Observations About Putin
If we are going to deal effectively with Putin’s Russia, we need to have a better understanding of him.
A Religious Crusade
Putin is not at war with Ukraine. Rather, he is on a religious crusade. He has mentioned repeatedly that Russia’s true home is Ukraine, which makes no sense. The Duchy of Moscow has been known as Russia’s home for centuries. In meeting with Sovietologists and Russian history experts as preparation for debriefing a Russian defector in the 1980s, I learned that the Duchy of Moscow had expanded since the 1500s by an amount equal to the size of the Netherlands each year. The idea that Russia’s true nascence is in Ukraine is bizarre. And, dismissal of Putin’s desire to restore the lands of the Soviet Empire is foolish.
The home of Russian Orthodoxy was not in Ukraine. It was in Byzantium, which is the original source of most Eastern Rite Churches, including Russian, Ukrainian, Greek and others. The only non-Latin-rite churches to originate other than from Byzantium are the Anglican Communion and the Coptic Rite Churches. The former was founded by Henry VIII, in a dispute with the then-reigning Pope about divorce; the Coptic Rite began on its own.
Putin has talked about Poland and Estonia forsaking the “true” Eastern Rite to adopt Catholicism. That makes the course of his crusade plain. First Ukraine, then Poland and Estonia. The latter, although a member of NATO, is likely to offer less resistance than Ukraine because, at the end of World War II, the Russians deported all males over the age of 12 and replaced them with Russians. Estonia is thus about 35% Russian.
We’re not dealing with a madman; we’re dealing with a religious crusader. His determination will be that of a religious zealot.
History of Crusades
The most famous crusades took place between 1095 and 1292, sponsored by Kings, Popes and religious orders. They sent thousands of people to the Holy Land to take back possession from Muslims, with no success. Every state they established was overthrown by the Muslim Caliphate. There was some success in Europe, such as in Spain, which deported the last of the Moors in 1492, and in Albania and Serbia.to
It did not matter that all of the crusades had resulted in slaughter, because that was only death of the body, not the soul. The Crusaders were on a mission from God, and no amount of money nor its theft, no amount of negotiation would dissuade them from their holy mission.
The first Crusade alone, intended to free Byzantium (now Constantinople) and Anatolia (much of modern Turkey) consisted of 100,000 people including Knights, infantry and supporters. It failed. Regardless of how futile succeeding crusades proved, the chance to become a martyr for one’s faith – a form of virtue signaling – proved irresistible.
There were few other true crusades throughout modern history. The closest was likely the Thirty Years War on the European Continent. The primary combatants were the Protestants (then called Evangelists and nearly all Lutheran, led by Sweden) and the Roman Catholics of Bavaria. It was a true religious war that was defined by capturing territory. The Roman and Eastern Rite Catholics had decreed that the prince (royal ruler of a domain) had the right to determine the faith of the people in his domain. Thus, control of territory was vital.
Religious Conflict is Rarely Religious in Nature
Most “religious conflict” isn’t religious in nature, it’s the haves versus the have-nots. Thus, the millennium-long alliance between Jews and Arab Muslims was brought to an end in the late 1800s when Zionists attempted to create a Jewish state in the homeland of the tribes of Israel. For a millennium Jews and Muslims had been good friends. The local Muslim leaders had created conditions of poverty and want among their subjects. The fatalism of Muslims, represented by “insh’Allah,” “If God so wills,” means that their leaders are not responsible for their poverty and starvation.
The leaders persuaded their subjects that they had been cheated by the Jews, who had bought land from willing sellers. The difference was that the Jews not only believed “If God so wills,” they also believed “If I weed, irrigate, fertilize the crops and put work into creating bounty.” It is always easier to blame an outsider than to admit to having made a mistake. See #PutinPriceHike for a current example.
The Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland is simply rebellion against an occupying invader. Beginning in 1619, England began an intentional depopulation of Ireland, reducing the Irish population by nearly two-thirds through shipping them to New England and the Caribbean Islands as slaves.
The Sunni-Shia conflict is similarly haves versus have-nots. When the original missionaries arrived from Egypt, they headed immediately to the better-organized and wealthier tribes in the center of the country. When the Iranians arrived, all that was left were the poor. That is the conflict.
Putin was never a spy
Second, he was never a spy, because KGB was never a spy agency. The KGB was the Sword and Shield of the Party, protecting the governing Nomenklatura from the governed. Viewing him as a spy is a fundamental misunderstanding of his outlook. The enemy of the KGB wasn’t the West, it was the Russian people themselves. The work of spying was left to the military GRU, which was very effective. Unlike in the US, all foreign spying, whether clandestine espionage, imagery, or electronic intelligence, was left to a single agency, the military.
We’re dealing with a religious zealot whose history isn’t spying, it’s internal security. Failure to grasp that will result in failure of whatever the Biden administration’s mission is, which is - typically - not yet clear. Perhaps it will become clearer once Putin turns his eyes on Estonia or Poland, or Turkey.
I enjoy your writing, Bill, and it is to my shame that I feel compelled to advise you that Constantinople is now Istanbul (a small thing - but impossible for a compulsive proofreader to ignore).
As it happens, I am currently reading Dan Jones' fine book THE TEMPLARS - the Rise and the Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors.
Your identification of Putin as a self-perceived Holy Warrior is apt. Although the articles have likely been scrubbed from the Internet, there has been much written and published electronically about how Putin invested millions into the Russian Orthodox Church and how he has done much to revitalize the faith.
Once old age and gravity inevitably fail President Putin, he will stop going shirtless and might be seen in a white jersey with the famous Templar cross emblazoned on it.
Ever since Khrushchev, Russian leaders have criticized the West for its decadence and degraded behavior. Now that the West is truly depraved and Christianity has all but disappeared, Putin may actually turn into the crusader that brings Christianity back from the grave - unless the bio-weapons in Ukraine turn the entire world into a graveyard.
Excellent analysis. I quibble (well, I disagree) with only one part of it. Muslims and Jews did not ever have a genuine alliance--which requires a certain shared balance of power. They do have bone-deep similarities which each is truly loathe to acknowledge. "I'm not REALLY related to him!" though they've got the same parents...
(I been both, by the way. Remain indelibly an ethnic and cultural Jew. Some of the other can still be detected in the marrow of my bones now, though I'm best described as an apostate to two faiths.)