When Argentinian president Javier Milei spoke at the World Economic Forum, his view of history was clear:
Capitalism has enriched the world. Countries should embrace free markets to increase common prosperity.
When Putin sat down with Tucker Carlson, his understanding of history was no less clear:
Rurik princes and medieval geography are riveting stuff. The world should return to the great power relations of previous centuries.
Two right-wing presidents, two right-wing visions.
Of course, it’s all very performative—Putin knows that talking about medieval history is not politics as Americans know it, but therein lies the point. He seeks to impress by being arcane.
In obsessing over pre-modern Russia, Putin is also channeling his favorite thinker, Alexander Dugin. Dugin maintains that Americans have no “deep identity” since they lack a “premodern legacy.” Talking about Russia’s medieval history is a way of gloating: you have AI, we have Eastern Orthodoxy.
Yet his choice of subject matter shows exactly why Russia is broken. Putin is obsessed with a world where most of Russia’s population toiled as serfs and economic growth was unknown—he prefers ideas to things, words to numbers.
To be sure, Putin knows a lot about history, more than Milei or any Western leader probably. But Putin is a particular kind of thinker—monodisciplinary, indifferent to developments outside the humanities. Knowing about history isn’t worth so much if you can’t supplement it with basic findings from the social sciences.
In modern parlance, Putin sounds very much like a wordcel—someone who can string together lots of historical facts and big ideas without being much bothered by the findings of quantitative fields. In the end, it’s all value judgments about identity and meaning. Putin doesn’t even do us the service of trying to derive his ought from his is.
I long had the impression that modern Russia, though corrupt and autocratic, functioned better than the Soviet Union. Russia grew quickly in the early 2000s after liberalizing the markets that languished under the Soviets. Russia’s economy remained deeply flawed, with economic interests concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs, but this seemed a better state of affairs than the central planning of the Soviets.
Now, I think that Russia has regressed ideologically to a more primitive state than even that of the Soviets. The Soviets, for all their flaws, had a vision of an economic future. Misguided though it was, Soviet ideology dictated that the state work toward developing the country. Marx did math and looked to the future—so did the Politburo, even if they were cooking the numbers.
But Russia cares a lot more about medieval geography than numbers under Putin. That’s a problem: striving for a communist utopia, even if hopeless, is probably better for the Russian people than a vision of the world depends on the affairs of 900 AD.
Eurasianism, Russia’s defining ideology today, amounts to a kind of unfalsifiable world-systematizing exercise—astrology for dictators. Unlike Marxism, it dispenses with economic insight as a primary concern.
Anyone who has illusions about how far gone Putin is should read Gary Saul Morson’s overview of Eurasianism, Putin’s favorite school of thought. Eurasianism has little to say about economics or prosperity—it was born of Russian linguistics. Here is one revealing excerpt from Morson’s piece:
“Modern democracy must give way to ideocracy,” Trubetskoy argued, referring to rule based on abstract ideals. Pluralist democracy entails no all-encompassing and uniform philosophy of life, but ideocracy does. Therefore, “ideocracy presupposes the selection of the ruling echelon according to its faithfulness to a single common governing idea…united in a single ideological state organization” that will “control all aspects of life.” This collectivism ensures that the “last traces of individualism will disappear” and that a common outlook will “become the inalienable ingredient” of everyone’s psyche
This is not Putin’s stated ideology, but it is the primary influence on Russia’s leading intellectual, Alexander Dugin. Lest you think Dugin has moderated these early Eurasian views, here is where he stands today:
Russia must lead not only other steppe peoples but everyone oppressed by the West; in this sense, Eurasia is everywhere. Dugin calls this updated Eurasianism “the fourth political theory,” which he elaborates in his book of that name. Totally rejecting the first theory, liberalism, Eurasianism borrows generously from the other two, communism and fascism. Like Lenin and Stalin, Dugin advocates using any means whatsoever in the struggle against “blood-sucking American, oligarchic, liberal scum.” And we must get over making Hitler into a bogeyman, because apart from its antisemitism, Nazism was no worse, and maybe better, than liberalism.
Dugin has picked up on the Eurasian tradition and infused it with a particularly virulent hatred of Americans and liberals. Yes, Marx was a bad influence, but an occultist philosopher who implores Russians to “Kill! Kill! Kill!” is probably even worse.
That is the big picture: with its apocalyptic fury, Dugin’s Eurasianism is a dead-end wordcel ideology. The West—not economic utopia—is its animating force, and Dugin cannot even articulate what comes after Russia has reclaimed its peripheries and defeated the Western international order. He admits this plainly in Foundations of Geopolitics:
The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us
That’s it?
Russia’s economy already doesn’t work—GDP is near what it was over a decade ago. Right now, the Kremlin is kicking the can down the road by pumping money into the military. I don’t think it’s a “cope” to say that Russia’s currently strong growth will likely end in overheating and a crash soon enough.
It should be little surprise that Russia’s aggressive economic policies are starting to resemble those of the Third Reich. Where Dugin does opine on economic matters, he skews toward third-way ideas about “Keynesian paternalism.” There is a strong case that Russia today is trading one 20th-century totalitarian ideology for another, posturing about the “fourth political ideology” aside.
But Russia is too militarily inept to follow the path of the Nazis. It will more likely start to resemble North Korea—a stagnant autarky dependent on relations with China. Oil deposits and a stronger pre-existing economy will ensure Russia is not so much of a backwater, but the country’s vision will revolve entirely around militarism and saber-rattling with the West.
Some Westerners are enraptured with a leader who can talk about Kievan Rus' like yesterday’s news. But Putin would be more impressive if he came out and said, “As Russians, we care more about medieval maps than being able to afford a washer and dryer.” That would get to the heart of what the Russian project currently entails.
I support Ukraine and think the Russian invasion is evil. But I don't think Putin is being a wordcel caught up in the past. This is a war for natural and mostly human resources. The objective is turning Ukranians into Russians. It is a very comparable affair to the wars after 1640 of Spain trying to reconquer Portugal.
Putin knows from history that national identity and religion are a very malleable thing. The English went from Catholic to Protestant through top down pressure of the government on the population (and the process would have been aborted if Bloody Mary had lived a longer life), something similar happened in the same time frame in Iran, with the government forcing people to switch from Sunni Islam to Shia Islam. The process is over when the last generation that knows how things used to be dies, and all that is left is people that only know the new reality.
Putin knows that Ukranians don't want to be Russian, but he also knows that if he conquers Ukraine, in 3 generations all Ukranians that knew an independent Ukraine will be dead, and all that will be left is people who grew up being indoctrinated in Russian controlled public schools about how the Ukranian nation was never real, how it was a creation of the west to weaken and diminish Russia, how Kiev is the birthplace of the Russian nation, etc.
Annexing Ukraine would be a gigantic boon for Russia, it would make them a country of more than 150 million people, it would help make sure Russia keeps it's Slavic Christian European identity, instead of becoming more of an Eurasian significantly Islamic State, and it would give Russia very valuable natural resources, including some of the best farmland in the world.
Even though the realist explanation of Mearshamer about NATO is completely bullshit, the actions of Putin are still completely rational, though immoral, like an American annexation of Canada.
There is no ideology in Russia, only irritable mental gestures of our leaders, and Dugin never really had any major influence on the Kremlin, especially now. I understand that if you have no way of knowing the inner workings of the Russian regime it’s very enticing to say “this or that is the main ideology so let’s just open a book and infer things from there” but this will obfuscate more than elucidate.