THE INTELLECTUAL CATASTROPHE OF VLADMIR PUTIN
Vladimir Putin may have gone out of his mind, but it’s also possible that he has merely gazed at events through a peculiar and historical Russian lens and has acted accordingly. To invade one’s neighbors is not, after all, a novel thing for a Russian leader to do. It is a customary thing. It is common sense. It is hoary tradition. But when Putin looks for an up-to-date rhetoric capable of explaining the whys of hoary tradition to himself or the world, he has trouble coming up with anything.
He grasps at political rhetoric from times long gone. It disintegrates in his hands. He delivers speeches and discovers that he is speechless or nearly so. This may have been the original setback, well before the military setbacks that have afflicted his army. It is not a psychological failure, then. It is a philosophical failure. A suitable language of analysis eludes him; therefore, lucidity eludes him.
The problem that he is trying to solve is the eternal Russian conundrum, the actual “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” that Winston Churchill ascribed to Russia (and could never define, though he considered that “national interest” offered a key). This is the conundrum of what to do about a very odd and dangerous imbalance in Russian life.
The imbalance consists of, on one side, the grandeur of Russia’s civilization and its geography, which are massive strengths, and, on the other side, a strange and persistent inability to construct a resilient and reliable state, which is a massive weakness. Russian leaders across the centuries have tried to cope with the imbalance by constructing the most thuggish of tyrannies, in the hope that brutality would compensate for the lack of resilience. And they have complemented the brutishness with a foreign policy not like any other country’s, which has seemed to do the trick.
BRUTISHNESS AND AN UNUSUAL FOREIGN POLICY helped the Russian state make it through the 19th century without collapsing, which was an achievement. But twice in the 20th century, the state collapsed. The first time, in 1917, led to the rise to power of extremists and madmen and some of the worst disasters of world history. Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev returned the state to a stable condition.
Then it collapsed again. The second collapse, in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, was not as calamitous. Yet the empire disappeared, wars broke out along Russia’s southern borders, the economy disintegrated, and life expectancy fell. This time, Putin led the recovery. In Chechnya, he did it with a degree of thuggishness that qualifies him alone, among the belligerents in the current war, for an accusation of something like genocide.
