Our secret histories and lines of fracture oft reveal hidden relationships and interdependencies, with those of America and Russia in our turbulent whirlpools, undertows, waves, and reverse flows along the stream of time being exemplars of chaotic systems.
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the capture of the American state by Putin’s star agent Traitor Trump in the Stolen Election of 2016 are linked events which signaled and made possible the Third World War which has engulfed us in ten different theatres, the home fronts of both our nations among them.
How did this happen, what does it mean, and what is to be done?
Herein I signpost with special urgency and call of Hey Rube the existential threat of secret power, the primacy of the role of truthtellers in calling out the emperor who has no clothes, and the complicity of silence in the face of evil, in this context of an undeclared World War our authorities are pretending has not seized and shaken us all like a rat in the jaws of a lion. An invisible war, reported only in its parts and not as a whole, which like a tornado of nothingness now devours our humanity and like a Bonfire of the Vanities annihilates our pretensions to civilization, for we have regressed from throwing words to throwing stones.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We humans are now living in the world of Elie Wiesel’s Night, and it is from his great novel of our previous struggle with fascism that I borrow a coda on the Trump era and our mission statement as American patriots and Anti-fascists; “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
As I wrote in my post of February 23 2023, Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Triggered by the McQuade Prosecution Memo of Treason and Insurrection Charges in United States Versus Trump: A Desperate Gamble For Power By A Failing Fourth Reich; As I wrote on this day in 2022; We awake to a radically changed world today, as the Russian Conquest of Ukraine begins and Barbara McQuade openly publishes her Prosecution Memo of charges in the United States Versus Trump.
Putin seems to have misread the situation disastrously; his fig leaf of lies and illusions in manufactured and staged propaganda of fake atrocities by Ukraine collapses under scrutiny and with it any just cause or pretext for the invasion he has launched, which renders Russian support questionable and now makes regime change a real possibility, NATO has coalesced from the ashes of history to offer solidarity with Ukraine as a united front
The Russian speaking and aligned people of Ukraine, many already Russian citizens, are declaring they will fight to the death not for Russia but for an independent Ukraine, which makes occupation a thousand times more likely to fail, especially with America and Europe imposing sanctions and supplying weapons and advisors to Ukraine, and Trump pronounces this an act of genius, one he would like to emulate at our border with Mexico.
As written by Sara Boboltz in Huffpost; “Trump appeared in awe of Putin during an interview on a right-wing talk radio program broadcast from Tennessee. He described watching the Monday evening news after Putin declared two sections of Ukraine to be independent and ordered Russian troops to storm the regions for alleged “peacekeeping” purposes.
“I said, ‘This is genius,’” Trump recalled. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine ― Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”
“So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent.’ A large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force,” Trump said.
“We could use that on our southern border,” he added, before continuing with his praise. “That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re going to keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”
“I know him very well. Very, very well,” Trump said.”
We can always count on Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, pathetic and ridiculous as he is, for the comedy relief. After all, he modeled his persona on the Joker, in equal measure with his idols Hitler and Charles Manson.
This incident answers an important question for us as it reveals the nature of the Putin-Trump relationship; why is Putin invading Ukraine now? After maneuvering Trump into the White House in the Stolen Election of 2016 for the purpose of conquering the Crimea as a stepping stone to the conquest of Ukraine, a clear parallel to the Japanese conquest of Manchuria as both are industrial centers crucial to the construction of an imperial army capable of world conquest and dominion, why invade now, after a year of holding an invasion force on the border?
Putin’s toy is broken and lost as Trump snarls threats he is powerless to enforce, not from the White House but from the golf course, and the noose of evidence and exposure of his treason is tightening around his neck.
Putin the Puppetmaster and Traitor Trump are inextricably linked as the figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and reveal each other’s secret faces and shadow selves to the witness of history. Here we may read the true history of the global Fourth Reich as it captured Russia and America to impose tyranny and Nazi revivalist state terror as our first world government.
For Trump, the purpose of power is cruelty, and secondarily the vengeance and destruction he can inflict on a world that never loved him. For Putin, the purpose of power is power; this why Putin is the master and Trump is his minion.
Trump’s declaration of his subservience to Putin yesterday as the Russian imperial conquest of Ukraine began recalls to me a similar incident, when Trump called Putin from the bunker for help in breaking the People’s Siege of the White House by sending Russian troops to occupy America and enforce brutal repression of dissent.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2020, No Velvet Glove, Just the Iron Fist: Trump Attempts to Use Nationwide Riots Not to Redress Historic Inequalities But to Impose Tyranny; Cowering in his bunker in the darkness, cries of thousands of voices of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the masses of those re-enslaved through divisions of exclusionary otherness thundering through the warrens of his underworld kingdom of lies, Trump made a frantic call to his master in the Kremlin, Putin, former Colonel of the KGB and long his patron and agent handler.
“Boss? Boss, you gotta get me outta this. Its not going down like we planned. They got the palace surrounded. What do I do?”
“Listen Donald, there’s nothing you can’t solve with greater force. You like Napoleon, right? Conquered Europe, they gave him a princess to marry as tribute. Somebody to grab, and own like a thing, just like you want to do with all of America. You just do what he did to seize the throne of France; give ‘em a whiff of grapeshot.”
“Can you send the Russian Army to restore order? Our plan was, I was supposed to ask you for an occupation force when we kicked off the boogaloo.…”
Putin laughs. Click.
“Hey, that’s not funny. Pick up the phone.” He smashes things, howling and blubbering in fear and rage. “I’m the joke? I’m never the joke. I’ll make America pay for making a monkey outta me. I’ll make everybody pay.”
And like the petulant child and bully that he is, Trump goes forth to avenge himself on the world that does not love him, visions of a red button in a briefcase dancing in his head, muttering, “Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Among the many testimonials of the witness of history which have been written on this anniversary of an enormous war crime, there is one which intrigues me as it presents our recent history in terms of Hegelian dialectical process, though we remember the Soviet Union very differently as I can never forget that we would never have overthrown the Apartheid regime of South Africa without Soviet and Cuban solidarity in resistance, one of many conflicts of revolutionary struggle in which I was and now remain proud to have called Russian soldiers comrades.
As written by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic’s newsletter of February 23, 2023; “The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.”
“Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.
The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.
When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.
And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.
Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.
If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.
Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song “Hero” by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. “Great song,” I said to her in Russian. “One of my favorites,” she answered.
This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.
In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.
I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.
I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.
And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.
Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and while I celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies, I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.
I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.
P.S.
Today I’ll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.
— Tom”
The Restoration of Democracy in the wake of the Putin-Trump Fourth Reich balances on our solidarity of action in stewardship of each other, and in the many theatres of World War Three which has engulfed much of the former Soviet hegemony and dominion Ukraine is our first and most crucial historical test of America as a guarantor of democracy and an emerging free society of equals which may one day become a United Humankind.
Biden’s recent speech in Warsaw, from which we survivors of Mariupol and such allies as we could gather in a reorganized Abraham Lincoln Brigade launched our campaign to bring a Reckoning to the oligarchs and war criminals of Putin’s regime who are the direct and primary beneficiaries of his mad conquest of the Middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe, not counting the Stolen Election of 2016 as he never actually sent a Russian army of occupation to seize America, is an important fulcrum of change event. I hope that the free world can find the political will to challenge tyranny with liberty, division with solidarity, fear and hate with love and hope.
As written by Kevin Liptakin in CNN, in an article entitled Biden issues a rallying cry in Warsaw: ‘Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia’; “
President Joe Biden vowed in a fiery speech Tuesday to continue supporting Ukraine as it enters a second year of war, repeatedly denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin and promising the United States would not waver even as the conflict enters a new, more uncertain phase.
In his second major address in less than a year from the same Polish castle, Biden said before a large, energetic crowd that Western resolve was stiffening in the face of Putin’s assault on democracy.
He used his trip to the Ukrainian capital a day earlier as evidence that the democracies of the world are growing stronger in the face of autocracy, repeatedly noting Kyiv remained in Ukrainian hands despite the early expectations inside the Kremlin.
“One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv. Well, I’ve just come from a visit to Kyiv and I can report Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud, it stands tall and most important, it stands free,” Biden said as a crowd, many waving American flags, cheered underneath cold rain.
In remarkably pointed terms, Biden accused Putin of atrocities and said his attempt to subjugate a sovereign nation wouldn’t succeed.
“President Putin’s craven lust for land and power will fail,” he said, one of the 10 separate times he singled out the Russian leader by name in his address.
By contrast, Putin didn’t name Biden once in a lengthy and belligerent address from Moscow earlier in the day. In other ways as well, the two presidents’ speeches could not have been more different. Biden was introduced to a driving electronic pop anthem; meanwhile in Moscow, some members of Putin’s audience appeared to fall asleep during his one-hour-and-45-minute speech.
White House aides said ahead of time that Biden’s remarks were not timed to act as a rebuttal to Putin’s speech. And Biden made only a single reference to it, denying Putin’s claim that Ukraine and its allies in the West started the war.
“The West was not plotting to attack Russia,” Biden said by way of response in his own speech.
According to senior US and European officials, Putin’s aims have not changed since he launched his invasion a year ago. Despite humiliating setbacks for his military and an apparent power struggle between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian defense ministry, Russia has recently made gains in the east. Putin’s troops appear poised to take the city of Bakhmut, the first significant Russian military victory in months.
Visiting the region this week, Biden hoped to again provide a rallying cry for Ukraine, demonstrating to Putin and Russia that Western resolve isn’t weakening. Harkening to the start of the war, Biden said the challenges of the invasion extended beyond Ukraine’s borders.
“When Russia invaded, it was not just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages,” he said. “Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO was being tested.”
Biden appeared to speak almost directly to Putin in much of the remarks, saying, “Autocrats only understand one word: No. No, no. No, you will not take my country. No, you will not take my freedom. No, you will not take my future.”
“Ukraine, Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never,” Biden said to applause.
Biden makes the case for ‘the defense of freedom
The war has left an indelible mark on nearly all aspects of Biden’s presidency and he has left his mark on the war, from the billions of dollars in arms shipments to the newly invigorated Western alliance. It has caused convulsions in the global economy and created political problems at home while still providing Biden an opening to demonstrate his oft-recited claim that “America is back.”
White House officials have been looking towards this week’s anniversary for weeks, consistently making the point that one year ago, as Russian troops were massing on the border with Ukraine, there were plenty of people – including inside the Biden administration – who predicted Kyiv would’ fall in a matter of days.
The surprising resilience of the Ukrainian people, along with the unexpected ineptitude of the Russian forces, have prevented a full takeover. Instead, the war has become what NATO’s chief Jens Stoltenberg described last week as a “grinding war of attrition” without a discernible end.
“We have to be honest and clear-eyed as we look at the year ahead,” Biden said Tuesday. “The defense of freedom is not the work of a day. It’s always difficult. It’s always important.”
The United States and other Western nations have been shipping tranches of arms, tanks and ammunition to Ukraine, steadily increasing what they are willing to provide in the hopes of changing the trajectory of the war. It’s not enough for Zelensky, who wants heavier weapons and fighter jets.
US officials have said they hope the massive influx of weaponry to Ukraine – which includes new vehicles, longer-range missiles, and Patriot air defense systems – can help Ukraine prevail on the battlefield and put the country in a stronger position to negotiate an end to the war.
