Rarely has a book

come so timely.

Just when the question that burns in most of us is: Why does Putin do this?

How can he think that the attempt to conquer Ukraine is worth the price (economically, politically, humanly, morally) for the country he leads?

Just then, the Russian researcher Martin Kragh is publishing a book that makes a real attempt to describe Vladimir Putin's political identity and will, by putting it in context.

More specifically, two contexts: first a historical Russian perspective, and towards the latter part of the book in a global contemporary perspective. 

In the book "The Fallen Empire: Russia and the West Under Vladimir Putin", Kragh places the Russian president in the constant interplay of politics between history and room for maneuver, ideology and opportunism;

the art of the possible.

Ideology - Kragh shows

with convincing power - is in itself something dynamic, something that is transformed and grows, or withers, in interaction with circumstances. 

When the KGB man Putin was unexpectedly appointed to succeed Boris Yeltsin, who in turn almost as unexpectedly became the Soviet Union's pathfinder a decade earlier, he had no ideology and little political identity.

He was placed in his place in history and began to grow into a leader - characterized by the Soviet society he grew up in, the post-Soviet turbulence in which he helped Yeltsin stay afloat and by the Russian historical identity perceptions that spread beyond both. 

This is a clear and neat

 book, but still I think that Martin Kragh gives a richer and more complex picture of Putin and what created him is what, for example, Timothy Snyder does in The Road to Freedom.

The Russianness that is constantly mobilized as a political force, in different contexts and with different purposes, emerges in Kragh as just as unfathomable, contradictory, deep and dense as the really strong sources of power are.

And throughout history, Kragh points out, this idea of ​​Russianness has been repeatedly used as a tool to create something other than the European, the Western.

Do you understand Putin's war motives by reading this book?

Yes and no (and what to expect - they are in a way almost incomprehensible by definition). 

I probably

think that the first half of the book, the writing of history from the tsarist 19th century to the fall of the Soviet Union, is most fascinating.

That certain normative ideas lived unbroken through it all: nationalism and the idea of ​​the absolute peculiarity of the Russian people;

the right to control the sphere of interest / local area;

and the idea that a strong leader can legitimately represent and express the will of the people. 

There are three ideas that for the average westerner look good mossy.

Not least the belief in the people as a natural unit.

European public debate has long been dominated by the view of nations and peoples as ideological creations, as "imagined communities" to use Benedict Anderson's formidably powerful concepts. 

In Putin's rhetoric

, concepts such as Russia and the Russian people are not symbols, if they mean something trivial or unreal.

When Putin talks about things like restoring Russia's authentic unity and greatness - then it sounds to me helpless as a kind of mysticism.

Perhaps it is the deepest insight that Martin Kragh's book gives a materialist-pluralist-oriented westerner like me: that the purely mysterious can function as an enormous political force, now as then as always.