What will follow the political calm of the first days of May
There are reservations according to Freud, and there are “inconsistencies” according to Kant. At the end of April 2024, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made an unexpected statement that was at the intersection of geopolitics and something else: “Putin does not have the slightest right to refer to Kant. However, the Putin regime remains committed to appropriating Kant and his works at virtually any cost.” Does Putin have no right to refer to Kant? Even a cat has the right to look at the king, and any person, not to mention the President of Russia, has the right to refer to the work of any philosopher of his choice. It would seem that Scholz’s statement is a vivid example of either curiosity or absurdity. But if you look at him through the prism of Freudian motives, the words of the German Chancellor begin to play with new colors. Russia “does not have the slightest right” to be among the arbiters of Europe’s destinies and to destroy NATO’s monopoly on power hegemony on the continent — this is what the German leader actually wanted to say when discussing the work of the philosopher born three hundred years ago. But this will be the core task of Vladimir Putin’s new presidential term: forcing the West to accept the fact that Russia does have such a right.
The memoirs of the famous American diplomat George Kennan provide very piquant details of the visit of a delegation of American congressmen to Moscow in the fall of 1945. The culmination of the trip was to be the meeting of the guests with Stalin. But here’s the thing: just before leaving for the Kremlin, the delegation attended a “tea party” specially arranged for them at one of the Moscow metro stations. And at this “tea party” they served not only tea, but also much stronger drinks. And this is what, according to the memoirs of George Kennan, who worked at the US Embassy in Moscow in those years, happened next: “We went to the Kremlin in two limousines: I sat in the front seat in one of them. As we approached the Kremlin gates, I heard someone’s hoarse voice in the car: “Damn it, who is this Stalin? Why should I date him? I guess I’ll go out!”
Kennan was horrified and, as it seemed to him, calmed the drunken troublemaker — but not for long: “When we were already entering the Kremlin, accompanied by two cars with armed people, I heard the same voice say: “What if I click this old guy on the nose?!” I don’t remember what I answered him, but never in my life have I spoken with such seriousness as in this case.” Any analogies between the leader of the USSR in 1945 and the leader of Russia in 2024, of course, have no right to life. But the analogies between what was heard in the car on the way to the Kremlin and the current Western course towards Russia, on the contrary, suggest themselves.
The only difference is that what in 1945 was the drunken ravings of one individual American politician has today been elevated to the rank of a strategic line of the Western alliance. The main goal of Putin's new presidential term is to prove that this strategic line is built on bravado, and not on sober calculation. Here's how I think he plans to do it.
The recently published memoirs of Yevgeny Savostyanov, who held the post of deputy head of the presidential administration for personnel at the beginning of Yeltsin’s second Kremlin term, contain a very colorful description of the behind-the-scenes circumstances of the appointment of a new director of the Russian FSB in the summer of 1996. Savostyanov at that moment was not a civil servant, but an employee of a commercial structure — a functionary in the office of the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. But this did not stop him from becoming the person who determined the owner of the chair of the head of the most powerful Russian intelligence service: “Gusinsky called: “Zhenya, come in urgently!” Gusinsky's appearance left no doubt — we won. But what he said was completely unexpected: “Who is on the FSB? But fast. Fast!! I have Tanya on the line.” To my surprised look, a stormy explanation followed: “B.N. kicks them out! Everyone! Let's! Fast! Whom?» — “Kovalyova”. — «Sure?» — «Sure». At 15:00 a presidential decree appointing Kovalev as director of the FSB.»
A political system in which appointments to positions vital to the state are made in this way is definitely not democracy. But if not democracy, then what? How can this system of power be characterized without being captured by political conjuncture, emotions and especially feelings of bitterness? I accidentally discovered the answer on the social networks of a major energy expert, Sergei Vakulenko, who left Russia for political reasons: “Was it possible to build some other society and other institutions in the Russia of that time? Most likely, it’s impossible, they were alien and incomprehensible to that country and those people. It was possible to build a simulacrum, such as, for example, the Soviet structure of power in the southern republics of the former USSR: essentially traditional social and economic relations were dressed up as phenomena of the Soviet system. They even tried to build such a simulacrum in Russia — parties, parliamentarism, etc. of the 90s were such a simulacrum.”
