Ukraine has stopped social assistance payments to the inhabitants of “The People’s Republic of Donetsk.” The “People’s Republicans” are whining and moaning about the unfairness of that decision.
This is a region where nobody has ever considered the possibility of working and feeding themselves. It has always been about demanding that somebody feed them. The whorish mentality of the region’s inhabitants is nothing short of appalling.
I think I already shared the story of my young and able-bodied cousins in Donetsk who sent off their retirement-age mother to a fish factory in Canada so that she can work herself to death and feed them and their young and able-bodied husbands. The mother’s Canadian visa ran out and she was planning to return home. But the 30-year-old “children” opposed her return because they need the mother to keep working and feeding them. They are supervising her every move, throwing tantrums every time she takes a free day because when she is working, she is not making money to send to them. And nobody is seeing this situation as strange or worthy of comment. I mean, she is their mother, so of course she is supposed to provide for them.
Ask me once again why I emigrated.
Clarissa's Blog 
My thinking now is that Putin’s plan (once he realized that a land corridor to Crimea wasn’t going to happen soon) is just to create a massive financial liability for Ukraine and then leave. He certainly could have taken over the whole area by now and Ukraine is disinvesting in the area because ….. as you say…. it’s a massive liability in the best of times.
I’m thinking it will be a political hot potato with Ukraine and Russia daring each other to take responsibility for the place (with neither side wanting it).
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I agree completely with your analysis.
The original hope of Ukrainians was that the people of Donbass would wake up and try to take control of their own lives. Which, of course, is the definition of a pipe dream.
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\\ The original hope of Ukrainians was that the people of Donbass would wake up and try to take control of their own lives.
I don’t know what I would’ve been able to do, had I stayed there. How I would “try to take control” from people with guns and tanks. By suicide?
Are the people of Donbass supposed to defeat the Russian army on their own? Ukrainian army deserted them because of fear of greater Russian invasion. Blaming people of Donbass is psychologically convenient, but it isn’t the whole truth.
Just recently I’ve been thinking of my former classmates caught in that hell.
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“I don’t know what I would’ve been able to do, had I stayed there. How I would “try to take control” from people with guns and tanks. By suicide?”
– In other regions of the country, people managed to beat off the bandits with very few or no casualties.
“Are the people of Donbass supposed to defeat the Russian army on their own? ”
– Kharkov did it. Mariupol did it. Dnepropetrovsk did it.
“Ukrainian army deserted them because of fear of greater Russian invasion.”
– That’s completely untrue.
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I read many Russian / Ukrainian blogs and everybody describes Donbass people in the worst way possible. That’s why I comment here.
I can’t believe most of my former neighbors and classmates are supporting Russian invaders and a few Ukrainian bandits destroying their towns and even lives. Do you believe somebody held fair elections to create those “Republics”? If entire Ukrainian army was unable and afraid to immediately respond with force, what right one has to demand heroic feats from people under occupation?
Just imagined my family still there, probably dead already and getting blamed by all sides. (Btw, here is one of examples where Jews are much-much worse than in Israel: no economy, no security and, in addition, antisemites may target them specifically. Middle East conflict is nothing in comparison.)
Using nation-state vocabulary, don’t the rest of Ukrainians need to present people of Donbass as traitors to preserve their own national self-esteem? Instead of “we failed to protect our citizens because of being weak,” they say “those traitors get what they deserve” and “good riddance to enemies from within.”
In my childhood, we had many hard working, decent people around us, even if they drank much more vodka than Israelis. But the latter is true for other areas in Ukraine too.
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“I can’t believe most of my former neighbors and classmates are supporting Russian invaders and a few Ukrainian bandits destroying their towns and even lives. ”
– They don’t support. Neither do they not support. They just float in a vacuum, evincing mild annoyance with everybody and everything.
“Do you believe somebody held fair elections to create those “Republics”? ”
– No, of course not. But I also don’t believe the people of Donbass care that much one way or the other.
“Using nation-state vocabulary, don’t the rest of Ukrainians need to present people of Donbass as traitors to preserve their own national self-esteem?”
– I’m not a citizen of Ukraine any longer and haven’t been for 13 years. I don’t think they are traitors. I think they are just useless moochers. I’m very upset with my cousins right now. They are marrying the poor mamma off to a stranger just so that she can keep feeding them!
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“They are marrying the poor mamma off to a stranger just so that she can keep feeding them!”
If this weren’t so horrible it could form the script of a (very) black comedy.
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“If this weren’t so horrible it could form the script of a (very) black comedy.”
– Not for the inhabitants of Donbass. They would not even understand what the big deal is.
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How does that work? How old is Mama.
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58.
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\\ Using nation-state vocabulary, don’t the rest of Ukrainians need to present people of Donbass as traitors to preserve their own national self-esteem?
That’s not an attack against you or against Ukrainians from other areas.
I would love to hear what you think about this statement analytically (I meant, without connection to feelings), even though emotions run high on the issue.
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“That’s not an attack against you or against Ukrainians from other areas.
I would love to hear what you think about this statement analytically (I meant, without connection to feelings), even though emotions run high on the issue.”
– Ukraine has held on to Donbass – at an enormous cost that the rest of the country will be paying off for decades – for as long as it could. But there hasn’t been a single gesture on the part of the people of Donbass manifesting their will one way or another. It seems to me that Donbass wants to exist the way it does now but getting “pensions” from both Russia and Ukraine. I believe that would be the ideal way of being for most in Donbass. These are all my personal views. I have no idea if anybody in Ukraine supports them. Obviously, my views are colored by the situation within my family.
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About the time they started pawing through airplane wreckage and dead bodies to try to find material goodies I kind of decided that Russia deserves these people.
Ukraine should wash their hands of them and bid them farewell (and not let a single one of them back in if and when Ukraine is better off than Russia).
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“About the time they started pawing through airplane wreckage and dead bodies to try to find material goodies I kind of decided that Russia deserves these people.”
– Yeah, those people. And I wasn’t even surprised when that happened. If I heard that people in Poltava, Uzhgorod, Kiev, etc. did that, I would have been very shocked. But Donbass: yes, it’s to be expected.
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\\ Ukraine should wash their hands of them and bid them farewell (and not let a single one of them back
I see you are a supporter of collective punishment. Many from Donbass would be glad to move to a safer Ukrainian place, I am sure.
Clarissa, can they leave Donbass and go deeper into Ukraine? Would Ukraine help old people, people with children, etc. as refugees which they are?
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“Clarissa, can they leave Donbass and go deeper into Ukraine? Would Ukraine help old people, people with children, etc. as refugees which they are?”
– Many already did that. I have relatives from Donetsk who moved to Kharkiv, for instance, etc. Everybody who wanted to leave already left.
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\\ “They are marrying the poor mamma off to a stranger just so that she can keep feeding them!”
You have always said that “poor” women get huge payments for their “sacrifices.” (Btw, I don’t think it’s always so.) What is their mamma getting from the deal? May be, she was glad to move to a 1st world country, feel she was needed by somebody and get married, thus getting a husband who would need her too? Obviously, I don’t know the situation, but it was one guess.
How can anybody force an adult and independent woman to get married? Especially, when they are in different countries, as I’ve understood.
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“You have always said that “poor” women get huge payments for their “sacrifices.” (Btw, I don’t think it’s always so.) What is their mamma getting from the deal? May be, she was glad to move to a 1st world country, feel she was needed by somebody and get married, thus getting a husband who would need her too?”
