The Russian war against Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022, was a shock for many of us, Westerners convinced that such aggressions were a thing of the past. How can we explain that Vladimir Putin could have made such a disastrous decision and that the majority of the Russian people followed him in this sad crusade?
In his body Z for zombie, published in 2022 and reissued in paperback this year (“Folio”, 2024, 155 pages), Iegor Gran offers a terrifying explanation. The French novelist, son of Andreï Siniavski, dissident Soviet writer and gulag survivor, asserts that, “for more than a century, Russia has persisted in living in parallel fictions”. She thus invents “metaphysical battles in which she puts all her faith and her future”, to oppose a West that she hates and against which she intends to defend her “historical uniqueness”.
The Russians, writes Gran, are convinced of the superiority of their culture over Western decadence and worship the power that allows them to defend it. The country, outside the big cities, is poor, people live poorly there, but a Russian, Gran notes, “would never trade his T-90 tank for the life of a child, sometimes even his own child “.
The Russian admires despots, who know how to “enforce themselves”, the rich, whom he imagines as Darwinian heroes, and cannot stand that a brother country, like Ukraine, refuses its model to get closer to the West . By sending its tanks to invade its neighbor, Russia, in its logic, is not waging war; she is leading a humanitarian intervention to “save the Ukrainians” from Western influence.
Is it strong coffee, you say? Gran attributes the success of such a speech to the power of Russian propaganda. Putin’s television, “the only source of information for millions of citizens, especially in the provinces”, has become, according to Gran, a “formidable brain-braining factory” by daily hammering out false information about Ukraine, portrayed as a Nazi den. in the pay of the United States. The Russians, through the Web, could have access to information unfiltered by the Kremlin, but they seem to prefer, writes Gran, to be voluntary zombies.
Only “a major military fiasco, painful and humiliating, could shake them by shattering the myth of Russia’s invincibility”, concludes Gran, who therefore encourages the West to support Ukraine militarily and economically and to stop “doing kind eyes to Russia” to rather tell it its four truths in order to corrode “the power of its fiction”.
In Russkiy Mir (PUL, 2024, 110 pages), which means “Russian world” in French, political scientist Jean-François Caron, professor in Kazakhstan, does not fundamentally contradict Gran’s thesis, but he offers a finer, more in-depth reading and less controversial Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Several commentators have suggested that Putin’s goal was, as Caron summarizes, “to prevent Ukraine from becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s borders.” This is not false, writes the political scientist, but it does not explain what is perhaps the essential motive for the aggression.
“The current conflict between Russia and the Western world,” writes Caron, “is not only the result of a security dilemma, but the reaffirmation of cultural idealism and a sense of profound differences with a world considered decadent. “. It is, in other words, in Putin’s logic, a war of civilization.
Supporter, by conviction or by opportunism, of Slavophilism, an ideological current born in the 19the century which postulates a genius specific to Russia that a decadent westernization would threaten, Putin is basically waging a cultural battle by waging war on Ukraine.
His Slavophilism today is embodied in traditional and conservative values - it is radically opposed to current Western culture, which he assimilates to Wokism – and in the illiberal model.
Russia, notes Caron, “is no longer an economic and military superpower” as before, but it could become an “ideocratic” superpower by creating an “anti-Western bloc” adhering to its world, which it already manages to do in some countries in Europe and Africa. China, for the moment, is keeping its distance from this program, while not contesting it.
Caron, himself against Wokism, is worried about this coming civilizational shock, says that it is important to “understand the enemy” so as not to be the fools of the joke and encourages the liberal West, in a conclusion subject to controversy, to swallow its colonialist superb on the moral level in order to preserve its power of influence on the international scene.