In the book In the Head of Vladimir Putin, the writer Eltchaninoff anticipates and Romance the imaginary Novorossia plan implemented by the Tsar which reflects the current Russia / Ukraine scenario
Never like this time it can be said that everything was already written. And the April 17, 2014, Putin has just annexed the Crimea and in a televised intervention he mentions the plan for the first time Novorossia, a term created when the Russian Empire colonized the southern part of Ukraine between the mid-eighteenth century and the thirties of the nineteenth century, founding the main cities. “Kharkiv, Donetsk, Nikolaiev and Odessa were not part of Ukraine at the time of the tsars, they are territories transmitted to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet power. Why they did it, God only knows. We should therefore recover them” , thunders the Russian president.
In addition to the Donbass, the Novorossia plan has a much more ambitious goal: to connect Russia to the Transnistriathe strip of land beyond the Dniestr in Moldova inhabited by pro-Russian separatists after the fall of the USSR, and thus create a long corridor that from the Donbass, through the south of the country and Crimea reconnects to the east, leaving Ukraine no more outlets on the Black Sea. The plan, as well as an impressive barrage of statements and speeches, clearly demonstrate how the “special operation” in Ukraine did not arise from chance or from senile failure of Putin’s mind, but arose from a explosive mix of nationalism, philosophical and religious conservatism, fear of contagion by a decadent West with no more values.
Not by chance, In Putin’s head is the title of a large and documented contribution by the French philosopher of Russian origin Michel Eltchaninoff, recently published in Italy by the publisher and / or updated to the Ukrainian crisis after the original edition was released in France in 2015. The attempt of the French philosopher to give a rational motivation for the decision of the war is certainly not the only one . We recall, among others recently published, the homologue In the mind of Putin by Elena Kostiouvic (The ship of Theseus), The wars of Putin by Giorgio Dell’Arti (same publisher) and the contribution of one of the most beloved Russian writers in Italy in recent years, Nicolai Lilin, Putin. The last tsar from St. Petersburg to Ukraine (Piemme).
The merit of Eltchaninoff’s book lies in the accurate reconstruction of the reasonsmostly ideological and philosophical, of Putin’s political vision, which he retraces alternating the quotation of documents and official interventions with private conversations he himself had with leading intellectuals. An impressive picture that fully reconstructs the mental universe of the Russian president and the reasons that led him to the war. So much so that it is natural to ask, given the apparent surprise leaked by Western governments in the face of the invasion, whether their respective intelligence agencies have ever had the opportunity to leaf through this book.
A first piece of this universe is openly declared by Putin on the evening of February 21, three days before the invasion: the historical-religious roots of Russia in ancient Rus. Already in a 2013 speech in Kiev, Putin solemnly stated: “Ukraine is undoubtedly an independent state (…), but let’s not forget that the current Russian state has some roots linked to the Dnieper. As they say, we share the same baptismal fonts in the Dnieper. Russia in Kiev is the origin of the immense Russian state. We have a common tradition, a common mentality, a common history, a common culture. (…) I repeat, in this sense we are one people”. And here the religious perspective also appears. Aleksander Dugin, ideologue of Eurasianism, Putin’s theory of a Russia bulwark in the face of American influence and NATO aggression, trusts in a private conversation with the author that “Putin wants to bring about a union of European Christian kingdoms “, as the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ëv already proposed,” according to which the ancient European kingdoms, rediscovering their Christian identity, would unite to fight the Antichrist, under the strategic control of Russia “.
The West as a place of decay and dissolution of moral values is a refrain that frequently resonates in Putin’s mind. On December 12, 2013, the twentieth anniversary of the post-Soviet Constitution of 1993, while Ukrainian pro-Europeanists demonstrate in Kiev’s Maidan Square, he gives a high-profile speech in front of all the representatives of the nation: “Today in many countries the norms of morality and customs are reconsidered, national traditions are erased, as are the distinctions between nations and cultures. Society no longer demands the explicit recognition of everyone’s right to freedom of conscience, political opinion and privacy, but also the compulsory recognition of the equivalence, strange as it may seem, between good and evil, which have an opposite essence “.
Eltchaninoff writes that on the bedside tables of Russian apparatcik A nineteenth-century philosopher who the Russian president often reads and quotes has stood out for some time: Nikolaj Danilevskij (1822-1885), who in his most important work, Russia and Europe, published in 1871, proposes the union of all Slavs under the leadership of Russia, a project motivated first of all, according to him, by the impossibility of his country to be part of Europe, due to a structural enmity. Thus he concludes: “The struggle against the West is the only healthy means both to heal our Russian culture and to advance Pan-Slavic sympathy.” But Danilevskij is not the only thinker appreciated by the president. Ivan Ilyin, fiercely anti-Bolshevik and for this reason forced into exile, in a volume of 1925, On the resistance to evil through force rejects Tolstoy’s theory of nonviolence, affirming the need, when necessary, to oppose evil in the face of external aggression, and foreshadows the plan to “dismember Russia in order to bring it under the control of the West, undo it and eventually make it disappear”.
“Now that some peoples of the former USSR have decided to abandon the Soviet universe and Russian patronage, the president feels surrounded by hostile powers,” notes Eltchaninoff. “Without the slightest consideration of the will of the peoples, in this process he sees nothing but a CIA operation.”
Here then is a Putin who not only wants to reunify the former Soviet empire, but also focuses on those populist movements that wind their way through Western Europe and that long for a return to national roots and traditional values, to present themselves as an alternative model to the American model. . And, continues Eltchaninoff: “Putin is returning to Russia its international ideological vocation.
Identity conservatism must become a beacon for all peoples of the world. The conservative mobilization initiated and directed by the Kremlin no longer has borders. The Soviet Union was not a country but a concept. With Putin, Russia is again the name of an idea. “As we can see, in Putin’s head there was already everything, except the perception, not insignificant, of what was going on in the head of Zelenskij and the compatriots of he.
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