– Of course, it is a masochist’s choice to suffer. But that doesn’t free the sadist from culpability.
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\\ – Of course, it is a masochist’s choice to suffer. But that doesn’t free the sadist from culpability.
What is wrong if everybody is happy in the end? 🙂
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“What is wrong if everybody is happy in the end? ”
– I’m obviously not throwing myself between them, yelling “Stop immediately, freaks!” But I can and will express my opinion on the situation. And my opinion is very low. In case I haven’t made that clear yet. 🙂
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“This is a region where nobody has ever considered the possibility of working and feeding themselves.”
According to the Knoema statistical site the employment rate in the Donetsk region in 2012 was 60% in the 15-70 years old age group. The whole population of the Donetsk region is about 4.3 million, so at least 2 million people considered this noble deed at one point in their lives. Generalization can heavily insult them.
The monthly minimum wage in Ukraine was 73.8 euro (which is 92.3 USD per month) in 2012. Let’s say the mother earns the Canadian minimum wage in the fish factory which differs between C$1,725 (1535 USD) and C$1,907 (1697 USD) according to the state where she works in. Let’s take the average which is 1616 USD per month. If the mother sends home only the 10% of her Canadian salary, that’s 9.1% more than 2 minimum wages in Ukraine (I don’t think your cousins would make more in a warzone). This way she still has 1455 USD per month which is enough for a lifestyle about 50 times higher than she would have if she remained at home. Everybody wins here, the mother herself wins the most: she is both the moral and the financial winner in the story. Ok, she works at a fish factory at the age of 50 in one of the most developed and emphatic countries in the world. So what? 90% of people in her age range have a way rougher life.
From your description your cousins seem to be extremely depressed. Just like the other people in that region, which is not that surprising considering their situation (maybe that’s why everybody who lives there understands the reasons of your cousins). Extremely depressed people in warzones usually don’t have high moral values. If they lived in Canada (or in any other western countries) they would get a very generous mental health benefit from the welfare state for about the 10% of the MH problems they currently seem to have, and everybody would emphatize with them. Now, because their MH benefit is sent by their mother, not by the state they are considered parasites as they will never get a fair MH diagnosis in Ukraine. Sorry if I was rude, and I’m aware that my comment was fucking boring with all those numbers, but recently I’m very picky of the stereotypes concerning the Eastern European region (or parts of it), as all of us have to heavily pay for it. Maybe it’s just my migrant trauma, and your cousins are really exceptionally vile.
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“From your description your cousins seem to be extremely depressed.”
– I’m not sure what you are basing the diagnosis on but it’s quite mistaken. 🙂
“Extremely depressed people in warzones usually don’t have high moral values.”
– You are assuming they acted differently before March of 2014. That, unfortunately, is not true. This has always been exactly this way. And my cousins are no exception. Things have been this way in Ukraine for decades. It’s the legacy of the USSR. And it was one of the main reasons I emigrated. I just couldn’t keep living in the midst of this mentality.
“This way she still has 1455 USD per month which is enough for a lifestyle about 50 times higher than she would have if she remained at home. Everybody wins here, the mother herself wins the most: she is both the moral and the financial winner in the story. Ok, she works at a fish factory at the age of 50 in one of the most developed and emphatic countries in the world.”
– Emigration is a trauma and a tragedy always. Emigration at the age of almost 60, without even the most basic knowledge of the language, with a complete loss of the customary social status, with extremely strenuous physical work in horrible conditions (the likes of which she never experienced back home) – I don’t know how this can be considered a winning strategy for anybody.
“If they lived in Canada (or in any other western countries) they would get a very generous mental health benefit from the welfare state for about the 10% of the MH problems they currently seem to have”
– Canadian welfare state is, indeed, generous but not to the point of keeping 4 healthy adults in permanent non-working condition for no reason whatsoever.
“and everybody would emphatize with them”
– Who is everybody??? I never would empathize with this life strategy. Especially as somebody who used to pay the extremely high and unfair taxes in Canada.
“Now, because their MH benefit is sent by their mother, not by the state they are considered parasites as they will never get a fair MH diagnosis in Ukraine.”
– 🙂 🙂 What diagnosis? These are very young and healthy people.
” Maybe it’s just my migrant trauma, and your cousins are really exceptionally vile.”
– No, they are not exceptional. This is simply how Ukrainians are. Things started to change somewhat recently (after the well-known events) but not in the Donbass region.
“The monthly minimum wage in Ukraine was 73.8 euro (which is 92.3 USD per month) in 2012. Let’s say the mother earns the Canadian minimum wage in the fish factory which differs between C$1,725 (1535 USD) and C$1,907 (1697 USD) according to the state where she works in. Let’s take the average which is 1616 USD per month. If the mother sends home only the 10% of her Canadian salary, that’s 9.1% more than 2 minimum wages in Ukraine”
– Have you wondered why the young and healthy cousins are not coming and making these delectable amounts on their own, instead of sending their mom off to do it?
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About Putin:
Одна из важных вещей, пропущенная летом, но не забытая – длиннющая статья главного редактора Нью-Йоркера Дэвида Ремника про экс-посла США в России Майкла Макфола. Вот эта: Watching the Eclipse.
http://taki-net.livejournal.com/1977989.html
I could not read English version since it’s locked for not paying users:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse
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McFaul is a very intelligent, interesting guy with a lot of respect and love for Russia.
Article: “In January, 2012, Michael McFaul, a tenured political scientist from Stanford and President Obama’s chief adviser on Russia through the first term, arrived in Moscow with his wife and two sons to begin work as the United States Ambassador. In Palo Alto and Washington, D.C., the McFauls had lived in modest houses. In Moscow they took up residence at Spaso House, a vast neoclassical mansion that was built by one of the wealthiest industrialists in imperial Russia. Spaso features a vaulted formal dining room and a chandeliered ballroom, where William C. Bullitt, the U.S. Ambassador in the thirties, used to throw parties complete with trained seals serving trays of champagne and, on one memorable occasion, a menagerie of white roosters, free-flying finches, grumpy mountain goats, and a rambunctious bear. One guest, Mikhail Bulgakov, wrote about the bash in his novel “The Master and Margarita.” Another, Karl Radek, a co-author of the 1936 Soviet constitution, got the bear drunk. The bear might have survived the decade. Radek, who fell out with Stalin, did not.
On his first night in Spaso, McFaul wearily climbed the stairs, from the stately rooms on the ground floor to the living quarters on the second, and he noticed along the way a wall filled with black-and-white photographs of his predecessors, including the “wise men” of mid-century: W. Averell Harriman, Charles (Chip) Bohlen, George F. Kennan. Every diplomat and scholar who thinks about Russia thinks about Kennan—his mastery of the language, his chilly, and chilling, brand of élitism, and, particularly, his influence on the strategic posture of the West from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet imperium. Kennan, who lived to be a hundred and one, had been Ambassador for only four months when, in September of 1952, Stalin declared him persona non grata and ordered him out of the country.
