CHAPTER 4

Putin’s Philosophy

Russia has long been in flux, with mixed beliefs on what was the most advantageous system for a nation in which three quarters of its land mass is in Asia, while three quarters of its population lives in the European quarter. Since the time of Peter the Great’s European illumination, the question of the Russian cultural identity has risen to the forefront of discussion. In the age of Putin’s neo-Tsarist empire, the question is this: Does Russia accept the status quo of European and American dominance of the world order, or does it take measures to upset the global center of gravity and forge its own strategic culture?

Putin is at a crossroads that many Russians struggle with. For a century, Russians have been conditioned to believe that Western democracy is destined to fail but when given the chance to embrace it they did—and many do not like the messy results. Many former communist philosophers emerged from the Soviet debris field and embraced a wild mélange of beliefs about the future of Russian identity. Some have emerged as thought leaders that have not only influenced Russia’s elite ruling class but have jumped the Atlantic and acted as a pole star for American conservatives. To many neo-Tsarist Russian philosophers, the Soviet Union’s traditional leftist and European socialist partners, who were horribly liberal, failed them in the battlefield of ideas. Hence, liberalism of any kind is a mortal enemy that must be vanquished. They embrace the conservative right and teeter close to fascism.

Putin is an autocratic ruler and like every Tsar and dictator before him on the global stage, it is imperative that he control the narrative with an intentional philosophy. Gleb Pavlovsky describes it as, “He acts as a professor, as a lecturer. He [explains] to us what Russian history was like, what values we have, what we should believe in.”¹ But, furthermore, under Putin lies a pantheon of new philosophers who are helping craft the future narrative of both Russia and America.

VLADISLAV SURKOV WAS a Russian businessman and politician of Chechen descent who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia from 2012 to 2013. He was Putin’s “right hand man” as the first Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration of Vladimir Putin. His career first started as a bodyguard in the 1990s for Mikhail Khodorkovsky.² Under Putin, Surkov was more widely known as a Kremlin propagandist. According to Atlantic magazine’s Peter Pomerantsev, he is nicknamed “Political Technologist of all of Rus.” Many have assumed that Surkov is an Eminence Grise—a Gray Cardinal or behind-the-scenes mastermind who pulls the levers of power. As a political technologist, he strengthens Putin’s control in Russia through media power. Russia’s democracy is a “Sovereign Democracy,” a Surkovian term—via media intervention, it assures that Russia’s democracy has a different set of philosophies than other democracies, which under Putin bears a striking resemblance to the true democracy that was always proclaimed under the Soviet Union:

“It is a society of true democracy, [a] political system which ensures effective management of all public affairs, ever more active participation of the working people in running the state, and the combining of citizen’s real rights and freedoms with their obligations and responsibility to society. Democracy in capitalist countries, where there are antagonistic classes, is, in the last analysis, democracy for the strong, democracy for the propertied minority. In the U.S.S.R., on the contrary, democracy is democracy for the working people, i.e., democracy for all.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union and Marxist-Leninist Communism, wrote in a 1917 treatise The Transition from Capitalism to Communism: “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society.”³ However, instead of being a bastion of balance and tolerance, Surkov’s version of democracy is crafted by a centralized control system for information and narrative manipulation through the use of mind control and influence techniques, and where certain words and images were repeated mantra-like over and over. Surkov was focused on ideology. He created covert fake opposition parties not just in Russia but in Ukraine as well. He would stage liberal art shows in order for them to be attacked by Greek orthodox priests. In 2013, Peter Pomerantsev interviewed Surkov in an Atlantic article titled “The Hidden Author of Putinism or How Vladislav Surkov invented the new Russia” where Surkov introduces himself as, “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system.”⁴

