March 24, 2104--The Blinding Dawn of a New Russian Revolution

If we approach matters with Russia assuming Vladimir Putin and his advisors and supporters are motivated by rational self-interest, we will be sadly disappointed.

Rational self-interest, which assumes he and they care more about the Russian economy, the wellbeing of the Russian people, and their standing in the international community than in the emotions that patriotism and nationalism unleash.

It is rather these latter forces that are motivating and driving the agenda for Putin and his allies.

Anyone who knows anything about Russian history and literature knows about the surging psychological and xenophobic passions that have driven Russian imperial ambitions for centuries.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground alone should be on all Western policymakers' desks as they and our president try to understand what to think about, expect, and then do. Little of what they learn will make conventional sense and thus would provide essential insights.

In Notes, the unnamed narrator, a retried civil servant living in isolation, is so guided by subterranean, underground forces that he repeatedly acts, as Dostoyevsky puts it, against his own seeming self-interest.

He takes pleasure in pain and unhappiness, even when his liver throbs or he has a toothache. None of this, in a post-Enlightenment world, makes "sense." But, then again, to him it does and to the Russian people for whom he is an exemplar.

It is in this way that he and they validate their existence.

We have been seeing this kind of paranoiac behavior on display recently in Russia as it reappropriates Crimea and in Putin's behavior.

After the Crimeans voted to reaffiliate with Russia, Putin made an impassioned speech to the country's political elite in which he spoke about perceived slights from the West, how Russia had been humiliated following the collapse of the Soviet Union and in turn denounced the domination of the U.S. and Western Europe.

He said, "They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presented us with completed facts. That's the way it was with the expansion of NATO . . . They always told us the same thing, 'Well, this doesn't involve you.'"

According to the New York Times, at a public rally later that night, reaching deep into Russian and Soviet history to embrace the national soul, Putin anointed himself the guardian of the greater Russian people, including those living beyond current Russian borders. He spoke about restoring a part of the old Russian Empire that the collapse of the USSR had overthrown.

"Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad,"he intoned, "Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republic, and the Russian people became the biggest divided nation in the world."

He then joined the rally in singing nationalistic songs as tears flowed among the enormous Moscow crowd.

Even more disturbing was a second piece in the Times that reported about Putin's inner-circle of confidential advisors--individuals steeped in Russian imperial aspirations and mysticism.

Take Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, who in the late 1990s called for "the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution, fascism--borderless as our lands, and red as our blood," for a flavor of those who have Putin's ear--

Aggressively anti-American he has called for a "conservative revolution" that combines socialist economic thinking with ultra-conservative cultural traditionalism. He is responsible for the movement to establish a Eurasian empire, "constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy," which he called "Atlanticism," a concoction of liberal values and U.S. hegemony.

Also in Putin's circle of private advisors is Vladimir Yakunin, president of Russian Railroads. He points to a "global financial oligarchy" and the "global domination that is being carried out by the U.S."

Last week, he offered plans for a Soviet-style megaproject to develop transportation infrastructure in Siberia, something he called "an economics of a spiritual type" that would insulate Russia from the West's alien values. He compared this vision to the adoption of Christianity in ancient Rus, the conquest of Siberia, the electrification of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet space program. As a bone to his friend Vladimir Putin, not as an after thought, he added the recent Sochi Olympics to that list of historic accomplishments.

Looked at through Western eyes, none of this makes much sense--the Soviet Union is no more, a government-directed version of a market economy has resulted in a large Russian middle class, tens of millions have been brought out of poverty, and the new Russia has been a powerful and respected player on the world stage. Why place these gains in jeopardy--the Russian economy is already showing signs of serious decline just over the past few weeks?

The answers may best be found in a collective longing for the Russian past and a form of self-abnegation that embraces behavior that appears to be against Russia's self-interest. We would be wise, however, to understand that what looks like that to us may very well be their own unique and characteristic form of self-interest. And dangerous at that.