Let us, by all means, do everything we can to cleanse London and the other financial centres of the West of the dodgy Russian money that has enriched our bankers, driven up our property prices and distorted our politics, but we shouldn’t assume that targeting Putin’s money, or his
‘But what’s his philosophy?’ I’d been answering questions for almost an hour from a collection of intelligence analysts, in a European country with a fairly pressing interest in Russia. So far, the questions had been pretty specific and practical: which institutions had more power, who was on the way up and who might be on the way down, was Moscow going to push further into Ukraine? This last question caught me on the hop. I started to talk about Putin’s vision for Russia and his approach to power, but this was clearly not what the questioner had in mind.
‘No, I mean which philosophical school of thought does he follow? Is he committed to Dugin’s Eurasianism or Prokhanov’s neo-Imperialism? Do you subscribe to the view that his ideas are shaped by Ivan Ilyin’s writings?’ Oh dear, I thought to myself. I had been so close to getting out of there, but it seemed that I was going to be stuck for a while longer.
Having been caught by surprise by him before, people are often looking for the magic answer with Putin, the key that will somehow unlock his plans and secrets. For some, it’s all about following the money, while for others it’s about rebuilding the USSR. Then there are those like that analyst who, in their quest to try and understand how Putin thinks – and thus what he may do next – seek to identify philosophers, dead or alive, whom they can present as explaining his world view.
Consider the names above. Alexander Dugin is a writer, pundit, philosopher and enthusiastic self-publicist who delights in such Western descriptions of him as ‘Putin’s brain’. He espouses ‘Eurasianism’, the idea that Russia should be the heart of an empire spanning Europe and Asia, committed to fighting Western ‘Atlanticism’ and the liberal values it represents. At various times, he has eulogised fascism, Stalin, Neopaganism and then Putin, saying, ‘Putin is everywhere, Putin is everything, Putin is absolute, and Putin is indispensable.’ In early 2014 his views were useful to provide some kind of intellectual rationale for the Crimean land-grab, and when Putin was toying with either creating a puppet pseudo-state of ‘Novorossiya’ (‘New Russia’) in south-eastern Ukraine, or annexing that land, too. But by summer of that year, Putin had backed away from this idea, and Dugin was suddenly no longer useful. His appearances in the media dwindled dramatically, and his contract at Moscow State University was not renewed.
Alexander Prokhanov was an old-school propagandist from Soviet times, who was called ‘the nightingale of the General Staff’ for his sentimental odes to the bravery and decency of the Red Army, portraying them upholding internationalist values and foiling dastardly CIA plots from Afghanistan to Central America. Now he is an ageing ultranationalist, churning out articles and books calling for a new Russian empire, and making occasional trips to the Donbas to pose with a Kalashnikov in his hand. In 2012 he founded the Izborsk Club, a nationalist think tank that some see as a sinister engine powering Russian policy abroad. Yet while it regularly generates lunatic proposals, such as the idea that Ukraine could be divided between Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, they are distinctly absent from Kremlin calculations.