McFaul had no reason to expect that sort of hostility from the Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev. As a policy expert who served on Obama’s National Security Council, McFaul was a principal architect of the “reset,” a kind of neo-détente with Moscow. When, in September, 2011, Obama nominated McFaul to be his envoy to Moscow, relations with the Kremlin were hardly amorous, but a businesslike atmosphere usually prevailed. Obama and Medvedev did solid work on arms control, antiterrorism efforts, Iran’s nuclear program, and the war in Afghanistan. To the bitter outrage of Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s predecessor and patron, Medvedev even agreed to abstain from, rather than veto, a U.N. Security Council resolution approving NATO air strikes in Libya. But a week after McFaul’s official appointment was announced Putin declared that he would return from the shadows and run for President again in March, 2012. This high-handed “castling” maneuver soured spirits in Moscow, sparking a series of demonstrations in Bolotnaya Square and elsewhere in downtown Moscow. The protesters’ slogan was “Russia Without Putin.”
In the three months between McFaul’s appointment and his arrival in Moscow, a great deal changed. Putin, feeling betrayed by both the urban middle classes and the West, made it plain that he would go on the offensive against any sign of foreign interference, real or imagined. A raw and resentful anti-Americanism, unknown since the seventies, suffused Kremlin policy and the state-run airwaves.
As a new Ambassador, McFaul was hardly ignorant of the chill, but he launched into his work with a characteristic earnestness. “Started with a bang,” he wrote in his official blog. During the next two years, McFaul would be America’s primary witness to the rise of an even harsher form of Putinism—and, often enough, he would be its unwitting target.
William Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and then a deputy to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had, coincidentally, come to Moscow that January, and together McFaul and Burns visited a range of Kremlin officials. McFaul also presented his diplomatic credentials to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The next day, they were scheduled to meet at the U.S. Embassy with some of the best-known figures in human-rights circles and leaders of the opposition. When McFaul saw the schedule, he knew it was part of a traditional “dual-track” diplomacy—officials first, then the opposition—but he was also aware of Putin’s darkening mood. Putin had publicly accused Hillary Clinton of giving “the signal” that sparked the Bolotnaya demonstrations. He was also familiar with McFaul’s biography—his long-standing relationships with liberal activists, the shelf of books and articles he’d published on democratization.
McFaul was nervous about these meetings, but, he said, “I was the democracy guy, so we went forward.” The visitors to the Embassy included some of Putin’s fiercest critics, and, after their session with McFaul and Burns, representatives of state television lobbed accusatory questions at them as if they had just received marching orders for an act of high treason.
That night, Channel One, the biggest television station in Russia, turned its rhetorical howitzer on the new Ambassador. Mikhail Leontiev, an acid-tongued conservative who hosts a show called “Odnako” (“However”), declared that McFaul was an expert not on Russia but on “pure democracy promotion.” In the most withering tone he could summon, Leontiev said that McFaul had worked for American N.G.O.s backed by American intelligence; he had palled around with anti-Kremlin activists like the “Internet Führer,” Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption crusader who had, damningly, spent some time at Yale. (The listener was meant to interpret “some time at Yale” as roughly “some time inside the incubator of Russophobic conspiracy.”) Leontiev also noted that McFaul had written a book about the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, and another called “Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.”
“Has Mr. McFaul arrived in Russia to work in his specialty?” Leontiev said. “That is, to finish the revolution?”
Like any effective propagandist, Leontiev had artfully woven the true, the half true, and the preposterous into a fabric of lurid colors. When I asked him about the broadcast recently, he smiled and shrugged: “What can I say? It was very convenient. McFaul made himself vulnerable and we exploited that.”
Andranik Migranyan, a Putin loyalist who directs a Russian-financed institute in New York, told me, “You can’t come and start your ambassadorship by seeing the radical opposition.” He compared it to a Soviet diplomat coming to Washington heading straight for “the Black Panthers or the Weathermen.”
At first, McFaul took the attack personally, not yet realizing that he was, for Putin and official Moscow, a mere foil. “The shit that Leontiev put out on me—this haunted me for the rest of my time in Russia. I was made out to be the guy who came to Moscow to foment revolution,” McFaul told me. “Meanwhile, I was feeling really bad about this fiasco, and in D.C. the mid-level people”—in the Administration—“were saying, Why is McFaul doing this? It was affirmation of why you don’t send people like McFaul to Moscow. Like I was the one screwing up the U.S.-Russia relationship.”
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Continued: “A generation ago, in 1990, as the Soviet Union was lurching toward implosion—with the economy cratering, the Communist Party unravelling, the republics rebelling, the K.G.B. plotting its revenge—McFaul, a graduate student in his mid-twenties, kept showing up in Moscow’s “pro-democracy” circles, hanging out, asking questions, offering assistance and advice. McFaul was a sunny, eager guy, with a wide-open expression, shaggy blond hair, effortful Russian, and an irrepressible curiosity. He had grown up rough in a mining town in Montana. His mother was a secretary, his father a saxophone player in a country-and-Western band. In Moscow, operating in a culture steeped in fatalism and irony, McFaul was the most optimistic, least ironical young man you’d ever want to meet. He handed out instructional manuals translated into Russian with titles like “How to Run for Office.” He was determined to help establish liberal values and institutions—civil society, free speech, democratic norms—in a land that, for a thousand years, had known only absolutism, empire, and the knout. “That’s me,” he says even now. “Mr. Anti-Cynicism. Mr. It Will All Work Out.”
McFaul was ostensibly in Moscow to write a doctoral dissertation on Soviet-African relations. He was, in truth, bored with the quantitative trends in his field of political science—the stark modellings, ziggy graphs, and game theory that seemed so abstract when all around him was the nerve-racked excitement of revolt, the intrigue of political debate and awakening in meeting halls that stank of cheap cigarettes and wet wool. Moscow at that time was a pageant, irresistible to anyone with even a trace of democratic idealism and fellow feeling for the Russians. The sense of historical drama was unmistakable. “Like being in a movie,” McFaul recalled.
The Eastern and Central Europeans, with their simpler narrative of liberation from Soviet occupation, had already sprung the lock of history—or so it seemed—and now the capital of empire was up for grabs. McFaul was addicted to the excitements of revolution. You kept seeing him at demonstrations on Manezh Square or at Luzhniki Stadium, alongside young activists aligned with groups like Democratic Russia and Memorial; there he was at public forums and meetings where the fevered talk was all about how Mikhail Gorbachev was finished, Boris Yeltsin was the answer, and it was only a matter of time before some form of counterattack would come from the reactionary elements inside the secret services and the Communist Party, the gray, angry men, who saw their footing in the world—their power, their salaries and privileges—slipping away.
When McFaul took the time to read, it was rarely for his dissertation. He lived in a miserable hotel room and pored over Crane Brinton’s study of the cycles of rebellion and reaction in “The Anatomy of Revolution,” Trotsky’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the work of the “transitologists” Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, who explored the process by which one political system transforms into another—anything that might feed his understanding of what he was seeing on the streets and what he was hearing in his interviews with the political actors of Moscow: the radicals, the reactionaries, the manifesto drafters.
McFaul had first visited the Soviet Union in 1983, when he was an undergraduate at Stanford. The Palo Alto campus, with its gleam of wealth, had pushed him to the political left. His summer at Leningrad State University was his first time abroad. He was at ease there. After classes, he met with dissidents and consorted with the fartsovshchiki, the young hustlers of bluejeans and hard currency. There are people who encounter Russia and see nothing but the merciless weather, the frowns, the complicated language that, in casual encounters, they hear as rudeness, even menace; and there are those who are entranced by the literature and the music and the talk—the endless talk about eternal matters. McFaul was attuned to this particular kind of Russian romance. But his unusual immersion in politics made him stand out from his fellow-students. He believed, without reservation, that he could take part in the transformation of the world.
