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Essay: The Intellectual Catastrophe of Vladimir Putin The Intellectual
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ESSAY


THE INTELLECTUAL CATASTROPHE OF VLADIMIR PUTIN


THE MEANING OF RUSSIA’S WAR IN UKRAINE IS ITS OWN NATIONAL WEAKNESS.

March 13, 2022, 9:32 AM
Russian President Vladimir Putin looks on during the opening ceremony of the
2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing on Feb. 4. WANG ZHAO/AFP via Getty Images
By Paul Berman, the author of, among other books, Power and the Idealists.

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 the 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 he 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.


RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE

A major land war looms over Europe.

More on this topic

He grasps at political rhetorics from times long gone. They disintegrate 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, which
is 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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin looks on during the opening ceremony of the
2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing on Feb. 4. WANG ZHAO/AFP via Getty Images

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 the 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 he 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.


RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE

A major land war looms over Europe.

More on this topic

He grasps at political rhetorics from times long gone. They disintegrate 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, which
is 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 an unusual foreign policy not like any other
country’s, which has seemed to do the trick.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

People demonstrate against the war and food supply shortages in Vladivostok,
Russia, in 1917. OFF/AFP via Getty Images

Brutishness and the 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. And yet, the empire disappeared, wars
broke out along Russia’s southern borders, the economy disintegrated, 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.



Yet Putin was no more able than Khrushchev and Brezhnev to achieve the ultimate
success, which would be the creation of a Russian state sufficiently sturdy and
resilient to avoid any further collapses. He worries about this. Evidently he
panics. And his worries have brought him to a version of the same fundamental
view of the problem that one after another of his predecessors arrived at in
times past.

The view amounts to a species of climate paranoia. This is a fear that warm
principles of liberal philosophy and republican practices from the West,
drifting eastward, will collide with the icy clouds of the Russian winter, and
violent storms will break out, and nothing will survive. It is, in short, a
belief that dangers to the Russian state are external and ideological, instead
of internal and structural. The first such collision, the original one, took a
very crude form and was not at all characteristic of subsequent collisions. But
it was traumatic. This was Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, which crashed
the French Revolution in a debased and dictatorial form into the frozen
medievalism of the tsars. The collision of the French Revolution and the tsars
brought the French army to the embers of Moscow, and the tsarist army to Paris.

Read More


UKRAINE IS EUROPE’S CHANCE FOR RENEWAL

Russia’s war in Ukraine has to be met not just with resistance but with
inspiration.

Argument | Timothy Snyder



But the characteristic collisions, the ones that have taken place repeatedly
over the centuries, have always been philosophical, with military aspects
confined to a Russian response. A decade after the tsarist army’s entrance into
Paris, a circle of Russian aristocrats adopted liberal ideas under influences
from the French Revolution and the American Revolution. They conspired together
on behalf of a new and liberal Russia. They were arrested and exiled, and their
enterprise was crushed. But the tsar, who was Nicholas I, felt less than
confident of his victory over them. And he reacted by adopting a policy that
would forever more protect the Russian state against the subversive danger.

A new French revolution broke out in 1830, which sparked sympathetic and liberal
stirrings here and there in Europe, notably in Poland. Nicholas I recognized
that an upsurge of liberalism on the borders of his own country was destined to
revive the conspiracies of the arrested and exiled liberal aristocrats. He
responded by invading Poland, and for good measure he swallowed the Polish state
into the tsarist empire.

Still another revolution broke out in France in 1848, which led to liberal and
republican uprisings in still more parts of Europe—very nearly a continental
revolution, in plain indication that a new civilization was struggling to emerge
in Europe, no longer royalist and feudal, no longer obedient to the dictates of
whatever church might be locally in power, a new civilization of human rights
and rational thought. But the new civilization was precisely what Nicholas I
feared. He responded by invading Hungary. Those two invasions of his—the
invasions of Poland and Hungary—were, from Nicholas I’s point of view, wars of
defense, which took the form of wars of aggression. They were “special military
operations” designed to inhibit the spread of subversive ideas into Russia by
crushing the revolutionary neighbors, with the added hope of stamping out the
revolutionary inspiration in broader regions too.

The wars were successful. The continental revolution of 1848 went down to defeat
continentally, and Nicholas I had a lot to do with it. He was the “gendarme of
Europe.” And the tsarist state endured for another two or three generations,
until everything that he had feared finally did occur and inspirations from the
German Social Democrats and other liberal and revolutionary currents in the West
penetrated fatefully into his own Russia. That was in 1917. His great-grandson,
Nicholas II, was tsar.

