Vladimir Putin: Russia's Increasingly Anti-American Would Be Tsar

Some scoff at my drawing of parallels between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.  Yet parallel's do exist, most particularly in the use of the excuse of "protecting ethnic Germans and, in the case of Putin, Russians outside of the mother country.  Another parallel might be Putin and say Ivan the Terrible since Putin seems to increasingly see himself as a new Tsar.  The irony is that Communism, the system Putin helped to enforce during his KGB days, destroyed Tsarist Russia and set back the nation economically by many decades. A piece in the New Yorker that looks at former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, also looks at Putin's dangerous delusions of grandeur and growing anti-Americanism.  Here are excerpts:

When, after the Medvedev interregnum, Putin returned to power, in 2012, he perceived the anti-Kremlin protests as an echo of Kiev. The demonstrators had no clear ideology, no leaders. They did not extend much beyond the urban creative and office classes. They had neither the coherence nor the staying power of the protesters on other squares—Taksim, Tahrir, Maidan, Wenceslas. All the same, Putin could not countenance them. What he loathes, his former aide Gleb Pavlovsky told me, is spontaneity in politics. “Putin is anti-revolutionary to his core,” he said. “What happened in Kiev”—on Maidan, in 2014—“was for him absolutely disgusting.”

An avid reader about tsarist Russia, Putin was forming a more coherent view of history and his place within it. More and more, he identified personally with the destiny of Russia. Even if he was not a genuine ideologue, he became an opportunistic one, quoting Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Nikolai Berdyayev, and other conservative philosophers to give his own pronouncements a sense of continuity. One of his favorite politicians in imperial Russia was Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister under Nicholas II. “We do not need great upheavals,” Putin said, paraphrasing Stolypin. “We need a great Russia.” Stolypin had also said, “Give the state twenty years and you will not recognize Russia.” That was in 1909. Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in Kiev, in 1911. But Putin was determined that his opportunity not be truncated: “Give me twenty years,” he said, “and you will not recognize Russia.”

And so now, instead of nurturing the business and creative classes in the big cities, he turned on them. He vilified them on TV; he weakened them with restrictions, searches, arrests, and selective jail terms. He sided now with the deeply conservative impulses, prejudices, and habits of mind of the Russian majority. “There was an idea to gain the support of the majority, to distinguish it from the minority,” Boris Mezhuev, a conservative columnist at Izvestia and the editor of the Web site politconservatism.ru, told me. “This was done harshly.”

Putin’s speeches were full of hostility, lashing out at the West for betraying its promises, for treating Russia like a defeated “vassal” rather than a great country, for an inability to distinguish between right and wrong. He denounced the United States for its behavior in Hiroshima and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Libya. He cut off adoptions to America, claiming that “our” babies were being abused by cruel and heedless foreigners. The West was hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and dissolute, according to Putin, so he strengthened his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church to reëstablish “traditional Russian values.” He approved new laws on “non-traditional” sexual practices—the so-called “anti-gay propaganda” laws. 

An ideology, a world view, was taking shape: Putin was now putting Russia at the center of an anti-Western, socially conservative axis—Russia as a bulwark against a menacing America. “Of course, this is a conservative position,” he said in a speech last year, “but, speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyayev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”

One reason that McFaul was surprised by the assault on him is that he thought he was being careful in his ambassadorial role. He never went to demonstrations. He steered clear of Alexei Navalny.
Still, he was hardly a quiet American. Hillary Clinton had called for U.S. diplomats to use social media, and he was especially ardent, maintaining an active presence, in both Russian and English, on Facebook and Twitter. The young liberal intelligentsia loved McFaul for his openness, his availability. Putin’s people thought his behavior bewildering, adolescent, and hostile.

The imagery of Putinism, with its ominous warnings against political chaos and outside interference, has long been in evidence. All you have to do is watch television. In 2008, state television broadcast a cheesy docudrama called “The Destruction of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium,” which was hosted and produced by Tikhon Shevkunov, a Russian Orthodox priest whose church, the Sretensky Monastery, is just down the street from Lubyanka, K.G.B. headquarters. Shevkunov, who has known Putin for many years, is widely rumored to be the Russian President’s dukhovnik, his spiritual adviser. The film purports to be a history of the Byzantine Empire’s fall at the hands of the perfidious West, and not, as scholars have it, to the Ottoman Turks, who conquered Constantinople in 1453.

Such phenomena are now common fare. The airwaves are filled with assaults on the treachery of Russian liberals and American manipulations. Dmitri Kiselyov, the head of Russia Today, Putin’s newly created information agency, and the host, on Sunday nights, of the TV magazine show “News of the Week,” is a masterly, and unapologetic, purveyor of the Kremlin line. With his theatrical hand gestures and brilliantly insinuating intonation, he tells his viewers that Russia is the only country in the world that can turn the U.S. into “radioactive dust,” that the anti-gay-propaganda laws are insufficiently strict, and that Ukraine is not a real country but merely “virtual.”

Kiselyov eclipses Bill O’Reilly, and as a theoretician of conspiracy he shames Glenn Beck. He tells his viewers that, in Ukraine, fascists abound, the U.S. State Department underwrites revolution, and “life is not worth a single kopeck.” But he insists, “The presentation of me as a minister of propaganda is itself a form of propaganda.”

Nearly a quarter century after the fall of empire, Putin has unleashed an ideology of ressentiment. It has been chorussed by those who, in 1991, despaired of the loss not of Communist ideology but of imperial greatness, and who, ever since, have lived with what Russians so often refer to as “phantom-limb syndrome”: the pain of missing Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic states; the pain of diminishment. They want revenge for their humiliation.