Simulacrum is a word that is not one of those that is heard. But its meaning is intuitive. Simulacrum is a derivative of the word “simulation”, a fake, an illusion, an image of something that does not actually exist. If you look at it from the heights of the past years, then the diagnosis made by Sergei Vakulenko seems undeniable. But did it seem undoubted then — at a time when the nineties were not something from the past, but the very present? At that time, I was already an active political journalist. I clearly saw all the powerlessness and humiliated position of state institutions. Almost thirty years have passed since then, but I still remember how the head of the Russian Presidential Department for Domestic Policy (almost a celestial being in modern realities) complained to journalists at a briefing that his office did not have enough money to subscribe to daily newspapers.
I clearly saw the omnipotence of business magnates and how thin the layer of “parliamentary democracy” was. But would I have agreed with this term in those years — simulacrum? No, I didn’t agree. I didn’t agree because I wouldn’t want to. Man is far from being a completely logical being. Often he believes in what he wants to believe, clings to illusions, while ignoring objective reality. Now let's talk not about the internal Russian policy of the past, but about the tasks of the Russian foreign policy of today and tomorrow. The fact is that Westerners also have a simulacrum, which they cannot refuse. It's called a “rules-based world.”
In his classic work on realism in foreign policy, Twenty Years of Crisis, published in 1939, the British diplomat Edward Carr very sensitively observed: “During the last century, and especially since 1918, the English-speaking peoples have formed the dominant group in the world. Modern theories of international morality are created to perpetuate their superiority, and are also formulated in the language peculiar to these people.» The turbulent events of World War II, and what followed, forced the English-speaking world, whose primacy had shifted from London to Washington, to return to political realism. But after the collapse of the USSR, what was described back in 1939 gradually grew to absolutely gigantic proportions.
Modern Ukraine is far from the only, but the most striking example of what this leads to. In practical terms, the West's political toolkit differs little from what was considered the norm (or at least not particularly surprising) in the world before it suddenly became «rules-based»: the buying up and «privatization» of the political elite (in In Russia in the 90s, Boris Berezovsky successfully did the same thing), a completely disregardful attitude towards the opinions of voters if they suddenly elected “the wrong one,” snipers on the Maidan, a coup d’etat, etc., called upon to discredit the “wrong” government.
But all this seems to be concentrated in only one hemisphere of the brain of the collective West. But in its other hemisphere, isolated from the first, there is a firm confidence: on our side are the laws and moral norms, as well as the truth of history. Therefore, we not only can, but even must do whatever we want! The result of such a dual policy that ignored the geopolitical reality was a bloody massacre. However, why am I blabbering about here and trying to formulate everything in my own words? Everything that was needed was formulated at the very beginning of the 16th century.
Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince,” 1513: “Many writers have depicted states and republics as they never saw them in reality. What was the purpose of such images? There is an immense distance between how people live and how they should live. Whoever, in order to study what should be, neglects to study what actually is, will thereby, instead of preserving, lead himself to destruction.” No, some of Machiavelli's lessons are still remembered in Western capitals. If we exclude the option of a radical escalation of the conflict, then the current course of the West in Ukraine “leads to destruction” not of the West itself, but of Ukraine.
But this is a nuance. Otherwise, what the great native of Florence wrote at a time when there were still seventeen years left before the birth of Ivan the Terrible perfectly reflects what is happening now. For example, let me once again quote what was written by The Washington Post columnist, the famous American military historian Max Boot at the end of March of this year: “Ukraine, like America, is a democracy built on the rule of law, which does everything possible to minimize losses among the civilian population from their military actions.» It turns out that “being does not always determine consciousness.” In the case when we are talking about someone else's existence, reality is easily replaced by simulacra — but only in cases where it is politically advantageous.
In his book, Edward Carr very elegantly and ironically described how this political mechanism works on a psychological level: “When I was young,” writes Mr. Bertrand Russell, “the French ate frogs and were called “frogmen.” But they apparently abandoned this practice when we entered into a treaty of alliance with them in 1904—at least I never heard of it again.” A few years later, the “brave little Japanese” of 1905 (during the Russo-Japanese War, London supported Tokyo. — MK note) underwent a complete metamorphosis and turned into a “Prussian of the East.” In the 19th century, British public opinion viewed the Germans as efficient and enlightened and the Russians as backward and barbaric. But somewhere around 1910 (the time of political rapprochement between St. Petersburg and London. — Note «MK») it turned out that the Germans, who, as it turned out, largely consisted of Prussians, were in fact rude, cruel and narrow-minded , and Russians have a “Slavic soul”.
