Putin as his country’s eschatological defender against Satan and evil.
Why U.S. Presidents Misjudge Putin
A scholar of the Russian dictator says he sees himself as his country’s eschatological defender against Satan and evil.
ET
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a worry circulated among foreign-policy analysts that the aims and decision-making processes of Islamic jihadists confounded our attempts to penetrate them—unlike those of the Soviets, which, however perilous, we at least understood.
But did we? American commentators and policymakers have long assumed that they understood Russian strategic thinking better than they did. To this day, despite the temptation to assume the reasoning of Russian leaders more or less comports with Western norms, the Kremlin’s intentions remain “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill memorably put it.
The habit lives on in the current U.S. administration. President Trump sagely dismisses the sincerity of Iran’s jihadist regime. Talk of an impending “deal” aside, all my reporting suggests he has no regard for the words of Iran’s leaders. Yet Mr. Trump persists in the belief that Vladimir Putin would negotiate in good faith, according to Western notions of interest, if only he thought he could. Recall a social-media post in August of last year in which Mr. Trump said the war could end “almost immediately” if only Ukraine would relinquish its claims on Crimea and forswear its ambition to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Credulity about Russia is a bipartisan affair. Recall the preposterous “reset” button Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented to her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in 2009, or her successor John Kerry’s expression of outrage after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea in 2014: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”
A book published last month in the Netherlands reminds us how vast is the difference between the West’s conceptions of interest and Mr. Putin’s. “Poetins Tsaristische Droom,” or “Putin’s Czarist Dream,” contends that Mr. Putin’s outlook has evolved, over the quarter-century in which he has ruled, into a spiritual amalgam every bit as eschatological as that of Iran’s mullahs. The authors, Beatrice de Graaf and Niels Drost—a professor of history at Utrecht University and a research fellow at the Clingendael Institute in The Hague, respectively—think Western observers have missed a major component of the Russian dictator’s worldview. In early May I connected by videolink to Ms. de Graaf in her book-laden office in Utrecht.
The essential thing to understand about Mr. Putin, she begins, is that he isn’t a Marxist or a communist or even a defender of Leninism or Stalinism. He has often made vaguely disparaging remarks about Bolshevism and Soviet command economics. Plainly, however, Mr. Putin hasn’t abandoned the Soviet-era Kremlin’s expansionist aims. Over the past quarter-century, Ms. de Graaf and Mr. Drost argue in their book, he has developed a view of himself as the latest, and perhaps greatest, in a centuries-long line of Russian autocrats.
Ms. de Graaf began following Russian politics in the early 2000s. What surprised her then about Mr. Putin’s rule was the statues. When she visited St. Petersburg in 2006, “I was amazed by how many statues of Russian czars Putin had erected.” He had taken power on the last day of 1999, when Boris Yeltsin resigned. “Every year, one or two or three statues were erected. But they didn’t honor Lenin or Stalin. The statues were of Alexander I, of Peter the Great, of Catherine, of Nicholas I.”
Any time Mr. Putin would dedicate one of these statues, Ms. de Graaf recalls observing, “he would do it in the company of an Orthodox priest, and the priest would sprinkle holy water and make an address, and both the priest and Putin speak of the ‘holiness of the moment’ or some language like that. . . . To me, it became obvious this wasn’t only about history.”
The Kremlin publishes Mr. Putin’s speeches on its website. Ms. de Graaf, employing her co-author’s digital savvy and superior Russian fluency, managed to compile almost all of Mr. Putin’s public statements from 1999 to 2024: some 11,000 of them, including formal speeches, addresses to staff and introductory remarks. She expected to find that the Russian president spoke of the czars “a couple of dozen times,” Ms. Graaf recalls; perhaps she could base an academic paper on it. In fact he refers substantively to the czars in more than 3,000 addresses. “Of course he also refers to the Second World War, and he does refer to Stalin—but not that much. Far more often he talks about the great Russian czars.”
The book plots the changes in how Mr. Putin draws on the czarist tradition. Early in his presidency, when relations between Russia and the West briefly thawed, Mr. Putin would speak of “Peter the Great and European interests, of Catherine the Great and literacy and the Enlightenment. He spoke of Alexander I and Europe joining to defeat Napoleon.”
That changed around 2004. After the chaos Russia sustained in the 1990s, Mr. Putin, having brought stability, expected to be heralded by the West the way Alexander I was after Waterloo. What Mr. Putin “didn’t realize is that this was too big a cloak in which to clad Russia in the early 2000s.” The country’s annual economic output was smaller than that of several European nations with considerably smaller populations. “He had nukes,” Ms. de Graaf says, “but he hadn’t much in terms of export and import.”
His rhetoric took on elements of Eastern Orthodoxy and of darkness and light. “He began to speak often of ‘evil.’ Russia for him was a ‘beacon of light’ that would save the world from evil,” she recounts.
A crucial turn took place in 2011. That December, the Putin-linked United Russia party won an election credibly described as fraudulent by outside observers and Russian journalists. Mr. Putin, who had pretended for four years to take the lesser role of prime minister even as he continued running the country, returned to the presidency in that election. Tens of thousands protested on the streets of Moscow in what Western observers optimistically called the Snow Revolution.
