"Discerning Vladimir Putin."
Contra ignorance.
(Kremlin.ru/ Wikimedia Commons.)3 MARCH—Our minds regurgitate with the incessant propaganda leveled at Russia and its leadership. The other side of this moon is not to be missed: If the venomous propaganda is overwhelming, its success in mutilating Western minds is equally egregious to witness. “This is a semiprofessional question,” a friend in Hanoi writes. “In your long journalistic career, have you ever witnessed such an orchestrated campaign of hatred against one man and one country? I haven’t. Not against Milošević, not against Saddam, not against Gaddafi, not against Assad… The current one against Putin and Russia seems to break all records.”
We haven’t either and yes, it does. To cultivate ignorance of this prevalence is more than unprincipled, cynical, or antidemocratic. It is dangerous, opening the path to national conduct we commonly associate with Mussolini’s Italy and other such places and eras.
“Putin is a madman.” “Putin is unstable.” “Putin has lost his grip.” This latest trope from our national leadership and in our media serves but one purpose: It relieves those who accept these preposterous notions of any responsibility to understand the Russian perspective on events. And if there is one capacity that the 21st century calls upon all of us to cultivate, it is the ability to grasp how others see things that we may interact constructively for the common good. This, to us, is the very core of the Biden administration’s dereliction—and, of course, that of its clerks in the press: their encouragement of the American public to refuse to consider the reasons for Moscow’s regrettable but in our view necessary intervention in a nation a cynical empire is determined to put to cynical imperial uses.
Are China and Xi Jinping next for this treatment? The latest noise out of Washington and in the foreign affairs journals indicates that the wilder factions among the policy cliques think they can make use of Taiwan as they have Ukraine.
We have had enough. And we publish the following essay in part as a hand raised in protest. With it, we invite readers to consider Russia and Vladimir Putin as they are, not more, not less. There is nothing more important, in our view, for all of us to do at this moment.
“Discerning Vladimir Putin” first appeared in the Autumn 2018 number of Raritan, the quarterly journal. We publish is as it appeared, without updates, contemporaneous references as they were four years ago. Autumn 2018 puts us two years into the Russiagate fiasco. It is useful in this way to note the extent to which the paranoiac frenzy that now engulfs us has been gathering momentum over the course of years. Future historians will shame those in positions of influence for their role in fomenting this freak show. We will have no hand to offer them.
This is the first of two parts.
——The Editors.
By Patrick Lawrence
WE HAVE LEFT BEHIND the Russian dolls, one inside the other as if occlusion were their very point. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Churchill’s famous mot (invariably quoted out of context) is no longer for us. We have come to know better. We know Russia and Russians and, especially, we know their president. We read Vladimir Putin with the confidence of a clinical psychiatrist. We know just who he is and what he is up to and what he leaves unsaid and what his secret intentions are.
Good enough, one might say, that we Americans have taken one name off our list of inscrutables. But, purporting to clear sight, what is it we see when we look across at Russia and its people and the man who has led them these past eighteen years? What do we talk about when we talk about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? These are our questions. Our replies must shock anyone who considers them. Orientialism— among much else, the denial of all complexity in others—fades but slowly. At this point the dolls were a marginally better idea.
If there is a more pervasive case of blindness as America assesses another nation and its leader, it has not occurred in my lifetime (which takes us back to the midpoint of the last century). Not since Stalin, in the post–“Uncle Joe” period, has a Soviet or Russian figure been so thoroughly cast as Beelzebub. In some cases this amounts to willful distortion; our policy cliques, most of our media, and our “thought leaders” (not to be confused with our surviving intellectuals) all practice it. For the rest it is a matter of acquiescence—often out of political expedience—that of late has become difficult to forgive. And, again, a willful acquiescence, I would say. One cannot otherwise explain the near-complete absence of what the Jesuits call discernment, the critical thinking of autonomous minds.
Favoring Putin or detesting him is not at issue, to run straight at a point I should not have to make. Why we think it wise to confuse ourselves with conjured imagery is a good question. But most immediately at issue are the consequences of these misrepresentations. They are grave for all of us, no matter one’s political stripe. A few years ago some of us wondered whether we stood at the edge of Cold War II. This is no longer in question: Minus the ideological dimension, it has commenced. As I write, it is a month since the Pentagon released its Nuclear Posture Review, advocating low-yield nuclear weapons—those more thinkable than the previously un–. It is a week since Putin, in his state of the nation speech, disclosed Russia’s work on its own new generation of missiles and warheads. The sequence of these events—American action, Russian reaction—is a topic with a seventy-year history, and I will return to it. For now, this: But for Putin’s recent decision to decline a new nuclear arms race, which he made clear shortly after his speech to the nation, we would be at the forward edge of one. Absent our cultivated animosities toward a leader we cannot see clearly, to say nothing of understand other than cartoonishly, this would not be our location.