But it remains unclear what parameters Zelensky might be willing to accept in any peace negotiations, and the US has steadfastly refused to define what a settlement may look like beyond stating it will be up to Zelensky to decide.
Meanwhile, new concerns about the available supplies of ammunition and weapons have emerged in the past week, a clear indication the West cannot provide unlimited support forever – neither logistically nor politically – as evidenced by polls showing support for the war effort waning.
In the US, some conservative Republicans have balked at providing any more aid to Ukraine, though the party’s leaders appear unwavering in their support. As Biden prepares to announce his intentions on running for reelection, anxiety is rising in Europe that a change in the White House could herald a shift in policy toward Ukraine.
Clashing with Putin
The last time Biden spoke from the courtyard of the Royal Castle, the content of his 27-minute speech was mostly obscured by what he ad-libbed about Putin at the end: “For God’s sake,” he proclaimed in March 2022, “this man cannot remain in power.”
Nearly a year later, Biden returned to the Royal Castle to mark the anniversary of a war that has increasingly put him directly at odds with the Russian leader, a Cold War dynamic underscored by Biden’s highly secretive visit to Kyiv a day earlier.
In his speech, Biden accused Putin of atrocities and trying to “starve the world” by preventing Ukrainian grain exports.
“When President Putin ordered the tanks to roll in Ukraine, he thought we would roll over. He was wrong,” Biden said.
Yet unlike Biden’s last appearance in Warsaw, which came as Putin’s forces appeared in retreat and observers expected the Russian economy to crumble under the weight of Western sanctions, the war now appears poised to stretch at least another year. There are currently no serious efforts at negotiating an end to the fighting.
If there was ever a point when Biden and his aides hoped to avoid personalizing the Ukraine conflict, it was over long before this week’s anniversary. Biden has declared Putin a “war criminal” and a “pure thug,” accusing Russia of genocide and, in his castle speech, making an implicit call for regime change.
Speaking to reporters ahead of Biden’s speech, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said it was not planned as a direct rebuttal to Putin.
“We did not set the speech up some kind of head to head,” Sullivan said. “This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else.”
‘Our support for Ukraine remains unwavering’
In meetings with Polish President Andrzej Duda earlier Tuesday, Biden reiterated his commitment to the region’s security.
Biden thanked Duda for his country’s commitment to supporting the people of Ukraine, calling the relationship between the two nations “critical, critical, critical.” Biden said he believes Ukraine is in a “better position than we’ve ever been” and called on NATO countries to “keep our head and our focus.”
“I made it clear that the commitment of the United States is real and that a year later I would argue NATO is stronger than it’s ever been,” Biden said.
“I can proudly say that our support for Ukraine remains unwavering.”
Biden announced Monday he would join European nations in announcing new sanctions on Moscow and unveil another security assistance package on top of the tens of billions already committed this year.”
As I wrote in my post of February 25 2023, On the Question of Motives and Goals: Why has Putin Invaded Ukraine?; Our first question in any analysis and interpretation of current events for purposes of strategy and policy guidance, my field here at Torch of Liberty as a voice of the global Resistance in democracy and antifascist action, regards the motives and goals of the enemy. In the case of Putin and the Russian Dominion in the invasion and conquest of Ukraine, why has Putin invaded Ukraine?
The McQuade Memo being the trigger and last cause of the invasion, because Putin saw himself losing any chance of his puppet and agent Trump retaking the White House and therefore a closing window of opportunity for the conquest of Ukraine without American, NATO, EU, or UN intervention, only goes back as far as the Maidan Revolution which overthrew Putin’s Ukrainian puppet and created a new democracy, to the conquest of Crimea and its vital warm water ports, and to the Stolen Election of 2016 in America.
But larger historical and systemic forces are in play here, which involve Putin’s ideological model and shaping source, the philosopher of Russian identitarian politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil Ivan Ilyin, and we must also have a model of the material and economic conditions driving political decisions.
As written by Volodymyr Ishchenko in Jacobin, in an article entitled Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict: The invasion of Ukraine is not simply a product of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist mindset. It corresponds to a project for Russian capitalism that he and his allies have pursued since the collapse of the Soviet Union; “Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine earlier this year, analysts across the political spectrum have struggled to identify exactly what — or who — led us to this point. Phrases like “Russia,” “Ukraine,” “the West,” or “the Global South” have been thrown around as if they denoted unified political actors. Even on the Left, the utterances of Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Joe Biden, and other world leaders about “security concerns,” “self-determination,” “civilizational choice,” “sovereignty,” “imperialism,” or “anti-imperialism” are often taken at face value, as if they represented coherent national interests.
Specifically, the debate over Russian — or, more precisely, the Russian ruling clique’s — interests in launching the war tends to be polarized around questionable extremes. Many take what Putin says literally, failing to even question whether his obsession with NATO expansion or his insistence that Ukrainians and Russians constitute “one people” represent Russian national interests or are shared by Russian society as a whole. On the other side, many dismiss his remarks as bold-faced lies and strategic communication lacking any relation to his “real” goals in Ukraine.
In their own ways, both of these positions serve to mystify the Kremlin’s motivations rather than clarify them. Today’s discussions of Russian ideology often feel like a return to the times of The German Ideology, penned by young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels some 175 years ago. To some, the dominant ideology in Russian society is a true representation of the social and political order. Others believe that simply proclaiming the emperor has no clothes will be enough to pierce the free-floating bubble of ideology.
Unfortunately, the real world is more complicated. The key to understanding “what Putin really wants” is not cherry-picking obscure phrases from his speeches and articles that fit observers’ preconceived biases, but rather conducting a systematic analysis of the structurally determined material interests, political organization, and ideological legitimation of the social class he represents.
In the following, I try to identify some basic elements of such an analysis for the Russian context. That does not mean a similar analysis of the Western or Ukrainian ruling classes’ interests in this conflict is irrelevant or inappropriate, but I focus on Russia partially for practical reasons, partially because it is the most controversial question at the moment, and partially because the Russian ruling class bears the primary responsibility for the war. By understanding their material interests, we can move beyond flimsy explanations that take rulers’ claims at face value and move toward a more coherent picture of how the war is rooted in the economic and political vacuum opened up by the Soviet collapse in 1991.
What’s in a Name?
During the current war, most Marxists have referred back to the concept of imperialism to theorize the Kremlin’s interests. Of course, it is important to approach any analytical puzzle with all available tools. It is just as important, however, to use them properly.
The problem here is that the concept of imperialism has undergone practically no further development in its application to the post-Soviet condition. Neither Vladimir Lenin nor any other classical Marxist theorist could have imagined the fundamentally new situation that emerged with the collapse of Soviet socialism. Their generation analyzed the imperialism of capitalist expansion and modernization. The post-Soviet condition, by contrast, is a permanent crisis of contraction, demodernization, and peripheralization.
That does not mean that analysis of Russian imperialism today is pointless as such, but we need to do quite a lot of conceptual homework to render it fruitful. A debate over whether contemporary Russia constitutes an imperialist country by referring to some textbook definitions from the twentieth century has only scholastic value. From an explanatory concept, “imperialism” turns into an ahistorical and tautological descriptive label: “Russia is imperialist because it attacked a weaker neighbor”; “Russia attacked a weaker neighbor because it is imperialist,” and so on.
Failing to find the expansionism of Russian finance capital (considering the impact of sanctions on the very globalized Russian economy and the Western assets of Russian “oligarchs”); the conquest of new markets (in Ukraine, which has failed to attract virtually any foreign direct investment, or FDI, except for the offshore money of its own oligarchs); control over strategic resources (whatever mineral deposits lie in Ukrainian soil, Russia would need either expanding industry to absorb them or at least the possibility to sell them to more advanced economies, which is, surprise, only severely restricted because of the Western sanctions); or any other typical imperialist causes behind the Russian invasion, some analysts claim that the war may possess the autonomous rationality of a “political” or “cultural” imperialism. This is ultimately an eclectic explanation. Our task is precisely to explain how the political and ideological rationales for the invasion reflect the ruling class’s interests. Otherwise, we inevitably end up with crude theories of power for the sake of power or ideological fanaticism. Moreover, it would mean that the Russian ruling class has either been taken hostage by a power-hungry maniac and national chauvinist obsessed with a “historical mission” of restoring Russian greatness, or suffers from an extreme form of false consciousness — sharing Putin’s ideas about the NATO threat and his denial of Ukrainian statehood, leading to policies that are objectively contrary to their interests.
It is not uncommon for collective class interests to only partially overlap with the interests of individual representatives of that class.
I believe this is wrong. Putin is neither a power-hungry maniac, nor an ideological zealot (this kind of politics has been marginal in the whole post-Soviet space), nor a madman. By launching the war in Ukraine, he protects the rational collective interests of the Russian ruling class. It is not uncommon for collective class interests to only partially overlap with the interests of individual representatives of that class, or even contradict them. But what kind of class actually rules Russia — and what are its collective interests?
Political Capitalism in Russia and Beyond
When asked which class rules Russia, most people on the Left would likely answer almost instinctively: capitalists. The average citizen in the post-Soviet space would probably call them thieves, crooks, or mafia. A slightly more highbrow response would be “oligarchs.” It is easy to dismiss such answers as the false consciousness of those who do not understand their rulers in “proper” Marxist terms. However, a more productive path of analysis would be to think about why post-Soviet citizens emphasize the stealing and the tight interdependency between private business and the state that the word “oligarch” implies.
As with the discussion of modern imperialism, we need to take the specificity of the post-Soviet condition seriously. Historically, the “primitive accumulation” here happened in the process of the Soviet state and economy’s centrifugal disintegration. Political scientist Steven Solnick called this process “stealing the state.” Members of the new ruling class either privatized state property (often for pennies on the dollar) or were granted plentiful opportunities to siphon off profits from formally public entities into private hands. They exploited informal relations with state officials and the often intentionally designed legal loopholes for massive tax evasion and capital flight, all while executing hostile company takeovers for the sake of quick profits with a short-term horizon.
Russian Marxist economist Ruslan Dzarasov captured these practices with the “insider rent” concept, emphasizing the rent-like nature of income extracted by insiders thanks to their control over the financial flows of the enterprises, which depend on the relationships with the power holders. These practices can certainly also be found in other parts of the world, but their role in the formation and reproduction of the Russian ruling class is far more important due to the nature of the post-Soviet transformation, which began with the centrifugal collapse of state socialism and the subsequent political-economic reconsolidation on a patronage basis.
Other prominent thinkers, such as Hungarian sociologist Iván Szelényi, describe a similar phenomenon as “political capitalism.” Following Max Weber, political capitalism is characterized by the exploitation of political office to accumulate private wealth. I would call the political capitalists the fraction of the capitalist class whose main competitive advantage is derived from selective benefits from the state, unlike capitalists whose advantage is rooted in technological innovations or a particularly cheap labor force. Political capitalists are not unique to the post-Soviet countries, but they are able to flourish precisely in those areas where the state has historically played the dominant role in the economy and accumulated immense capital, now open for private exploitation.
The presence of political capitalism is crucial to understand why, when the Kremlin speaks about “sovereignty” or “spheres of influence,” it is by no means the product of an irrational obsession with outdated concepts. At the same time, such rhetoric is not necessarily an articulation of Russia’s national interest so much as a direct reflection of Russian political capitalists’ class interests. If the state’s selective benefits are fundamental for the accumulation of their wealth, these capitalists have no choice but to fence off the territory where they exercise monopoly control — control not to be shared with any other fraction of the capitalist class.
