Drawing with both hands from the Russian collective unconscious, Vladimir Putin, as a former member of the KGB, has all the tools necessary to manipulate his people as he pleases. A pure product of the Soviet Union and the Bolshevism that gave birth to it, he knows all its tricks by heart.
Because the Russian soul is complex. According to the words of the precursor of Bolshevism, Vissarion Bielinski (1811-1848), mysticism is its basis. In fact, it is made up of a curious mixture of sacrificial-type atheistic nihilism and, on the other hand, a mystical religious conservatism.
And the latter would be so strong that it defies all reason. It is true to say that historically the Russians have never gone out of their way to achieve their goal, no matter what damage they have done along the way.
One need only think here of Ivan the Terrible who, in the sixteenthand century, had given itself a double mission: to fiercely maintain its power in place and above all… to save souls! But in the same way, Putin presently proposes to his people such mysticism and imperatively calls for struggle and combat. Those who oppose it will be, according to him, only traitors and heretics to vomit.
Sergei Nechayev (1847-1882) said in the 19and century that, no matter what was at stake, suffering was present in all struggles and that, whatever the damage caused, it was always legitimate and moral. Just as with Nietzsche (1844-1900), there was no room among Russian intellectuals for pity or compassion when achieving an ideal. In this sense, a human life is not much. It is worth nothing in itself compared to this ideal.
Difficult to understand
For us Westerners, this mystical meaning remains difficult to understand. It must be said that many other things are difficult to grasp in the Russian soul. This is the case, for example, with the concept of freedom. Russians consider that Western-style freedom is not real freedom insofar as it remains individual and is in no way creative from a collective point of view. We find a similar notion of freedom widely developed in the poetry of Pushkin (1799-1837).
While freedom means, according to us, the right to speak and to act as we see fit, according to the Russian tradition of the 19and and XXand centuries, freedom must be associated with a project to which we devote ourselves entirely. Also, if we say in the West that our freedom stops where that of others begins, following the Russian spirit, it will be the opposite: that of others begins where mine stops!
Let’s understand that in Russia, tradition weighs heavily! The Bolshevik spirit, perfectly embodied by Putin, remains very present in the Russian collective unconscious. Historically, the Russian people, made up essentially of scrupulously religious peasants, had been accustomed for centuries to a harsh and difficult life in the hope of reaching the afterlife promised by clerical orthodoxy in the service of power.
Hence a certain fatalism. It will be found in the novels of Nicolas Gogol in particular (1809-1852). It is this faculty which the Russians have to accept the worst privations. And it is this same fatalism that the communists of the XXand century will exploit ad nauseam to make the people accept the passage from a promise of the hereafter to that, which will always remain fictitious, of a classless society.
Unfortunately, this exaltation of a new humanitarianism, which, a priori, was to lead to the liberation of the people, led straight to its opposite. By the absurd present in his novels, the great Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) had however announced it in the XIXand century: there exists among the Russians an almost irrational closure to everything that is properly human in the human.
However, 31 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is today a message in all respects in conformity with Bolshevism that the propaganda of Vladimir Putin peddles. What she proposes is a purification of the Ukrainian soul mate. Faced with the proximity of the Western world, a world which, just as in the days of communism, is associated with evil, decay and injustice, the “Little Russia” of yesteryear must be saved.
Can we, however, think that the younger generations raised on McDonalds and social media have a different soul and will escape Putin’s murderous propaganda? I do not think so. Because if these young people believe that a period of repression is necessary to keep the prosperity that Putin has given them for the past twenty years, they will be ready to sacrifice themselves momentarily. Especially if it is a question, as Putin presents it, of saving the brotherly Ukrainian people. In reality, what Putin is hypocritically asking of them is an act of faith.