That was his habit of mind, a peculiarly American one. He was an idealist, at once ambitious and determinedly naïve. When McFaul was applying for a Rhodes Scholarship, his interviewer took note that McFaul, along with an intelligent and rambunctious classmate named Susan Rice, had helped lead the anti-apartheid movement on the Stanford campus. They occupied a building, campaigned for divestment. Among McFaul’s academic interests was the range of liberation movements in post-colonial Africa: Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. How did McFaul reconcile his desire to study at Oxford on a Rhodes, the interviewer inquired, with the fact that its benefactor, Cecil Rhodes, had been a pillar of white supremacy? What would he do with such “blood money”?
“I will use it to bring down the regime,” McFaul said. In the event, both he and Rice won the blood money and went to Oxford.
Over the years, as he developed as a scholar, McFaul made frequent trips to Moscow, and, because of his refusal to stay in the library, some Russian officials grew convinced that he was working for Western intelligence, doing what he could to hasten the fall of the Kremlin’s authority. They took his openhearted activism to be a cover for cunning.
In 1991, McFaul was in St. Petersburg, trying to organize a seminar on local government. He found himself doing business with a man from the mayor’s office named Igor Sechin. He and Sechin took an immediate liking to each other. It turned out that, like McFaul, Sechin was interested in Mozambique. They both spoke Portuguese. Sechin never actually said that his familiarity with matters Mozambican came from having been a young Soviet intelligence operative in Maputo, or that he still was a K.G.B. officer, but McFaul knew the score. What he discovered, as they talked, was that Sechin assumed that McFaul, too, was an intelligence agent.
It was an encounter with a certain historical freight: a generation later, when McFaul became Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, Sechin became the president of Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned, hugely profitable energy conglomerate. He would also be the most important counsellor to the same man he was working for way back in 1991: a career intelligence officer and deputy mayor named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
On the day McFaul was preparing to go home, he went to see his academic supervisor in Moscow, Apollon Davidson. He thanked Davidson and said he’d had a fantastic time and was hoping to return in a few months.
“You are never coming back,” Davidson said.
McFaul was shocked. There was a taxi outside idling, waiting to take him to the airport.
“You came here to do one project,” Davidson said, “and you did a lot of other things—and it isn’t going to happen again.”
“There is a file on me,” McFaul said. A couple of decades ago, a Russian friend from perestroika days who is “still in politics” told him, “I just read something disturbing about you that says you are C.I.A.” McFaul denied it, but he could see that his friend was impressed. The file, after all, had been marked “Sovershenno Sekretno”—“Top Secret.”
“In government, I’ve seen the power of getting a file marked ‘Top Secret,’ ” McFaul said.
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In 1996, President Yeltsin was running for reëlection against Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of what was left of the Communist Party. After a few years in office, Yeltsin had soiled his reputation as a reforming democrat. There was his strategy of brutal overkill in Chechnya and the way he empowered, under the banner of privatization, a small circle of billionaire oligarchs to soak up Russia’s resources and help run the country. “Democracy” was roundly known as dermokratiya—“shitocracy.” Yeltsin’s approval numbers plunged to the single digits. For months, it seemed entirely possible that Zyuganov, who attacked the injustices of the Yeltsin regime in favor of the old ideology, could win. McFaul, who had established an outpost of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, had attracted attention in Yeltsin’s circles by writing an article about how Yeltsin could win.
Yeltsin was ailing, alcoholic, and often out of sight. He left his campaign largely to shadowy figures like his bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov. In January, McFaul got a call from “a guy—let’s call him Igor—one of Korzhakov’s guys.” They met at the President Hotel, Yeltsin’s campaign headquarters. “The people I knew were on the ninth floor,” McFaul said to me. “He was on the tenth: metal detectors, guys with guns. And he told me, ‘I am intelligence. I work for Korzhakov. I am in charge of the analytic center.’ ”
Later that year, Igor asked to meet with McFaul again. “We need to have a quiet conversation about the elections,” Igor said. “Let’s go out to Korzhakov’s dacha.”
McFaul was nervous, but an intermediary from Yeltsin’s team told him, “You are better off going than not going.” He called his wife, who was in Palo Alto, and told her, “If I am not back by the end of the day, tell the Embassy.”
McFaul met his contact at the Kremlin and got in his official car, the standard black Volga sedan. They reached the dacha, one of Stalin’s old country residences. “The Chechen war was going hot and heavy, so there was lots of security and guys with guns,” McFaul recalled.
Yeltsin’s people engaged McFaul in a long discussion about the elections. As the conversation developed, McFaul realized that they were implying two things: that he was a C.I.A. agent and that the Yeltsin forces might postpone the elections. What they wanted from Washington, they made clear, was “coöperation.” If the election was postponed, they said, they wanted Washington to “hold your nose and support us.”
Finally, McFaul broke in and said, “Hey, I’m just an untenured assistant professor at Stanford.”
Igor replied, “Stop! I know who you are! I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t.”
The experience, McFaul said, “freaked me out.” He told the Embassy about it.
As the election approached, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov and relied on the largesse, the media outlets, and the strategic advice of the tight circle of oligarchs, who had met secretly in Davos and decided that they could not afford to lose their patron.
On Election Day, “the good guys won,” as McFaul puts it. Yeltsin prevailed. McFaul’s book on the subject, “Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics,” is not only dull; it is a whitewash, far too cursory about the shabby nature of the election. When I conveyed that to McFaul, he did not dispute the point, instead saying that the book was “an illustration of the tension between being an advocate and an analyst at the same time.” McFaul said that his academic friends thought the best outcome would have been a fair election; his friends in Russian political circles thought a Zyuganov victory would be a catastrophe, morally worse than a rigged ballot. “I was tormented about that,” he said.
McFaul has written and edited many books on Russia and political transition—some of them useful, some pedestrian, none enduring. From the start, his idealism and ambition lured him away from the library and toward politics and the powerful. He began visiting Washington to talk periodically with members of the Bush Administration, including Bush and Cheney. The Administration’s neoconservatism and McFaul’s liberal interventionism overlapped in the desire to press the “democracy agenda” in the former states of the Soviet Union. In 2004, McFaul counselled the Edwards and the Kerry campaigns.
In late 2006, McFaul got a call from Anthony Lake, who had been the national-security adviser in the Clinton Administration. Lake said that he was putting together a foreign-policy advisory team for “the next President of the United States”—Barack Obama. McFaul told Lake that he was already committed. He was planning to work with Edwards again.
A half hour later, Susan Rice, his old friend from Stanford and Oxford, called him.
“I am part of this thing, too, so get your shit together and join!” she crooned.
“That’s Susan’s personality, and so I said, ‘Yes! Of course!’ The stakes for me were low. Susan had had to defect from the Clintons, and they were tough on her, with all kinds of nasty-grams about people who aren’t loyal.”
Rice had already put in place a kind of shadow National Security Council for Democrats, with various foreign-policy mavens charged with heading up regional directorates. The group was later dubbed the Phoenix Initiative, a name intended to send the message that, in the wake of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration’s Vulcans, American foreign policy, under a Democratic President, would, like the mythical bird, rise from the ashes. Rice declared that the group’s thinking had broken free of the traditional clash in American foreign-policy thinking between realist power politics and liberal idealism. The emphasis was less on big-power politics than on problems like climate change and terrorism, issues that emphasized international institutions and coöperation. Around the same time, Rice and Lake also set up an advisory board for their candidate. McFaul led the division dedicated to the former Soviet Union.
