Trying to understand Vladimir Putin, historians of the future will be faced with choosing which tsar should be compared to in the millenary Russian history, whether with the European orientation of Peter the Great or the Asian orientation of Ivan the Terrible. Probably, they will have less doubts about what his greater geopolitical influence was.
Geopolitics has to do with the life and history of peoples, in relation to the territory they occupy, and their field of study also attempts to explain the effects of human and physical geography on politics and international relations.
In Putin’s geopolitical vision, Eurasianism predominates and is totally dominant, which is a whole movement, both cultural and ideological, that emerged in the communities of Russian émigrés from the second decade of the twentieth century, and whose main theorists were Nikolái Danilevski and Konstantin Leóntiev. After the fall of the USSR and the subsequent failure of economic liberalism reappears in the 90s with force, acquiring prominence, especially Aleksandr Duguin, although and above all, by the former fascist flirtations of the latter, a whole current of analysts questions the level of his intellectual influence on Putin.
In the 90s, the Russian school of Eurasianism emerged as a counterpart to the so-called Atlanticism, which would be an ideology of European dependence on the United States. It is an illiberal current far removed from liberalism and communism, rather conservative, which criticizes both democracy and modernity, adversary of individualism, and which makes freedom fall on a collective subject, which would be the Russian soul, whose culture would be refractory to the Anglo-Saxon vision of universal rights, which they see as a form of racist imposition, since it would suppose a hierarchy of the peoples.
This vision places the United States and its strategic control of Atlanticism as the great adversary, and the need for the great Russian Homeland, its history and its destiny, to confront it. It also has a mystical basis, which would be religion, based on the Orthodox variant of Christianity, and an ethnic base that unites Russians with all Slavic peoples. It is that fate that went astray with the Communists.
The difference of Eurasianism with other cultural, philosophical and nationalist currents is the link that is found with a whole proposal and geopolitical action, which gives a sense of mission to Russia after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and which had already been expressed in places like Transnistria deciding to remain linked to Russia after the appearance of new republics, and in Georgia in 2008 and in Crimea and the Ukrainian Donbas in 2014.
It is a narrative that is fed by a strong victimization, in which Russia has no alternative but to defend itself through the occupation of territories that it considers historically its own, since from the west they are trying to weaken it and impose a foreign culture on its tradition, and that wants to reduce it to a level of almost vassal, above all, economically. Hence the actual fear of alliances such as NATO and also of the so-called color revolutions in former Soviet republics, which are seen as an attempt to surround and isolate Russia, a mentality that is not only of now, but has an admirable continuity with tsarism and communist foreign policy, fueled by real events like the invasions that have come from the west, which have been varied and that have not been limited to Napoleon and Hitler. Today, it is added that the change of governments that Washington does not like is sought.
Russia is not only a state, but also a civilization with people, language, culture and Church, which also has a component beyond its borders, in the millions of Russians left in new countries by the breakup of the Soviet Union, and who would be subject to persecution in their language and traditions, and in whose representation Putin speaks as well as he does it for the Slavic world, citing the intervention of NATO, Europe and the United States in the defeat of Serbia and the birth of Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia, which had been facilitated because then there was weakness and prostration in Moscow, which must be corrected.
Victimization joins the argument of the need for respect for Russia, since, from the 90s, it would have been treated in a disrespectful and arrogant way by the victors of the cold war.
Russia must set itself three objectives, the first being to recover its place of great power, and although it is not more global, it will always be Eurasian. Secondly, it will have to fight against the unipolar world that emerged at the fall of the USSR (and hence the well-known phrase that it was “a geopolitical catastrophe”), and third, the representation of the Russian speakers of the former USSR living in other republics and of the wider Slavic universe: “Russia, as a Eurasian country, it is a unique example of the dialogue of cultures,” Putin said in 2003 in his address to the Council for Culture and Art.
This school of thought and the geopolitical variable allow us to better understand what is behind the invasion of Ukraine. It also allows to answer the question of whether the war is a personal issue of Putin or rather something scattered on many levels of Russia, perhaps with another leader it would not be the same, but if something similar, since there is no real liberal alternative, but the alternative to Putin are still the heirs of the Communist Party, their electoral rival, in addition to the fact that the liberals were very discredited after the 90s, and the prevailing mentality today sees them as another Western imposition.
In geopolitical terms, there is continuity in many aspects between the tsars, communism and today, Putin, from the need for hot water ports to deeper issues of feeling always threatened from the West. It is a mixture of national pride and feeling slighted which is behind the aggression and territorial objectives in Ukraine, not even a war for Moscow, but a simple “military operation” in a territory that historically feels like its own.
Simplification of a complex reality, to hide an act of war against another country.? Sure, but also a vision of history and the world that feels that since the disappearance of the Soviet Union something is owed to them: the negotiation of a new scenario for Russia, which takes into consideration an important place for it in the world.
And meanwhile, a Putin who wanted to be a modernizer like Peter the Great appears more like Ivan the Terrible to that world.
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