Russian President Vladimir Putin’s enmity with the West goes back to “the entire history of Russia” and will continue “for a long time”, according to a report published on the Foreign Policy website.
The magazine’s lengthy report reviewed the real reasons for Putin’s anti-Western stance, which she said goes beyond simply restoring the glories of the Soviet era, but rather is linked to the idea of Russia as an empire that knows no boundaries, and is also linked to a personal history of Putin, who was a child during World War II, and worked in Russian intelligence when The dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The report notes that these ideas are not exclusive to Putin only, but are shared by the elite who have supported him for two decades.
Even if Putin is toppled, the generals and senior security officials around him will also be aggressive toward the West.
The report cites the writings of Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin ideologist, who wrote after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 that it would mark “the end of Russia’s epic journey to the West, stopping its repeated and fruitless attempts to become part of Western civilization.”
He predicted that Russia would live in geopolitical isolation for at least the next 100 years.
The roots of the faith
The report says that Putin and his supporters considered Ukraine, a “historic sister nation”, the last red line in a “long chain of Western humiliation.”
These perceived insults go back a long way: not only during the 30 years since the end of the Cold War, nor in the 100 years since the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922, but to the European Enlightenment, more than three centuries ago.
This European movement gave rise to the idea of freedom, democracy, and human rights, but for Russian nationalists such as Putin, these developments gradually overshadowed the distinctive character of Russia as a civilization.
Eurasian Moscow
Putin does not see himself as an heir to the Soviets, but as a champion of Russian civilization and the Moscow Eurasian Empire, which traces its roots back to Prince Vladimir I, from 980 to 1015 AD.
Vladimir was the ruler of what the Russians consider their first empire, the Slavic state known as “Kyiv Rus'” based in Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine.
Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity in 988 gave rise to the idea that Russia would be the “Third Rome”, heir to the Roman and Byzantine empires that fell after the surrender of Constantinople to the Ottomans.
For this reason, many Russians, such as Putin, refer to “Kyiv Rus'” as “the cradle of Russian civilization” and Kiev as “the mother of Russian cities”.
Putin’s historical focus is also intended to convey his firm belief that Russia represents a distinct civilization that has little in common with the West.
Harvard historian Kelly O’Neill says he espouses an imperialist ideology against what he sees as the “petty tendencies” of the West and the “corruption” of its democracies.
She noted that Putin’s reluctance to fully integrate modern Russia into the global economy, other than selling it so much oil and gas, is based on the “Eurasian” belief that Russia and its lands are “distinct economies that belong to this beautiful imperial whole. It’s a defense mechanism. If you integrate, You become more vulnerable. Their view is “We are the fortress of Russia. We don’t need anyone else.”
The report points to another reason, which is “the Russian belief that Orthodox Christianity is superior to liberal Christianity in the West”, which Putin and other conservative Russians consider “corrupt” due to the ideas of the Enlightenment.
In the early nineteenth century, the Russian response to the Enlightenment doctrine of the French Revolution that called for “liberty, equality, fraternity” was “orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism.”
Sergei Uvarov, Minister of Public Education under Tsar Nicholas I, considered it the defining foundation of the Russian Empire.
Triple Doctrine
While this tripartite doctrine is not mentioned in Putin’s speeches and writings, because he still likes to pretend that Russia is a democracy, it has been cited by far-right writers who have influence on the Russian president.
“Uvarov’s formula explains why Russia has always resurrected an authoritarian empire in periods of crisis, as it did after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and now in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union,” says Peter Eltsov, a professor at the US National Defense University.
For Putin, the idea of rebuilding a “Eurasian empire” under his rule, of which Ukraine should be a part, seems fundamental to his sense of leadership.
The report points to Russia, a vast territory stretching across Europe and Asia, which has been unable to determine whether it is more European or Asian, and has historically been unable to agree on what its borders should be.
Thomas Graham, a former American diplomat, said that “there has never been a Russian nation-state in history. It has always been an empire in some way. The borders of Russia today, are very much the borders of Russia in 1721, the year the empire was founded the way they see it now.” The year 1991 wiped out roughly 200 to 300 years of geopolitical progress.
“Tsar of Russia” seeks to compensate for the losses
Putin’s main goal in office was to reverse this trend as much as possible. Or as Surkov put it in 2019: “After the collapse from the level of the Soviet Union to the level of the Russian Federation, Russia stopped collapsing, began to recover and return to its normal state, and therefore “Russia will soon return to its former glory and to the first place in the geopolitical struggle.”
Graham and other Russian experts see it as a mistake to view Putin as just a former KGB member angry and upset about the fall of the Soviet Union and NATO “aggression” after the Cold War.
Putin is “rather a Russian Eurasian nationalist”, and his constant evocation of history going back to Kievan Rus’ should be considered the best explanation for his view that Ukraine should be part of Russia’s sphere of influence.
In an article published last July, Putin described the idea of creating a Ukraine state as “the use of weapons of mass destruction” against Russia.
Putin described Ukraine as a historic stronghold of the Slavic people and warned the West against trying to turn it against Russia. He wrote in the article: “We will never allow our historical lands and the people close to us who live in it to be used against Russia… To those who would embark on a similar attempt, I tell them that in this way they will destroy their country.”
The report says that after a brief democratic period under his predecessor under Boris Yeltsin, Putin showed no sympathy for the Western order and focused on the idea of redrawing borders and power.
Putin was primarily driven by an old strategic concept, espoused by Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, of the need for “strategic depth”.
For Putin and many Russians, the highlight of their lives was the shock of Hitler’s invasion and the death of tens of millions of their compatriots. This was likened to Napoleon’s war on Russia in the previous century.
Putin’s “strange” promise to “de-Nazis” Ukraine even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew, suggests he believes he is still fighting World War II, in which a large number of Ukrainians joined Nazism.
Putin believes the Allied battle against the Nazis is largely a Russian victory.
“He may actually think he’s reproducing the war and fighting against Nazism again,” Marilyn Laruel, a Russian scholar at George Washington University, tells the magazine.
Many Russian experts say that Putin should be seen as Russia’s last tsar.
It is worth noting that the Russian invasion led the US administration to postpone the issuance of the US National Security Strategy, according to the report.
US officials say that the delay came perhaps to focus on new challenges after the invasion, such as reactivating the role of NATO and the Western alliance and the militarization of major European Union countries such as Germany.
The late US President John F. Kennedy said that the United States was living in a “long-term conflict” with Moscow.
In his book: “From the Cold War to the Hot Peace: An American Ambassador to Putin’s Russia”, the former US ambassador, Michael McFaul, who worked during the administration of former President Barack Obama, and participated in formulating the policy of “resetting the relationship” with Russia, explains that There is “a new ideological struggle between Russia and the West, not between communism and capitalism but between autocracy and democracy.”
Russia analyst Anna Borshevskaya previously told Al-Hurra that Putin believes in a world order that is “totally different from the liberal, rules-based order led by the United States. He believes that small states, such as Ukraine, are not real sovereign states” and does not think he will back down from His position now, sticking to this belief.