This is an edited and translated excerpt from French columnist and writer Christine Ockrent’s most recent book, Les Oligarques (October 2014). 

Never before have Europeans and Americans misunderstood Vladimir Putin’s Russia quite so much. Fyodor Lukyanov says that Westerners are fooled by an optical illusion:

“This new world order that Washington has assumed the right to impose on the world, this is your order, not ours.”

“You are obsessed with our president, but it is a mistake to demonise him! Take a long hard look at your own mistakes and you will see that his logic is not completely unpredictable. […] You Westerners crossed a red line in Ukraine. You failed to understand the country’s strategic importance to Moscow. Since what you call the end of the Cold War, we have been looking at reality in different ways. For us, it was not a real war, so there has not been a real peace. We never agreed to the rules that the West sees as universal values […] This new world order that Washington has assumed the right to impose on the world, this is your order, not ours. And your European Union is part of it.” [1]

Throughout the Ukraine crisis, Vladimir Putin has baffled the West and has set the tempo of events. Ignoring the West’s warnings and indignation, he annexed Crimea, thereby changing a European border by force for the first time since 1945. But who will go and die for Ukraine? For generations now, Europe has been built on peace and prosperity. Only the Yugoslav wars at the end of the last century interrupted the continent’s tranquillity, and Kosovo’s independence remains an affront to the Kremlin. The Russian president is well aware of Europe’s divisions and cowardice, and of the weakness of Washington and President Barack Obama. He has never pretended that his relationship with the American president was one of trust, and since Obama’s procrastination over Syria, the relationship is now close to contempt.

Putin perpetuates a conception of power that has long since been abandoned in our democracies.

Vladimir Putin perpetuates a conception of power that has long since been abandoned in our democracies. Putin looks to models such as Tsar Nicholas I, whose portrait hangs in Putin’s office at the Kremlin, and Alexander Dugin, the passionate champion of Eurasianism. His idea of power has an ideological basis to match: Nicholas I’s official ideology of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, the moral and physical supremacy of the motherland and the domination of its natural space. No matter that Nicholas I lost the Crimean War and died at the front in Sevastopol in 1855; Russian nationalists see him as the incarnation of a national genius. Rather than relying on the concepts of modernisation, cosmopolitanism, and the liberalisation of ideas and values, he built the superiority of the Russian system on order, the police, and censorship.

Dugin, the son of a KGB officer, co-founded with Edward Limonov in 1993 the National Bolshevik Party, before setting up his own party, “Eurasia”. For Dugin, the West, where the sun sets, represents decline. Conversely, Eurasia, where the sun rises, is the land of the gods and of rebirth. Maintaining the theory of Russian exceptionalism forged during the nineteenth century, from the Slavophiles to Alexander Blok via Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dugin says that Russia is not a country, it is a civilisation. He advocates “the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution, fascism – borderless like our lands, and red as our blood.” Vladimir Putin’s use of language is the same: he speaks of “this versatile Russian genetic code, very durable, our competitive advantage” and of “the man of the Russky mir [Russian world], driven by a higher moral purpose”. For Russians, this messianic discourse evokes at the same time the Russian Idea of the Tsarist era and the vocabulary of Soviet propaganda – a powerful combination.

Moscow stands as the Third Rome, facing the decadent West and its hordes of degenerate homosexuals, contemptible secularism, and unbounded tolerance.

Moscow stands as the Third Rome, facing the decadent West and its hordes of degenerate homosexuals, its contemptible secularism, and its unbounded tolerance. Echoing the recurring themes of reactionary movements, Vladimir Putin wants to appear as the sole true guardian of European culture and Christian values, the defender of “the spiritual and moral foundations of civilisations […] the values of traditional families, real human life, including religious life”, as he promised in the Russian parliament in December 2013.

To the Russian president, Europe is the soft underbelly of the Western alliance. Europe, as he sees it, is beset by forces of disintegration that have been accelerated by the economic and social crisis – and which he can encourage by making use of the extreme right.

To the Russian president, Europe is the soft underbelly of the Western alliance.

This is why we saw Putin congratulate Viktor Orbán, the nationalist Hungarian prime minister who has supported Putin’s policies in Ukraine. Putin saluted the Hungarian neo-Nazi movement Jobbik, and, as a sign of approval, he lowered the price that Budapest must pay for Russian gas. Marine Le Pen was received with great fanfare in Moscow in April 2014 by the chairman of the Duma and was applauded by Putin’s adviser, none other than Alexander Dugin himself. From the French National Front and the Belgian Vlaams Belang to the Italian Lega Nord and the Austrian Freedom Party, all of Europe’s far right parties sent observers to cheer on the Crimean referendum, which confirmed Russia’s annexation of the region with 95.5 percent of the vote. Throughout Europe – and in France in particular – organisations such as the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation are being set up, which spread Moscow’s message under cover of research and events.

The 2014 Ukraine crisis will determine the new borders of the Russian world and decide public opinion within those borders. Because of this, it represents both an opportunity and a challenge for Putin. No matter how bad the economic situation gets or how great the risks of dependency on Beijing, he must prove the coherence of his vision and the cohesion of his power vertical.

The 2014 Ukraine crisis will determine the new borders of the Russian world and decide public opinion within those borders.

At the top of the system, where the clans jostle for influence, Putin appears more than ever to be the sole and implacable decision-maker. He fired one of his closest advisers, Vladislav Surkov, for having failed to anticipate the protest movements of 2012; he sacked Alexei Kudrin, a respected economist and a long-time finance minister who even worked under Putin in the mayor’s office in St Petersburg, for his very obvious disdain for Dmitry Medvedev. Kudrin now denounces the wasteful confrontation with the West.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the most emblematic of the oligarchs and the sacrificial lamb of the Russian system, does not believe that Western policy is effective either. He says: “Putin does not care about sanctions, he makes fun of his advisers. You live in a democratic society in which the president’s entourage is involved in his decisions. But in a totalitarian society, a dictator does not have to bother with the interests of his entourage, especially of those outside the security apparatus.”

The Russians are proud of their master.

The master of the game controls all the pieces on the chessboard and carefully divides up the areas of power. He manages the rivalries between the oligarchs who originated in the security services, the siloviki, sector by sector, so that none of them has influence across all the important sectors – ideology, religion, and the economy – except perhaps for Vladimir Yakunin, the head of the Russian Railways company.

Nationalist fervour and increased control over the media has more than ever marginalised the opposition, which has almost no outlet for political expression. The Russians are proud of their master.

Christine Ockrent produces and anchors a weekly radio programme on foreign affairs, Affaires Etrangères, on France Culture public radio, and is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Listen to her latest podcast for ECFR, Crimea and punishment? A French view of sanctions.

[1] Interview with Fyodor Lukyanov, Rome, 13 June 2014.

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