The book “In Putin’s Head” was published in 2016 and is now being expanded to include a current chapter.
(Photo: via REUTERS)
It has now become fashionable to poke around in Vladimir Putin’s mind, in fact “in his head” so to speak, in order to find the motives for his attack on Ukraine. And to guess how far the Russian President will go. More and more articles on Putin’s psyche are appearing.
To save the honor of the French philosopher and Dostoyevsky expert Michel Eltchaninoff, it should therefore be noted that his book “In Putin’s Head” was published in 2016 and has now only been supplemented by a current chapter for a new edition.
What Eltchaninoff unfortunately did not examine enough, but which probably would have required more of a psychiatrist than a philosopher, is why the Kremlin chief keeps coming back to certain topics: for example his accusation of the “West that is jealous of Russian vitality”, to which Putin accuses “wanting to rewrite history,” or claiming that Ukraine is planning an attack on Russia or that drug-addicted neo-Nazis rule Ukraine.
It is remarkable that Putin and those around him do what he accuses others of doing themselves: Neo-Nazi expansionists are his advisors, who rave about a “Novorossiya”, a “New Russia” that goes well beyond the previous Russian state borders and, in doing so, follow Hitler’s request for creativity from “Living Space in the East”.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
And drug excesses in Moscow’s ruling elite are well documented. Putin is currently actively reinterpreting history by claiming that Ukraine is not an actual state at all, but a creation of Lenin. He himself practices historical revisionism, which he accuses others of.
Michel Eltchaninoff: In Putin’s head.
Translation: Till Bardoux
Tropen Verlag
Berlin 2022
224 pages
12 euros
The French author writes that Putin is not ready to accept the existence of an independent Ukraine: “He has a new reason to detest Western Europe and moves on to the next stage: carrying out the final synthesis of time and space, of idea and Reality, myth and life, in short: invasion of Ukraine.”
>>Read also: The Kremlin understanders: “Reading Putin” – the hottest discipline among CIA agents
Eltchaninoff is credited with thoroughly dissecting the mindset and ideological underpinnings of the philosophers who influence Putin and his whisperers. At the New Year’s reception in 2014, Putin had three works by Ivan Ilyin, Nikolay Berdyaev and Vladimir Solovyov distributed to 5,000 members of parliament, top officials and high-ranking claqueurs of the regime.
Eltchaninoff, editor-in-chief of the French “Philosophie Magazine”, concludes that Putin not only wants to reunite large parts of the Soviet Union, but also wants to become the “leader of Europe” with his morally conservative turn and support for the far-right. As early as 2016, the author predictably stated: “For Putin, war is a preferred instrument for demonstrating Russia’s return to the international stage.”
More: Frank-Walter Steinmeier – In Search of the Strong Republic