The 2008 Presidential-election contest between Obama and John McCain was mainly about domestic issues. Russia was barely on the agenda—until the summer of 2008, when Russia and Georgia went to war. “McCain wanted more conflict, and we were the ones pulling back,” McFaul said. “That was the whole analytic frame of the campaign. . . . We were on defense.” McFaul was among those who pressed Obama to toughen his language and prevailed.
The episode made an impression. Benjamin Rhodes, a close adviser to Obama on foreign policy, said that McFaul’s scholarly background provided “context” that the President appreciated during the campaign and throughout the first term. They talked about everything from just-war theory to questions of development, and yet, McFaul told me, on the “big debate” over realism versus internationalism, he could never quite figure out Obama. “For Barack Obama, it is essential to end those two wars”—Iraq and Afghanistan—“and this retrenchment is in the national interest,” he said. “What I never knew at the time is where he came down on the question of hard interest versus values.”
During one argument among aides in the White House, McFaul took the position that nations need not wait for the development of a middle class before building democratic institutions. As McFaul recalled, “Somebody said, ‘That’s interesting, but that’s not what the President thinks.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting, but if that is what he thinks he is wrong.’ It was a jarring moment, and I thought I might even get fired.” He recalled arguing with Tom Donilon, the national-security adviser, about the issue. “Donilon would tell me, Obama is not really interested in that stuff. He’s just a realist.” And yet McFaul, who is not shy about suggesting his own influence, pointed out that Obama gave speeches in Cairo, Moscow, and Accra, in 2009, “making my arguments about why democracy is a good thing. . . . Those speeches made me more optimistic, after all those colleagues telling me he is just a realist.”
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“Obama has multiple interests he is thinking about,” McFaul went on. “He has idealist impulses that are real, and then impulses about concerns about unintended consequences of idealism. We were in the Roosevelt Room during the Egypt crisis, and I asked, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘What I want is for this to happen quickly and the Google guy to become President. What I think is that this will be a long-drawn-out process.’ ”
Obama’s advisers and the Washington policy establishment have all spent countless hours trying to square the President’s admiration of George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft—classic realists—with his appointments of interventionists like McFaul, Rice, and Samantha Power. In the end, one leading Russia expert, who has worked for two Administrations, told me, “I think Obama is basically a realist—but he feels bad about it.”
In his first two terms in office, from 2000 to 2008, Vladimir Putin made his priority the reëstablishment of a strong state. He disempowered disloyal regional governors, crushed the oligarchs who did not heed his insistence that they stay out of politics, and obliterated the leadership of the separatist uprising in Chechnya. He took complete control of the main television channels and neutered any opposition political parties. He established postmodern state symbols and an anthem that combined features of the imperial and Communist past. But he was not, foremost, an ideologue. Kleptocracies rarely value theoretical tracts. They value numbered accounts. They value the stability of their own arrangements.
In the heart of the Soviet era, Kremlin leaders, including Lenin and Stalin, wrote scholastic treatises dictating the ideological course for many aspects of life. At the heart of the Communist Party Central Committee was the department of ideology, which laid down the law on everything from the permissible interpretation of history to the dissidents and artists who had to be suppressed, imprisoned, or exiled. By the late Soviet period, though, K.G.B. officers like Putin were nearly as dismissive of Communist ideology as the dissidents were. “The Chekists in his time laughed at official Soviet ideology,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to Putin, told me. “They thought it was a joke.” Putin, in 1999, admitted that Communism had been a “blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization.”
Buoyed by the sharp rise in energy prices, Putin was able to do what Yeltsin had not: he won enormous popular support by paying salaries and pensions, eliminating budget deficits, and creating a growing urban middle class. It was hardly a secret that Putin had also created his own oligarchy, with old Leningrad pals and colleagues from the security forces now running, and robbing, the state’s vast energy enterprises. This almost unimaginably corrupt set of arrangements, which came to be known as Kremlin, Inc., outraged nearly everyone, but the relative atmosphere of stability, in which tens of millions of Russians enjoyed a sense of economic well-being and private liberty, provided Putin with a kind of authoritarian legitimacy.
This relative prosperity and personal freedom was, in fact, unprecedented. For the first time, millions of Russians took vacations abroad, got mortgages, bought foreign cars, remodelled their kitchens, acquired iPhones. The state was indifferent to the way people lived—what they read, where they worshipped, whom they shared a bed with. A sitcom called “Nasha Rasha” featured a gay factory worker in the Urals. “For the States or Sweden, it would have been politically incorrect,” Alexander Baunov, a columnist for the Web site slon.ru, told me. “But for Russia it was a real improvement! No one killed him!” The state media were under close watch by the authorities, and there were occasional arrests to show where the limits were, but there was no return to Sovietism. Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff, called the system “sovereign” democracy.
Nor was Putin aggressively anti-American in his first years in power. He craved membership in the world economy and its institutions. He was the first foreign leader to telephone George W. Bush on 9/11 and offer assistance in Afghanistan. He abhorred the influence of foreign N.G.O.s, thinking that they undermined Russian interests, but he wanted membership in the global club. He even talked about Russia joining NATO. “Russia is part of the European culture,” he told the BBC, in 2000. “And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy.” The spirit of relative amity did not last.
In 2009, after Putin had ceded the Presidency to Medvedev, he hosted Obama at his country residence and lectured the U.S. President on the history of American deceptions. It was an hour before Obama managed more than “hello.” McFaul, who was at that meeting, said, “It was grossly inaccurate, but that is his theory of the world.” Putin demanded that the U.S. cede to him the former Soviet republics—Ukraine above all—as a Russian sphere of influence. He felt that the United States had, in the glow of post-Cold War triumphalism, pushed Russia around, exploiting its weakness to ignore Yeltsin’s protests and bomb Belgrade and Kosovo. Gorbachev had always said that the U.S. had promised that, in exchange for his acquiescence to the reunification of Germany, NATO would not expand to the east. In 2004, NATO absorbed seven new countries—Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states, which Putin took as a particular offense and a geopolitical threat. And then, later that year, came the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, which Putin saw as a Western project and a foreshadowing of an assault on him.
When, after the Medvedev interregnum, Putin returned to power, in 2012, he perceived the anti-Kremlin protests as an echo of Kiev. The demonstrators had no clear ideology, no leaders. They did not extend much beyond the urban creative and office classes. They had neither the coherence nor the staying power of the protesters on other squares—Taksim, Tahrir, Maidan, Wenceslas. All the same, Putin could not countenance them. What he loathes, his former aide Gleb Pavlovsky told me, is spontaneity in politics. “Putin is anti-revolutionary to his core,” he said. “What happened in Kiev”—on Maidan, in 2014—“was for him absolutely disgusting.”
An avid reader about tsarist Russia, Putin was forming a more coherent view of history and his place within it. More and more, he identified personally with the destiny of Russia. Even if he was not a genuine ideologue, he became an opportunistic one, quoting Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Nikolai Berdyayev, and other conservative philosophers to give his own pronouncements a sense of continuity. One of his favorite politicians in imperial Russia was Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister under Nicholas II. “We do not need great upheavals,” Putin said, paraphrasing Stolypin. “We need a great Russia.” Stolypin had also said, “Give the state twenty years and you will not recognize Russia.” That was in 1909. Stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in Kiev, in 1911. But Putin was determined that his opportunity not be truncated: “Give me twenty years,” he said, “and you will not recognize Russia.”