Down went the fragile Russian state. It reemerged as a communist dictatorship.
But the basic dynamic remained the same. Stalin’s view of liberal or
liberalizing currents from the West was identical to Nicholas I’s, even if
Stalin’s vocabulary for expressing his worries was not a tsarist one. Stalin set
out to crush liberal or liberalizing inspirations in the Soviet Union. But he
set out to crush them also in Germany, which was an early goal of his Germany
policy, aimed at destroying the Social Democrats more than the Nazis; and in
Spain during the Civil War there, where his policy aimed at destroying the
non-communists of the Spanish left as much as or more than the fascists. When
World War II came to an end, Stalin set about crushing those same inspirations
in every part of Europe that had fallen under his control. It is true that he
was cracked.

But Khrushchev, who was not cracked, also turned out to be a Nicholas I. In
1956, when communist Hungary decided to explore some faintly liberal
possibilities, Khrushchev detected a mortal danger to the Russian state, and he
did what Nicholas I had done. He invaded Hungary. Brezhnev came to power. He
turned out to be the same. A liberalizing impulse took hold among the communist
leaders of Czechoslovakia. And Brezhnev invaded. Those were the precedents for
Putin’s small-scale invasion of a newly liberal and revolutionary Georgia in
2008 and his invasion of Crimea in the revolutionary Ukraine of 2014. Every one
of those invasions in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries was intended to
preserve the Russian state by preventing a purely philosophical breeze of
liberal thoughts and social experiments from wafting across the border. And the
same reasoning has led to the most ferocious invasion of all, which is the one
going on right now.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Joseph Stalin (center) and other top Soviet officials stand at the balcony of
the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow in 1926. AFP via Getty Images

Only, Putin has run into a problem of language or rhetoric that afflicted none
of his predecessors. Nicholas I in the 1830s and ’40s knew exactly how to
describe his own wars against the liberal ideas and movements of Central Europe.
This was by invoking the principles of a mystical and Orthodox royalism. He knew
what he was for and what he was against. He was the champion of the true
Christianity and sacred tradition, and he was the enemy of satanic atheism,
heresy, and revolutionary disorder.



His principles aroused a loathing among friends of the French and American
revolutions. But they aroused respect and admiration among friends of royalism
and order, who were, with help from himself, dominant in Europe. His principles
were noble, solemn, grand, and deep. They were universal principles of a sort,
which made them worthy of the grandeur that is Russia—principles for the whole
of humanity, with the Russian monarchy and the Orthodox church in the lead. They
were living principles, grounded in realities of the era, even if hidden behind
smoke and incense, and they put the tsar and his advisors in a position to think
lucidly and strategically.

Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev likewise knew how to describe their wars
against the liberals and subversives. This was by invoking the principles of
communism. Those principles, too, were majestic and universal. They were
principles of human progress, with Russia still in the lead—principles for the
entire world. The principles aroused support and admiration in every country
where communist parties were strong and sometimes too among non-communists, who
accepted the argument that Soviet invasions were anti-fascist. In those ways,
the communist principles were likewise grounded in realities of their own era,
and the grounding put the communist leaders in a position to make their own
strategic calculations in a spirt of lucidity and self-confidence.

But what sort of philosophical doctrine can Putin claim? The pro-Putin
theoreticians ought to have worked up one for him, something superb, capable of
generating a language useful for thinking about Russia’s situation in our own
moment and the eternal conundrum of the Russian state. But the theoreticians
have let him down. He ought to have them shot. Perhaps the failure is not really
their fault, which is no reason not to shoot them. A philosophical doctrine
cannot be worked up at will, the way speechwriters work up speeches. Powerful
doctrines exist, or do not exist. And so Putin has had to make do with whatever
ideas are floating about, grabbing one idea and another and tying them with a
knot.

He has drawn almost nothing from communism, except for the hatred for Nazism
that remains from World War II. He has put a lot of emphasis on his anti-Nazism
too, and his emphasis accounts for a good deal of the support he has succeeded
in arousing among his Russian compatriots. But anti-Nazism is not, in other
respects, a strength of his doctrine. The role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine in recent
years has been a visible one, if only in the form of graffiti and occasional
street demonstrations. But it has not been a major role or even a minor role. It
has been minuscule, which means that Putin’s emphasis on Ukrainian neo-Nazis,
which is helpful for his popularity in Russia, also introduces a major
distortion into his thinking.

