Both Russians and the West Fail to Understand How Three Distinct Russias Interact, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 10 – Three Russias – the Russian idea, the idea of Russia and Russia as an idea – coexist and interact, but their relationships are so complex that they get in the way of understanding both by Russians themselves and by outsiders as to what is really going on and what is possible, Vladimir Pastukhov says.

            The first Russia, the London-based Russian analyst says, is “Putin’s fictional Russia, today’s façade, a country hooked on an ideological drug … with a craving for unlimited expansion and which has turned into a global exporter of chaos” (t.me/v_pastukhov/1148 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=668E3BEDCD17C).

            The second Russia, Pastukhov continues, is “the real Russia hidden behind the façade, the country ‘as it is,’ closed in on itself and indifference to everything, suffering from complexes and devastations, tired of a century of revolutions and terror, with a poor demography and an even worse elite, slowing dying.”

            And the third Russia is “a virtual one that never existed, Russia as an idea,” something invisible to prying eyes that exists only in the imagination,” a Kitezh that never drowned but “never really floated to the surface either, hidden deep in the subconscious of the people and manifesting itself in phobias, addictions and stable behavioral stereotypes.”

            According to Pastukhov, “the problem is that in Russia, it seems, everything imaginary is ultimately real, and everything real as a rule exists mainly in the imagination.” As a result, “the interactions among these three Russias are complex and poorly understood both by the Russians themselves and even more so by foreigners.”

            “Why,” he asks, “does the West constantly underestimate the Putin regime? Because behind the Kremlin leader’s façade, the West sees only the actual Russia of today, an unhappy, broken-down country that in the view of the West doesn’t pose the strategic threat that China does.”

            But “if the West better understood the depth, potential and true meaning of the Russian idea, at least in the way in which Richard Pipes did when he was advisor to Reagan, then it would set its priorities differently and the much-ballyhooed Chinese threat would fade into the background,” Pastukhov argues.

            “Behind the façade of modern Russia, which out of its hidden weakness gave rise to Putin’s Russia, frightening everyone with either real or imaginary power, lies the outlines of a Russia which exists outside of time and space as an idea, a ‘virtual Russia,’ invisible and intangible by conventional means” but one that provides it with “’dark social energy.’”

            This virtual Russia, the analyst continues, “makes the Putin regime both extremely dangerous for all humanity and much more resistance to any pressure, including military and especially economic than it seems to those who are accustomed to coming up with scenarios guided solely by Euclidean geometry and positivist thinking.”       

            Pastukhov then says that while he isn’t ready to “subscribe to the formula that ‘you can’t understand Russia with your mind,’” he doe believe that “it is really difficult to understand it only with your mind based solely on the historical experience of Europe. People there drink different wines there.”

            And that has led him to focus on the question “why is this ‘wine of Russian history’ almost always dark? Why shouldn’t it be filled with ‘light energy’?” Mikhail Epstein gives an accurate but incomplete answer when he says that this wine has been “bottled in moments of ‘cultural default.’”

            But Russia is not experiencing its first such default, and some European countries have experienced defaults of their own without giving up the possibility of the restoration of light, the analyst continues, who insists that the fate of modern Russia will depend on whether it can be “reformatted” so that it emits not dark energy but some other kind.

            “Unfortunately,” Pastukhov says in conclusion, “there is no clear answer; and any answer appears likely to lie more in the area of faith than in that of knowledge,” something that makes it particularly inaccessible to many in both Russia and the West.