In the mind – and in the paranoia – of the autocrat

A story in The New York Times, immediately picked up by everyone: the director of US intelligence, Ratcliffe, made a ‘secret’ visit to Moscow to meet Bortnikov, head of the Russian intelligence services. Front-page ‘secrecy’ is one of The New York Times’s strengths. In 1956 – at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union – Khrushchev delivered a ‘secret’ speech to delegates of the Soviet Communist Party denouncing Stalin’s crimes. About three months later, the New York Times published it. The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees absolute freedom of speech: it is the so-called ‘civil religion’ of the US.

Correspondents are dealing with Russia and making statements on Trump’s behalf: yet the Russian-Ukrainian war that he claimed he would end in 24 hours has been going on for four and a half years. Meanwhile, a secret service maintains constant contact with everyone, usually without talking about it. In this case, the Americans believe that, after 26 years in power, Putin is surrounded by courtiers: and is not always well-informed; but having made his career in the secret services, he ought to take them seriously.

Between satellites, espionage, artificial intelligence and data analysis centres, the United States has unrivalled intelligence. Ratcliffe shared one piece of information with Bortnikov: once on the front line in Ukraine, a Russian soldier has, on average, 35 minutes left to live (the reader should not assume this is a printing error: not 35 days or 35 hours, but 35 minutes). Even if some ploy were to extend his survival to 36 minutes, the news has already spread around the world: according to the Italian News Agency, in the last few days alone and on the border with Georgia alone, 113,000 Russians of conscription age have fled.

What will Putin do? A nationalist leader, after all, swears that the country is his top priority. But the reality is more complex. A leader, accustomed to consensus for decades, loves his own image even more than the country. Nobody is perfect; every human being harbours some immorality. But, according to all historical studies, the temptation towards megalomania is extremely strong in tyrants: indeed, they manage to make a name for themselves. In libraries around the world, the most frequently cited figure is Jesus. Hitler comes in seventh place, and Stalin in eighteenth. Putin is not ranked. Yet he generates a great deal of talk about himself, for a leader of a country that is only the world’s ninth-largest economy: even behind Italy, which ranks eighth. According to historians, in addition to megalomania, tyrants tend towards lying, paranoia (shifting the blame onto others) and psychopathy (a lack of morality) – distortions that are reinforced by impunity and sycophants. Could Putin end the war with a compromise, but would that save his image as a Tsar? ‘Let’s say we’ve won, and let’s get out,’ reasoned the Americans as they left Vietnam. Did they lose face? At the time, yes. But not long afterwards, they won the ‘war of facts’: by then, even the Soviets were wearing jeans, eating at McDonald’s and listening to the Beatles just like Westerners.

These are the facts: even today, most Russians would still prefer consumerism above all else. Yet the autocrat who claims to love his country more than anything else lives in a fantasy world and cares above all for his own image. He ‘keeps a straight face’, impassive, like a catwalk model.

Once an autocrat’s true self has begun to wither away, mythical pseudo-personalities take its place and begin to function autonomously. He may become a Saviour, embodying a fusion of Christ and Genghis Khan. The psychopathology of a leader, however, does not arise in a vacuum, but within history. In primitive societies, there were ‘scapegoat rituals’: if someone had cast the evil eye, sacrificing the goat would bring relief. Unfortunately, archaic man also survives in the modern unconscious: offering Jews as sacrificial victims was automatic for the superstitious Hitler. There was the Great Inflation, and many Jews were bankers: currency devaluation was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’. And conspiracies, being secret, can explain everything and nothing; they are extremely useful when political ideas are lacking, as is the case with Trump and Putin.

Some time ago, my Russian publisher planned to publish an article of mine on paranoia throughout history. However, he cancelled the contract, explaining that it ‘contained references to figures who are still popular in Russia’. Obviously: the main chapters deal with the paranoia of Hitler and Stalin. Consequently, even supposedly cultured circles, such as those in publishing, appear convinced that Putin identifies with his predecessor in the Kremlin. There is no censorship in Russia: the publisher practised self-censorship, thereby proving precisely that paranoia does exist.

We are therefore discussing autocrats at moments when they are almost no longer themselves. Jung explained how Stalin, having grown up fighting the Tsar, had in turn become a Tsar himself. According to historiography too, in their search for the most charismatic embodiment, tyrants identify with one another. According to Souvarine, Stalin copied Lenin and Mussolini. According to Bullock, Stalin often admired Hitler and sometimes imitated him. Will Putin opt for a compromise? Or will he raise the stakes, perhaps by attacking the Baltic states or Finland in the west?

In the first half of 1941, Hitler appeared to be the master of Europe, from Scandinavia to Greece. He could have been content with that. Landing in England was too difficult; even Napoleon had given up on it. But he was an autocrat, unaccustomed to critical scrutiny. The paranoid fears conspiracies and feels ‘surrounded’. Unable to defeat the enemy in the west, Hitler turned to the east: he attacked the world’s largest country, the Soviet Union. Unwittingly, he created the very trap he feared. And Putin? For a long time, he has maintained that NATO wanted to encircle him from the south. As a result, two neutral northern countries – Sweden and Finland – have applied for and been granted membership of NATO. The Russian bear has encircled itself, like someone who cries ‘wolf, wolf!’ until the wolf actually comes.

In March 1945, the Allied forces were closing in on Berlin from the east and west. Just as he had ordered during the German troops’ retreats from the occupied countries, Hitler commanded that they withdraw whilst leaving a scorched earth behind them, even in Germany. He issued the Nero-Befehl, the ‘Nero Order’. The dictator was not seeking to preserve the country: rather, he was safeguarding the ‘paranoid coherence’ of his theory. If it is a ‘law of nature’ – or social Darwinism – that the ‘strongest peoples’ prevail, perhaps the Slavs are not so inferior after all. Hitler was not wrong either in waging war or in following racist theories: he merely made a mistake within the framework of his own racism.

On 29 April, the Führer dictated his will (Bundesarchiv, German Federal Archives). He explained that he did not want war. On page 3, he stated that it had been decided by international Jewry: a responsibility of which the peoples of Europe would take note, seeing how many millions of Aryans had died because of them. He adds that the Jews have now received their punishment, carried out, no less, by ‘human means’.

Could even the Kremlin autocrat, unaccustomed to reality, prefer a Neronian ‘twilight of the gods’ to bourgeois reasonableness? Geopolitically speaking, Russia cannot afford to lose the war. But nor can it win it, now that it is losing face. What might he write in his will? He has already embarked on this whitewashing of reality, calling his invasion – that is, the bombing of civilians – a ‘special operation’. To write his will, however, Putin would have to imagine his own death. It is unlikely that he will do so. For him, what Freud said holds particularly true: when faced with death, we are always unconscious. We know it exists, but it is always someone else’s death.