You Could See Putin Coming From at Least 1839

A quadrillion articles explain Vladimir Putin by the fact that he's KGB.

A million articles explain him in connection with the diabolically sneaky Chekists who preceded the KGB.

A thousand articles explain him in connection to pre-revolutionary Tsarist times. Once you go back that far, light starts to be shed on the Ukraine invasion, which stemmed more from Putin's bombastic Peter-the-Great aspirations than from his KGB flunky inclinations.

John Sipher (one of my favorite expert writers on Russia - don't miss his Twitter feed) connects him all the way back to 1839, when Marquis Astolphe de Custine published his authoritative account of Russian political culture. Sipher's musings were prompted by a NY Times article on the long history of brutality in the Russian military and a New Yorker discussion with historian Stephen Kotkin explaining that a certain mindset predates any actions the West has taken, predates NATO, predates just about everything. This is centuries of cultural momentum - an immense and oblivious flywheel of karmic inevitability - playing itself out.

The cutting-edge question of the moment is: does Putin drink his own lemonade? how deeply does he believe the baloney he's peddling? Sipher finds that De Custine answered this beautifully nearly 200 years ago:

“By continually endeavoring to hide truth from the eyes of others, people become at last unable to perceive it themselves.”

Note: Bill Browder says (most recently on Preet Bhahara's podcast) that Putin has no Peter-the-Great aspirations. He says that's all for show. Whenever his approval rating tanks, he invades a neighbor, hollering grandiose statements, and it's always to distract his people from the fact that he and his cronies have sucked all the wealth out of the country. The notion that Putin gives even a nano-crap about Russian standing or interests is laughable, given that he's the guy who's sucked the very life out of it.

So how do we square that with Sipher's contradictory assessment? Easy-peasy. Again: “By continually endeavoring to hide truth from the eyes of others, people become at last unable to perceive it themselves.” Stop reaching for a linear throughline of actuality. It's all lollipop kazoodles. When truth is methodically deprecated for a very long time, no one can find solid ground; not even the deprecators.