DAVID SOLWAY: PUTIN AND THE RUSSIAN SOUL @Arts & Opinion

In a previous article, I had occasion to cite Henry Kissinger’s remark that “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy, it is an alibi for the absence of one.” (hat tip Roger Kimball). In the same vein, as Russologist Paul Robinson asserts, the tendency to label assorted thinkers or political leaders fascist or evil is an easy way to dismiss them out of hand, permitting us “to ignore the geopolitical aspects of the conflict between Russia and the West [and to avoid] having to address any contributions we may have made to our mutual problems.” The upshot is that we prevent a deeper understanding of, in this case, Putin’s real motives and the ideas that have informed his world view. The barrage of unfiltered hatred Putin is receiving is now starting to get tedious and unproductive.

For example, in the opinion of columnist C.A. Skeet, “Putin is an old-school Russian chauvinist and an ex-KGB communist who dogmatically believes . . . a nation is made stronger by territorial expansion and the overwhelming domination of smaller neighbors.” Thus, for Skeet, “it's abundantly clear that Putin's overriding goal is the reestablishment of the Russian Empire.” I see no proof of this hyperbolic claim, though the prospect terrifies many in the milquetoast West for whom it is a certainty. Latvia is shaking in its britches even as Putin shows no interest in so trivial an acquisition. Nothing in his actual behavior or policy directives shows that he is itching to ignite what could well prove to be a global conflagration.

Skeet, and those who share his animus, hate Putin as much as Jonah Goldberg hates Trump, whom Goldberg compares to a rapist. “I don’t like anthropomorphizing foreign policy,” Goldberg fumes, “But the Trump approach to Ukraine is like saying to a rape victim, ‘I’ll help you cut this rape short if you sign this document letting me garnish half your wages for the rest of your life.’” Goldberg shows how baseless hatred of Trump can lead to a cocktail of absurdity laced with obscenity, no less than a torrent of righteous execration launched against Putin without parsing the complex realities of a geopolitically fraught situation leads to profoundly unhelpful misunderstanding.

The neocon argument is that funding Ukraine is worth the investment in the dividends of a weakened and wounded Russian Federation that despises our values and way of life. This is dangerous nonsense. Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and we should take Putin at his word that he will not scruple to use it if Russia is existentially threatened. As for tactical warfare, it has been said that Russian Iskanders and Kinzhals are unstoppable and have wrecked most of Ukraine's electricity grid and industrial base. The Oreshnik is waiting in the wings. Russia is no ailing superpower, as its exorbitant venture in building a major Arctic fleet reveals, and even if it were, attacking a wounded bear is not an appealing option.

To dismiss Putin as merely a recycled KGB hack with a lust for conquest is to miss the point rather dramatically. If one wishes to understand Putin’s plans and motivations, one should examine his historical and intellectual sources among the Russian sages, religious thinkers, and philosophical luminaries. Putin is not stupid and is indeed both erudite and animated by the spirit of Mother Russia. We should not underestimate him or insist on getting him wrong.

To begin with, the influence of two major Russian philosopher-theologians cannot be discounted. They are Putin’s twin lodestars.

Ivan Ilyin criticized Western liberalism, Paul Robinson writes, “for putting too much faith in elections and ignoring the requirement for a well-developed legal consciousness among the people as well as a strong sense of national community,” words that spoke eloquently to Putin. In an April 2005 State of the Nation Address, Putin quoted Ilyin as saying that “State power has its limits . . . It cannot regulate scientific, religious, and artistic creation.”

Putin credits Ilyin for the principle that “Whoever loves Russia should desire freedom for it; first of all, freedom for Russia itself… and finally, freedom for the Russian people, freedom for all of us; freedom of religion, the search for justice, creativity, labour, and property…The state must not meddle in moral, family and everyday life.” The extent to which so noble a formulation underwrites Putin’s political thinking and actual behavior is obviously moot, yet it must be taken into consideration.

The influence of the great Russian philosopher and Christian apologist Nikolai Berdyaev, born in Kyiv (!) in 1874, is equally, if not, in the long run, even more important. An early Marxist who later abandoned that “ideological monstrosity” in favor of Christ, he wrote in his The Russian Idea about “the thought of God concerning Russia,” which he explained as the idea that Russia was destined to become an empire of faith, a nation that despite its falling into error and a form of secular diabolism, will eventually come to understand that “the spell and slavery of collectivism is nothing else than the transference of spiritual communality from subject to object,” a historical no less than religious aberration.

