No one knows how the war in Ukraine will end; everything is more or less informed cabals. However, there is some certainty, such as that, to understand the Russian invasion, the Marxist method is of little use, which explains everything with the means of production and the class struggle. These have been liquefied a la Bauman and are being replaced by a crude matrix of alphabetic identities and genders. It is so crude that its imposition requires the existence of a moral police, like the Iranian one, which Podemos has set up in the Ministry of Equality, with the acquiescence of the psoe.
To try to predict the future of the war in Ukraine, more than Marxism, we must resort to history and clinical psychology, and in particular to the psychology of Putin. The guy is a spectacular case of megalomania and patriotic resentment! However, perhaps there is a third way to a greater understanding of the subject and the character: literature.
Russian children, from an early age, study and read their national literary canon. None of the changes in educational plans in recent decades has diminished the importance of literature, which it continues to be seen as an essential way of introducing children to the national political community.
Although we do not know to what extent, the boy Putin also studied his classics and never misses an opportunity to make public his devotion to Dostoevsky Y Tolstoyof course!, but also because Lermontov and even for Turgenev, despite its conspicuous Westernism. This of citing the most canonical canon to boast of little readings is always suspicious and invites mistrust; it is as if the scrupulous Sanchez, PhD.would say that he admires and reads Cervantes, Calderon Y Quevedo: we know the character and it would not be credible even if he included it in his list fake a Almudena Grandeswhich would be a must update of his particular literary canon. The sincere Sánchez does not allow us to successfully carry out one of the essential operations against literature: the suspension of disbelief.
Putin’s strategy seems to focus on the survival and defense of little mother Russia – always vilified – and in the imperative of clinging to it until death, which reminds me of the Hadji Muratby Tolstoy, which I consider to be one of the best novellas in world literature:
“On my way home I noticed that in a ditch there was a magnificent thistle in flower, of the species we call tartar thistle […] I decided to uproot the thistle to put it among the flowers. I jumped into the ditch and, after kicking out a hairy drone that was sleeping on the flower, I tried to pull it out.”
I summarize what follows: the narrator pricks himself, injures his hand, struggles for painful minutes with the leathery native plant to take the flower and when he manages to pull it out “fiber by fiber”, the stem is destroyed and the flower has lost its freshness. . A little further on, in the middle of a devastated wasteland, he sees another Tartar thistle that, after being crushed by a wheel, stood proudly again, without letting itself be defeated by the rampaging man.
Putin seems to want to turn Ukraine into his own mythological space, albeit with the opposite purpose of the great master:
further increase their warmongering.
Tolstoy admires the individual courage of Murat, represented by those indomitable thistles, who fought the Russians, later allied himself with them and was finally betrayed by them. The influence of this story on Putin could be in the opposite direction: Hadji Murat did not want to submit to anyone and Putin does not want anyone to resist him, but another equally inverse analogy can be glimpsed: Tolstoy was in the Caucasus and fought in the Crimea (yes! , in Crimea!) and with his literature he turned both regions into mythological spaces that marked him deeply and made him an ardent pacifist. the devious Putin seems to want to turn Ukraine into his own mythological space, although with the opposite purpose to that of the great master: to further increase his warmongering. The undeniable historical relations between Ukraine and Russia fuel their feverish convulsions.
It is seen that the winners of wars have to be careful with the conditions they impose on the vanquished. The Treaty of Versailles so humiliated Germany that as soon as she could, she cried out for revenge, brought the Nazis to power, and started another world war. The Russians, at least apparatichik, they still feel humiliated for having lost the cold war (it all started with the humiliation of the blockade of Cuba); their animosity towards the West, and in particular towards those who know in their hearts that they were their victors, the United States, is as irrational as it is unassailable. That is why the politicians who exploit this infernal source have the upper hand in Russia. In the everlasting Russian quarrel between Slavophiles and Westernists (slavionofily against zapadniki), the former win by a landslide and Putin is their champion today.
Chaadaevin their philosophical letters, of 1836, expresses it bluntly:
“We Russians do not belong to any of the great families of humanity, neither to the West nor to the East, we do not have the tradition of one or the other. We exist as if we were outside of time and the universal culture of the human race does not concern us.
The majestic Lermontov, the Byron with a Russian soul, he also lived in the Caucasus as a young man, where he had close knowledge of the eternal struggles between Cossacks and Muslim guerrillas. The Caucasian experiences marked him with fire, as it happened to Tolstoy, and he returned to Moscow disturbed by the awareness of the Russian «imperfection» in that region (I take the expression of Víctor Andresco). Putin has to deal with the Russian imperfection in Ukraine, and he has decided to use a saber and not a scalpel. Who knows if it is true that he has read Lermontov and is inspired by these verses:
«but the candle, rebel,
look for the storm
as if there was calm in it.
If the Crimean War changed Tolstoy’s life, another traumatic event – his imprisonment and near execution – changed that of Dostoevsky, who abandoned any pragmatic vision of life and, through an intense spirituality, found his bones. in Pan-Slavism. The great Dosto did not escape a typical aftermath of these “ethnic” loves, and his love for little mother Russia was nourished by hatred towards the West, something he strongly emphasized in his letters, while he traveled to cure himself of his epilepsy through clinics and medical consultations. from… you guessed it: from the West! Those healing trips reaffirmed his conviction that Westerners are spiritually inferior to Russians. It would seem, then, that Putin does read Dostoyevesky, although he could also caress, as an excuse, Tolstoy’s messianic idea when, at the beginning of War and peace, puts into the mouth of Anna Pavlovna: «Only Russia must be the savior of Europe». Although she despises us, she would want to save us from ourselves.
My idea about the relationship that can be drawn between Putin and the literature of his country is very similar to that of the professor of Slavic philology Andrew Kaufman: Putin embraces Dostoevsky’s faith in Russian exceptionality and spurns Tolstoyan faith in the universality of human experience and ethics. (although he was never an admirer of what he saw as Western values). If this conclusion is correct, Ukraine is very complicated. The war has reached a point where it cannot be predicted whether the already badly disturbed and cornered Putin (how do you say “shot in the back” in Russian) will use nuclear weapons.
What should be predictable, since it should be planned in detail, is NATO’s response if it does.
I would very much like to know that there are answers planned, that there are politicians ready to give them, and that the Swedish Social Democrats (beautiful souls if there are any) will not have seats in the situation room.