Putinism

This admiration contains clues to Mr. Putin’s own, somewhat enigmatic philosophy, the venerable historian Walter Laqueur writes in “Putinism: Russia and Its Future With the West,” an aptly timed and much needed look at the mercurial master of the Kremlin. With Russia grabbing territory and sponsoring a separatist war in Ukraine, putting it once again at odds with the West, efforts to peer inside Mr. Putin’s head have taken on profound significance. The White House has spent months on an interagency review trying to answer the question: What is Putinism anyway, and what should be done to counter it, beyond the immediate crisis in Ukraine?

Into this examination comes Mr. Laqueur, with trademark scholarly discipline deconstructing Mr. Putin, who in his 16 years as prime minister and president has defied the understanding of some of the world’s best-informed leaders and best-financed intelligence agencies. “What is Putinism?” Mr. Laqueur asks. “A great amount of mental energy has been devoted to finding an accurate definition, as so often happens when a new regime appears. But it has not been a very successful enterprise.”

Mr. Laqueur, who has studied Russia for more than 60 years and has written more than 25 books, does not fall for the easy traps. While some in the United States see Mr. Putin as simply a revanchist Soviet, even a latter-day Stalin, Mr. Laqueur understands it is not so simple.

To be sure, Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer raised with Soviet sensibilities, has paid homage to the old symbols and promoted nostalgia for a lost superpower. He has in some ways rehabilitated Stalin, in keeping with the views of a strikingly large share of Russia’s populace. But Mr. Putin is not a Communist in the old sense. He does not talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the worker’s paradise, nor does he export ideological revolution beyond his own neighborhood.

He came to power as the heir apparent to Boris N. Yeltsin, and many in the West wishfully thought he would stabilize Russia’s shaky journey toward democracy. The signs, though, were there early for those who cared to notice: Mr. Putin took over independent television, punished defiant business tycoons, turned Parliament into a rubber stamp and eliminated the election of governors.

To the extent that he has defined a governing philosophy, Mr. Putin has made clear he favors the restoration of a strong state. At first, the ruling philosophy was called the “vertical of power” — in other words, a top-down system with him at the top. Later, amid criticism in the West that he had forsaken freedom, the phrase was recast as “sovereign democracy,” with the emphasis on the sovereign.

But that seemed more of a brand, not an ideology. Mr. Putin’s efforts at political definition have often felt more opportunistic than organized, the product of a leader playing the angles to preserve power and nervous about what he portrays as outsiders trying to take it from him.

Mr. Laqueur searches for the organizing principle. Putinism, he writes, seems to be state capitalism with elements of a liberal economic policy but significant state intervention — “almost total interference when important issues are concerned.” Russia has the trappings of democracy — elections, a Parliament, news media — but that all increasingly seems to be for show. And “the most important component in the new ideology is nationalism accompanied by anti-Westernism.”

In recent years Mr. Putin has tried to position himself as the champion of a Eurasian power, setting Russia as a counterpoint to Europe. Mr. Laqueur does not buy this, either. For all the talk of the Mongol influence on a country that stretches all the way to the Pacific, Mr. Laqueur notes that Russia remains much more tied to Europe in terms of culture, history, language and religion.

Mr. Putin’s approach has always been rooted in resentment over at Russia’s lost superpower status and his promise to restore the country’s greatness. But where he once sought to validate that greatness through membership in the world’s elite organizations, what was then the Group of 8, lately he has stoked anger at the West, presenting it as determined to keep Russia down. He is the self-appointed protector of Russians, even those living in other countries like Ukraine. Similarly, he has played to the longstanding dream of becoming the Third Rome, defining Russia as the savior of morality at a time of moral decay in the West that for him is typified by the rise of gay rights.

Mr. Ilyin has been a source of inspiration to the Kremlin in this project. In him, Mr. Laqueur writes, Mr. Putin and his circle “have found the prophet to present their much-needed new ideology.”

The product of an upper-class Moscow family with ties to the army, Mr. Ilyin studied philosophy and did not last long once the Bolsheviks swept to power. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922, he wound up in Germany, where he worked for the Russian Scientific Institute, which Mr. Laqueur points out was part of Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda. He was fired and fled again, this time to Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1954. Once forgotten in Russia, nearly 30 of his books have been republished in his home country since the fall of the Soviet Union.

To some extent, Mr. Laqueur saw this coming. In his 1993 volume, “Black Hundred,” issued as the rest of the world was still basking in the fall of the Soviet Union and foreseeing a new democratic Russia, he warned of the opposite. “An authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism appears more probable,” Mr. Laqueur wrote then.

More than 20 years later, he seems eerily and depressingly prescient.

Peter Baker