Putin’s War

Mind | Body | BrainPolitics & Government
Written By David P. Levine

It would be an oversimplification, but not a radical oversimplification, to say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is Vladimir Putin’s war, as it is a manifestation of Putin’s personal vision of the restoration of the world as he experienced it, or imagined it was, before the breakup of the Soviet Union. To understand the events unfolding and especially the humanitarian catastrophe that is the inevitable consequence of the invasion, then, we need to pay special attention to Putin’s emotional agenda, which, expressed in the language of international politics, involves the restoration of the standing of Russia in the world of states, in other words the restoration of the nation’s lost greatness.

What might Putin have in mind when he speaks of retrieving the greatness of the past? As it turns out, when we speak of retrieving the greatness of the past, we are often speaking less of the past as it was than we are of a future that seemed possible in the past but not anymore. In other words, it is the loss of the future latent in the past that weighs so heavily on the present. Putin offers a particularly revealing comment on this complexity in the relationship between past, present, and future when he explains his need to invade Ukraine: “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.” [1]

If the nation’s historical future is the future that seemed possible in the past, then we seek to retrieve the past as a way of making that future possible once again. The reason that Putin’s involvement with the “historical future” has become so destructive is that recapturing the glorious future means returning to a past of misery and suffering, a past in which the only good thing in it was the future that seemed possible then.

There are those who stand in the way of retrieving the historical future. They are its enemies. As paradoxical as it may seem, the enemies of the future are those who claim they can make it real. They would bring the future into the present and, by so doing, put it at risk. Prominent among these enemies are the Western democracies.

For Putin, the reality of Western democracy is a reality of weakness and self-indulgence, of vulnerability, a reality without fear of subjection to tyranny, a reality of a world no longer ruled by hatred and darkness. As Putin knows, and the Western democracies do not, the world is too dangerous a place to let down your guard and enjoy your life, to give up power for self-fulfillment. To Putin’s way of thinking, because it embodies the qualities of weakness and self-indulgence, the West will inevitably prove unable to bear the costs of resisting Russian aggression and for this reason his invasion is bound to succeed. Put in the language of Russian culture, Russia will win the conflict because of its unchallenged capacity to suffer. What Putin intends to show us through demonstrations of strength is the power of suffering and therefore how vital suffering is if we are to hold onto our dream of the future. And he will demonstrate this truth by destroying the lives of those who enjoy the pleasures of self-fulfillment or think that they can.

Through the invasion of Ukraine, Putin offers an object lesson, one he knows too well from personal experience. Here is a brief summary of a notable part of that experience:

 With cardboard walls and several families sharing a single toilet, the communal Communist bedsit could only be described as a hovel. Amid the slum conditions, gangs roamed the streets, vicious brawls were common and children died of hunger. So it is hard to believe anyone living in such poverty could rise to become one of the world’s richest and most powerful men. But it certainly explains Vladimir Putin’s ruthless streak. One former friend of the child gang member turned Russian president told the Mirror: “On these streets he learnt to survive. “It was brutal and it was mean – it was survival of the fittest. It gave him the strength to believe anything was possible.” [3]

For Putin, “small-time hoodlum from the slums of St. Petersburg,” action taken in the present is not driven by a memory of an idyllic past, for example of the nurturing environment of the maternal dyad. It is action driven by much darker memories.

… the gang life in which he participated was the external manifestation of an already established internal drama, and those targeted in his gang experience are the external forms of, or containers for, that part of himself already targeted internally.

Putin’s gang experience played an important role in setting in motion the process that made him the man he became. What the gang provided was a structure of living in the world that affirmed, reinforced, and enacted the imperatives defined earlier and engraved in his mind as memories and fantasies featuring violent and dangerous characters. In other words, the gang life in which he participated was the external manifestation of an already established internal drama, and those targeted in his gang experience are the external forms of, or containers for, that part of himself already targeted internally. To borrow some language from John Steiner, what we are seeing in Putin’s actions is the way the “destructive part of the self … tyrannizes the dependent needy part.” Here, Putin has identified himself with the destructive part of the self and Western democracies with the dependent needy part.

So long as the world outside is structured on the model offered by the characters in his internal drama, Putin knows how to survive in it. You survive by provoking fear, and you provoke fear in others as a way of managing your own fear, which is to say the fear you experience, or would experience, if you were identified with the dependent needy self. Just as, internally, you mobilize your destructive self to manage the dependent needy self, you mobilize your army to manage the presence in the world outside of those made to represent your needy dependent self.

One way to do this involves moving the satisfaction of the needy self and our connection with it into the indefinite future where it is safe from the danger it faces were it to manifest itself, or become real, in the here and now. The primary task is to keep it safe in the historical future. All of Putin’s emotional energy and all of his actions in the world are intended not to realize his dream of the future but to keep it sealed away in a safe place.

During a press conference after a meeting with the French president, Putin offered a comment to his European counterparts that vividly expresses this need to bury a memory and a dream: “You may like it, you may not, but you’ll have to endure it, my beauty.” This comment recalled a piece of Russian folklore: “A beauty is sleeping in the coffin, I’ve crept up and now I am fucking her / You may like it, you may not, sleep, my beauty.” Putin makes a telling revision to the original when he replaces “sleep” with “endure.” [2] In Putin’s allusion to the Russian folktale, he tells us how beauty is buried in a coffin, how he represents the threat to beauty, and how all that is left to us in the face of this threat is to “endure” life in a coffin with the ever-present threat of assault. Putin knows that he is the primary threat to the needy self. So, in this drama, he is both protector and assailant. Indeed, for Putin, aggression against the dependent needy self keeps it secure by driving it out of awareness, in other words depriving it of presence.

We might consider the attempt to reconstitute the Soviet Union an attempt to recreate the institutions of repression that could, in the adult world, do the work of the adolescent gang in securing the fortress within which beauty—desire’s object—is kept under strict control by violent means. If beauty is love’s object, when beauty is kept under control, it is also love that is kept under control because to feel love is to connect with your needy dependent self. And, to connect with your needy dependent self is to make yourself vulnerable to assault.

It may be worth mentioning that, if this is the drama being enacted by Putin and the Russian army, it has provoked another and opposing drama in some ways connected to the same dream. The difference is that, in this opposing drama, the lead character is not bent on raping the beauty asleep in the coffin but saving her from Putin’s enactment of his rape fantasy. The lead character in this drama is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an individual well suited by his work as an actor to take on the role of a character in a drama playing out in the world outside the theater, a world in which the stakes are so much higher and the need for a connection to the emotional intensity of drama so much greater. [4]

 

David P. Levine
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