of the infamous leaders of the White counter-revolutionary forces, General Anton Deniken. One passage Putin cites states, “No Russia, reactionary or democratic, republican or authoritarian, will ever allow Ukraine to be torn away. The foolish, baseless, and externally aggravated quarrel between Muscovite Rus’ and Kyivian Rus’ is our internal quarrel, of no concern to anyone else, and it will be decided by ourselves.”
Russia’s president has also been entrenched in the writings of Ivan Ilin, according to Plokhy, who emerged as a leading ideologue of the White movement. In fact, Putin even cited Ilin in 2006, in a speech before the Russian parliament. At one point, Ilin had written an observation about Russian history that goes a long way to explain Putin’s view of Russia’s past, and how he is applying it to Russia’s present. “Russia will not perish as a result of dismemberment but will begin to repeat the whole course of her history: like a great ‘organism,’ she will again set about collecting her ’members,’ proceeding along the rivers to the seas, to the mountains, to coal, to grain, to oil, to uranium.”
That Putin would hold such reverence for not only a leading thinker but also the military commander of a dangerous counter-revolutionary movement, tells us much about his views of the Soviet Union. Perhaps even more demonstrative is that he went so far as the pay for the repatriation and internment of the remains of General Deniken and his wife in Moscow, where they could rest alongside those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mr. Ilin.
Clearly, the Soviet Union holds no special place in the heart of Russia’s current president. To be sure, Putin did spend years of service to that state while in the KGB, but he appears to have done so not out of conviction to the cause of Communism, or the Soviet Union per se, but because the USSR was simply the most recent incarnation of the Great Russian Empire. Many cite his now famous statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest disaster of the 20th Century—ignoring other truly horrific events, like two world wars, the Holocaust, Stalin’s Terror and the famine brought on by his agrarian collectivization program—but Putin goes on to add that it would be foolish to try to recreate the USSR. The one element of that regime that he appears to see as a model for his own governance is the brutal, authoritarian dictatorship he has established in Russia today, a development The Economist has so aptly labelled as the Restalinization of Russia.
Cipher Brief Subscriber+Members can access Cipher Brief Expert and former CIA Chief of the Central Eurasia Division, Rob Dannenberg’s assessment, With his only option being escalation, this is how Putin’s War must End
Rather than the Soviet Union, perhaps it would be more helpful to apply the model and interpretations of Russia’s past that the Russian president seems to hold more closely to heart. And that brings us not to Stalin or Lenin, but to the Tsars themselves, especially the long line that runs from Ivan III to Nicholas I. Here, the comments of Deniken and Ilin are truly revealing. Ivan III was the first to expand the territory of Muscovy to any great degree and to assume the title of Tsar, moves he justified by claiming lineage to Vladimir the Great, who brought Christianity to Kievan Rus, the state that many view as the foundation of the Tsarist empire, a move that also brought him canonization in the Russian Orthodox Church and the undying reverence of Russian nationalists.
Those Muscovite holdings continued to grow over the centuries. It should be no surprise that the principal opponents to the growth of Muscovy during those years often came from the West in the form of Poland and Lithuania, Sweden, and Germany. Finally, it was Nicholas I who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, enshrined his domestic and foreign policies under the official banner of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality, phrases that today sound ominously prescient. This is especially revealing when you consider that the forces Nicholas I saw as the greatest threat to his reign were the newly emerging liberal regimes and revolutionary democratic movements of western Europe.
Once again, Russia’s ruler has found his bete noir in the West. As Putin directs his campaign of venom and disinformation at NATO and the United States, the villains who allegedly have launched campaigns not only to encroach on what Putin considers his Russkiy Mir, but also to block to the reunification of all the Russian peoples, undermine the allegedly natural Russian form of government, and weaken and even dismember the Russian state
Fortunately, we are no longer somewhere in the middle of the seventeenth century when the leading Cossack hetman could declare his fealty to Moscow and bring along all the Ukrainian land and serfs under his rule. As the past few weeks have demonstrated, Ukrainians—and I suspect many in Belarus—have developed a national identity that looks to an independent future, and one aligned with the West. And that is a national identity for which they are clearly willing to fight and die.
The question is just what does this tell us of where Putin wants to go in the days and years ahead? Obviously, Ukraine is of paramount importance to his vision for the future of Russia, which suggests that he has no desire to engage in meaningful negotiations that would halt and certainly not reverse his invasion of that country. Nor does this historical context point to a more peaceable and benign Russia in the Central and East European neighborhood, should he succeed—or even fail–in Ukraine. There remain other territories and states that would appear to be vulnerable to Putin’s messianic view of Russian history, Belarus and Moldova in particular but also the Baltic states and then those further east in Central Asia. Putin clearly sees himself as part of this ‘organic’ process to collect the lost pieces of the Russian empire, beginning with its most valuable member—after Russia, of course.
Is this all inevitable? Of course not. Dissatisfaction has grown in Russia among those familiar with the course and the cost of the war in Ukraine. Unfortunately, many of those same people have now fled Russia, possibly robbing that country of many potential leaders and supporters of a reform movement. And there is always the possibility of a palace coup, especially given Putin’s increasing isolation and erratic behavior. That isolation appears to have only reinforced his delusional messianism and divorced him from any realistic assessment of life in Ukraine today. One must wonder just how effective the repressive regime Putin has built can be and how long it can continue to govern when so few benefit. Then again, this restalinization appears to be functioning well enough at the moment, at least in achieving its repressive and crippling objectives.
Perhaps we can draw some hope from the words of the Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, which he recently shared in an editorial for the Washington Post. Kara-Murza, who has the distinction of surviving not one, but two assassination attempts by the Putin regime, pointed to a different lesson from Russian history. He cited several occasions when imperial and military overstretch–such as the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905 and the more recent invasion and war in Afghanistan—led to revolts that overthrew oppressive regimes in Moscow and nearly changed the course of Russia’s political development. Perhaps this time they will actually succeed.
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