Surkov has given talks at prestigious universities and public forums worldwide despite the fact that he was linked to Nashi, aka the Ours movement,⁵ a group labeled the Russian pro-Putin version of the “Hitler Youth.” Surkov organized the group in 2005. He is also renowned in Russia for burning books by democratic authors, deemed “unpatriotic writers,” in the Red Square.⁶ His biggest efforts at censorship involved suppressing liberal media outlet rankings in Yandex, the most widely trafficked search engine in Russia.⁷ Since 2009, he has written two post-modern ideology novels. Though in 2012, he denied ever having penned them. His first book, Almost Zero, blames liberal society for the bad state of Russia during the fall of communism and rise of capitalism, and his second novel, Mashinka and Velik, introduces a worldview where intellectuals, mafia, sadists, ex-clergy, and professors are all pedophiles and exploiters of children—many disappeared—all on the same side, the left side.⁸ He also published a short story “Without a Sky” in March 2014, a futuristic work complete with technology, robots, warfare, mutants, and underworlds, etc. He published it under the pseudonym, Natan Dubovitsky, a nom de plume based on his wife’s maiden name, Natalia Dubovitsky.⁹

Surkov was allegedly fired by Putin’s Kremlin officials in 2011, though it was stated that he had resigned. In Putin’s second run for president, Surkov had surprisingly backed Medvedev. He had been verbal with the Russian elite that he supported the liberal Medvedev instead of Putin. He was dismissed from the Putin administration. Considering that Medvedev was a political placeholder for Putin, if they had a falling out, there must be another reason.

In 2016, Surkov was put on the US sanctions list for his role in helping fashion the rebellious Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” and agitation in Eastern Ukraine. His role was exposed by a group of Ukrainian hackers known as “Cyber Junta.” Central and Eastern European correspondent Shawn Walker wrote in The Guardian, “It is possible that going after Surkov is the first salvo in what the CIA promised would be ‘unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia’ in the wake of alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic Party’s computer networks.”¹⁰

Aleksandr Dugin was a former professor of sociology at Moscow State University and an advocate of neo-Eurasianism, a geopolitical policy that advocates for the seizure of former Soviet Union territories. He has been referred to as “Putin’s Rasputin” by Breitbart News¹¹ and has become the loudest voice of the Russian fringe as it reflects the global conservative themes prominent in right-wing circles in America and Europe. He was the leader of the National Bolshevik Party, National Bolshevik Front and Eurasia Party. Dugin created the International Eurasian Movement in 2000¹² and idealizes the Eurasia concept that Russia is more aligned to the Asian continent. With this philosophy, he seeks to expand Russian control over not only the former Soviet Union territories but other Asian countries as well.¹³ He sees Russia as having gone through a national awakening under Putin’s leadership, a Russian Spring. “I think that the new Russian identity and ideology will be constructed on the basis of people as the central political reality—not ethnic or racial, but the people as a community.”¹⁴ According to Dugin, unipolar globalization brings “sociopolitical, ethnic, religious, and national infrastructures into one system.” Neo-Eurasianists believe it is Russia’s destiny to smash the “one nation state” of globalization that is consuming the world into that American transatlantic paradigm above. It’s a Russian take on “New World Order,” and it has many American adherents, including Donald Trump and his supporters.

Dugin is said to be inspired by the writings of Adolf Hitler and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Ironically, he is a staunch advocate against governments and people he calls “globalists” who, in his words, “are in the process of destroying any identity except for that of the individual.” His followers include combined tribes of anti-globalists and nationalists.¹⁵ Dugin calls for revolutionary ideas that bear a striking resemblance to a conservative version of the Capitalist (owner) versus Proletariat (worker) rhetoric of Communism under which he was raised.

He has advocated for a shift to traditional conservative politics to restore the place of the Russian orthodox religion in public policy. Regarding the United States, Dugin has stated that liberalism in the West has come to an end of its political cycle and a return to conservative policies was inevitable. For instance, he strongly protested the acceptance of the LGBT community and other policies commonly associated with liberalism. His stances mirror characteristics of American conservative extremists. However, Dugin has no problem recommending unbridled use of Russian military force that he often complains of. In 2008, Dugin called for the seizure of Ukraine and Georgia and to bring them back into the post-Soviet sphere of influence. He has espoused the view that the former Soviet states belong to Russia. These statements are alarming to small NATO nations such as Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia who only just liberated themselves from Russia.

