Mity polityczne Kremla

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin borrows a great deal from former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's aphorism regarding Russia itself: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. What is often left out is that Churchill did believe there was a key to the puzzle: Russian national interest. Putin himself has instructed members of his own party to review the works of three Russian philosophers and theologians, specifically those of Nikolai Berdayev, Vladimir Solovyov, and Ivan Illyin. Within each context of Russian national interest, Byzantine and Orthodox traditions concerning polity and the rule of law, and Putin's own intellectual vision for a new Russia, such fusion of Orthodox, Slavic, and Byzantine traditions quickly bring into focus Putin's determination to see Russia as a respected and co-equal partner alongside the EU and US, realizing and fulfilling Russia's 21st century role as both a Third Rome and the proper defender of Western Civilization at its periphery. Russian President Vladimir Putin's shift from foreign policy realism to nationalist idealism since the 2008 Georgian crisis has not gone unnoticed by Kremlinologists. Once viewed as a modernizing and Westernizing influence by European and American observers, Putin's recent moves into Ukraine after the Maidan Revolution, the annexation of the Crimea, and the current air campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL) has shown a degree of Russian chauvinism not seen since the Soviet-era incursions into Angola and Afghanistan in the late 1970s. Once thought to be a partner in the War on Terrorism, Putin's latest moves have shifted Western narratives, demonizing Putin's new Russia as a mafia, or worse as a destabilizing force in Europe that must be met with more firm response from NATO approaching that of a second Cold War.

The war in Ukraine has seized international public opinion by its brutal irruption and its generalized violence against Ukrainian society. This invasion provoked the awareness of Vladimir Putin's inordinate will to power, which burst into the open after the underestimation of his plan to invade this neighboring country for many months prior to the outbreak of the war on February 24, 2022, despite the warnings of the Anglo-Saxon intelligence services. How to explain this lasting ignorance of Putin's warlike intentions without asking the questions of who this man is, how he came to these irrational and inhuman extremes? How did the Russian political system allow the accession to supreme power of a man who was labeled as "gray" at the beginning, especially after his training in the KGB, where his GRU department officials decided to bar him as "unsuitable for the functions of a KGB agent" because of his inability to dominate his deep negative impulses and his thirst for domination by any means? What were the ingredients and origins of his progressive pathological drift? Can we still deduce what he thinks of the situation created by the invasion of Ukraine, a "special operation" badly thought out with regard to a people and a country denied in their essence, and now transformed into a total war of attrition? It is difficult to give an opinion on such a conflict and its future outcome, but on the other hand, it is possible to deepen the analysis of Putin's personality through his acts, his postures, to better understand him, this is what this article proposes, without claiming to go beyond and cover the global geopolitical situation.

VLADIMIR PUTIN'S LEADERSHIP WAS RIVEN WITH CONTRADICTIONS, and on the basis of these contradictions very different evaluations of his presidency are possible. The contradictions themselves became a source of Putin's power. They allowed him to act in several different political and discursive spheres at the same time, with a degree of credibility in each, although their genuine authenticity was questioned. Arriving into the presidency in 2000 Putin declared his goal as the 'dictatorship of law', and indeed this principle was exercised in the attempt to overcome the legal fragmentation of the country in the federal system; but when it came to pursuing regime goals, it appeared more often than not that the system ruled by law rather than ensuring the rule of law. This is just one example, and there are many more—the revival of the party system, the development of civil society, international integration—where the declared principle was vitiated by contrary practices. The most interesting debates about Putin's leadership are precisely those that examine whether the tensions were contradictions, and thus amenable to resolution (non-antagonistic), or whether they were antinomies (antagonistic contradictions) that could not be resolved within the framework of the system itself. The first option allowed an evolutionary transcendence of the Putinite order; whereas the second would require some sort of revolutionary rupture. Challenges and contradictions Putin's presidency did not operate in a vacuum, and too often easy judgements are made on the basis of a decontextualised absolutism of principles which fails to engage with the real challenges faced by the Russian government during Putin's watch at the helm of the Russian state. The challenge from the Chechen insurgency, accompanied by incursions beyond the republic—into Dagestan, and even into Moscow with the Dubrovka theatre siege of October 2002, as well as the terrible siege of the school in Beslan in September 2004 in which 364 died—would test the political order of even the most long-established democracy. In foreign policy, the terms on which Russia would be accepted into the international community reflected certain postulates that alarmed parts of the ruling elite in Moscow (issues discussed by Angela Stent and Fyodor Lukyanov in this collection). Teleological applications of the transition paradigm, which focused on the mechanics of democracy building and consolidation but neglected history and geopolitics, were tested to destruction in Russia. This reinforced

A study of Putin and Putinism from the political, financial, ideological and religious points of view

2015

Eurasianet, 2016

Slavic Review, 2018

2019

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a source of both admiration and concern because of its renewed assertiveness in the post-soviet era as far as international affairs are concerned. More recent developments in the Kremlin’s foreign policy, as well as that of Beijing, are indicative of an ongoing shift in the world order toward a new path of multipolarity. Whereas most of the West perceives Russia’s increasing challenges to the liberal international order as a threat, other regions in the world look at it as an alternative model to emulate. Why is President Putin acting in this way? Which are the historical and political dynamics that may explain such an evolution in the external attitude of the once main actor within the USSR? Angela Stent’s book offers interesting answers to these questions by dealing with a plurality of aspects related to the evolution of Moscow’s foreign policy with Putin. Main topics range primarily from the renewed prominent role of Russia in its “near abroad” to the e...