The world, for Dugin, is divided between conservative land powers (Russia) and libertine maritime powers (the U.S. and the U.K.)—Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage. The maritime powers seek to impose their will, and their decadent materialism, on the rest of the world. This struggle is at the heart of history. For Dugin, Russia must rise from its prolonged post-Soviet depression and reassert itself, this time as the center of a Eurasian empire, against the dark forces of America. And this means war. Dugin rejects the racism of the Nazis, but embraces their sense of hierarchy, their romance of death. “We need a new party,” he has written. “A party of death. A party of the total vertical. God’s party, the Russian analogue to the Hezbollah, which would act according to wholly different rules and contemplate completely different pictures.”

There is much more to the lengthy article which I encourage readers to read in full.  If some of the foregoing carries a sense of deja vu, it's because it sounds much like what the Nazi regime did in Germany in the 1930's.  We all know how that turned out and how many millions of lives were lost.  Would that Russians listening to Putin's storyline would wake up and draw the parallels and realize that Putin could lead them to a state like Germany's in 1945.  Putin needs to go.  The sooner the better.

Are The Trigger Points for World War III In Place?

One Hundred years ago tomorrow, Germany invaded Belgium and Great Britain declared war on Germany.  While what became known as World War I had actually begun in the east a few days earlier when Germany declared war on Russia, August 4th was when the rest of the dominoes for that disaster for millions began in full earnest.  While the lead up to World War I differed in some ways  from German aggression in the late 1930's, a common thread in the events leading up to both wars was the same: imperial ambitions on the part of some rulers and rabid nationalism.  Some argue that one hundred years after the beginning of World War I, the triggers are now in place for World War III.  It would be nice to hope that humankind might have learned from the disasters and horrors of the past, yet if one looks at events in Ukraine and Gaza and and the personalities of Putin and Netanyahu, it is easy to see aspects reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, and Mussolini.  Here are excerpts from an article in The Atlantic which looks at today's triggers for disaster:

Pessimism is a useful prism through which to view the affairs of states. Their ambition to gain, retain, and project power is never sated. Optimism, toward which Americans are generally inclined, leads to rash predictions of history’s ending in global consensus and the banishment of war. Such rosy views accompanied the end of the Cold War. They were also much in evidence a century ago, on the eve of World War I.

Then, as now, Europe had lived through a long period of relative peace, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Then, too, rapid progress in science, technology, and communications had given humanity a sense of shared interests that precluded war, despite the ominous naval competition between Britain and Germany. Then, too, wealthy individuals devoted their fortunes to conciliation and greater human understanding. Rival powers fumed over provocative annexations, like Austria-Hungary’s of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, but world leaders scarcely believed a global conflagration was possible, let alone that one would begin just six years later. The very monarchs who would consign tens of millions to a murderous morass from 1914 to 1918 and bury four empires believed they were clever enough to finesse the worst.

The unimaginable can occur. That is a notion at once banal and perennially useful to recall. Indeed, it has just happened in Crimea, where a major power has forcefully changed a European border for the first time since 1945.

Events cascade. It is already clear that the nationalist fervor unleashed by Putin after a quarter century of Russia’s perceived post–Cold War decline is far from exhausted. Russians are sure that the dignity of their nation has been trampled by an American and European strategic advance to their border dressed up in talk of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Whether this is true is irrelevant; they believe it. National humiliation, real or not, is a tremendous catalyst for war. That was the case in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles . . . .  Russia, convinced of its lost greatness, is gripped by a Weimar neurosis resembling Germany’s post–World War I longing for its past stature and power. The Moscow-backed separatists taking over government buildings in eastern Ukraine and proclaiming an independent “Donetsk People’s Republic” demonstrate the virulence of Russian irredentism. Nobody can know where it will stop. Appetite, as the French say, grows with eating.

[T]he realization that the Russian bear can bite as well as growl is timely. It is a reminder that a multipolar world in a time of transition, when popular resentments are rising over joblessness and inequality, is a dangerous place indeed.

The international system does not look particularly stable. The Cold War’s bipolar confrontation, despite its crises, was predictable. Today’s world is not. It features a United States whose power is dominant but no longer determinant; a one-party China that is a rising hegemon; an authoritarian Russia giddy on nationalism and the idea of a restored imperium; and a weak, navel-gazing, blasé Europe whose pursuit of an ever closer union is on hold and perhaps on the brink of reversal.

Pacifist tendencies in western Europe coexist with views of power held in Moscow and Beijing that Bismarck or Clausewitz would recognize instantly.
A century ago, in the absence of clear lines or rules, it was just this kind of feel-good hope and baseless trust in the judgment of rival powers that precipitated catastrophe. But that, it may be said, was then. The world has supposedly been transformed.

But has it? Consider this article in my father’s 1938 high-school yearbook:

The machine has brought men face to face as never before in history. Paris and Berlin are closer today than neighboring villages were in the Middle Ages. In one sense distance has been annihilated. We speed on the wings of the wind and carry in our hands weapons more dreadful than the lightning … The challenge of the machine is the greatest opportunity mankind has yet enjoyed. Out of the rush and swirl of the confusions of our times may yet arise a majestic order of world peace and prosperity.

The ghosts of repetition reside alongside the prophets of progress. From the “rush and swirl” of 1938 where “distance has been annihilated” would follow in short order the slaughter of Stalingrad, the mass murder of European Jewry, the indiscriminate deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the anguish of all humanity. We should not lightly discard a well-grounded pessimism or the treaties it has produced.