Here is a source of his deluded belief that large numbers of Ukrainians,
frightened by the neo-Nazis, would be grateful to see Russian tanks rolling
through the streets. But nothing else of communism survives in his thinking. On
the contrary, he has recalled with regret that official communist doctrines of
the past were encouraging of the autonomy of Ukraine instead of encouraging a
Ukrainian submission into the greater Russian nation. Lenin’s position on what
used to be called the “national question” is not his own position.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Putin speaks prior the military parade of the celebrations marking the 60th
anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, in Moscow
on May 9, 2005. YURI KADOBNOV/AFP via Getty Images

From the mystical royalism of the tsars he has drawn, by contrast, rather a lot.
He has drawn a sense of ancient tradition, which leads him to invoke the role of
Kyiv in the founding of the Russian nation in the ninth century, and the
religious wars of the 17th century between the Orthodox Church (the good guys)
and the Roman Catholic Church (the bad guys). Royalism is not a nationalism, but
Putin has given to his own reading of the royal and religious past a nationalist
interpretation, such that Orthodoxy’s struggle against Catholicism emerges as a
national struggle of the Russians, who, in his interpretation, include the
Ukrainians, against the Poles. He invokes the heroic 17th-century Cossack
rebellion of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, though he discreetly chooses to leave
unmentioned Khmelnytsky’s additional role as the leader of some of the worst
pogroms in history.

But there is nothing grand or noble in Putin’s nationalist reading of the past.
His invocation of church history implies the greatness of Orthodox spirituality
but does not seem to reflect it, quite as if Orthodoxy were, for him, merely an
afterthought or an ornament. His nationalism resembles only in a surface way the
sundry Romantic nationalisms of Europe in the 19th century and the years leading
up to World War I. Those nationalisms, the ones from the past, tended to be
versions of universality in which each separate nationalism, in rebelling
against the universalism of the Jacobin dictators or the multiethnic empires,
claimed a special mission for the whole of humanity.

But Putin’s nationalism claims no such special mission. It is a small
nationalism instead of a grandiose one. It is a nationalism for a tiny country—a
nationalism with an oddly tiny voice, like the voice of Serbian nationalism in
the 1990s ranting about events of the 14th century. It is, to be sure, an angry
voice, but not in the deep and thunderous fashion of the communists. It is a
voice of resentment, directed at the victors in the Cold War. It is the voice of
a man whose dignity has been offended. The aggressive encroachments of a
triumphant NATO enrage him. He simmers.

But his resentment, too, lacks grandeur. It lacks, in any case, an explanatory
power. The tsars could explain why Russia had aroused the enmity of the liberal
and republican revolutionaries: It was because Russia stood for the true faith,
and the liberals and republicans were the enemies of God. The communist leaders
could likewise explain why the Soviet Union had aroused its own enemies: It was
because the enemies of Soviet communism were the defenders of the capitalist
class, and communism was capitalism’s undoing.



But Putin speaks of “Russophobia,” which means an irrational hatred, something
inexplicable. Nor does he identify an ultimate virtue in his resentment. The
tsars believed that if only they could defeat the subversives and atheists, they
could offer the true faith to humanity. The communists believed that after
defeating the capitalists and capitalism’s tool, the fascists, the liberation of
the world was going to be at hand. But Putin’s resentment does not point to a
shining future. It is a backward-looking resentment without a forward-looking
face.

Here, then, is a Russian nationalism without anything in it to attract support
from anyone else. I realize that here and there around the world, people do
support Putin in the present war. They do so because they harbor their own
resentments of the United States and the wealthy countries. Or they do so
because they retain a gratitude for Cold War help from the Soviet Union. There
are Serbs who feel a brotherly connection. But hardly anyone seems to share
Putin’s ideas. There is nothing to share. Nor does anyone around the world
suppose that Ukraine’s destruction will usher in a new and better era.

The doctrine does not offer hope. It offers hysteria. Putin believes that under
the supposed neo-Nazi leadership that has taken over Ukraine, millions of
Russians within Ukraine’s borders have become victims of a genocide. By
“genocide” he sometimes appears to mean that Russian-speakers with an ethnic
Russian identity are being forced to speak Ukrainian, which will deprive them of
their identity—which is an implication in his 2021 essay “On the Historical
Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Other times he is content to leave intact the
implication of mass slaughter. Either way, he appears to have been singularly
unpersuasive on this important point. Nowhere on Earth has anyone held a protest
to denounce the genocide of millions of Russians in Ukraine. Why not? It is
because Putin speaks in the tone of a man who does not even aspire to be
believed, except by people who require no convincing.