This interest in “marking territory” is not shared by, or at least not so important for, different types of capitalists. A long-running controversy in Marxist theory centered around the question of, to paraphrase Göran Therborn, “what the ruling class actually does when it rules.” The puzzle was that the bourgeoisie in capitalist states does not usually run the state directly. The state bureaucracy usually enjoys substantial autonomy from the capitalist class but serves it by establishing and enforcing rules that benefit capitalist accumulation. Political capitalists, by contrast, require not general rules but much tighter control over political decision makers. Alternatively, they occupy political offices themselves and exploit them for private enrichment.
Many icons of classical entrepreneurial capitalism benefited from state subsidies, preferential tax regimes, or various protectionist measures. Yet, unlike political capitalists, their very survival and expansion on the market only rarely depended on the specific set of individuals holding specific offices, the specific parties in power, or specific political regimes. Transnational capital could and would survive without the nation-states in which their headquarters were located — recall the seasteading project of floating entrepreneurial cities independent of any nation-state, boosted by Silicon Valley tycoons like Peter Thiel. Political capitalists cannot survive in global competition without at least some territory where they can reap insider rents without outside interference.
Class Conflict in the Post-Soviet Periphery
It remains an open question whether political capitalism will be sustainable in the long run. After all, the state needs to take resources from somewhere to redistribute them among the political capitalists. As Branko Milanovic notes, corruption is an endemic problem for political capitalism, even when an effective, technocratic, and autonomous bureaucracy runs it. Unlike in the most successful case of political capitalism, such as China, the Soviet Communist Party institutions disintegrated and were replaced by regimes based on personal patronage networks bending the formal facade of liberal democracy in their favor. This often works against impulses to modernize and professionalize the economy. To put it crudely, one cannot steal from the same source forever. One needs to transform into a different capitalist model in order to sustain the profit rate, either via capital investments or intensified labor exploitation, or expand to obtain more sources for extracting insider rent.
The region’s relatively low wages were only possible due to the extensive material infrastructure and welfare institutions the Soviet Union left as a legacy.
But both reinvestment and labor exploitation face structural obstacles in post-Soviet political capitalism. On the one hand, many hesitate to engage in long-term investment when their business model and even property ownership fundamentally depend on specific people in power. It has generally proven more opportune to simply move profits into offshore accounts. On the other hand, post-Soviet labor was urbanized, educated, and not cheap. The region’s relatively low wages were only possible due to the extensive material infrastructure and welfare institutions the Soviet Union left as a legacy. That legacy poses a massive burden for the state, but one that is not so easy to abandon without undermining support from key groups of voters. Seeking to end the rapacious rivalry between political capitalists that characterized the 1990s, Bonapartist leaders like Putin and other post-Soviet autocrats mitigated the war of all against all by balancing out the interests of some elite fractions and repressing others — without altering the foundations of political capitalism.
As rapacious expansion began to run up against internal limits, Russian elites sought to outsource it externally to sustain the rate of rent by increasing the pool of extraction. Hence the intensification of Russian-led integration projects like the Eurasian Economic Union. These faced two obstacles. One was relatively minor: local political capitalists. In Ukraine, for example, they were interested in cheap Russian energy, but also in their own sovereign right to reap insider rents within their territory. They could instrumentalize anti-Russian nationalism to legitimate their claim to the Ukrainian part of the disintegrating Soviet state, but failed to develop a distinct national development project.
The title of the famous book by the second Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine Is Not Russia, is a good illustration of this problem. If Ukraine is not Russia, then what exactly is it? The universal failure of non-Russian post-Soviet political capitalists in overcoming the crisis of hegemony made their rule fragile and ultimately dependent on Russian support, as we have seen recently in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The alliance between transnational capital and the professional middle classes in the post-Soviet space, represented politically by pro-Western, NGO-ized civil societies, gave a more compelling answer to the question of what exactly should grow on the ruins of the degraded and disintegrated state socialism, and presented a bigger obstacle to the Russia-led post-Soviet integration. This constituted the main political conflict in the post-Soviet space that culminated in the invasion of Ukraine.
The Bonapartist stabilization enacted by Putin and other post-Soviet leaders fostered the growth of the professional middle class. A part of it shared some benefits of the system, for example, if employed in bureaucracy or in strategic state enterprises. However, a large part of it was excluded from political capitalism. Their main opportunities for incomes, career, and developing political influence lay in the prospects of intensifying political, economic, and cultural connections with the West. At the same time, they were the vanguard of Western soft power. Integration into EU- and US-led institutions presented for them an ersatz-modernization project of joining both “proper” capitalism and the “civilized world” more generally. This necessarily meant breaking with post-Soviet elites, institutions, and the ingrained, socialist-era mentalities of the “backward” plebeian masses sticking to at least some stability after the 1990s disaster.
For most Ukrainians, this is a war of self-defense. Recognizing this, we should also not forget about the gap between their interests and those who claim to speak on their behalf.
The deeply elitist nature of this project is why it never truly became hegemonic in any post-Soviet country, even when boosted by historical anti-Russian nationalism as it was in — even now, the negative coalition mobilized against the Russian invasion does not mean that Ukrainians are united around any particular positive agenda. At the same time, it helps to explain the Global South’s skeptical neutrality when called on to solidarize with either a wannabe great power on a par with other Western great powers (Russia) or a wannabe periphery of the same great powers seeking not to abolish imperialism, but to join a better one (Ukraine). For most Ukrainians, this is a war of self-defense. Recognizing this, we should also not forget about the gap between their interests and the interests of those who claim to speak on their behalf, and who present very particular political and ideological agendas as universal for the whole nation — shaping “self-determination” in a very class-specific way.
The discussion of the role of the West in paving the way for the Russian invasion is typically focused on NATO’s threatening stance toward Russia. But taking the phenomenon of political capitalism into account, we can see the class conflict behind Western expansion, and why Western integration of Russia without the latter’s fundamental transformation could never have worked. There was no way to integrate post-Soviet political capitalists into Western-led institutions that explicitly sought to eliminate them as a class by depriving them of their main competitive advantage: selective benefits bestowed by the post-Soviet states. The so-called “anti-corruption” agenda has been a vital, if not the most important, part of Western institutions’ vision for the post-Soviet space, widely shared by the pro-Western middle class in the region. For political capitalists, the success of that agenda would mean their political and economic end.
In public, the Kremlin tries to present the war as a battle for Russia’s survival as a sovereign nation. The most important stake, however, is the survival of the Russian ruling class and its model of political capitalism. The “multipolar” restructuring of the world order would solve the problem for some time. This is why the Kremlin is trying to sell their specific class project to the Global South elites that would get their own sovereign “sphere of influence” based on a claim to represent a “civilization.”
The Crisis of Post-Soviet Bonapartism
The contradictory interests of post-Soviet political capitalists, the professional middle classes, and transnational capital structured the political conflict that ultimately gave birth to the current war. However, the crisis of the political capitalists’ political organization exacerbated the threat to them.
Bonapartist regimes like Putin’s or Alexander Lukashenko’s in Belarus rely on passive, depoliticized support and draw their legitimacy from overcoming the disaster of the post-Soviet collapse, not from the kind of active consent that secures the political hegemony of the ruling class. Such personalistic authoritarian rule is fundamentally fragile because of the problem of succession. There are no clear rules or traditions to transfer power, no articulated ideology a new leader must adhere to, no party or movement in which a new leader could be socialized. Succession represents the point of vulnerability where internal conflicts within the elite can escalate to a dangerous degree, and where uprisings from below have better chances to succeed.
Such uprisings have been accelerating on Russia’s periphery in recent years, including not just the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014 but also the revolutions in Armenia, the third revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the failed 2020 uprising in Belarus, and, most recently, the uprising in Kazakhstan. In the two last cases, Russian support proved crucial to ensure the local regime’s survival. Within Russia itself, the “For Fair Elections” rallies held in 2011 and 2012, as well as later mobilizations inspired by Alexei Navalny, were not insignificant. On the eve of the invasion, labor unrest was on the rise, while polls showed declining trust in Putin and a growing number of people who wanted him to retire. Dangerously, opposition to Putin was higher the younger the respondents were.
None of the post-Soviet, so-called maidan revolutions posed an existential threat to the post-Soviet political capitalists as a class by themselves. They only swapped out fractions of the same class in power, and thus only intensified the crisis of political representation to which they were a reaction in the first place. This is why these protests have repeated so frequently.
The maidan revolutions are typical contemporary urban civic revolutions, as political scientist Mark Beissinger called them. On a massive statistical material, he shows that unlike social revolutions of the past, the urban civic revolutions only temporarily weaken authoritarian rule and empower middle-class civil societies. They do not bring a stronger or more egalitarian political order, nor lasting democratic changes. Typically, in post-Soviet countries, the maidan revolutions only weakened the state and made local political capitalists more vulnerable to pressure from transnational capital — both directly and indirectly via pro-Western NGOs. For example, in Ukraine, after the Euromaidan revolution, a set of “anti-corruption” institutions has been stubbornly pushed forward by the IMF, G7, and civil society. They have failed to present any major case of corruption in the last eight years. However, they have institutionalized oversight of key state enterprises and the court system by foreign nationals and anti-corruption activists, thus squeezing domestic political capitalists’ opportunities for reaping insider rents. Russian political capitalists would have a good reason to be nervous with the troubles of Ukraine’s once-powerful oligarchs.
The Unintended Consequences of Ruling-Class Consolidation
Several factors help to explain the timing of the invasion as well as Putin’s miscalculation about a quick and easy victory, such as Russia’s temporary advantage in hypersonic weapons, Europe’s dependency on Russian energy, the repression of the so-called pro-Russian opposition in Ukraine, the stagnation of the 2015 Minsk accords following the War in Donbas, or the failure of Russian intelligence in Ukraine. Here, I sought to outline in very broad strokes the class conflict behind the invasion, namely between political capitalists interested in territorial expansion to sustain the rate of rent, on the one hand, and transnational capital allied with the professional middle classes — which were excluded from political capitalism — on the other.
The Marxist concept of imperialism can only be usefully applied to the current war if we can identify the material interests behind it. At the same time, the conflict is about more than just Russian imperialism. The conflict now being resolved in Ukraine by tanks, artillery, and rockets is the same conflict that police batons have suppressed in Belarus and Russia itself. The intensification of the post-Soviet crisis of hegemony — the incapacity of the ruling class to develop sustained political, moral, and intellectual leadership — is the root cause for the escalating violence.
The Russian ruling class is diverse. Some parts of it are taking heavy losses as a result of Western sanctions. However, the Russian regime’s partial autonomy from the ruling class allows it to pursue long-term collective interests independently of the losses of individual representatives or groups. At the same time, the crisis of similar regimes in the Russian periphery is exacerbating the existential threat to the Russian ruling class as a whole. The more sovereigntist fractions of the Russian political capitalists are taking the upper hand over the more comprador, but even the latter likely understand that, with the regime’s fall, all of them are losing.