And so now, instead of nurturing the business and creative classes in the big cities, he turned on them. He vilified them on TV; he weakened them with restrictions, searches, arrests, and selective jail terms. He sided now with the deeply conservative impulses, prejudices, and habits of mind of the Russian majority. “There was an idea to gain the support of the majority, to distinguish it from the minority,” Boris Mezhuev, a conservative columnist at Izvestia and the editor of the Web site politconservatism.ru, told me. “This was done harshly.”
Putin’s speeches were full of hostility, lashing out at the West for betraying its promises, for treating Russia like a defeated “vassal” rather than a great country, for an inability to distinguish between right and wrong. He denounced the United States for its behavior in Hiroshima and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and Libya. He cut off adoptions to America, claiming that “our” babies were being abused by cruel and heedless foreigners. The West was hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and dissolute, according to Putin, so he strengthened his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church to reëstablish “traditional Russian values.” He approved new laws on “non-traditional” sexual practices—the so-called “anti-gay propaganda” laws. When the feminist performance artists and political activists Pussy Riot burst into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and performed their “Punk Prayer” (“Throw Putin Out!”), the system knew what to do: Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Church, denounced them for “blasphemy,” and the courts, an utterly dependent instrument of the Kremlin, handed down a Draconian sentence. More and more, Putin spoke about “traditional Russian values” and of the uniqueness of Russian “civilization,” a civilization that crossed borders.
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An ideology, a world view, was taking shape: Putin was now putting Russia at the center of an anti-Western, socially conservative axis—Russia as a bulwark against a menacing America. “Of course, this is a conservative position,” he said in a speech last year, “but, speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyayev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”
One reason that McFaul was surprised by the assault on him is that he thought he was being careful in his ambassadorial role. He never went to demonstrations. He steered clear of Alexei Navalny.
Still, he was hardly a quiet American. Hillary Clinton had called for U.S. diplomats to use social media, and he was especially ardent, maintaining an active presence, in both Russian and English, on Facebook and Twitter. The young liberal intelligentsia loved McFaul for his openness, his availability. Putin’s people thought his behavior bewildering, adolescent, and hostile.
When Navalny was on trial for a trumped-up charge of embezzlement, McFaul addressed him directly: “I am watching.” And when street reporters stalked McFaul and tried to throw him off his stride, he had a tendency to confront, rather than finesse, his tormentors. Considering McFaul’s sometimes shaky grasp of the Russian idiom, this could make him look both volatile and unconfident.
One winter afternoon, he went to call on the human-rights campaigner Lev Ponomaryov, an old friend from the nineties, and he made the mistake of getting into an unruly debate with a “reporter” from NTV, one of the slavishly loyal television channels. He accused the reporter of somehow knowing his whereabouts through illegal surveillance: “Aren’t you ashamed?” At one point, he blurted out that his diplomatic rights had been violated, that Russia “turned out to be a dikaya strana”—a wild, an uncivilized, country. Later, on Twitter, he said, “I misspoke in bad Russian.” He had meant to say that NTV was behaving wildly. “I greatly respect Russia.” He told a reporter, “I’m not a professional diplomat.” It might not have helped that Navalny, Putin’s nemesis, stepped in and tweeted, “I don’t understand McFaul. He’s got diplomatic immunity. He can just lawfully beat up the NTV journalists. Come on, Mike!”
Another time, McFaul went on Twitter to announce in Russian that he was headed to “Yoburg” for an event. He intended a slangy way of saying Yekaterinburg. Unfortunately, yob is the root of the verb for copulation and his tweet came off as “I am headed to Fucksville.”
These awkward moments were gifts for Putin and his circle, who wanted nothing more than to keep McFaul, and, by extension, the Obama Administration, off balance. At one Kremlin reception, where Putin gave a toast in honor of national independence, a Russian friend told McFaul that he should “lay low,” and said, “You are really on thin ice.”
“What do you mean?” McFaul said.
“I saw Putin and he said, ‘What’s up with this guy? He seems like a real rabble-rouser.’ Putin’s message was to be very careful.”
At the Embassy, McFaul was writing deeply pessimistic memos to the White House about the direction of Russian-American relations. At night, he would go up the stairs and see Kennan’s photograph and wonder if he, too, would get expelled from Moscow.
When Obama was reëlected, in 2012, McFaul was among those who pressed him to visit Moscow, to see what business there was to do with Putin. “So the trains started rolling, we got dates, and our job was to develop a substantive agenda to make this worthwhile,” McFaul said. “This was the last push to try to engage on some of these issues, and it all struck out—arms control, missile defense. It got to be where I was having doubts whether the President should come. It looked like chickenshit to me. And I thought that would be a way worse optic than not coming at all.”
Then Edward Snowden arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong. The Russians greeted him with barely concealed delight. The summit was off. “And suddenly,” McFaul said, “we were in a different world.”
The imagery of Putinism, with its ominous warnings against political chaos and outside interference, has long been in evidence. All you have to do is watch television. In 2008, state television broadcast a cheesy docudrama called “The Destruction of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium,” which was hosted and produced by Tikhon Shevkunov, a Russian Orthodox priest whose church, the Sretensky Monastery, is just down the street from Lubyanka, K.G.B. headquarters. Shevkunov, who has known Putin for many years, is widely rumored to be the Russian President’s dukhovnik, his spiritual adviser. The film purports to be a history of the Byzantine Empire’s fall at the hands of the perfidious West, and not, as scholars have it, to the Ottoman Turks, who conquered Constantinople in 1453. The film is a crude allegory, in which, as the Byzantine historian Sergey Ivanov points out, Emperor Basil is an “obvious prototype of Putin, the wealthy man Eustathios is a hint at the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, while Bessarion of Nicea is easily associated with another tycoon, Boris Berezovsky,” and so on. Shevkunov’s film was, in effect, about the need to resist Western influence and to shore up central authority in Russia.
Such phenomena are now common fare. The airwaves are filled with assaults on the treachery of Russian liberals and American manipulations. Dmitri Kiselyov, the head of Russia Today, Putin’s newly created information agency, and the host, on Sunday nights, of the TV magazine show “News of the Week,” is a masterly, and unapologetic, purveyor of the Kremlin line. With his theatrical hand gestures and brilliantly insinuating intonation, he tells his viewers that Russia is the only country in the world that can turn the U.S. into “radioactive dust,” that the anti-gay-propaganda laws are insufficiently strict, and that Ukraine is not a real country but merely “virtual.” When I remarked on his delivery, during a recent visit to his offices, Kiselyov was pleased: “Gestures go right to the subconscious without any resistance.”
In 1991, Kiselyov made a name for himself by refusing to go on the air and broadcast the Kremlin line about an attack on the Baltic independence movements, but now he is an enthusiastic, and often vicious, voice in defense of the state.
“I preserved the capacity to evolve,” he told me. “Back then, we believed we could build a democracy without a state. . . . People said, ‘So what, we will just be a collection of little Latvias.’ But society began to change, and I am a reflection of that change.”
