Putin and the Final Victory

The Kremlin is trying to enforce upon us a different interpretation of history and of the future. We must resist

One of my personal passions and hobbies used to be reading Russian philosophy, in particularly the philosophy of eschatology. Now I think about Russian eschatology as a specific factor in Russian politics and society, but without the passion. In fact, the horror of the Russian End has engulfed much of how I view many expressions of Russian culture. I now find it difficult to look past that misprision of our world that encompasses the terrifying cultural achievements that I used to admire. It is astonishing how time changes us, and our world.

Time plays a crucial component in the short but frenzied history of Russian thought (if we take the simplified starting point that Russian philosophy started in the early nineteen century, with the publication of Petr Chaadayev’s Philosophical Letters).

Chaadayev’s work was a fateful foundation for the later traditions of Russian philosophy. I use that term loosely here, though ‘Russian philosophy’ is accepted as a term in academic tomes and university courses, and to many Russian thinkers . Chaadayev insisted on the historicity of the world, but more crucially that Russia had become horrifically dislodged from the temporal processes through which Russian society could reach its end salvation.

Chaadayev’s shocking criticism of Russian culture, his argument that Russia was out of time but also lacked its own cultural memory has rankled within Russians’ subsequent self-considerations of their historical role, their nationhood, and their relationship with Europe. Chaadayev also pricked at the dissatisfaction between aspirations to Russian exceptionalism and the inability of its people to teach the world a great lesson. Although Chaadayev developed his thinking throughout his work, his initial claim that Russians could not create Russians ideas seems to run through many aspects of Russian discontent.

Chaadayev’s successors and he himself engaged with his arguments. However, the idea that Russianness should be construed historically has permeated much subsequent thought. At this moment in time, Russia is imperfect. The Russian world is far from the ideal and needs to push on to its final, perfect status. All aspects of life are need improvement: in fact, in itself right now, the physical realm is contemptible.

The return of the Russian end

Antagonism in Russian philosophy between the Russian and the nonRussian and conflicting axiologies also take inspiration in part from Chaadayev and his starting point on the conflict between Russian time and European time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, conflicting views over the meaning of Russian time and the implications for the country’s relations with Europe have filtered into contemporary debates. The notion that the material world now is less than the ideal and requires reshaping — even violently — towards its final perfection was a cornerstone of Soviet Communism and its human and ecological engineering. Now that antipathy towards the current moment and the contemporary world can be seen in Russian political messaging: the nuclear threats and Putin’s claim that Moscow could destroy the world and send the Russians to Heaven, and the annihilation of large swathes of Ukraine.

In most Russian messaging regarding its war on Ukraine and ‘the West’, the projected future looms large. Studies of Russian politics and manipulation rightly focus on historical memory and how this is projected into contemporary messaging. However, the intense political and informational climate now in Russia has reintroduced the violent future, the projection of a supposed destiny for Russia that is enforced aggressively into others’ cognition and perception.

Divan philosopher Alexander Dugin has in fact just today highlighted the violent conquest of the future in his Substack. Dugin criticises Modernity as it ‘deals with the Big Bang time, flowing from the past into the future’.

Dugin insists that ‘time in reality flows from future to the past. It is attracted by future (causa finalis) and pushed away by it’ (sic).

Dugin of course is a Russian thinker in his particular engagement with the traditions of European philosophy. But his focus, for all his crudeness, is important for us to consider: the Eschaton is the all, modern life is without value unless reframed through the vision of the End, and Russia is justified in doing all it can to bring about that final point where Russia (and possibly all humanity) reaches its ideal status.

Putin’s need for victory

The notion of victory is crucial in all this. Putin has been strangely focused on victory since his mutation in 2011-2012 into the monstrous figure we see today. Putin’s 2012 presidential campaign was all about pushing the country on to its final victory. I was at many events in Petersburg and Moscow in Spring 2012, and was astonished by the apocalyptic discourse: victory over what?, I asked myself, as Putin objurgated and hissed and gesticulated. Victory over whom??

