The prophet and inspiration for the Soviet Union, which Vladimir Putin apparently aspires to rebuild on bigger and better lines, was Karl Marx. But a better understanding of Putin’s motivations for a greater Russia, and the lesser Ukraine, might be derived from the collected works of Sigmund Freud.
It is time to put Vladimir V Putin on Professor Freud’s legendary couch — especially after the latest tele-cast outburst about fighting the enemies within as well as abroad and in Ukraine.
His story is classically Freudian — because it is a tale of narcissism and betrayal. The supreme leader in the successor realm to the Soviet empire has been let down by those around him, and by his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
“Any people, and particularly the Russian people, will always be able to tell the patriots from the scum and traitors and spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths. I am convinced this natural and self-cleansing of our society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to meet any challenge.”
Yet Putin’s soldiers are finding it tough going to meet “any challenge” in the suburbs and bogs out in Ukraine. They are in a very different place from that imagined by the supreme leader back in Moscow.
Keeping track of where Putin’s musings on history and destiny are heading is now critical. He is increasingly working a path of parallel realities, and at times seems to be in a world of his own.
This may be the key to Putinism in its latest exaggeration. He is setting out on the road of the state terror adopted by Vladimir Lenin, Maximilien Robespierre or Pol Pot, with a narcissism more lethal than that of Donald Trump and Eva Peron.
The dilemma is that posed brilliantly by the nuclear apocalypse movie Dr Strangelove, based on the novel Red Alert by the former RAF Second World War pilot Peter George. Do you obey orders for an act of nihilistic crime and total destruction when it is clear the commander has gone nuts, and is in a fugue of paranoid delusion?
It may be time for the inner clique at the Kremlin, Lavrov, Shoigu, and Gerasimov, to call for the plain van to pick up Vlad the Deluded. I doubt they will.