Kiselyov worked as a broadcaster in Kiev during the Orange Revolution and recalls being sickened by the upheaval, which he says was sparked by insidious American interference. “Western journalism, in large part, reproduces values,” Kiselyov said. “When I saw the horror in Ukraine and I returned to Russia, I realized we need to produce values. . . . Putin didn’t make me this way. The Orange Revolution did.” As a master of theatrical sarcasm and apocalyptic rhetoric, Kiselyov eclipses Bill O’Reilly, and as a theoretician of conspiracy he shames Glenn Beck. He tells his viewers that, in Ukraine, fascists abound, the U.S. State Department underwrites revolution, and “life is not worth a single kopeck.” But he insists, “The presentation of me as a minister of propaganda is itself a form of propaganda.”
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Although Kiselyov denies that he gets direct instructions from the Kremlin, he was appointed by Putin and is under no illusions about what is expected of him. When he goes on an anti-Semitic tirade against an opposition journalist or mocks American officials, he is doing what he was hired to do. He is a wily, cynical man, and well briefed. When we met, he quickly wanted me to know that he had somehow seen a film of a speech I’d given a couple of years ago in Moscow. “You mesmerized the public, you made them zombies!” he said, delighted with himself. “They looked at you the way they would a boa constrictor!”
When I noted that Putin’s tone had changed, he said, “I agree. Putin now talks more about ideology and about the system of values and the spiritual origins of Russia. In this sense, he, too, is a person of tardy development. He became President unexpectedly. He had no preparation for this role. He had to respond to challenges in the course of things. At first, he had to reconsolidate the state. Now he has inspired a new energy that can be drawn from the national character and the system of values that are rooted in our culture.”
Putin, Kiselyov has said on the air, “is comparable among his predecessors in the twentieth century only with Stalin.” He meant it as a compliment.
Nearly a quarter century after the fall of empire, Putin has unleashed an ideology of ressentiment. It has been chorussed by those who, in 1991, despaired of the loss not of Communist ideology but of imperial greatness, and who, ever since, have lived with what Russians so often refer to as “phantom-limb syndrome”: the pain of missing Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic states; the pain of diminishment. They want revenge for their humiliation.
“People in the West twenty-five years ago were surprised by how calmly Russians seemed to absorb the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Boris Mezhuev, the conservative columnist, said. “It seemed to them as if we had voted on it! But in no time at all people were told that everything they had worked for was nonsense. They were told that the state they lived in was based on an unfair idea, that ideology was a myth, the West was only a friend—a complete reversal of ideas. The West underestimated the shock. Only now are we facing the consequences.”
There is an air of defiance, even a heedlessness, to Putin’s behavior. As the conservative commentator Stanislav Belkovsky put it to me, “It was clear that the actions in Crimea would lead to sanctions, capital flight, and a deterioration of Russia’s reputation, but nobody supporting the aggression thought twice. The imperial horn has been sounded. But we are a Third World kleptocracy hiding behind imperial symbols. There are no resources for a true imperial revival.”
Nevertheless, the voices of neo-imperialism are loud and prominently aired. One evening, I went to see Aleksandr Prokhanov, a far-right newspaper editor and novelist, whom I’ve known since the late eighties. In the Soviet period, he was known as the Nightingale of the General Staff, a writer commissioned to ride and chronicle the glories of nuclear subs and strategic bombers and to visit the Cold War battlefields of Kampuchea and Angola. He was a panegyrist of Stalin’s military-industrial state and the achievements of Sovietism. “No one,” he told me, “could describe a nuclear reactor like I could.”
Prokhanov loathed Gorbachev and Yeltsin—Gorbachev for his weakness and lack of regard for the Soviet system, Yeltsin for “hollowing out the state.” He not only favored the K.G.B.-led putsch against Gorbachev, in 1991; he was the principal author of an ominous manifesto, “A Word to the People,” shortly before Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his vacation home in Crimea and tanks rolled into the center of Moscow. He began publishing a newspaper called Dyen (the Day), which collected the fevered rants of all the forces in opposition to the democrats: imperial Stalinists, Russia-for-Russians nationalists, National Bolsheviks, ugly sorts who traced Russia’s troubles to “international Jewry,” Masonic conspiracy, George Soros, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Foundation. Somewhere along the line, the paper was relaunched as Zavtra (Tomorrow).
Prokhanov is now in his seventies. In the Yeltsin era, the “democratic” media rarely invited Prokhanov on the air. These days, the Nightingale sings brightly and nationally; he appears regularly on talk shows and prime-time debates, a deliberate attempt by the regime to give voice to ascendant, approved ideas. When a liberal is trotted out to debate him, viewers invariably vote in overwhelming numbers for Prokhanov’s arguments.
“I miss the nineties! They were the best!” he said with mock despair. “I was in the opposition and was alone battling against the system! Now I am part of the system.”
When I asked him if he wasn’t being exploited by the regime, he smiled indulgently.
“Everyone is being used, including yourself,” Prokhanov said. “We give the system a body, a shape. We’ve explained to the system why it’s great, why it’s in a condition of blooming, and that it exists because of God’s will. And the system has been enlivened by this.” Prokhanov admires, above all, Putin’s strength, as a matter of both image and policy.
Putin came to power thanks to Yeltsin, but Putin did not hesitate to put some distance between himself and his ailing patron. Bill Clinton, at the very end of his time in office, visited Putin at the Kremlin, and at one point in their time together Putin led Clinton on a tour of the vast and magnificent premises. (Compared with the Kremlin, the West Wing of the White House is as grand as an Ethan Allen furniture outlet.) First, they visited a gym, full of state-of-the-art equipment. “I spend a lot of time here,” Putin said, body-proud even then. They proceeded down a long hall to another room; this one was gloomy, abandoned, with a hospital bed, a respirator, a cart filled with medical paraphernalia. Putin turned to the President. “The previous resident spent a lot of time here,” he said.
Putin’s displays of shirtless virility may play as a joke abroad, but to supporters like Prokhanov strength and its projection are at the center of Putinism. “Putin prevented the disintegration of Russia,” Prokhanov said, echoing a widely held sentiment. “In him I saw the traits of a traditional Russian ruler. He struck out at the oligarchs who had controlled Yeltsin. They would pour some vodka for Yeltsin, get him drunk, and they ran the country. Putin destroyed the Yeltsin élite and created a new élite from the siloviki”—the leaders of the security services and the military.
During the anti-Putin protests two years ago, Prokhanov attended counter-demonstrations elsewhere in Moscow. “These young liberals wanted to get rid of Putin and practically send him to the fate of Qaddafi. There was an imbalance in political and ideological forces. The liberals dominated everywhere in mass media, culture, the economy, and Putin decided to correct this imbalance and so he began to grow the patriotic forces.”
Prokhanov could read the signals of encouragement, but he does not pretend to see Putin often. (“My connection to Putin is mystical. We meet each other in our dreams. Which is the best place. No one eavesdrops there.”) Together with members of other institutions associated with the Kremlin—the armed forces, the intelligence services, and the Russian Orthodox Church—he started an intellectual group called the Izborsky Club. In the nineties, Yeltsin had called on a group of intellectuals to help formulate a new “Russian idea,” one that relied largely on a liberal, Westernized conception of the nation. It went nowhere. Now, with such notions as “democracy” and “liberalism” in eclipse, groups like the Izborsky Club, Prokhanov says, are a “defense factory where we create ideological weapons to resist the West.” He said the group recently organized a branch in eastern Ukraine, led by the pro-Russian separatists. “The liberals used to be in charge in all spheres,” Prokhanov said. “Now we are crowding them out.”