Vladimir Putin is the new czar, driven by nostalgia for the old empire. He wants to recreate the Soviet Union, taking back all the republics. (And never mind that these purported ambitions cancel one another.) He is an ultranationalist bent on restoring Russia’s superpower status. Putin is an aggressor across the world, he is a tyrant, he is a murderer of journalists, he is a fascist, he is Hitler. All of these descriptions of Russia’s president have been asserted, every one leveled and taken with perfect seriousness. Masha Gessen, the émigré writer, declared last year that Putin presides over a new totalitarianism and won a National Book Award for it.
Putin is many things, not all of them worthy of approval. He is a modernizer, an internationalist, and a gifted statesman by any serious measure. But his domestic record is very mixed. If Putin has campaigned against the worst post–Soviet corruption, there remains too much of it, even if his intent is to turn patronage to national purpose in the context of his “state-centered capitalism.” He exercises too heavy a hand in domestic politics, mixing coercion with co-optation. He has regenerated a Russian middle class but does not seem to know how to field its aspirations. There is a considerable list of such shortcomings.
What does it mean to be Russian? Mikhailovsky, n.d. (Wikimedia Commons.) But the point remains: Commonly accepted demonizations of Putin do not withstand scrutiny. I have already suggested why people advance and accept so many neat, facile characterizations of who Putin is. Animosity toward Russia and its leaders dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when prominent European figures—de Tocqueville, Michelet, and Sainte–Beuve among them—first cast czarist Russia as the Other of the West. “The West” as a modern political construct, indeed, took shape in consequence of Russia’s early signs of emergence: It was defensive from the first, then, formed in reaction. But what gives this latest iteration of antipathy efficacy, personified as it is, if it is so at variance with reality? Name-calling, a depressing mark of our discourse’s degeneracy, often succeeds in precluding argument. But there is something else we must consider more seriously.
It comes to a simple word: None of our prevailing versions of Putin has any context. There is no trace of Russian history, political culture, moral tradition, national priorities, or national identity in any of them. In conversation I call this POLO, the power of leaving out, for it is perniciously effective. Leaving out context is an old trick among the propagandists—and of our press, we must at last recognize. It now turns our discourse into irrational nonsense. Putin is this or that, or he is not this and not that: One may as well take a New Hampshire farmer to task because he does not grow rice.
■ ■ ■
ONE CAN REFER to the years following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the Yeltsin era, and achieve a rudimentary understanding of Putin and how he governs. Most of us are unable to reflect back even this far, so corrupted is our orthodox narrative, a point to which I will return. It is better nonetheless to begin one’s journey into Russia’s present a century and more earlier. There we find the later Romanovs facing the prospect of the modernization of a state and society wherein most of what was “modern,” if not all of it, would be imported from the West. This was a common predicament during the second half of the nineteenth century. Meiji Japan had to contend with the same social, political, and, indeed, psychological disorders at roughly the same time. Only slightly later, so did the last of the Qing emperors. Japan and China are known, in more or less acceptable shorthand, as “late developers.” There is no understanding either without a grasp of the complexities lying within this phrase. Russia was also a late developer.
What does it mean to be modern? This question was posed among all the late developers. Was to modernize to Westernize? All that one once was suddenly had to go? The question was quickly turned upside down to still-thornier effect: What does it mean to be Japanese or Chinese or Russian? Was there some ineffable Japaneseness or Chineseness or Russianness, some ballast held within, that must not be lost on the way to becoming a modern nation, made of modern institutions and modern people?
These questions prompted what can fairly be called irruptions, searches for believable accounts of identity with a touch of the frantic about them. Wakon yosai, the Meiji ideologues proclaimed: Japanese spirit, Western things (or technology). There is ti and there is yong, Chinese “self-strengtheners” took to saying: On the one hand essence and on the other function, application, method. There is nothing remarkable in the similarity with which this matter was engaged. It was the irreducible line of inquiry. If there is anything about this worth noting, it is that neither the Japanese nor the Chinese—exactly a hundred and fifty years later in Japan’s case—have completed their replies. They are still working on them.