By launching the war, the Kremlin sought to mitigate that threat for the foreseeable future, with the ultimate goal of the “multipolar” restructuring of the world order. As Branko Milanovic suggests, the war provides legitimacy for the Russian decoupling from the West, despite the high costs, and at the same time makes it extremely difficult to reverse it after the annexation of even more Ukrainian territory. At the same time, the Russian ruling clique elevates the political organization and ideological legitimation of the ruling class to a higher level. There are already signs of a transformation toward a more consolidated, ideological, and mobilizationist authoritarian political regime in Russia, with explicit hints at China’s more effective political capitalism as a role model. For Putin, this is essentially another stage in the process of post-Soviet consolidation that he began in the early 2000s by taming Russia’s oligarchs. The loose narrative of preventing disaster and restoring “stability” in the first stage is now followed by a more articulated conservative nationalism in the second stage (directed abroad against Ukrainians and the West, but also within Russia against cosmopolitan “traitors”) as the only ideological language widely available in the context of the post-Soviet crisis of ideology.
Some authors, like sociologist Dylan John Riley, argue that a stronger hegemonic politics from above may help to foster the growth of a stronger counterhegemonic politics below. If this is true, the Kremlin’s shift toward more ideological and mobilizationist politics may create the condition for a more organized, conscious, mass political opposition rooted in the popular classes than any post-Soviet country has ever seen, and ultimately for a new social-revolutionary wave. Such a development could, in turn, fundamentally shift the balance of social and political forces in this part of the world, potentially putting an end to the vicious cycle that has plagued it since the Soviet Union collapsed some three decades ago.”
How did Russia, once a committed antifascist state and nation bearing a historical momentum of global revolutionary struggle and often a heroic lone ally in solidarity with oppressed peoples throughout the world, as it was with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War which we American volunteers in the defense of Ukraine named ourselves for, how did this glorious and resolute champion of humankind become a fascist tyranny?
As I wrote in my journal of February 25 2022 Origins of the Fourth Reich Part One: Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism Ivan Ilyin; As the second day of the Russian Conquest of Ukraine dawns, fierce resistance and savage battles erupt throughout Ukraine and mass peace protests engulf Russia, air raid sirens are near constant as Ukraine shoots Russian planes from the sky and Russian bombs and artillery devastated her cities, Russian special forces teams in the capital assassinate Ukrainian leaders and prepare the way for the main army closing in despite heroic last stands by the defenders of Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, Moldovia and other former Soviet dominion states wonder if they are next on the menu, President Biden imposes sanctions which directly target the oligarchs who rule Russia as a crime syndicate, and ominously the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl has become a contested prize.
As written by Tony Tran in The Byte; “In an ominous turn of events, Ukraine’s president says that Russian troops are trying to seize the sealed off Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Pripyat.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Twitter on Thursday Russia was “trying to seize” the area, and media are now reporting that fighting has broken out there. The fighting could endanger the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus, a massive steel and concrete structure encasing the highly radioactive nuclear reactor that melted down in a 1986 disaster.
“Russian occupation forces are trying to seize the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated,” Zelensky said. “This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”
Anton Herashchenko, former deputy minister and current advisor to Ukraine’s interior ministry, echoed the point in a Facebook post, warning that “if the invaders’ artillery hits” the sarcophagus, “radioactive nuclear dust” could “be spread over the territory of Ukraine, Belarus, and the countries in the EU.”
This all came mere hours after Russian President Vladmir Putin announced a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has begun military operations throughout Ukraine that includes bombardments of cities, attacks on military bases, and boots-on-the-ground fighting with Ukrainian soldiers.
So basically, things are looking pretty bleak. Not only does this war threaten the lives of millions of innocent Ukrainian citizens, but it also throws the entire geopolitical arena into turmoil.
Now, with the threat of nuclear fallout from Chernobyl rearing its head, it’s clear things might get very ugly very quickly.”
Putin has cried havoc and loosed the dogs of war, and all bets are off as to where it may end. I greet the dawn with prayers that we have not witnessed the start of the Third World War and the extinction of humankind.
We must now interrogate and assess the ideas, motives, and construction of Russian national identity of Vladimir Putin, a man who captured the government of the United States of America without a shot fired in the Stolen Election of 2016, and in the conquest of Ukraine as a game of brinkmanship with NATO holds the balance between the survival or extinction of humankind in global nuclear war.
What are the origins of the Fourth Reich, and how did it come to seize both Russia and America without Resistance?
For the historical background of how fascism came to Russia with Putin as its champion, I refer to Timothy Snyder’s Road to Unfreedom. Here is the story of how a Russian nationalist and fascist, Ilyin, has become the guiding ideological force of Putin’s Russia and its key role in the global fascist assault on the heritage of the Enlightenment and Western civilization; democracy and our values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and the Universal Rights of Man.
As written by Tim Adams in The Guardian, reviewing The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder; “Even presidents who don’t believe in history need a historian to rely on. When asked, in 2014, by a delegation of students and history teachers for his chosen chronicler of Russia’s past, Vladimir Putin came up with a single name: Ivan Ilyin.
Ilyin is a figure who might have been easily lost to history were it not for the posthumous patronage of Russia’s leader. Putin first drew attention to him – Ilyin was a philosopher, not a historian, a Russian who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954 – when he organised the repatriation of Ilyin’s remains for reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin’s personal papers, held in a library in Michigan, were also brought “home” at the president’s request. New editions of Ilyin’s dense books of political philosophy became popular in Kremlin circles – and all of Russia’s civil servants reportedly received a collection of his essays in 2014. And when Putin explained Russia’s need to combat the expansion of the European Union, and laid out the argument to invade Ukraine, it was Ilyin’s arguments on which the president relied.
Timothy Snyder begins his pattern-making deconstruction of recent Russian history – which by design, he argues, is indistinguishable from recent British and American history – with a comprehensive account of Putin’s reverence for the work of Ilyin. Like much of Snyder’s analysis in this unignorable book, the framing offers both a disturbing and persuasive insight.
Ilyin, an early critic of Bolshevism, had been expelled by the Soviets in 1922. In Germany, where he wrote favourably of the rise of Hitler and the example of Mussolini, he developed ideas for a Russian fascism, which could counter the effects of the 1917 revolution. As a thread through his nationalist rhetoric, he proposed a lost “Russian spirit”, which in its essence reflected a Christian God’s original creation before the fall and drew on a strongly masculine “pure” sexual energy (he had been psychoanalysed by Freud). A new Russian nation should be established, Ilyin argued, to defend and promote that ineffable spirit against all external threats – not only communism but also individualism. To achieve that end, Ilyin outlined a “simulacrum” of democracy in which the Russian people would speak “naturally” with one voice, dependent on a leader who was cast as “redeemer” for returning true Russian culture to its people. Elections would be “rituals” designed to endorse that power, periodically “uniting the nation in a gesture of subjugation”.
To establish that dystopian state, Snyder argues, Putin’s regime has deliberately pursued two of Ilyin’s central concepts. The first demanded the identification and destruction of the enemies of that Russian spirit to establish unity; alien influences – Muslim or Jewish, fundamentalist or cosmopolitan – were intent on “sodomising” Russian virtue (sexual imagery is never far away in the Kremlin’s lurid calls to arms). If those enemies did not exist they would have to be invented or exaggerated. After the terror attacks on Russian institutions – the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school massacre – Chechen separatism was used as a reason to bring first television and then regional governorships under state control. Those policies were led, Snyder documents, by Vladislav Surkov, the former postmodernist theatre director who was Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff and then Putin’s lead strategist. Surkov directs a policy, borrowed from Ilyin, which he calls “centralisation, personification, idealisation”. With Surkov’s management, “Putin was to offer masculinity as an argument against democracy”, Snyder suggests; he was to associate, specifically, for example, gay rights and equal marriage with an attack on the Russian spirit.
In this culture war, disinformation was critical. Russian TV and social media would create a climate in which news became entertainment, and nothing would quite seem factual. This surreal shift is well documented, but Snyder’s forensic examination of, for example, the news cycle that followed the shooting down of flight MH17 makes essential reading. On the first day official propaganda suggested that the Russian missile attack on the Malaysian plane had in fact been a botched attempt by Ukrainian forces to assassinate Putin himself; by day two, Russian TV was promoting the idea that the CIA had sent a ghost plane filled with corpses overhead to provoke Russian forces.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin. Putin made, Snyder argues, his direct assault on “western” factuality a source of national pride. Snyder calls this policy “implausible deniability”; you hear it in the tone of the current “debate” around the Salisbury attack: Russian power is displayed in a relativist blizzard of alternative theories, delivered in a vaguely absurdist spirit, as if no truth on earth is really provable.
The second half of Snyder’s book explores how Russia has sought to export this policy to those who threaten it, primarily through a mass disinformation war, a 2.0 update of Sun Tzu’s “confusion to our enemy” principle, with the aim of dividing and polarising pluralist democracies – in particular the EU and the US – against themselves.
Snyder is very astute at joining the dots in how Russian propagandists, human or digital, sought to spread fake news to undermine faith in the democratic process, at the same time giving overt support to European separatists and Russia TV regulars such as Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. He details how, for example, Russian “news” sources spread the idea that the Scottish independence vote had been “rigged” by “establishment forces” with the aim of undermining faith in democratic institutions in Britain before the EU referendum. We are still awaiting, of course, the full disentangling of Donald Trump’s complex relations with Putin’s government, and the many links between his campaign organisation and Russian operatives. As with Luke Harding’s book Collusion, however, there is more than enough here to keep Robert Mueller busy for a long while yet.
One unavoidable conclusion of this depressing tale lies in the acknowledgment that Putin’s strategy has been so successful in shaking faith in the sanctity of fact and expert knowledge.”
” How did we get here? Snyder has a good idea.”
And now our story begins to develop of how America was seized by a fascist regime whose figurehead was a lifelong agent of the KGB and of Russia’s FSB intelligence thereafter, the most successful espionage operation ever conducted against America by a foreign power, culminating in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the Presidency of Donald Trump and his mission of subversion of global democracy and the fall of America to a Fourth Reich of white supremacist terror and fascist tyranny, in a new book by Craig Unger, American Kompromat.
As reported in The Guardian, Unger describes the ease with which a credulous fool with no morals, a consuming greed, and an appetite for perversions and sexual terror became an instrument of Russian imperialism and the violation and destruction of America’s values and institutions; “Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
Here is the expanded version of Timothy Snyder’s essay “God Is a Russian” in the April 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review:
“The Russian looked Satan in the eye, put God on the psychoanalyst’s couch, and understood that his nation could redeem the world. An agonized God told the Russian a story of failure. In the beginning was the Word, purity and perfection, and the Word was God. But then God made a youthful mistake. He created the world to complete himself, but instead soiled himself, and hid in shame. God’s, not Adam’s, was the original sin, the release of the imperfect. Once people were in the world, they apprehended facts and experienced feelings that could not be reassembled to what had been God’s mind. Each individual thought or passion deepened the hold of Satan on the world.
And so the Russian, a philosopher, understood history as a disgrace. Nothing that had happened since creation was of significance. The world was a meaningless farrago of fragments. The more humans sought to understand it, the more sinful it became. Modern society, with its pluralism and its civil society, deepened the flaws of the world and kept God in his exile. God’s one hope was that a righteous nation would follow a Leader into political totality, and thereby begin a repair of the world that might in turn redeem the divine. Because the unifying principle of the Word was the only good in the universe, any means that might bring about its return were justified.
