PUTINISM
Russia and Its Future With the West
Walter Laqueur
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press
271 pages; $27.99
For Christmas in 2013, President Vladimir V Putin sent three books to every regional governor and other senior officials in Russia. One of them was Our Tasks by Ivan Ilyin, an early-20th-century Russian philosopher who disdained Western-style democracy and argued for an authoritarian, though not totalitarian, state. In Ilyin's view, the government would not control all aspects of society, but in certain important areas would be "dictatorial in the scope of its powers."
Mr Putin has developed something of a man crush on that exiled writer. This admiration contains clues to Mr Putin's own, somewhat enigmatic philosophy, the venerable historian Walter Laqueur writes in Putinism: Russia and Its Future With the West, an aptly timed and much needed look at the mercurial master of the Kremlin.
With Russia grabbing territory and sponsoring a separatist war in Ukraine, putting it once again at odds with the West, efforts to peer inside Mr Putin's head have taken on profound significance. The White House has spent months on an interagency review trying to answer the question: What is Putinism anyway, and what should be done to counter it, beyond the immediate crisis in Ukraine?
Into this examination comes Mr Laqueur, with trademark scholarly discipline deconstructing Mr Putin, who in his 16 years as prime minister and president has defied the understanding of some of the world's best-informed leaders and best-financed intelligence agencies.
Mr Laqueur, who has studied Russia for more than 60 years and has written more than 25 books, does not fall for the easy traps. While some in the United States see Mr Putin as simply a revanchist Soviet, even a latter-day Stalin, Mr Laqueur understands it is not so simple.
To be sure, Mr Putin, a former KGB officer raised with Soviet sensibilities, has paid homage to the old symbols and promoted nostalgia for a lost superpower. He has in some ways rehabilitated Stalin, in keeping with the views of a strikingly large share of Russia's populace. But Mr Putin is not a Communist in the old sense. He does not talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the worker's paradise, nor does he export ideological revolution beyond his own neighbourhood.
To the extent that he has defined a governing philosophy, Mr Putin has made clear he favours the restoration of a strong state. At first, the ruling philosophy was called the "vertical of power" - in other words, a top-down system with him at the top. Later, amid criticism in the West that he had forsaken freedom, the phrase was recast as "sovereign democracy," with the emphasis on the sovereign.
Mr Laqueur searches for the organising principle. Putinism, he writes, seems to be state capitalism with elements of a liberal economic policy but significant state intervention - "almost total interference when important issues are concerned." Russia has the trappings of democracy - elections, a Parliament, news media - but that all increasingly seems to be for show. And "the most important component in the new ideology is nationalism accompanied by anti-Westernism."
In recent years Mr Putin has tried to position himself as the champion of a Eurasian power, setting Russia as a counterpoint to Europe. Mr Laqueur does not buy this, either. For all the talk of the Mongol influence on a country that stretches all the way to the Pacific, Mr Laqueur notes that Russia remains much more tied to Europe in terms of culture, history, language and religion.
Mr Putin's approach has always been rooted in resentment over at Russia's lost superpower status and his promise to restore the country's greatness. But where he once sought to validate that greatness through membership in the world's elite organisations, what was then the Group of 8, lately he has stoked anger at the West, presenting it as determined to keep Russia down.
Ilyin has been a source of inspiration to the Kremlin in this project. In him, Mr Laqueur writes, Mr Putin and his circle "have found the prophet to present their much-needed new ideology."
The product of an upper-class Moscow family with ties to the army, Ilyin studied philosophy and did not last long once the Bolsheviks swept to power. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922, he wound up in Germany, where he worked for the Russian Scientific Institute, which Mr Laqueur points out was part of Joseph Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda. He was fired and fled again, this time to Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1954. Once forgotten in Russia, nearly 30 of his books have been republished in his home country since the fall of the Soviet Union.
To some extent, Mr Laqueur saw this coming. In his 1993 volume, Black Hundred, issued as the rest of the world was still basking in the fall of the Soviet Union and foreseeing a new democratic Russia, he warned of the opposite.
"An authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism appears more probable," Mr Laqueur wrote then.
More than 20 years later, he seems eerily and depressingly prescient.
© The New York Times News Service