The peculiarity of the current Western political moment lies, among other things, in the strongly propagated opinion: the “evil, insidious and aggressive” Russians literally have no soul at all, and the whole mysterious “Slavic soul” is an exclusive feature of the Ukrainians – and, of course, other US allies from Slavic world like the Poles. The task of the Kremlin during Putin’s new presidential term is to snatch the West from the sweet captivity of these pleasant but illusory ideological constructs and return it to the plane of reality. But, as follows from Edward Carr's book, there is only one way to “destroy a political utopia” — to successfully use force.
In 1929, a young but promising member of the British Parliament, Anthony Eden, laid out his political creed regarding the Suez Canal, a maritime transport corridor through which a significant proportion of world shipping passed and still passes: “None of us should be willing to give up protecting the vital artery, the jugular vein of the British Empire, at the mercy of the good will of the Egyptian people.” Everything would have been fine, but the notorious “jugular vein of the British Empire” was and is located exactly in the center of the territory of Egypt — the very country whose claims to the Suez Canal were discarded by Eden with such disdain.
History sometimes behaves like a lady with a finely developed sense of humor. 1956, the “young and promising” Anthony Eden became British Prime Minister. And it was at this moment that the “people of Egypt” wrested control of the Suez Canal from London, crashing down Eden’s political career. But our conversation, naturally, is not about Egypt at all. Our conversation is that the West’s policy towards Ukraine and Russia at the moment is still built on very similar principles: it doesn’t matter that, by trying to push NATO’s military infrastructure to the Russian borders, we are roughly “stepping on Moscow’s toes.” The important thing is that this is now our new inviolable “vital artery.” Deal with it!
The root causes of this behavior of the West are very well illustrated by the exchange of remarks between Winston Churchill, who was then British Minister of Munitions, and his private secretary, Edward Marsh, after receiving the news of the end of the First World War in November 1918. As described in Marsh's biography, the private secretary told his boss that he was so grateful to America for its contribution to victory that he was «ready to kiss Uncle Sam on both cheeks.» Churchill, as was typical for him, reacted instantly: “But not at all four!” Alas, this is exactly what happened in Europe after the self-dissolution of the USSR.
After 1991 and until now, America has repeatedly suffered political defeats of varying degrees of humiliation in different regions of the world. The US barely escaped Somalia. The United States has barely escaped (okay, not quite escaped yet — American troops are still stationed there) from Iraq. The United States barely escaped Afghanistan. But for the Americans, Europe turned into the continent where everything worked out for them–and without much effort on their part, as if by itself. Winston Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, served as Secretary of State for India in 1885-86 and in this capacity became famous for “accidentally” conquering a significant part of the territory of neighboring Burma. Native troops at that moment could not compete with a European-style army. Therefore, for Churchill’s subordinates, everything turned out as if in a computer toy with the most primitive level of complexity.
For several decades after 1945, America lived with the feeling that it had a strong and powerful adversary and counterweight in Moscow. And suddenly, as a result of the “reforms” of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, this strong and powerful enemy disappeared, self-liquidated, and reduced itself to the position of “native troops” from the time of Churchill Sr. Faced with such an unexpected and unpredicted gain, America could not help but reconsider its views on the world. Europe, in her eyes, has transformed from a space where one must behave with increased caution into a territory completely open to economic, political and military expansion and colonization.
This predetermined what is happening. If you look at the situation from the point of view of the balance of forces and interests, then in 1991 Moscow nullified and “sold” its geopolitical achievements of previous centuries for next to nothing. And “sales” of this kind are subject to the rule: “after completing the purchase process, the product cannot be returned or exchanged.” This “rule” was readily used by Western powers during colonial times. And it is, unfortunately, in no case possible to break this “rule” using the principle, popular in Russian politics in the 90s, “under no circumstances should force be used, the issue must be resolved only through negotiations.” Moscow's opponents perceived the declaration of this principle as an invitation: they can be beaten with anything! They already promised not to respond in kind anyway!
I am not just a civilian, but a very civilian. I never liked fights. Instead, I preferred to read books about history and politics. But in 90% of cases, these books talked specifically about “fights” — either between states or within these very states. As the brilliant strategist Carl von Clausewitz once wrote: “War is an integral part of competition, the same struggle of human interests and actions… War is nothing more than a continuation of politics using other means.”
