Steven Hayward, writing over at Power Line, offers a concise, incisive explanation of our real Russia problem. A month ago, I wrote about Vladimir Putin’s vision of history and argued that he is not properly understood when we sling terms around like “thug.” Instead, I argued that we can only really understand Putin and his Russia properly if we understand him to be in the long line of Russian tzars (czars). I consider myself in good company with Steven Hayward extending the point to our chattering and governing elite.

As I wrote:

Vladimir Putin is a Russian leader, in the long line of the czars and their nominally communist successors. Calling him a KGB thug or using “tzar” as an epithet obscures the reality. Czar or tzar, a Russian ruler is a ruler in the context of Russian history and culture. Any czar worth his salt would respond, when he could, to the loss of imperial territory Russia experienced on December 25, 1991, when the USSR was formally dissolved, the Soviet flag hauled down in Moscow and replaced by the Russian tricolor.

Yes, Putin was a KGB agent, who started inside Russia (a counterpart to the Stazi). Yes, Putin then went to Dresden, East Germany as part of the security service, keeping a nominally independent client state under Moscow’s thumb with less visibility than the tank units in barracks down the road from the local KGB headquarters. Yes, Yeltsin recruited him as the FSB leader, the successor to the KGB. Yes, he has people killed inside and outside his nation’s borders.

AND.

If you read the history of any successful Russian czar, you will find a killer. Crossing a tzar, or tzarina (Catherine the Great), gets you imprisoned or dead. It is fair to style Stalin, a Georgian thug who changed his name from Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili to Joseph Stalin, the Red Tzar.

Now, Steven Hayward tells us our elites have no clue of the deeper problem of Russian beliefs, such that even a magic bullet removing Putin will change little in geopolitics.

PUTIN AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT

Let’s start with a bold proposition: if the American right had had the same attitude toward our foreign policy establishment back around 1963 that it has today, we might never have allowed the Vietnam War to have become a decade-long quagmire.

[. . .]

There isn’t the slightest perception among our foreign policy elite that Putin isn’t simply trying to restore the old Soviet Empire: he’s trying to revive the 19th century idea of Russia as the “Third Rome” set against the West and Western liberal democratic principles (emphasis on the “liberal” part of that formula). This anti-Western strain has burrowed deep into Russian thought, and almost no one in Europe or America has taken it seriously. See especially Walter Newell’s perceptive article in Tablet on this point.

[…]
The main point here is not to conceive any possible justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine or to suggest in any way that the conflict is “our fault,” but to begin considering the idea that the problem is much worse than simply thinking Putin’s supposed madness or megalomania is the source of the trouble. In other words, if some Russian officer put a bullet in Putin’s head today, the problem of an aggressive and anti-Western Russia would remain. This requires some much larger strategic thinking than merely whether NATO should be expanded.

I previously published extensive excerpts from official Kremlin translations of other Putin speeches that confirm Hayward’s assessment of Putin’s view of Russia and the world. Here are the direct links to the 2021 article in which Putin describes his view of Russian and Ukrainian history, and Putin’s recent justification for invading Ukraine:

1. Article by Vladimir Putin “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“
2. Address by the President of the Russian Federation

I earlier extensively quoted important earlier statements by Putin, whitewashing Stalin’s crimes against humanity and his role in starting World War II as an aggressor. Those two posts, also linked to the official Kremlin transcripts, are worth your attention, if you had not previously read them. Putin’s February 2021 speech is consistent with these earlier positions, as he has been building a case for Greater Russia, a revived Russian empire, while insisting Russia has always been in the right and must not be criticized.

1. The Time When Life Changed: 25 December 1991
2. Fragments on Ukraine

UPDATE:

PowerLine podcast — “Taking Tyrants (Like Putin) Seriously, with Waller Newell“

From Newell’s recent article, “Vladimir Putin, Tyrant:”

Although Putin’s ambition is to restore Russian control over its former Warsaw Pact captive states, he in no way wishes to restore the Soviet regime itself. Russian history has long been riven by a cultural conflict between those who look to Europe, the West, and the Enlightenment as the path that Russia should follow and those who are loyal to Slavic nationalism, which is deeply religious and not interested in economic prosperity. In literature, this divide was typified by the different outlooks of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, which Tolstoy crystallized as the difference between St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the era of anti-Soviet dissidence, this split was typified by Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin is in the Slavophile camp. A devotee of Berdyaev, a Slavophile critic of Marxism-Leninism, Putin believes that Soviet communism was an import of European rationalism that poisoned the authentic Russian soul, which has nourished the country’s national and artistic greatness.

Does the Russian soul really matter to Putin? As I wrote in Tyrants, modern tyrants and conquerors since Robespierre have been bolstered by an ideology. Slavophile thought is crucial to Putin’s worldview, including both Berdyaev and also the modern writer Aleksandr Dugin’s ideology of “Eurasianist National Bolshevism.” Dugin, an academic and popular pundit, tried to rescue what he saw as the authentically Russian agrarian populist impulse behind the original Bolshevik Revolution from its betrayal by Lenin’s “scientific” socialism imported from European thought, calling instead for a “revolution of archaic values” based on the blood and soil traditions of family, rural life, and religious faith. Putin commissioned Dugin to overhaul the Russian education system to remove all traces of Gorbachev-era glasnost and perestroika, which both believed were signs of creeping Enlightenment rationalism and materialism corrupting the Motherland.

Yes, if you read my linked posts, Putin has celebrated Russian participation in the Enlightenment. So, there is an apparent internal conflict in his views. However, this may be part of historic Russian ambiguity over the West and Russia’s nature.