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According to ideologues like Prokhanov, the thousand-year shape of Russian history is defined by the rise, fall, and reassertion of empire. “These empires flower and become powerful and then they fall off a precipice and leave behind a black hole,” he said. “And in the black hole statehood disappears. But then the state reëmerges as the result of some sort of mysterious forces.” So far, Prokhanov explained, there have been four great empires. The first, a confederacy of princedoms with its center in Kiev, was invaded by the Tatars, in the thirteenth century. Then came the Moscovy tsardom, which featured the reign of Ivan the Terrible and was transformed into an empire by Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth century. Then came the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanovs, who gave way to the Bolsheviks in 1917. Finally, Prokhanov said, Stalin “took Russian statehood out of that black hole, put the state on its feet, built factories, produced scholars, and won the Great Patriotic War against Germany and conquered outer space.” That empire, the Soviet Union, crashed in 1991. Again, there was a ten-year-long black hole. “Yeltsin is the black hole of modern Russian history,” Prokhanov said. Under Putin, Russian statehood reëmerged. In his latest book, which Prokhanov gave me as a gift, he has a set piece addressed to Putin called “The Symphony of the Fifth Empire.”
Prokhanov is pleased to conclude that Russia is entering a prolonged war with the West—a cold war, possibly worse. “There is always danger of worse,” he said, “even worse than nuclear war—and that is soulless surrender.” Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he insisted, the West was, through its spies and diplomats, through its perfidious deals with weak Russian leaders, able to achieve its objective: the destruction of the state. The West, he said, “destroyed the Soviet Union without setting off a single bomb.”
Nothing has lifted the spirits of intellectuals like Prokhanov—and tens of millions of their countrymen—quite like Putin’s decision to flout international opinion and annex Crimea. Prokhanov pronounced himself “ecstatic” about it. One of his favorite writers for Zavtra, Igor Strelkov, is a former Russian intelligence agent who is leading the separatists in Donetsk, and is widely believed to be among those who bear responsibility for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. On the day of the catastrophe, Prokhanov posted a veritable ode to Strelkov on the Zavtra Web site, saying that the Russian fight in eastern Ukraine was a battle for “divine justice” and comparing Strelkov—“Russian warrior, knight, perfect hero”—to the most fabled generals in national history. To Prokhanov, this glorification of an armed agent is only natural, the war for Ukraine a matter of highest principle.
“This is a great country with only arbitrary borders,” Prokhanov said. “People grabbed up our territory, chopped it up into bits. Some people got used to this state of affairs and didn’t notice that their extremities had been chopped off—including the very pleasant extremity between your legs—and so it was with Ukraine. . . . Russians had to choose: ruin their relationship with the West, which was the very axe that chopped Russia into bits in the first place, or act without fear, because now Russia has an axe of its own.”
“When you see what is going on in Iraq, you can see that America is powerless to respond,” Prokhanov went on. “America brought chaos to the Middle East. Al Qaeda has its own state. And now Obama doesn’t want to send bombers to destroy it. We poor Russians have to go destroy it. Aren’t you ashamed?”
Prokhanov is hardly an outlier on today’s ideological scene in Russia. Nor is the geopolitical theorist, mystic, and high-minded crackpot Aleksandr Dugin, who has published in Prokhanov’s newspapers. He was once as marginal as a Lyndon LaRouche follower with a card table and a stack of leaflets. He used to appear mainly on SPAS (Salvation), an organ of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now the state affords him frequent guest spots on official television.
Dugin is in his mid-fifties and wears a beard worthy of Dostoyevsky. His father, he says, “probably” worked for military intelligence. His parents divorced when he was three. He hated Soviet society. He hated his family. “I hated the world I was born into,” he said. As a teen-ager, he fell into a circle of eccentric kitchen intellectuals, young people who despised Communism and the West with equal fervor. “They were kind of loonies,” Dugin told me. He attended the Moscow Aviation Institute, but was thrown out for his anti-Soviet, far-right politics.
Dugin’s intellectual journey includes dalliances at various times with pagans, priests, monarchists, fascists, neo-Bolsheviks, and imperialists. He admires far-right European theorists like the Weimar conservative Carl Schmitt; he admires various strains of the European New Right. He is a follower of René Guénon, a French mid-century philosopher who espoused the doctrine that became known as Traditionalism, which bemoans the decline of man since Creation and rejects modernity and rationalism. His most powerful influence is the Eurasianists, who envisioned Russia as a unique civilization, neither European nor Asian, with its own “special destiny” and grandeur.
The world, for Dugin, is divided between conservative land powers (Russia) and libertine maritime powers (the U.S. and the U.K.)—Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage. The maritime powers seek to impose their will, and their decadent materialism, on the rest of the world. This struggle is at the heart of history. For Dugin, Russia must rise from its prolonged post-Soviet depression and reassert itself, this time as the center of a Eurasian empire, against the dark forces of America. And this means war. Dugin rejects the racism of the Nazis, but embraces their sense of hierarchy, their romance of death. “We need a new party,” he has written. “A party of death. A party of the total vertical. God’s party, the Russian analogue to the Hezbollah, which would act according to wholly different rules and contemplate completely different pictures.”
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For all of Dugin’s extremism, he has, in the past decade, found supporters in the Russian élite. According to the Israeli scholar Yigal Liverant and other sources, Dugin’s work is read in the Russian military academy. He has served as an adviser to Gennady Seleznyov, the former chairman of the Russian parliament. His Eurasia Movement, which was founded in 2001, included members of the government and the official media. He declared his “absolute” support for Putin, and when he pressed his political positions in public it was usually to take the most hard-line positions possible, particularly on Georgia and Ukraine. In 2008, he was appointed head of the Center for Conservative Studies at Moscow State University. Dugin used to brag that “Putin is becoming more and more like Dugin.” And indeed Putin speaks more and more in terms of Russian vastness, Russian exceptionalism, of Russia as a moral paradigm.
When I asked Dugin about his connection to, or influence over, Putin, though, Dugin carefully disavowed any “personal connection” to the President. “I doubt that he knows who I am,” he said. “My influence on politics is zero, on government zero. I am working only on my Platonic vision of things.” Yet the mystic chords of that vision have come to reverberate widely in Russian society.
Dugin began to visit the West in 1989. Even though he spent most of his time calling on like-minded leaders of the European New Right, such as Alain de Benoist, he loathed his time there. Paris and Berlin were, in 1989, “worse than the Soviet Union.” Commercialism had obliterated the European culture he loved and reduced its citizens to a state of profound “loneliness.” As for the Americans, he found them “honest and clear and pragmatic and very free, and they are not so corrupt or hypocritical or decadent as Europe—but they are absolutely wrong at the same time in the metaphysical sense. They have a cult of real evil there. What they have taken for the most important value—individuality—is absolutely wrong. . . . I think American society is simply insane.”
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Thank you for posting the article! It’s surprisingly good. I wanted to ask clarification about:
\\ Commercialism had obliterated the European culture he loved and reduced its citizens to a state of profound “loneliness.”
Which elements of the European culture did he miss exactly?
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A joke about capitalism:
http://yoshke.livejournal.com/912399.html
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Yet a few months ago you were sayuing that there was no difference between that and other regions of Ukraine.
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“Yet a few months ago you were sayuing that there was no difference between that and other regions of Ukraine.”
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