Still, he clings to his idea. It suits him. He considers himself to be a
cultured person who thinks in the loftiest manner—someone who could not possibly
invade another country without being able to invoke a magnificent philosophy. He
does seem to crave reassurance on this point, which is why, I imagine, he has
spent so many hours on the phone with Emmanuel Macron, the president of the
motherland of intellectual prestige, which has always been France. But his
attachment to the magnificent philosophy is the heart of the disaster. For how
can a man think lucidly if he is awash in ideas as small and ridiculous as
those? He knows that real-world problems and challenges beset him, but his
imagination bubbles with resentments over medieval history, the religious wars
and Cossack glories of the 17th century, the parallels between Polish
Catholicism of the past and NATO’s “Russophobia” today, and the dreadful fate of
the Ukrainian Russians at the hands of Western-encouraged neo-Nazis. And amid
the bubbling resentments, the best that he can come up with is the foreign
policy of Tsar Nicholas I from the 1830s and ’40s.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, it is true that from the standpoint of a traditional foreign-policy
realism, everything I have just recounted ought to be dismissed as irrelevant.
Realism is an ideology that stipulates the insignificance of ideologies in favor
of attending strictly to power relations. This can mean only that Putin’s
nationalist maunderings are pretty much meaningless, except for the complaint
about NATO and its aggressions, which is deemed not to be ideological. That one
part should attract the whole of our attention.

But should it really? People who take seriously the complaint about NATO always
treat the danger to Russia as something so obvious as not to need an
explanation. Putin himself points to NATO’s eastward encroachments, slams his
fist on the table, and leaves it at that, without laying out the basis of his
objection. We are supposed to infer that NATO’s expansion poses a danger to
Russia because someday out of the blue NATO armies might pour across the border
into Russian territory just as, in 1812, Napoleon’s army poured across the
border.

Yet if we are to restrict the analysis to hard facts, as realism advises us to
do, we might recall that during its more than 70 years, NATO has given not a
single indication that it is anything but a defensive alliance. There is no
reason at all to suppose that one day out of the blue, NATO, which is
anti-Napoleonic in principle, will turn Napoleonic in practice. NATO’s purpose
in expanding eastward has been, instead, to stabilize Europe and put an end to
border disputes, which ought to be in Russia’s interest too.

Still, it is unquestionable that NATO’s expansion has, even so, infuriated
Putin, and it has frightened him. Only, why? I think the answer is obvious. And
it is obvious why no one wants to say it aloud. The European revolutions that
frightened Nicholas I eventually did take place, in spite of his best efforts.
The liberal republics arose. And in 1949, the liberal republics joined together
quite as if they earnestly believed that liberal and republican principles do
make for a new civilization. And they protected their civilization with a
military alliance, which was NATO. In that manner, the liberal republics
produced a military alliance that contained within it a spiritual idea, which
was the beautifulness of the liberal and republican project. Here was the
revolution of 1848, successful at last and protected by a formidable shield. And
Putin sees the problem.

NATO’s eastward expansion infuriates and frightens him because it stands in the
way of the sound and conservative Russian foreign-policy tradition that was
established by Nicholas I. This is the policy of invading the neighbors. Where
NATO expands, Russia can no longer invade, and the achievements of the liberal
and republican revolution can no longer be undone—not by Russian armies, anyway.
Opposition to NATO expansion amounts, then, to an acceptance of Russian
expansion. It is an acceptance of the very strange Russian expansionism whose
purpose has always been to impede the eastward spread of the revolutionary
concept.



But Putin does not say this, and neither does anyone else. It is unsayable.
Anyone who acknowledged an acceptance of the Russian policy of invading the
neighbors would be saying, in effect, that tens of millions of people on
Russia’s borders or in nearby countries should be subject to the most violent
and murderous of oppressions for the simplest of reasons, which is to spare the
Russian people from contact with ideas and beliefs that we ourselves believe to
be the foundations of a good society. So no one says it. Instead, the
supposition is allowed to linger that Russia is endangered by NATO because it
faces the prospect of a Napoleonic invasion. “Realism,” in short, is a principal
of intellectual fog, which claims to be a principle of intellectual lucidity.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

People light candles while visiting a memorial dedicated to late Maidan
activists along the Alley of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes during Maidan
Revolution commemoration ceremonies in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 20. Chris
McGrath/Getty Images

Why, finally, has Putin invaded Ukraine? It is not because of NATO aggression.
And it is not because of events in ninth-century Kyiv and the Orthodox-Catholic
wars of the 17th century. It not because Ukraine under President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy has gone Nazi. Putin has invaded because of the Maidan Revolution of
2014. The Maidan Revolution was the revolution of 1848 precisely—a classic
European uprising animated by the same liberal and republican ideas as in 1848,
with the same student idealism and the same romantic flourishes and even the
same street barricades, except made of rubber tires instead of wood.