Thus this Russian philosopher, whose name was Ivan Ilyin, came to imagine a Russian Christian fascism. Born in 1883, he finished a dissertation on God’s worldly failure just before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Expelled from his homeland in 1922 by the Soviet power he despised, he embraced the cause of Benito Mussolini and completed an apology for political violence in 1925. In German and Swiss exile, he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s for White Russian exiles who had fled after defeat in the Russian civil war, and in the 1940s and 1950s for future Russians who would see the end of the Soviet power.
A tireless worker, Ilyin produced about twenty books in Russian, and another twenty in German. Some of his work has a rambling and commonsensical character, and it is easy to find tensions and contradictions. One current of thought that is coherent over the decades, however, is his metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. A crucial concept was “law” or “legal consciousness” (pravosoznanie). For the young Ilyin, writing before the Revolution, law embodied the hope that Russians would partake in a universal consciousness that would allow Russia to create a modern state. For the mature, counter-revolutionary Ilyin, a particular consciousness (“heart” or “soul,” not “mind”) permitted Russians to experience the arbitrary claims of power as law. Though he died forgotten, in 1954, Ilyin’s work was revived after collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and guides the men who rule Russia today.
The Russian Federation of the early twenty-first century is a new country, formed in 1991 from the territory of the Russian republic of the Soviet Union. It is smaller than the old Russian Empire, and separated from it in time by the intervening seven decades of Soviet history. Yet the Russian Federation of today does resemble the Russian Empire of Ilyin’s youth in one crucial respect: it has not established the rule of law as the principle of government. The trajectory in Ilyin’s understanding of law, from hopeful universalism to arbitrary nationalism, was followed in the discourse of Russian politicians, including Vladimir Putin. Because Ilyin found ways to present the failure of the rule of law as Russian virtue, Russian kleptocrats use his ideas to portray economic inequality as national innocence. In the last few years, Vladimir Putin has also used some of Ilyin’s more specific ideas about geopolitics in his effort translate the task of Russian politics from the pursuit of reform at home to the export of virtue abroad. By transforming international politics into a discussion of “spiritual threats,” Ilyin’s works have helped Russian elites to portray the Ukraine, Europe, and the United States as existential dangers to Russia.
Ivan Ilyin was a philosopher who confronted Russian problems with German thinkers. This was typical of the time and place. He was child of the Silver Age, the late empire of the Romanov dynasty. His father was a Russian nobleman, his mother a German Protestant who had converted to Orthodoxy. As a student at Moscow between 1901 and 1906, Ilyin’s real subject was philosophy, which meant the ethical thought of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). For the neo-Kantians, who then held sway in universities across Europe as well as in Russia, humans differed from the rest of creation by a capacity for reason that permitted meaningful choices. Humans could then freely submit to law, since they could grasp and accept its spirit.
Law was then the great object of desire of the Russian thinking classes. Russian students of law, perhaps more than their European colleagues, could see it as a source of political transformation. Law seemed to offer the antidote to the ancient Russian problem of proizvol, of arbitrary rule by autocratic tsars. Even as a hopeful young man, however, Ilyin struggled to see the Russian people as the creatures of reason Kant imagined. He waited expectantly for a grand revolt that would hasten the education of the Russian masses. When the Russo-Japanese War created conditions for a revolution in 1905, Ilyin defended the right to free assembly. With his girlfriend, Natalia Vokach, he translated a German anarchist pamphlet into Russian. The tsar was forced to concede a new constitution in 1906, which created a new Russian parliament. Though chosen in a way that guaranteed the power of the empire’s landed classes, the parliament had the authority to legislate. The tsar dismissed parliament twice, and then illegally changed the electoral system to ensure that it was even more conservative. It was impossible to see the new constitution as having brought the rule of law to Russia.
Employed to teach law by the university in 1909, Ilyin published a beautiful article in both Russian (1910) and German (1912) on the conceptual differences between law and power. Yet how to make law functional in practice and resonant in life? Kant seemed to leave open a gap between the spirit of law and the reality of autocracy. G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), however, offered hope by proposing that this and other painful tensions would be resolved by time. History, as a hopeful Ilyin read Hegel, was the gradual penetration of Spirit (Geist) into the world. Each age transcended the previous one and brought a crisis that promised the next one. The beastly masses will come to resemble the enlightened friends, ardors of daily life will yield to political order.
The philosopher who understands this message becomes the vehicle of Spirit, always a tempting prospect. Like other Russian intellectuals of his own and previous generations, the young Ilyin was drawn to Hegel, and in 1912 proclaimed a “Hegelian renaissance.” Yet, just as the immense Russian peasantry had given him second thoughts about the ease of communicating law to Russian society, so his experience of modern urban life left him doubtful that historical change was only a matter of Spirit. He found Russians, even those of his own class and milieu in Moscow, to be disgustingly corporeal. In arguments about philosophy and politics in the 1910s, he accused his opponents of “sexual perversion.”
In 1913, Ilyin worried that perversion was a national Russian syndrome, and proposed Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as Russia’s savior. In Ilyin’s reading of Freud, civilization arose from a collective agreement to suppress basic drives. The individual paid a psychological price for sacrifice of his nature to culture. Only through long consultations on the couch of the psychoanalyst could unconscious experience surface into awareness. Psychoanalysis therefore offered a very different portrait of thought than did the Hegelian philosophy that Ilyin was then studying. Even as Ilyin was preparing his dissertation on Hegel, he offered himself as the pioneer of Russia’s national psychotherapy, travelling with Natalia to Vienna in May 1914 for sessions with Freud. Thus the outbreak of World War I found Ilyin in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, now one of Russia’s enemies.
“My inner Germans,” Ilyin wrote to a friend in 1915, “trouble me more than the outer Germans,” the German and Habsburg realms making war against the Russian Empire. The “inner German” who helped Ilyin to master the others was the philosopher Edmund Husserl, with whom he had studied in Göttingen in 1911. Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of the school of thought known as phenomenology, tried to describe the method by which the philosopher thinks himself into the world. The philosopher sought to forget his own personality and prior assumptions, and tried to experience a subject on its own terms. As Ilyin put it, the philosopher must mentally possess (perezhit’) the object of inquiry until he attains self-evident and exhaustive clarity (ochevidnost).
Husserl’s method was simplified by Ilyin into a “philosophical act” whereby the philosopher can still the universe and anything in it—other philosophers, the world, God— by stilling his own mind. Like an Orthodox believer contemplating an icon, Ilyin believed (in contrast to Husserl) that he could see a metaphysical reality through a physical one. As he wrote his dissertation about Hegel, he perceived the divine subject in a philosophical text, and fixed it in place. Hegel meant God when he wrote Spirit, concluded Ilyin, and Hegel was wrong to see motion in history. God could not realize himself in the world, since the substance of God was irreconcilably different from the substance of the world. Hegel could not show that every fact was connected to a principle, that every accident was part of a design, that every detail was part of a whole, and so on. God had initiated history and then been blocked from further influence.
Ilyin was quite typical of Russian intellectuals in his rapid and enthusiastic embrace of contradictory German ideas. In his dissertation he was able, thanks to his own very specific understanding of Husserl, to bring some order to his “inner Germans.” Kant had suggested the initial problem for a Russian political thinker: how to establish the rule of law. Hegel had seemed to provide a solution, a Spirit advancing through history. Freud had redefined Russia’s problem as sexual rather than spiritual. Husserl allowed Ilyin to transfer the responsibility for political failure and sexual unease to God. Philosophy meant the contemplation that allowed contact with God and began God’s cure. The philosopher had taken control and all was in view: other philosophers, the world, God. Yet, even after contact was made with the divine, history continued, “the current of events” continued to flow.
Indeed, even as Ilyin contemplated God, men were killing and dying by the millions on battlefields across Europe. Ilyin was writing his dissertation as the Russian Empire gained and then lost territory on the Eastern Front of World War I. In February 1917, the tsarist regime was replaced by a new constitutional order. The new government tottered as it continued a costly war. That April, Germany sent Vladimir Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, and his Bolsheviks carried out a second revolution in November, promising land to peasants and peace to all. Ilyin was meanwhile trying to assemble the committee so he could defend his dissertation. By the time he did so, in 1918, the Bolsheviks were in power, their Red Army was fighting a civil war, and the Cheka was defending revolution through terror.
World War I gave revolutionaries their chance, and so opened the way for counter-revolutionaries as well. Throughout Europe, men of the far right saw the Bolshevik Revolution as a certain kind of opportunity; and the drama of revolution and counter-revolution was played out, with different outcomes, in Germany, Hungary, and Italy. Nowhere was the conflict so long, bloody, and passionate as in the lands of the former Russian Empire, where civil war lasted for years, brought famine and pogroms, and cost about as many lives as World War I itself. In Europe in general, but in Russia in particular, the terrible loss of life, the seemingly endless strife, and the fall of empire brought a certain plausibility to ideas that might otherwise have remained unknown or seemed irrelevant. Without the war, Leninism would likely be a footnote in the history of Marxist thought; without Lenin’s revolution, Ilyin might not have drawn right-wing political conclusions from his dissertation.
Lenin and Ilyin did not know each other, but their encounter in revolution and counter-revolution was nevertheless uncanny. Lenin’s patronymic was “Ilyich” and he wrote under the pseudonym “Ilyin,” and the real Ilyin reviewed some of that pseudonymous work. When Ilyin was arrested by the Cheka as an opponent of the revolution, Lenin intervened on his behalf as a gesture of respect for Ilyin’s philosophical work. The intellectual interaction between the two men, which began in 1917 and continues in Russia today, began from a common appreciation of Hegel’s promise of totality. Both men interpreted Hegel in radical ways, agreeing with one another on important points such as the need to destroy the middle classes, disagreeing about the final form of the classless community.
Lenin accepted with Hegel that history was a story of progress through conflict. As a Marxist, he believed that the conflict was between social classes: the bourgeoisie that owned property and the proletariat that enabled profits. Lenin added to Marxism the proposal that the working class, though formed by capitalism and destined to seize its achievements, needed guidance from a disciplined party that understood the rules of history. In 1917, Lenin went so far as to claim that the people who knew the rules of history also knew when to break them— by beginning a socialist revolution in the Russian Empire, where capitalism was weak and the working class tiny. Yet Lenin never doubted that there was a good human nature, trapped by historical conditions, and therefore subject to release by historical action.
Marxists such as Lenin were atheists. They thought that by Spirit, Hegel meant God or some other theological notion, and replaced Spirit with society. Ilyin was not a typical Christian, but he believed in God. Ilyin agreed with Marxists that Hegel meant God, and argued that Hegel’s God had created a ruined world. For Marxists, private property served the function of an original sin, and its dissolution would release the good in man. For Ilyin, God’s act of creation was itself the original sin. There was never a good moment in history, and no intrinsic good in humans. The Marxists were right to hate the middle classes, and indeed did not hate them enough. Middle-class “civil society” entrenches plural interests that confound hopes for an “overpowering national organization” that God needs. Because the middle classes block God, they must be swept away by a classless national community. But there is no historical tendency, no historical group, that will perform this labor. The grand transformation from Satanic individuality to divine totality must begin somewhere beyond history.