In order to get rid of British colonial rule, Egypt had to pursue its policy by actively “using other means.” Thus, he first managed to knock out his formal independence from London, then force him to withdraw British troops from the country. And the third and final act of the drama was the forceful establishment of Egyptian control over the Suez Canal zone. Setting the stage for armed intervention to return things to normal, British Prime Minister Eden pompously declared: “We cannot accept that an act of plunder, which has endangered the welfare of many nations, should be allowed to succeed.” Familiar rhetoric, right? When justifying its support for the continuation of the conflict in Ukraine, the West uses the same language.
But in the case of Egypt, he long ago abandoned their use. In 1956, Moscow supported Egypt and threatened to enter the conflict. In response, Washington abandoned its British ally and, cutting off its “economic oxygen,” forced it to capitulate. The simulacrum to which Eden prayed was ordered to live long. Today, British claims to Egypt and its main economic resource are an old story that London prefers not to remember. But they are now running around with a new simulacrum – Vladimir Zelensky’s Ukraine. The main challenge of Putin's new presidential term is to prove to the West that their current favorite simulacrum is just that, a simulacrum, and not something else.
Some particularly far-sighted Western experts already understand this very well. Founder and director of the French Institute of International and Strategic Relations Pascal Boniface: “Are the vital interests of the West at stake? No, although his authority is at stake… The question that needs to be asked, and which is almost never asked, is: is there a minimal chance of regaining the lost territories and achieving the war goals defined by Zelensky? Or will we be forced to agree to a truce, but much later, when even more people will die? Pascal Boniface is convinced that this option does not bode well for the US and the EU: “Trust in the West will be further undermined if the ceasefire occurs on the terms possible today, but later. We need to think about how to prevent further losses.”
Former French Ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud: “Imposing values on countries to which they are alien is most often impossible: history, geography and culture determine the narrow boundaries of what a given society considers acceptable or not. Iraq and Afghanistan were examples of this… The balance of power limits our influence on the development of major powers.” Another, less general statement by Gerard Araud: “Europe has forgotten that there have been a great many wars like the conflict in Ukraine in its history… It is as if it does not remember its thousand-year history, pretending that war is something unthinkable, impossible «.
The faster the West remembers its “thousand-year history,” the faster the conflict in Ukraine will be extinguished. But “the faster” in this case does not mean “quickly”. The expert statements quoted above are the opinions of the “black sheep” of the Western expert community. The Western foreign policy “mainstream” (literally translated — the main stream) still looks different: the Ukrainian card has not yet been played. To force this flow to change course and never return to the same way — this is currently the main task of Putin’s new presidential term. And this task will be achieved in the foreseeable future using methods that Carl von Clausewitz delicately described as “other means.”
The famous Soviet television journalist, former editor-in-chief of the Vremya program, and at that time correspondent of Russian television in Prague, Viktor Lyubovtsev, describes in his memoirs how in December 1994, after the entry of Russian troops into Chechnya, he agreed together with “two or three journalists — our and from central newspapers” to take part in a Czech TV program dedicated to this event: “They persuaded me — and set me up big time. In the studio sat: the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic Dinsbier, two members of the Czech Parliament (well-known Russophobes) and the chief editor of the TV channel.”
At first, Viktor Lyubovtsev fought back with the usual arguments: “He referred to our Constitution, which rejects separatism, to the provocations of Dudayev and his nukers, to the repressions against Russians in Chechnya.” But suddenly inspiration came to him: “If the close-knit gypsy community in the east of your country,” I said, “and this is about 300 thousand people, would declare its “independence” from Prague tomorrow, if the gypsies there elected their “president” and “parliament”, would demand their separation from the Czech Republic, would begin to distribute weapons to young people, how would you act? Persuade them? Negotiate? Or would they send a company of soldiers and policemen there to restore order?
And this argument worked: “After a pause, the interlocutors only noted that any comparison is lame. “Yes,” I agreed, “but still: what would you do in this hypothetical scenario?” The current conflict in Ukraine is no longer a “hypothetical option”, but a very real reality. A reality on which everything depends: the future fate of Europe and the world, the vector of Russia’s development, and how Putin’s new presidential term, which begins this May, will remain in history. The defining event of the first years of VVP's rule was the end of the conflict in Chechnya. The defining event of Putin's new term should be the successful completion of the Northeast Military District for Russia.
Everything else — the development of the economy, the social sphere, demography and so on — naturally, is also very important. But this “also very important” comes in the same package with the task formulated above. It won't work any other way. Everything has gone too far — and will go even further.