The Russians proved the same and very different all at once. They had much greater exposure to the philosophic and political currents coursing through Europe and made full use of this access. Alexander Herzen—journalist, writer, early socialist—spent many of his most formative years in France and Italy and was but one of numerous influential thinkers to do so. Russian intelligents (aspiring philosophes, roughly) were perfectly dexterous as they weighed Proudhon’s subjective idealism against the German metaphysicians and their impersonal laws of history. (Until the Bolsheviks prevailed, the French suited them better.) But the Western tradition was not their tradition, any more than railroads and telegraphs were Russian inventions. Everyone understood this, whatever they chose to do with the fact. There were extreme slavophiles, xenophobes, and sentimentalists at one end of the continuum and extreme Westernizers at the other. But there was a recurrent thought at one or another point between these two: Russians had to cut their own path into the modern. It was to be theirs alone, sui generis. They would have to think it through and make it.
James Billington, the noted Russianist and later librarian of Congress, draws a useful distinction in Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism, his acute study of a prominent political intellectual of the mid– to late nineteenth century. Nikolai Mikhailovsky distinguished between level and type when he put Russia against the West. The Europeans had achieved a higher level of development by way of technological advances, labor productivity, and other such measures. There is no need of elaboration on this point. But Russia was a higher type of society precisely because it came late to capitalist development, Mikhailovsky considered. It still had attributes the Europeans had surrendered.
What did so audacious an assertion mean? In what way was pre-modern, radically underdeveloped Russia superior as a society to the France of the Eiffel Tower, daguerreotypes, the Right Bank’s opulent arcades? Or the England of cotton mills and steam?
The sovereignty of the village. 2006. (Dmitry Makeev, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons.) The simplest way at this question is to consider the word pravda. We customarily translate it as “truth” and leave it at that, but this is not adequate, as any first-year language student can tell you. Pravda fuses verity—the facts of the matter—with what is just, rightness. It is naturally difficult to take this in, for there is no equivalent thought or term in English. The best we do is “moral truth,” which gets us only part way there. “Every time that word pravda comes into my head,” Mikhailovsky wrote in the late 1870s, “I cannot help but be enraptured with its wonderful inner beauty.”
Enraptured? Inner beauty? These evocations suggest a world within a word—romantic to a fault, maybe. What is the nature of this world? At its center was the obshchina, the village commune. It was in the obshchina—poor to destitution, centuries unchanged—that one found the moral truth of Russia. In its simplicity and conservatism, the commune was Russia’s reply to the materialism smothering all the old, noted ideals of Western Europe. It embodied an idea of life that transcended the new, merely scientific idea. It was pre–Cartesian. In its customs and its naturally occurring notion of justice it was a fortress against law (in its modern elevation to supremacy) and the czarist metropole. “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away,” Chinese peasants used to say. The obshchina embodied a roughly similar thought. The state and its laws were of another universe to the commune dwellers (and the urban elites who read meanings into them). The commune had a kind of not-on-paper sovereignty, it is not too much to say. By the time Mikhailovsky wrote of “inner beauty,” the obshchina was thought of as the clue to a new Russia—a still-Russian, modern-but-not-altogether-modern Russia. Russians were not to climb into Max Weber’s “iron cage,” to put the point another way. (And the intelligents would have read their Weber.) This made Russia a superior type of society.
I offer this as a summary of the wave of populism that crested in Russia in the mid–1870s. It produced novels and landscapes, some of the latter still worthy of museum walls. At its romantic extreme it amounted to Russians Orientalizing Russians. This populist nationalism was not the only current running through Russian intellectual life, and it was not to survive the Marxification of political debate from the 1880s onward. Lenin, always good for cutting appraisals of others, later called the (wellborn) Mikhailovsky “a society fop” given to spouting “insipid trash.”
There is something to consider in the (wellborn) Lenin’s remark. He had an argument, but his scorn of the populists betrayed their unacknowledged influence on the Bolsheviks, as Eric Hobsbawm and a few other historians have noted. It was another case of difference mattering most when differences are narrowest. Let us not miss the worthwhile point. No one since the last Romanovs has been able to ignore rural Russia. “To lead I had to follow” is the thought of a nineteenth-century French radical. Its place in Russian political culture is to me unmistakable. There is plenty to suggest Vladimir Putin is well acquainted with the notion. This modernizer is consistently attentive to the unmodern, and the unmodern in Russia is vast.
To be continued.