According to Ilyin, liberation would arise not from understanding history, but from eliminating it. Since the earthly was corrupt and the divine unattainable, political rescue would come from the realm of fiction. In 1917, Ilyin was still hopeful that Russia might become a state ruled by law. Lenin’s revolution ensured that Ilyin henceforth regarded his own philosophical ideas as political. Bolshevism had proven that God’s world was as flawed as Ilyin had maintained. What Ilyin would call “the abyss of atheism” of the new regime was the final confirmation of the flaws of world, and of the power of modern ideas to reinforce them.
After he departed Russia, Ilyin would maintain that humanity needed heroes, outsized characters from beyond history, capable of willing themselves to power. In his dissertation, this politics was implicit in the longing for a missing totality and the suggestion that the nation might begin its restoration. It was an ideology awaiting a form and a name.
Ilyin left Russia in 1922, the year the Soviet Union was founded. His imagination was soon captured by Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, the coup d’état that brought the world’s first fascist regime. Ilyin was convinced that bold gestures by bold men could begin to undo the flawed character of existence. He visited Italy and published admiring articles about Il Duce while he was writing his book, On the Use of Violence to Resist Evil (1925). If Ilyin’s dissertation had laid groundwork for a metaphysical defense of fascism, this book was a justification of an emerging system. The dissertation described the lost totality unleashed by an unwitting God; second book explained the limits of the teachings of God’s Son. Having understood the trauma of God, Ilyin now “looked Satan in the eye.”
Thus famous teachings of Jesus, as rendered in the Gospel of Mark, take on unexpected meanings in Ilyin’s interpretations. “Judge not,” says Jesus, “that ye not be judged.” That famous appeal to reflection continues:
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
For Ilyin, these were the words of a failed God with a doomed Son. In fact, a righteous man did not reflect upon his own deeds or attempt to see the perspective of another; he contemplated, recognized absolute good and evil, and named the enemies to be destroyed. The proper interpretation of the “judge not” passage was that every day was judgment day, and that men would be judged for not killing God’s enemies when they had the chance. In God’s absence, Ilyin determined who those enemies were.
Perhaps Jesus’ most remembered commandment is to love one’s enemy, from the Gospel of Matthew: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Ilyin maintained that the opposite was meant. Properly understood, love meant totality. It did not matter whether one individual tries to love another individual. The individual only loved if he was totally subsumed in the community. To be immersed in such love was to struggle “against the enemies of the divine order on earth.” Christianity actually meant the call of the right-seeing philosopher to apply decisive violence in the name of love. Anyone who failed to accept this logic was himself an agent of Satan: “He who opposes the chivalrous struggle against the devil is himself the devil.”
Thus theology becomes politics. The democracies did not oppose Bolshevism, but enabled it, and must be destroyed. The only way to prevent the spread of evil was to crush middle classes, eradicate their civil society, and transform their individualist and universalist understanding of law into a consciousness of national submission. Bolshevism was no antidote to the disease of the middle classes, but rather the full irruption of their disease. Soviet and European governments must be swept away by violent coups d’état.
Ilyin used the word Spirit (Dukh) to describe the inspiration of fascists. The fascist seizure of power, he wrote, was an “act of salvation.” The fascist is the true redeemer, since he grasps that it is the enemy who must be sacrificed. Ilyin took from Mussolini the concept of a “chivalrous sacrifice” that fascists make in the blood of others. (Speaking of the Holocaust in 1943, Heinrich Himmler would praise his SS-men in just these terms.)
Ilyin understood his role as a Russian intellectual as the propagation of fascist ideas in a particular Russian idiom. In a poem in the first number of a journal he edited between 1927 and 1930, he provided the appropriate lapidary motto: “My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” Ilyin dedicated his huge 1925 book On the Use of Violence to Resist Evil to the Whites, the men who had resisted the Bolshevik Revolution. It was meant as a guide to their future.
What seemed to trouble Ilyin most was that Italians and not Russians had invented fascism: “Why did the Italians succeed where we failed?” Writing of the future of Russian fascism in 1927, he tried to establish Russian primacy by considering the White resistance to the Bolsheviks as the pre-history of the fascist movement as a whole. The White movement had also been “deeper and broader” than fascism because it had preserved a connection to religion and the need for totality. Ilyin proclaimed to “my White brothers, the fascists” that a minority must seize power in Russia. The time would come. The “White Spirit” was eternal.
Ilyin’s proclamation of a fascist future for Russia in the 1920s was the absolute negation of his hopes in the 1910s that Russia might become a rule-of-law state. “The fact of the matter,” wrote Ilyin, “is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” Arbitrariness (proizvol), a central concept in all modern Russian political discussions, was the bugbear of all Russian reformers seeking improvement through law. Now proizvol was patriotic. The word for “redemptive” (spasytelnii), is another central Russian concept. It is the adjective Russian Orthodox Christians might apply to the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, the death of the One for the salvation of the many. Ilyin uses it to mean the murder of outsiders so that the nation could undertake a project of total politics that might later redeem a lost God.
In one sentence, two universal concepts, law and Christianity, are undone. A spirit of lawlessness replaces the spirit of the law; a spirit of murder replaces a spirit of mercy.
Although Ilyin was inspired by fascist Italy, his home as a political refugee between 1922 and 1938 was Germany. As an employee of the Russian Scholarly Institute (Russisches Wissenschaftliches Institut), he was an academic civil servant. It was from Berlin that he observed the succession struggle after Lenin’s death that brought Joseph Stalin to power. He then followed Stalin’s attempt to transform the political victory of the Bolsheviks into a social revolution. In 1933, Ilyin published a long book, in German, on the famine brought by the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.
Writing in Russian for Russian émigrés, Ilyin was quick to praise Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. Hitler did well, in Ilyin’s opinion, to have the rule of law suspended after the Reichstag Fire of February 1933. Ilyin presented Hitler, like Mussolini, as a Leader from beyond history whose mission was entirely defensive. “A reaction to Bolshevism had to come,” wrote Ilyin, “and it came.” European civilization had been sentenced to death, but “so long as Mussolini is leading Italy and Hitler is leading Germany, European culture has a stay of execution.” Nazis embodied a “Spirit” (Dukh) that Russians must share.
According to Ilyin, Nazis were right to boycott Jewish businesses and blame Jews as a collectivity for the evils that had befallen Germany. Above all, Ilyin wanted to persuade Russians and other Europeans that Hitler was right to treat Jews as agents of Bolshevism. This “Judeobolshevik” idea, as Ilyin understood, was the ideological connection between the Whites and the Nazis. The claim that Jews were Bolsheviks and Bolsheviks were Jews was White propaganda during the Russian Civil War. Of course, most communists were not Jews, and the overwhelming majority of Jews had nothing to do with communism. The conflation of the two groups was not an error or an exaggeration, but rather a transformation of traditional religious prejudices into instruments of national unity. Judeobolshevism appealed to the superstitious belief of Orthodox Christian peasants that Jews guarded the border between the realms of good and evil. It shifted this conviction to modern politics, portraying revolution as hell and Jews as its gatekeepers. As in Ilyin’s philosophy, God was weak, Satan was dominant, and the weapons of hell were modern ideas in the world.
During and after the Russian Civil War, some of the Whites had fled to Germany as refugees. Some brought with them the foundational text of modern antisemitism, the fictional “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and many others the conviction that a global Jewish conspiracy was responsible for their defeat. White Judeobolshevism, arriving in Germany in 1919 and 1920, completed the education of Adolf Hitler as an antisemite. Until that moment, Hitler had presented the enemy of Germany as Jewish capitalism. Once convinced that Jews were responsible for both capitalism and communism, Hitler could take the final step and conclude, as he did in Mein Kampf, that Jews were the source of all ideas that threatened the German people. In this important respect, Hitler was indeed a pupil of the Russian White movement. Ilyin, the main White ideologist, wanted the world to know that Hitler was right.
As the 1930s passed, Ilyin began to doubt that Nazi Germany was advancing the cause of Russian fascism. This was natural, since Hitler regarded Russians as subhumans, and Germany supported European fascists only insofar as they were useful to the specific Nazi cause. Ilyin began to caution Russian Whites about Nazis, and came under suspicion from the German government. He lost his job and, in 1938, left Germany for Switzerland. He remained faithful, however, to his conviction that the White movement was anterior to Italian fascism and German National Socialism. In time, Russians would demonstrate a superior fascism.
From a safe Swiss vantage point near Zurich, Ilyin observed the outbreak of World War II. It was a confusing moment for both communists and their enemies, since the conflict began after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany reached an agreement known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Its secret protocol, which divided East European territories between the two powers, was an alliance in all but name. In September 1939, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, their armies meeting in the middle. Ilyin believed that the Nazi-Soviet alliance would not last, since Stalin would betray Hitler. In 1941, the reverse took place, as the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Though Ilyin harbored reservations about the Nazis, he wrote of the German invasion of the USSR as a “judgment on Bolshevism.” After the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, when it became clear that Germany would likely lose the war, Ilyin changed his position again. Then, and in the years to follow, he would present the war as one of a series of Western attacks on Russian virtue.
Russian innocence was becoming one of Ilyin’s great themes. As a concept, it completed Ilyin’s fascist theory: the world was corrupt; it needed redemption from a nation capable of total politics; that nation was unsoiled Russia. As he aged, Ilyin dwelled on the Russian past, not as history, but as a cyclical myth of native virtue defended from external penetration. Russia was an immaculate empire, always under attack from all sides. A small territory around Moscow became the Russian Empire, the largest country of all time, without ever attacking anyone. Even as it expanded, Russia was the victim, because Europeans did not understand the profound virtue it was defending by taking more land. In Ilyin’s words, Russia has been subject to unceasing “continental blockade,” and so its entire past was one of “self-defense.” And so, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.”
Although Ilyin wrote hundreds of tedious pages along these lines, he also made clear that it did not matter what had actually happened or what Russians actually did. That was meaningless history, those were mere facts. The truth about a nation, wrote Ilyin, was “pure and objective” regardless of the evidence, and the Russian truth was invisible and ineffable Godliness. Russia was not a country with individuals and institutions, even should it so appear, but an immortal living creature. “Russia is an organism of nature and the soul,” it was a “living organism,” a “living organic unity,” and so on. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” within quotation marks, since in his view they were a part of the Russian organism. Ilyin was obsessed by the fear that people in the West would not understand this, and saw any mention of Ukraine as an attack on Russia. Because Russia is an organism, it “cannot be divided, only dissected.”
Ilyin’s conception of Russia’s political return to God required the abandonment not only of individuality and plurality, but also of humanity. The fascist language of organic unity, discredited by the war, remained central to Ilyin. In general, his thinking was not really altered by the war. He did not reject fascism, as did most of its prewar advocates, although he now did distinguish between what he regarded as better and worse forms of fascism. He did not partake in the general shift of European politics to the left, nor in the rehabilitation of democracy. Perhaps most importantly, he did not recognize that the age of European colonialism was passing. He saw Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, then far-flung empires ruled by right-wing authoritarian regimes, as exemplary.
World War II was not a “judgment on Bolshevism,” as Ilyin had imagined in 1941. Instead, the Red Army had emerged triumphant in 1945, Soviet borders had been extended west, and a new outer empire of replicate regimes had been established in Eastern Europe. The simple passage of time made it impossible to imagine in the 1940s, as Ilyin had in the 1920s, the members of the White emigration might someday return to power in Russia. Now he was writing their eulogies rather than their ideologies. What was needed instead was a blueprint for a post-Soviet Russia that would be legible in the future. Ilyin set about composing a number of constitutional proposals, as well as a shorter set of political essays. These last, published as Our tasks (Nashi zadachi), began his intellectual revival in post-Soviet Russia.