Time in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s had appeared to settle into some kind of, well, normalcy: not quite Big Bang time, but a more cyclical vision of time where people were content with the present moment but keen to value that moment in the context of a wider, gentle vision of capitalistic progress. Something like you would expect in Europe, or in the United States. Putin’s vision of political control was completely incompatible with this, and he had to inject an eschatological vision into new Russian politics which fractured an inchoate cultural relationship with current time. Putin took a slowly stabilising society — one that was coming to terms with the end of the Soviet Union and accepting a new, at time uneasy place with a new global history — and fractured those relationship with the world, with time, and reinjected the promise of an idealised future.

‘Everyone goes to Heaven!’ Putin’s future-framed vision of history presents the end of time as preferable to a Russian defeat

Time and information manipulation

Concepts of time are crucial in information manipulation, as information manipulation at a deeper level involves the (re)construction of a historiological worldview which brings the audience into a new perception of reality, founded on a holistic vision of the past, present and future that brings an enforced meaning to the world and events.

As Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton write, ‘we must accept that at the root of all propaganda is a historical perception, a historiographical understanding of the past and of our destiny’.

It would be easy to say that this is one reason why information manipulation is so powerful in the Russian cultural-political environment, given the focus on history in Russian thought. Academics will come for me if I argue that, so I shall keep silent there…

I will argue that cognitive aggression is a crucial point in current Russian state messaging, in that political and social processes create an environment where people are not just exposed to messaging, but brutalised via a range of means into accepting that. What we are witnessing in Russia to a large extent is the violent imposition of new versions of history — but crucially of the future — into people’s minds.

This supposed future shapes the present and the past, rendering them meaningless outside the Kremlin’s vision of the course of history. Such messaging has, to my mind, undoubtedly led to the implementation of Russian forces’ contemptus mundi, or at least the loathing of the anti-Russian world. Anything outside this Russian historiographical vision has no value and is worthy of destruction: look at the Ukrainian towns of Marinka, Bakhmut, Avdiivka: they mean nothing outside their worldview. And they have been annihilated.

Winner winner

This, I guess, is why the vision of ‘victory’ is crucial, for Ukraine as well as for Russia. Not just the vision of victory, but the ability in messaging to insert that future-framed understanding onto contemporary events.

Again I shall refuse to argue that Russian philosophical and cultural historiographical traditions are particularly potent in persuading Russian soldiers and civilians in the Kremlin’s crude messaging. But the vision of victory must be potent in the morale of anybody fighting. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy surely gets that, especially in the way that he has encouraged the new US Administration to seek their victory in the war.

This is also where Moscow is beating us, in the UK and other countries. The Kremlin’s focus on a final ideal — even though it is not clearly articulated (it does not need to be) — is deeply compelling for many. Outside wider philosophical thinking, the UK Government failed right from the start (I was there) to articulate any concept of victory in the war, leading us into this static, meaningless half-way political and military support that is rooted in the now and has no strategic vision.

Hanging Chaadayev

Where are our thinkers?

Many Russian thinkers have presented their thought specifically in opposition to European strands of philosophy, not just in its content but in modes of thinking. Chaadayev grappled with the relationship of Russian historical identity to the development of European civilisation, and that accentuation of separateness and antagonism persists today.

Many Russian thinkers have also developed deliberately aggressive anti-rational approaches to their work, as a rejection of European intellectualism. This trend — for which Moscow is not exclusively responsible — has become more prominent also in our politics, in the mistrust of reasoned thinking, the shunning of experts, the reinterpretation of history.

But this is a continued threat from Russian information manipulation, in its aggressive engagement with concepts of universal consciousness, its seeking to shape cultural beliefs, and its reframing of time not just around a reconstructed past, but around an invented future. Putin would love nothing more for us to succumb to the belief that his victory is inevitable, that Russia is destined to win and to claim a role as an influential global civilisation. That vision of victory — and that way of interpreting history — is, for some, in Russia and overseas, highly attractive.

Already we see the russification of aspects of US political discourse (read Olga Lautman’s excellent Substack for more on this). The similarities are deeply concerning: US President Donald Trump already talks about victory. Over what? Over whom?? I ask myself now. Over our reasoned thought, over our perception of reality, over our cognition? It is a short path therefrom to a specific form of nihilism in which we lose. Information manipulation takes many forms, and this assault on our historicity could be the most pernicious yet.

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