Putin stated in February 2021, “Russia has not reached its peak. We are on the march of development…We have an infinite genetic code.” He is motivated not by the re-conquest of Eastern Europe, as many, tainted by what Berdyaev called “the falsehood and venality of the press,” fearfully and mistakenly assume, but by the notion of canonical territory, the ecumenical concept that the spiritual territory of the Church exceeds the borders of the Russian Federation. Conquest for mere territorial expansion or to restore the Soviet empire is not Putin’s aim. As he said in the 2025 Address, “Our goals in the international arena are extremely clear. These are security of borders and the creation of favourable external conditions for resolving Russia's domestic problems.”

Although certain Russian religious and political thinkers have equated spiritual and physical territory as coterminous, the canonical principle has absolutely nothing to do with territorial conquest as such but with the creation of what has come to be known as the “civilization state,” expounded in Christopher Coker’s The Rise of the Civilizational State. It is fundamentally a centripetal concept where the revival of a traditional ethos, remembered customs, religious unity, and a sense of cultural ancestry is intended to bind state and people in a common enterprise.

As Coker writes, “Just at the time Western exceptionalism is losing traction, the civilizational state is encouraging its own citizens to think of their own civilization as exceptional, at times even ‘immemorial’ or ‘eternal’.” This is because, unlike the staple Western state, “it is deemed to have an essence, or a spirit. A vision of a new world order,” he concludes, “is beginning to emerge, based largely on civilizational values.” The idea of the civilization state pertains mainly to China, India, perhaps neo-Ottoman Turkey, Christian Hungary, and obviously Russia. As such, we are not dealing with a Western progressivist dispensation and must learn to think outside the neo-liberal, globalist box.

According to Gary Lachman’s The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World, a fascinating study of, among other things, Putin’s politico-religious thinking, the Russian autocrat was even assigning readings to his audiences on Nikolai Berdyaev’s discussion of “spirit” in such volumes as The Meaning of the Creative Act, The Destiny of Man, and elsewhere in the philosopher’s oeuvre. Before bashing Putin in a hermeneutic bar brawl, it behooves us to temper our abhorrence somewhat and take the trouble to read Berdyaev for context and to gain some sense of the Russian President’s patrimony.

Putin is preoccupied with that period in Russian history known as the “silver age,” which envisioned a new “Eurasian” civilization with Russia at its center. Some of its leading lights included painter Marc Chagall, composers Alexander Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky, poets Osip Mandelstam and Alexander Mayakovsky, novelist Leo Tolstoy, and celebrated thinkers like Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank, and, of course, Nicolae Berdyaev, who gave the period its name. The latter’s not-uncritical The Brightest Lights of the Silver Age is a must-read to understand the era and to gauge the depth and extent of Putin’s own education.

The silver concept is often linked to the idea of Russkiy Mir (Russian World), which affirms a cultural and spiritual unity among Russian speakers globally, a concept that extends "to all Russia," that is, within the boundaries of the Russian dominion and not beyond. This is the clue to Putin’s canonical thinking. Respected Russian political philosopher, the aforementioned Semyon Frank, famously opposed Russia’s messianic role, whereas a neo-Slavophile like Berdyaev applauded and supported what he regarded as a consecrated project. However, aside from the need to defend the nation’s interests and its historic rights and claims, Berdyaev did not believe that imperial conquest was the route to spiritual hegemony. And we must again recall that Berdyaev was one of Putin’s most deeply felt influences.

Putin regards himself as a patriot who wants Russia to flourish, to recoup its international standing, and to demarcate and protect its sphere of influence. I must confess I find him less objectionable than Western leaders like the horrendous Keir Starmer, America-hating Barack Obama and Joe Biden, or my own PM, the feckless, nation-killing, mentally decorticate Justin Trudeau. These villains are intent on destroying their countries. Putin is determined to revive his. And as I have been at pains to point out, much of his domestic initiatives and power-projection derives from his readings in Ilyin for pragmatic wisdom and especially Berdyaev for spiritual guidance. Indeed, it is no accident that Berdyaev is among Putin’s assigned texts.

It is high time to get serious. One need not approve of Putin, but to understand him properly, one must know where he comes from, his roots and influences, his intellectual formation, and his religious and philosophical masters. Only then can we render a balanced and unemotional judgment of the man, his policies, passions, and his position on the contemporary international scene.