These postwar recommendations bear an unmistakable resemblance to prewar fascist systems, and are consistent with the metaphysical and ethical legitimations of fascism present in Ilyin’s major works. The “national dictator,” predicted Ilyin, would spring from somewhere beyond history, from some fictional realm. This Leader (Gosudar’) must be “sufficiently manly,” like Mussolini. The note of fragile masculinity is hard to overlook. “Power comes all by itself,” declared Ilyin, “to the strong man.” People would bow before “the living organ of Russia.” The Leader “hardens himself in just and manly service.”
In Ilyin’s scheme, this Leader would be personally and totally responsible for every aspect of political life, as chief executive, chief legislator, chief justice, and commander of the military. His executive power is unlimited. Any “political selection” should take place “on a formally undemocratic basis.” Democratic elections institutionalized the evil notion of individuality. “The principle of democracy,” Ilyin wrote, “was the irresponsible human atom.” Counting votes was to falsely accept “the mechanical and arithmetical understanding of politics.” It followed that “we must reject blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.” Public voting with signed ballots will allow Russians to surrender their individuality. Elections were a ritual of submission of Russians before their Leader.
The problem with prewar fascism, according to Ilyin, had been the one-party state. That was one party too many. Russia should be a zero-party state, in that no party should control the state or exercise any influence on the course of events. A party represents only a segment of society, and segmentation is what is to be avoided. Parties can exist, but only as traps for the ambitious or as elements of the ritual of electoral subservience. (Members of Putin’s party were sent the article that makes this point in 2014.) The same goes for civil society: it should exist as a simulacrum. Russians should be allowed to pursue hobbies and the like, but only within the framework of a total corporate structure that included all social organizations. The middle classes must be at the very bottom of the corporate structure, bearing the weight of the entire system. They are the producers and consumers of facts and feelings in a system where the purpose is to overcome factuality and sensuality.
“Freedom for Russia,” as Ilyin understood it (in a text selectively quoted by Putin in 2014), would not mean freedom for Russians as individuals, but rather freedom for Russians to understand themselves as parts of a whole. The political system must generate, as Ilyin clarified, “the organic-spiritual unity of the government with the people, and the people with the government.” The first step back toward the Word would be “the metaphysical identity of all people of the same nation.” The “the evil nature of the ‘sensual’” could be banished, and “the empirical variety of human beings” itself could be overcome.
Russia today is a media-heavy authoritarian kleptocracy, not the religious totalitarian entity that Ilyin imagined. And yet, his concepts do help lift the obscurity from some of the more interesting aspects of Russian politics. Vladimir Putin, to take a very important example, is a post-Soviet politician who emerged from the realm of fiction. Since it is he who brought Ilyin’s ideas into high politics, his rise to power is part of Ilyin’s story as well.
Putin was an unknown when he was selected by post-Soviet Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, to be prime minister in 1999. Putin was chosen by political casting call. Yeltsin’s intimates, carrying out what they called “Operation Successor,” asked themselves who the most popular character in Russian television was. Polling showed that this was the hero of a 1970s program, a Soviet spy who spoke German. This fit Putin, a former KGB officer who had served in East Germany. Right after he was appointed prime minister by Yeltsin in September 1999, Putin gained his reputation through a bloodier fiction. When apartment buildings in Russian cities began to explode, Putin blamed Muslims and began a war in Chechnya. Contemporary evidence suggests that the bombs might have been planted by Russia’s own security organization, the FSB. Putin was elected president in 2000, and served until 2008.
In the early 2000s, Putin maintained that Russia could become some kind of rule-of-law state. Instead, he succeeded in bringing economic crime within the Russian state, transforming general corruption into official kleptocracy. Once the state became the center of crime, the rule of law became incoherent, inequality entrenched, and reform unthinkable. Another political story was needed. Because Putin’s victory over Russia’s oligarchs also meant control over their television stations, new media instruments were at hand. The Western trend towards infotainment was brought to its logical conclusion in Russia, generating an alternative reality meant to generate faith in Russian virtue but cynicism about facts. This transformation was engineered by Vladislav Surkov, the genius of Russian propaganda. He oversaw a striking move toward the world as Ilyin imagined it, a dark and confusing realm given shape only by Russian innocence. With the financial and media resources under control, Putin needed only, in the nice Russian term, to add the “spiritual resource.” And so, beginning in 2005, Putin began to rehabilitate Ilyin as a Kremlin court philosopher.
That year, Putin began to cite Ilyin in his addresses to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, and arranged for the reinterment of Ilyin’s remains in Russia. Then Surkov began to cite Ilyin. The propagandist accepted Ilyin’s idea that “Russian culture is the contemplation of the whole,” and summarizes his own work as the creation of a narrative of an innocent Russia surrounded by permanent hostility. Surkov’s enmity toward factuality is as deep as Ilyin’s, and like Ilyin, he tends to find theological grounds for it. Dmitry Medvedev, the leader of Putin’s political party, recommended Ilyin’s books to Russia’s youth. Ilyin began to figure in the speeches of the leaders of Russia’s tame opposition parties, the communists and the (confusingly-named, extreme-right) Liberal Democrats. These last few years, Ilyin has been cited by the head of the constitutional court, by the foreign minister, and by patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.
After a four-year intermission between 2008 and 2012, during which Putin served as prime minister and allowed Medvedev to be president, Putin returned to the highest office. If Putin came to power in 2000 as hero from the realm of fiction, he returned in 2012 as the destroyer of the rule of law. In a minor key, the Russia of Putin’s time had repeated the drama of the Russia of Ilyin’s time. The hopes of Russian liberals for a rule-of-law state were again disappointed. Ilyin, who had transformed that failure into fascism the first time around, now had his moment. His arguments helped Putin transform the failure of his first period in office, the inability to introduce of the rule of law, into the promise for a second period in office, the confirmation of Russian virtue. If Russia could not become a rule-of-law state, it would seek to destroy neighbors that had succeeded in doing so or that aspired to do so. Echoing one of the most notorious proclamations of the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt, Ilyin wrote that politics “is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Putin’s promises were not about law in Russia, but about the defeat of a hyper-legal neighboring entity.
The European Union, the largest economy in the world and Russia’s most important economic partner, is grounded on the assumption that international legal agreements provide the basis for fruitful cooperation among rule-of-law states. In late 2011 and early 2012, Putin made public a new ideology, based in Ilyin, defining Russia in opposition to this model of Europe. In an article in Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced a rival Eurasian Union that would unite states that had failed to establish the rule of law. In Nezavisimaia Gazeta on January 23, 2012, Putin, citing Ilyin, presented integration among states as a matter of virtue rather than achievement. The rule of law was not a universal aspiration, but part of an alien Western civilization; Russian culture, meanwhile, united Russia with post-Soviet states such as Ukraine. In a third article, in Moskovskie Novosti on February 27, 2012, Putin drew the political conclusions. Ilyin had imagined that “Russia as a spiritual organism served not only all the Orthodox nations and not only all of the nations of the Eurasian landmass, but all the nations of the world.” Putin predicted that Eurasia would overcome the European Union and bring its members into a larger entity that would extend “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”
Putin’s offensive against the rule of law began with the manner of his reaccession to the office of president of the Russian Federation. The foundation of any rule-of-law state is a principle of succession, the set of rules that allow one person to succeed another in office in a manner that confirms rather than destroys the system. The way that Putin returned to power in 2012 destroyed any possibility that such a principle could function in Russia in any foreseeable future. He assumed the office of president, with a parliamentary majority, thanks to presidential and parliamentary elections that were ostentatiously faked, during protests whose participants he condemned as foreign agents.
In depriving Russia of any accepted means by which he might be succeeded by someone else and the Russian parliament controlled by another party but his, Putin was following Ilyin’s recommendation. Elections had become a ritual, and those who thought otherwise were portrayed by a formidable state media as traitors. Sitting in a radio station with the fascist writer Alexander Prokhanov as Russians protested electoral fraud, Putin mused about what Ivan Ilyin would have to say about the state of Russia. “Can we say,” asked Putin rhetorically, “that our country has fully recovered and healed after the dramatic events that have occurred to us after the Soviet Union collapsed, and that we now have a strong, healthy state? No, of course she is still quite ill; but here we must recall Ivan Ilyin: ‘Yes, our country is still sick, but we did not flee from the bed of our sick mother.’”
The fact that Putin cited Ilyin in this setting is very suggestive, and that he knew this phrase suggests extensive reading. Be that as it may, the way that he cited it seems strange. Ilyin was expelled from the Soviet Union by the Cheka—the institution that was the predecessor of Putin’s employer, the KGB. For Ilyin, it was the foundation of the USSR, not its dissolution, that was the Russian sickness. As Ilyin told his Cheka interrogator at the time: “I consider Soviet power to be an inevitable historical outcome of the great social and spiritual disease which has been growing in Russia for several centuries.” Ilyin thought that KGB officers (of whom Putin was one) should be forbidden from entering politics after the end of the Soviet Union. Ilyin dreamed his whole life of a Soviet collapse.
Putin’s reinterment of Ilyin’s remains was a mystical release from this contradiction. Ilyin had been expelled from Russia by the Soviet security service; his corpse was reburied alongside the remains of its victims. Putin had Ilyin’s corpse interred at a monastery where the NKVD, the heir to the Cheka and the predecessor of the KGB, had interred the ashes of thousands of Soviet citizens executed in the Great Terror. When Putin later visited the site to lay flowers on Ilyin’s grave, he was in the company of an Orthodox monk who saw the NKVD executioners as Russian patriots and therefore good men. At the time of the reburial, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church was a man who had previously served the KGB as an agent. After all, Ilyin’s justification for mass murder was the same as that of the Bolsheviks: the defense of an absolute good. As critics of his second book in the 1920s put it, Ilyin was a “Chekist for God.” He was reburied as such, with all possible honors conferred by the Chekists and by the men of God—and by the men of God who were Chekists, and by the Chekists who were men of God.
Ilyin was returned, body and soul, to the Russia he had been forced to leave. And that very return, in its inattention to contradiction, in its disregard of fact, was the purest expression of respect for his legacy. To be sure, Ilyin opposed the Soviet system. Yet, once the USSR ceased to exist in 1991, it was history—and the past, for Ilyin, was nothing but cognitive raw material for a literature of eternal virtue. Modifying Ilyin’s views about Russian innocence ever so slightly, Russian leaders could see the Soviet Union not as a foreign imposition upon Russia, as Ilyin had, but rather as Russia itself, and so virtuous despite appearances. Any faults of the Soviet system became necessary Russian reactions to the prior hostility of the West.
Questions about the influence of ideas in politics are very difficult to answer, and it would be needlessly bold to make of Ilyin’s writings the pillar of the Russian system. For one thing, Ilyin’s vast body of work admits multiple interpretations. As with Martin Heidegger, another student of Husserl who supported Hitler, it is reasonable to ask how closely a man’s political support of fascism relates to a philosopher’s work. Within Russia itself, Ilyin is not the only native source of fascist ideas to be cited with approval by Vladimir Putin; Lev Gumilev is another. Contemporary Russian fascists who now rove through the public space, such as Aleksander Prokhanov and Aleksander Dugin, represent distinct traditions. It is Dugin, for example, who made the idea of “Eurasia” popular in Russia, and his references are German Nazis and postwar West European fascists. And yet, most often in the Russia of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is Ilyin’s ideas that to seem to satisfy political needs and to fill rhetorical gaps, to provide the “spiritual resource” for the kleptocratic state machine. In 2017, when the Russian state had so much difficulty commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ilyin was advanced as its heroic opponent. In a television drama about the revolution, he decried the evil of promising social advancement to Russians.