Dugin’s brand of radical, almost fascist conservative populism is very popular in the pro-Trump circles. He endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2016 in an article titled, “Trump Is Real America,” where he postulated that Trump was a common man of the times and thus a challenge to the “global elite.”¹⁶ In his YouTube videos, he loudly proclaimed his support for the billionaire, “Donald Trump is the most right-wing candidate of the Republican Party, but not like the insane disabled McCain or the ex-Trotskyist neoconservatives, obsessed with the idea of world dominance.”¹⁷ He claimed that Trump would reverse the policies that support the transatlantic ties of America and Western Europe. “Trump is the voice of the real right-wing in America, which, in fact, doesn’t care about foreign policy and American hegemony.”¹⁸ On the election of Donald Trump, Dugin pushed his agenda to promote this ideology:

“November 8th, 2016 was a most important victory for Russia and for him (Putin) personally.”¹⁹

“This is the real America, the America of realism which has chosen its president and not succumbed to the false propaganda of the globalist liberal media.”²⁰

“More than half of the US population believes only itself, not the lying liberal globalist propaganda of the transnational elites. This is brilliant news. Dialogue can be held with this kind of America.”²¹

“There is nothing more stupid and fake than the American vote counting system. It is a disgrace, and not a democracy!”²²

Born July 3, 1974, Konstantin Malofeev has been likened as “Putin’s George Soros,” without the empathy and dignity. He had 15 years of experience in the world of Private Equity and Investment Banking. As founder of Marshall Capital Partners, an international investment fund group, he has amassed a vast fortune in real estate, agriculture, telecommunications, technology, and media investments. He ran the advisory board of St. Basil the Great Foundation, Russia’s largest charity and St. Basil the Great Grammar School, a school he founded in 2007. He is on the board of trustees for the Russian non-government nonprofit Safe Internet League, which led to drafting Russia’s original internet censorship law.

As president of right-wing think tank Katehon, Malofeev founded and subsequently funded Tsargrad TV & Tsargrad Media Group. He advocates for a new Russian empire and, in doing so, hosts a media platform for the far-right. It includes voices like American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Aleksandr Dugin, as well as a former Fox News anchor Jack Hannick; Aymeric Chauprade, advisor to Marine Le Pen; Austria’s Prime Minister Heinz-Christian Strache, formerly the Freedom Party leader, among others. On twitter, @Katehon was the entity pushing Dugin’s “Drain the Swamp,” a mantra during the election that would become a phrase used by presidential candidate Donald Trump and his followers.

In 2014 the Russian opposition hacking group, Shaltai Boltai (Humpty Dumpty) released emails between Malofeev and Georgy Gavrish.²³ The emails revealed a massive effort to prop up extremist right-wing ethno-nationalist groups throughout Europe, including in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, and Turkey. Efforts were also under way outside of Europe in Argentina, Chile, Lebanon, and Malaysia.²⁴ Malofeev was sanctioned by the Obama administration for being the principal funder of the Ukrainian separatist groups fighting in Donetsk that helped facilitate the seizure of Crimea.

Another of Putin’s philosophers was Igor Panarin, a Russian intelligence officer and former KGB analyst who worked for the Federal Agency for Government Information and Security (FAPSI), then the Russian equivalent of the NSA. In 2003, FAPSI dissolved and became the Special Communications Information Service. He went on to receive a doctorate in political science with a focus on geopolitics, social psychology, and US Economics and Information Warfare. Panarin is most widely known for announcing his prediction at the Information War Conference held in Linz, Austria, on September 9, 1998, nearly 7 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the US would face a similar Balkanization fate within the decade and no later than summer 2010. It was at that conference where Panarin planted the seeds of what many would later come to view as the basis for Putin’s disinformation campaign against the United States. Panarin calculated that fear of mass immigration, moral decay, and economic uncertainty could spark disunity within the United States. These factors could result in a civil war/culture war that could discredit the stability of the US dollar on an international level while undermining globalization.