From this point on, Ms. de Graaf contends, based on Mr. Putin’s many public utterances, he “immersed himself in the triad of Russian state power: nationality, autocracy, Orthodoxy”—the three-part formulation most closely associated with the reign, often termed “reactionary,” of Czar Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1855. Mr. Putin and his immediate circle began to express, Ms. de Graaf says, “a more eschatological, a more apocalyptic and violent vision.” His inner circle began calling Moscow the “third Rome.”
Mr. Putin “allowed people—he didn’t do it himself, he allowed others—to call him katechon.” This Greek word, usually defined as “restrainer” or “one who withholds,” appears in 2 Thessalonians 2, a mysterious chapter of the New Testament that speaks of a “man of lawlessness” and of one who will restrain him. Some early church fathers applied the term to the Roman Empire, which for all its faults constrained evildoers. The tradition mostly died when Napoleon defeated the last holy Roman emperor, Francis II, in 1805, although Russian Orthodox theology sometimes still casts the czars in the role of Katechon.
For Mr. Putin’s nationalist supporters, he fills the role anew. Which explains, Ms. de Graaf says, why his top aides and allies—Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, former President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev, among others—justified the 2022 invasion in part by alleging “satanic” activity in Ukraine. To Western ears that sounded risible, but for Putinists attuned to Orthodox political theology—and for the Russian president himself—the idea is entirely valid.
On the religious question, Mr. Putin has, for example, made it a custom to participate in Kreshchenskiye Kupaniya, or epiphany bathing, every Jan. 19, commemorating Christ’s baptism. Believers dip themselves three times in water, often outside during Russia’s subzero weather. Mr. Putin does so in the company of cameras and priests.
“For him,” Ms. de Graaf says, “the war in Ukraine really is a holy war.” She also points out that while “in Western Christianity, St. Augustine formulated an influential theory of just war, nothing of the sort developed in Eastern Christianity. In the East, the emperor has the power to define what is evil and crush it.”
Nonreligious scholars and analysts in the secularized West tend to assume that because they don’t take religion seriously, other important and accomplished people don’t, either. This is very often a mistake, so I put it to Ms. de Graaf: How sincere is Mr. Putin about any of this? “I’m not”—she searches for the English word—“clairvoyant? I cannot read his mind. . . . People say to me, ‘Yeah, Beatrice, all those speeches, but do you really think he believes any of it?’ ” She acknowledges the possibility that it’s all a cynical ploy, but doesn’t accept it. “If someone aligns his deeds with his words for the past 26 years,” she says, “you may properly infer that he attaches some meaning to the words. I think Putin increasingly believes what he says. I cannot say more than that.”
American analysts sometimes debate whether this or that rogue regime or dictator—the supreme leader in Iran, Mr. Putin in Russia—is a “rational” actor. Almost always the topic assumes a Western liberal-democratic definition of rational, which makes the question pointless. Ms. de Graaf is similarly skeptical of the question’s usefulness and helpfully describes what she calls “epistemic” rationality: It involves “the way you appraise reality. Maybe you appraise it differently from other people.”
She applies this to Mr. Putin: “So if he sees the number of square kilometers, the outlines of his country, as something that has bearing on his status internationally, for him it’s rational to expand his borders. And if he thinks that Kyiv belongs to Russia because St. Vladimir Christianized it around the year 1000 and he needs this story to give himself a kind of legitimacy as a ruler, then he’s behaving in a way that is completely rational.”
I infer from Ms. de Graaf’s observation that it’s folly to call Mr. Putin a “rational” actor if one means he thinks about his own country’s interests as the leader of a Western nation would think about his.
She agrees. For Mr. Putin, “the global order cannot be measured in units in the way we count them.” Western leaders and their citizens “divide the globe into autonomous nation-states, whereas he sees the world as a place of big empires,” and he sees empires as “vast cultural entities in search of identity, recognition, meaning in the world. America has an empire. So does India, so does China. Europe is what he would call a weak power, but it is still an empire.”
U.S. presidents have repeatedly misjudged Mr. Putin’s intentions. Mr. Trump, despite Democratic accusations of “collusion” with the Russians in 2016, exhibited more shrewdness on Russian matters than his predecessors, by withdrawing from the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on grounds that Russia had repeatedly broken it, by destroying Russian-backed mercenaries in Syria in 2018, and, of course, by sending weaponry to Ukraine. Yet Mr. Trump has just as frequently behaved as though the Russian tyrant desires “peace” as an end in itself.
Lately Russia has seemed to lose its way in the war—its front stalled if not regressing, its bases in the southwest under attack, its economy in shambles, its political elite soured on the immense cost. American leaders may expect Mr. Putin to respond to these circumstances in what they deem a “rational” way, by acknowledging battlefield realities and looking for ways to cut his losses and save face. But a reimbodied czar, a man empowered by God to restrain evil and protect Russia from satanic influence, probably won’t conform to expectations.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
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