I know this because I am a student of revolutions—I have seen revolutionary
uprisings repeatedly on different continents—and I saw the Maidan Revolution, at
a three-month delay. I felt the revolutionary electricity in the air, and so did
Putin from afar. The Maidan Revolution was everything that Nicholas I set out to
oppose back in 1848–49. It was dynamic, passionate, capable of arousing the
sympathies of vast numbers of people. Ultimately the Maidan Revolution was
superior to the revolutions of 1848. It did not result in outbreaks of crazy
utopias, or demagogy, or programs of extermination, or chaos.

It was a moderate revolution in favor of a moderate Ukraine—a revolution that
offered a viable future for Ukraine and, in doing so, offered new possibilities
to Ukraine’s neighbors too. And it did not fail, unlike the revolutions of 1848.
So Putin was terrified. He responded by annexing Crimea and stirring up his wars
in the breakaway provinces of eastern Ukraine, in the hope that he could inflict
a few dents on the revolutionary success.

He had some victories too, and the Ukrainians may have joined him in inflicting
a few dents of their own. But he saw that, even so, the revolutionary spirit
went on spreading. He saw the popularity in Russia of Boris Nemtsov, his own
opponent. He found it terrifying. Nemtsov was duly assassinated in 2015 on a
bridge in Moscow. Putin saw Alexei Navalny step forward to offer still more
opposition. He saw that Navalny, too, turned out to be popular, quite as if
there was no end to these reforming zealots and their popular appeal. Putin
poisoned Navalny and imprisoned him.

Even so, a new Maidan Revolution broke out, this time in Belarus. Still more
revolutionary leaders stepped forward. One of them was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya
in Minsk, who ran for president in 2020 against Alexander Lukashenko, the
old-school thug. She won!—though Lukashenko succeeded in a Stop the Steal
maneuver and declared himself the winner. Putin racked up another victory in his
unending counterrevolution, on a small scale. Tsikhanouskaya’s success at the
polls terrified him nonetheless.

And Putin was terrified by the emergence of Zelenskyy, who might have seemed to
be, at first glance, a nonentity, a mere television comedian, a politician with
a reassuringly accommodationist program. But Putin read the transcript of
Zelenskyy’s phone call with then-President Donald Trump, which showed that
Zelenskyy was not, in fact, a pushover. Putin saw that Zelenskyy was pleading
for arms. The transcript of that phone call might even have given him the sense
that Zelenskyy was one more heroic figure in the mold of the people he had
already assassinated, poisoned, imprisoned, or overthrown—someone unyielding,
therefore dangerous.

He concluded that Maidan’s revolution was destined to spread to Moscow and St.
Petersburg, if not this year, then next year. So he consulted with the ghosts of
Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and Stalin, who referred him to the master thinker, who is
Nicholas I. And Nicholas I told Putin that if he failed to invade Ukraine, the
Russian state would collapse. It was life or death.

Putin might have responded to this advice by coming up with a project to move
Russia in a democratic direction and preserve the stability of Russia at the
same time. He might have chosen to see in Ukraine the proof that Russian people
are, in fact, capable of creating a liberal republic—given that he believes
Ukrainians are a subset of the Russian people. He might have taken Ukraine as a
model, instead of an enemy—a model for how to construct the resilient state that
Russia has always needed.



But he lacks the categories of analysis that might allow him to think along
those lines. His nationalist doctrine does not look into the future, except to
see disasters looming. His doctrine looks into the past. So he gazed into the
19th century, and he yielded to its allure, the way that someone might yield to
the allure of the bottle, or the tomb. Down into the wildest depths of tsarist
reaction he plunged. The calamity that has taken place has been, then, an
intellectual calamity first of all. It is a monstrous failure of the Russian
imagination. And the monstrous failure has brought about the very collapse into
barbarism and the danger to the ever-fragile Russian state that Putin thought he
was trying to avoid.






Paul Berman is the author of, among other books, Power and the Idealists.


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