Panarin predicted that “there is a 45%–55% chance that disintegration will happen.”²⁵ It was met with great skepticism at the conference as he unveiled a map showing the United States—then still in a trade partnership with Russia—broken into six parts due to the fact that some economically sound US states would aim to unleash themselves from control from the federal government. At the same time, Alaska, which is only 90 miles from Russia’s nearest point, would once again, according to Panarin, become part of Russia while Hawaii would become a protectorate territory of either Japan or China, and “The Californian Republic” would be under Chinese influence (Calexit). Additionally, the northern states that Panarin refers to as “the Central North American Republic” would be taken over by Canada.²⁶ Not surprisingly, by 2015, the Kremlin would come to financially back some American separatist groups in order to effect this prediction. Panarin’s warning to the United States was based on what happened to the Soviet Union. Panarin wrote that Americans expect miracles from President Obama “but when the spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles.” Panarin cited that the collapse of the Soviet Union was predicted in 1976 by French political scientist, Emmanuel Todd, and that people laughed at him as well.²⁷

Steve Bannon, the American Goebbels

Steve Bannon is the American politician whose ideology has bridged the philosophies of the new Kremlin thinkers with the masses in America. He rose to prominence under Donald Trump and at a time when Trump looked like he would falter, Bannon led his campaign to victory in the 2016 elections. But once he opened his mouth about his true feelings of Trump’s incompetence, while extolling himself as a brilliant king-maker, he would fall in disgrace. That disgrace did not last long, Bannon started crisscrossing Europe to act as the networker-in-chief to bring his Trumpian style authoritarianism to European populist groups.

In power or not, Bannon would come to be the shining star in the Putin plan to bring America into an alliance of autocratic thought leaders. His ideologies were deeply rooted in Duginism and that gave him a place in the manipulation chain in the global game of information warfare. If the Americans under him proved as malleable as they were when it came to Moscow’s money, then perhaps it was appropriate to cultivate the entire American conservative movement into Moscow’s unwitting assets. Bannon saw the alt-right as conservative storm troopers who would assist Trump with changing the United States into a pro-Moscow wing of the world nationalist conservative network. When Bannon emerged on the political scene, he had worked in investment banking, entertainment, and gaming industries. He became executive chairman of the ultra-extremist Breitbart News. His personality has been described as everything from pathological to dangerous. He is a man with no fixed address though he has residences in Florida and California. He also claims to be a resident in Washington, DC, New York, London, Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, and Miami.²⁸ During his time in the Trump administration, he lived on and off with his third ex-wife. She allegedly smuggled drugs and a cell phone into prison to a lover, who was not Steve Bannon. On the other hand, Bannon was accused of violently abusing his ex-wife. He is alleged to have destroyed a leased home in Miami where the Jacuzzi bathtub had been ruined by a corrosive acid and every room was festooned with padlocks including the bathroom door. In the entire maelstrom that would become the 2016 campaign, these bizarre characteristics and foibles were not considered a problem for a man working in Donald Trump’s White House.

As Trump’s chief campaign advisor, one would have thought Bannon had been a political operative his entire life. But he came to the political forefront in a unique way. Bannon wasn’t of the manor-born. He was the son of an AT&T telephone company lineman and a stay-at-home mom. “I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats.… I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f—ed things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f—ed up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster.”²⁹

Bannon attended Virginia Tech and graduated in 1976. He was an officer in the US Navy for seven years, serving on the destroyer USS Paul F. Foster and later at the Pentagon as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations. He then went on to Georgetown to earn a Master’s degree in National Security Studies. In 1985, he earned an MBA degree with honors from Harvard. His military service, by many accounts, shaped his worldview. After his military stint, he worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker working to expand their presence in the entertainment industry. In 1990, he and some colleagues from Goldman Sachs launched a private investment company specializing in media. He became an executive producer of 18 films before 2016. He ended up with a financial stake in comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s TV show Seinfeld from which he still receives residuals every time the show airs.