Russian policies certainly recall Ilyin’s recommendations. Russia’s 2012 law on “foreign agents,” passed right after Putin’s return to the office of the presidency, well represents Ilyin’s attitude to civil society. Ilyin believed that Russia’s “White Spirit” should animate the fascists of Europe; since 2013, the Kremlin has provided financial and propaganda support to European parties of the populist and extreme right. The Russian campaign against the “decadence” of the European Union, initiated in 2013, is in accord with Ilyin’s worldview. Ilyin’s scholarly effort followed his personal projection of sexual anxiety to others. First, Ilyin called Russia homosexual, then underwent therapy with his girlfriend, then blamed God. Putin first submitted to years of shirtless fur-and-feather photoshoots, then divorced his wife, then blamed the European Union for Russian homosexuality. Ilyin sexualized what he experienced as foreign threats. Jazz, for example, was a plot to induce premature ejaculation. When Ukrainians began in late 2013 to assemble in favor of a European future for their country, the Russian media raised the specter of a “homodictatorship.”
The case for Ilyin’s influence is perhaps easiest to make with respect to Russia’s new orientation toward Ukraine. Ukraine, like the Russian Federation, is a new country, formed from the territory of a Soviet republic in 1991. After Russia, it was the second-most populous republic of the Soviet Union, and it has a long border with Russia to the east and north as well as with European Union members to the west. For the first two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian-Ukrainian relations were defined by both sides according to international law, with Russian lawyers always insistent on very traditional concepts such as sovereignty and territorial integrity. When Putin returned to power in 2012, legalism gave way to colonialism. Since 2012, Russian policy toward Ukraine has been made on the basis of first principles, and those principles have been Ilyin’s. Putin’s Eurasian Union, a plan he announced with the help of Ilyin’s ideas, presupposed that Ukraine would join. Putin justified Russia’s attempt to draw Ukraine towards Eurasia by Ilyin’s “organic model” that made of Russia and Ukraine “one people.”
Ilyin’s idea of a Russian organism including Ukraine clashed with the more prosaic Ukrainian notion of reforming the Ukrainian state. In Ukraine in 2013, the European Union was a subject of domestic political debate, and was generally popular. An association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union was seen as a way to address the major local problem, the weakness of the rule of law. Through threats and promises, Putin was able in November 2013 to induce the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, not to sign the association agreement, which had already been negotiated. This brought young Ukrainians to the street to demonstrate in favor the agreement. When the Ukrainian government (urged on and assisted by Russia) used violence, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens assembled in Kyiv’s Independence Square. Their main postulate, as surveys showed at the time, was the rule of law. After a sniper massacre that left more than one hundred Ukrainians dead, Yanukovych fled to Russia. His main adviser, Paul Manafort, was next seen working as Donald Trump’s campaign manager.
By the time Yanukovych fled to Russia, Russian troops had already been mobilized for the invasion of Ukraine. As Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2014, Russian civilizational rhetoric (of which Ilyin was a major source) captured the imagination of many Western observers. In the first half of 2014, the issues debated were whether or not Ukraine was or was not part of Russian culture, or whether Russian myths about the past were somehow a reason to invade a neighboring sovereign state. In accepting the way that Ilyin put the question, as a matter of civilization rather than law, Western observers missed the stakes of the conflict for Europe and the United States. Considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a clash of cultures was to render it distant and colorful and obscure; seeing it as an element of a larger assault on the rule of law would have been to realize that Western institutions were in peril. To accept the civilizational framing was also to overlook the basic issue of inequality. What pro-European Ukrainians wanted was to avoid Russian-style kleptocracy. What Putin needed was to demonstrate that such efforts were fruitless.
Ilyin’s arguments were everywhere as Russian troops entered Ukraine multiple times in 2014. As soldiers received their mobilization orders for the invasion of the Ukraine’s Crimean province in January 2014, all of Russia’s high-ranking bureaucrats and regional governors were sent a copy of Ilyin’s Our Tasks. After Russian troops occupied Crimea and the Russian parliament voted for annexation, Putin cited Ilyin again as justification. The Russian commander sent to oversee the second major movement of Russian troops into Ukraine, to the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in summer 2014, described the war’s final goal in terms that Ilyin would have understood: “If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen.”
Anyone following Russian politics could see in early 2016 that the Russian elite preferred Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee for president and then to defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. In the spring of that year, Russian military intelligence was boasting of an effort to help Trump win. In the Russian assault on American democracy that followed, the main weapon was falsehood. Donald Trump is another masculinity-challenged kleptocrat from the realm of fiction, in his case that of reality television. His campaign was helped by the elaborate untruths that Russia distributed about his opponent. In office, Trump imitates Putin in his pursuit of political post-truth: first filling the public sphere with lies, then blaming the institutions whose purpose is to seek facts, and finally rejoicing in the resulting confusion. Russian assistance to Trump weakened American trust in the institutions that Russia has been unable to build. Such trust was already in decline, thanks to America’s own media culture and growing inequality.
Ilyin meant to be the prophet of our age, the post-Soviet age, and perhaps he is. His disbelief in this world allows politics to take place in a fictional one. He made of lawlessness a virtue so pure as to be invisible, and so absolute as to demand the destruction of the West. He shows us how fragile masculinity generates enemies, how perverted Christianity rejects Jesus, how economic inequality imitates innocence, and how fascist ideas flow into the postmodern. This is no longer just Russian philosophy. It is now American life.”
Night, Elie Wiesel
Silence is complicity, Elie Wiesel
Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault
Silence: Lectures and Writings, by John Cage
The New Art–the New Life: The Collected Writings Of Piet Mondrian, Piet Mondrian, Editors Harry Holtzman, Martin S. James
Understanding Harold Pinter, Ronald Knowles
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, Timothy Snyder
American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, by Craig Unger
Ukrainian
23 лютого 2024 р. Як все почалося; Третя світова війна, захоплення Америки та підрив демократії зрадником Трампом, вторгнення в Україну та падіння цивілізації
Наші секретні історії та лінії розлому часто виявляють приховані зв’язки та взаємозалежності, причому стосунки Америки та Росії в наших бурхливих вирах, підводних течіях, хвилях і зворотних течіях уздовж потоку часу є зразками хаотичних систем.
Російське вторгнення в Україну та захоплення американської держави зірковим агентом Путіна, зрадником Трампом під час викрадених виборів 2016 року, є пов’язаними подіями, які сигналізували та зробили можливою Третю світову війну, яка охопила нас на десяти різних сценах, внутрішніх фронтах обох серед них наші народи.
Як це сталося, що це означає і що робити?
У цьому контексті я з особливою наполегливістю вказую на екзистенціальну загрозу таємної влади, першочергову роль правдословів у закликанні імператора, який не має одягу, і співучасть мовчання перед лицем зла в цьому контексті. неоголошена світова війна, яку вдає наша влада, не схопила і не потрясла нас усіх, як щура в пащі лева. Невидима війна, про яку повідомляють лише її частини, а не в цілому, яка, як торнадо небуття, тепер пожирає нашу людність і, як багаття марнот, знищує наші претензії на цивілізацію, бо ми відступили від кидання слів до кидання каміння.
Як ми дізнаємося від Джона Кейджа в музиці, Гарольда Пінтера в театрі та Піта Мондріана в мистецтві, саме порожні місця визначають і впорядковують значення; і в історії саме до заглушених і стертих голосів ми повинні прислухатися найуважніше, бо тут порожнеча говорить нам про таємну владу та про ключові функції та стосунки, які влада повинна приховувати, щоб зберегти свою гегемонію над нами.
Звернемо увагу на людину за завісою.
Ми, люди, зараз живемо у світі «Ночі» Елі Візеля, і саме з його великого роману про нашу попередню боротьбу з фашизмом я запозичив коду про еру Трампа та нашу місію як американських патріотів і антифашистів; «Ми повинні прийняти чийсь бік. Нейтралітет допомагає гнобителю, а не жертві. Мовчання підбадьорює мучителя, а не мученого. Іноді ми повинні втручатися. Коли людське життя знаходиться під загрозою, коли людська гідність знаходиться під загрозою, національні кордони та чутливість стають неактуальними. Скрізь, де чоловіків і жінок переслідують через їхню расу, релігію чи політичні погляди, це місце повинно – в цей момент – стати центром Всесвіту».
Russian
23 февраля 2024 г. Как все начиналось; Третья мировая война, захват Америки и подрыв демократии предателем Трампом, вторжение на Украину и падение цивилизации
Наши тайные истории и линии разлома часто раскрывают скрытые отношения и взаимозависимости, причем истории Америки и России в наших бурных водоворотах, отливах, волнах и обратных течениях вдоль потока времени являются образцами хаотических систем.
Вторжение России на Украину и захват американского государства звездным агентом Путина предателем Трампом на украденных выборах 2016 года — это связанные события, которые сигнализировали и сделали возможной Третью мировую войну, охватившую нас на десяти различных театрах военных действий, в тылу обеих сторон. наши народы среди них.
Как это произошло, что это значит и что делать?
Здесь я отмечаю с особой настойчивостью и призывом Эй Рубе экзистенциальную угрозу тайной власти, главенствующую роль говорящих правду в вызове обнаженного императора и соучастие молчания перед лицом зла в этом контексте необъявленная мировая война, как делают вид наши власти, не захватила и не потрясла нас всех, как крыса в пасти льва. Невидимая война, о которой сообщается только по частям, а не в целом, которая, как торнадо небытия, теперь пожирает наше человечество и, как костер тщеславия, уничтожает наши претензии на цивилизацию, поскольку мы регрессировали от бросания слов к бросанию камней.
Как мы учимся у Джона Кейджа в музыке, Гарольда Пинтера в театре и Пита Мондриана в искусстве, именно пустые пространства определяют и упорядочивают смысл; а в истории именно к заглушенным и стертым голосам мы должны прислушиваться наиболее внимательно, поскольку здесь пустота говорит нам о тайной власти и о ключевых функциях и отношениях, которые власть должна скрывать, чтобы поддерживать свою гегемонию над нами.
Обратим внимание на человека за занавеской.
Мы, люди, сейчас живем в мире «Ночи» Эли Визеля, и именно из его великого романа о нашей предыдущей борьбе с фашизмом я позаимствовал код об эпохе Трампа и нашей формулировке миссии как американских патриотов и антифашистов; «Мы должны принять чью-то сторону. Нейтралитет помогает угнетателю, а не жертве. Молчание поощряет мучителя, а не мучимого. Иногда нам приходится вмешиваться. Когда человеческие жизни находятся под угрозой, когда человеческое достоинство находится под угрозой, национальные границы и чувствительность теряют значение. Где бы мужчины и женщины не подвергались преследованиям из-за их расы, религии или политических взглядов, это место должно – в этот момент – стать центром вселенной».
Torch of Liberty 
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