For nearly 3 weeks, intellectuals and writers in the West have been struggling to understand the motives of Russian President Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine, and they are looking for intellectual, cultural and even religious justifications that constitute potential factors for the war in addition to the well-known geopolitical, economic and military dimensions.

Was Putin's move rational, or a reckless and crazy reaction?

Some insist that the political and strategic aspects are not enough to justify the war, and they are looking for an inspiring thinker for the Russian president who might be motivated by the war in the manner of the controversial intellectual Grigory Rasputin, who was an influential advisor in the imperial court, inspiring and convincing Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna until the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

But Rasputin was opposed to the war, and kept begging the Tsar not to get involved in the fighting with the Ottomans in the Balkans in 1913, and the monk and theologian predicted the demise of the rule of the Romanov dynasty if the war entered, however, the Russian Tsar entered World War I, in which more than 4 million Russians lost their lives.

Thus, the comparison with Rasputin seems inverse, as the monk was staunchly opposed to the war and used his influence on the empress and tsar to try to avoid it, while intellectuals close to the Russian president may be supportive of the war.

Putin's inspirations

In his article in the British “Unherd” magazine, Marilyn Larwell, director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, wrote that in the current Russian scene, there is no one who can be described as a teacher to Putin. The catastrophic, all of which worked through his "court" to accomplish the task of returning Ukraine as a country to Russia's orbit.

During his speech at the Valdai Club (the Russian equivalent of the Davos elite discussion forum) in September 2021, Putin referred to 3 influential authors: Kyiv-born theologian Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948), Soviet ethnologist Lev Gumilyov (1912-1992). ), and the ideological theorist Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954).

Putin borrowed from Gumilyov his two most famous concepts, first: the common historical destiny of the peoples of Eurasia and the true multinationality of Russia, as opposed to Russian ethno-nationalism, and secondly: the idea of ​​“passion” as a living force specific to each group consisting of a vital cosmic energy and an internal force, as Putin declared in February: February 2021 "I believe in emotion. In the theory of emotion, Russia has not reached its climax. We are on a path, on the path of development, we have an endless genetic code, and it is based on the mixing of blood."

Putin has referred on several occasions to Ilyin's vision of Russia's supposedly unique destiny and the centrality of state power in Russian history, and he has certainly also noted Ilyin's angry hatred for Ukraine.

For Ilyin, Russia’s enemies will try to push Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit through the hypocritical promotion of democratic values ​​with the aim of making Russia disappear as a strategic adversary, he wrote, “Ukraine is the region of Russia most in danger of division and conquest. International Military".

Ukraine and Russia

However, to attribute Putin's Ukraine vision to Ilyin only is a failure to understand that it is common for Russian intellectuals to say that Ukraine is an integral part of Russia and one of the weaknesses of its confrontation with the West.

The ideological founding fathers of Eurasianism in the 1920s were also fiercely anti-Ukrainians, with Prince Pyotr Trubetzkoy denouncing Ukrainian culture as "not a culture, but a caricature".

George Vernadsky explained that "the cultural divide (between Ukrainians and Belarusians) is only a political fantasy, as historically it is clear that Ukrainians and Belarusians are two branches of a uniquely Russian people."

Among contemporary ideologues, Alexander Dugin has been enthusiastically cited by Western observers as having a powerful influence on Putin. Indeed, Dugin has always been an enemy of independent Ukraine. “Ukraine as a country without geopolitical meaning,” he wrote in his book “The Foundations of Geopolitics,” called for Russia to fully assimilate it. Almost all of the western regions of Ukraine are left outside its range.

But according to the author, the Kremlin considers Dugin extremely radical and ambiguous in its formulations, bringing his ideas closer to the classics of the European far-right that cannot cope with the needs of the Putin administration. Regardless of Dugin's use of it in the following decades, Dugin was never a member of any of the many important civil society organizations even if he was able to inspire some influence in the military industry and security services, according to the author.

Dogin Shepherds

Other intellectuals defending the Russian imperial mission include two of Dugin's patrons: the Orthodox royal businessman Konstantin Malofeev who leads an Internet channel and a discussion group, and Bishop Tikhon, an influential figure in the Russian Orthodox Church and rumored to be one of Putin's "recognizers".

Both men worked together to advance a reactionary agenda in terms of "traditional values", including the position on issues of abortion, militarism, Byzantium as a historical model for Russia, and the ideological indoctrination of younger generations.

Malofeev has become a central figure in Russia's outreach to European far-right and aristocratic circles, while Tikhon focuses on bridging the gap between the Church and the Kremlin and ensuring ideological rapprochement between them.

Orthodox Church

This brings us to the Moscow Patriarchate (the institutional body of the Russian Orthodox Church) which has always been ambiguous in its attitude towards Ukraine. The Church promotes the concept of ecclesiastical territory, that is, the fact that the spiritual territory of the Church is wider than the borders of the Russian Federation, and includes Belarus, parts of Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

From the Church’s view of the world, all East Slavic countries constitute one historical nation, and Kiev is its spiritual cradle. The church long preceded Putin’s embrace of the idea of ​​Russian-Ukrainian unity, as he announced in his article in 2021, but because the patriarchate included a large number of its subjects in Ukraine, it was It should also recognize Ukraine's sovereignty as a state, and has tried to avoid ecclesiastical independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church even though the Patriarchate of Constantinople eventually recognized this in 2018.

Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces (Shutterstock)

The writer says that "we can not be sure of the extent of the sincerity of Putin's religiosity, he certainly believes that Russian civilization depends on Orthodoxy as a central cultural nucleus."

To this should be added the concept of the "Russian world", which the Church clearly promotes, in reference to the task of reunifying the "Russian lands" to which Ukraine will belong.

There are also more influential hidden figures: one of Putin's closest friends, the great businessman Yuri Kovalchuk, known for his conservative and religious views on Russia's greatness, is one of the most secretive economic and media figures in Putin's inner circles, and has no status in state institutions, according to the author.

He is the largest shareholder in one of the main Russian banks, and controls many media channels and major newspapers. He is said to be Putin's personal banker. He built the main palaces of the president, and Putin spent a large part of the Corona closure with him, and apparently he instilled in him the idea that history is important. More than the present, and that Putin needs to think about his legacy in Russia's long-term history, according to the writer.

But even if we could identify the personalities who had an ideological influence on Putin, it would not make clear what drives him to war, because ideological views of the world are always shaped by broader cultural traits than just specific readings.

The entirety of Soviet culture over many decades produced accounts of Ukraine's supposed lack of clear geopolitical identity, and painted the region as endlessly vacillating between rival patrons over the centuries.

A vision of deeply entrenched Ukrainian nationalism that had not been "cleansed" of the stigma of its cooperative tendencies during World War II with Nazism, these metaphors were part of the political tools of the Soviet regime that oppressed many Ukrainians in the name of their "(bourgeois) nationalism", and were also shared. On a non-political level through jokes about the Ukrainians.

This vision culminated in the inscription in the constitution, whose new amendments for 2020 state that the state protects “historical truth.” Many state institutions, such as the Military Historical Society, played a central role in strengthening the wars of memory, thus feeding Vladimir Putin with narratives about supposed Nazism in Ukraine.

The writer concludes that Putin's worldview was built over many years, shaped more by his personal resentment of the West than by any ideological influence, as well as by reading classic works of Russian philosophy that insist on Russia's historical conflict with the West, and emphasize Ukraine's role as a civilized frontier between both. , which is reinforced simply by his personal experience.