In 1993, Bannon left Goldman Sachs to become acting director of the ecological self-reliance research project Biosphere 2. In 2007, he cofounded Breitbart News with Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart had originally conceived of the site during a trip to Israel as a website that would be “unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel.” Andrew Breitbart died unexpectedly of a heart attack in March of 2016 and Steve was named the chief executive officer.

In 2006, in a move that would later help to cultivate just the kind of young, intelligent, anti-feminist, gun-loving, disaffected white male that would help elect Trump, Bannon persuaded Goldman Sachs to invest in Internet Gaming Entertainment, or IGE, a company that made money from selling virtual goods to gamers including magical swords and costumes and ways to cheat. There was a significant problem with this Hong Kong–based enterprise. The companies that made video games like World of Warcraft considered IGE’s business model illegal. The entire reason Bannon agreed to be the Vice Chairman of IGE was to gain acceptance of the moneymaking scheme with gaming companies. It was another big challenge with a huge potential payoff. Gamer credits were rewards for players who invested in games such as Medal of Honor and World of Warcraft, but Bannon weaponized the credit system by using cheap Chinese computer players in sweatshop environments to earn credits for online computer games. It was brilliant because there was a huge global market in online games and players could buy enhancements with these credits. Bannon’s company, IGE, then sold his industrial-harvested credits to gamers around the world for hard cash. When one considers that there are tens of millions of people playing these games in real time 24/7, even a single dollar sale could generate millions monthly. IGE worked hard to hide their activities from the large computer game design companies who were seeking to shut them down. In 2007, facing a class action lawsuit and an investigation by authorities in Florida, Bannon steered IGE away from its virtual credits business and changed the name of the company to Affinity Media Holdings. Authorities dropped the investigation in 2008 after being convinced IGE had gotten out of the business of selling virtual goods. Affinity Media Holdings stabilized under Bannon’s leadership and was sold for $42 million.

Bannon’s working-class background, military service, financial shrewdness, and digital media acumen helped him to see an opportunity in Donald Trump’s candidacy. He understood that a large part of America believed immigration, gender equality, diversity, political correctness, feminism, secularism, trade agreements, and Islam were the greatest threats to the American way of life. He hoped to harness a new power with gamers through Breitbart News. Regarding the gamers, Bannon said, “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power.”³⁰

Bannon is a loyal follower of Alexander Dugin, who glorifies the lost Tsarist Russian empire, just as Bannon glorifies the racist, genocidal Jacksonian America of the 19th century. Both men have a stringent belief that the true struggle is not between Russia and the United States but between ethical Judeo-Christian capitalists on one side and global crony capitalist bankers and multinational corporations on the other. Bannon believes in the strength of the nation-state—which is precisely what Putin’s Kremlin is promoting as it backs anti–European Union candidates in elections across the West. “I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing.… If we do not bind together as partners with others in other countries then this conflict is only going to metastasize.”³¹ He was referring to a conflict he perceived between Judeo-Christian values and what conservatives call Islamic fascism. He praises both Vladimir Putin and Dugin’s brand of Russian neo-Eurasianism, though he views Putin with suspicion. Bannon believes Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism. Bannon told Ronald Radosh at The Daily Beast that “Lenin… wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”³²

The greatest success of Dugin was to find a disciple in Bannon, the man who would become the strategy advisor for Donald Trump and editor of the ultranationalist web-based news source, Breitbart News. Bannon likened himself to Dugin in the belief that American democracy was doomed, and that the world should be led by autocrats and oligarchs in alignment with nationalist beliefs. They believed the East and West money class would join their easily led nations in a global alliance. Despite the fallout from his high publicity garnered firing, Bannon still believes that Trump is the natural leader of the worldwide populist, anti-globalist movement.