承前*1
Julian Borger and Angelique Chrisafis “ Decision to invade Ukraine raises questions over Putin’s ‘sense of reality’” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/24/putin-russian-president-ukraine-invasion-mental-fitness
Andrew Roth “‘It’s not rational’: Putin’s bizarre speech wrecks his once pragmatic image” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/its-not-rational-putins-bizarre-speech-wrecks-his-once-pragmatic-image
21日のウラディミール・プーチンによる、ウクライナへの事実上の宣戦布告スピーチは、その主旨（ウクライナ侵略）以上に、そのファナティックな語り口が西側の政治関係者にショックを与えているようだ。それまで、プーチンは残酷ではあるけれど実務的な判断力に長け、イデオロギー的陶酔からは距離を取ったクールな奴というイメージが持たれていた。今回、そのクール・ガイとしてのイメージが崩れてしまったという。
そうイメージってあったんだ！ まあ、そもそも侵略戦争を宣言する国家指導者にファナティックな語り口やトンデモ理論の動員というのはつきものなんじゃないだろうか？ イラク侵略の際のブッシュ（息子）もそうだったわけだし。
ただ、今回のプーチンの振舞いや決定を巡っての思想史的な考察が重要であることはいう迄もない。
Michel Eltchaninoff “What’s going on inside Putin’s mind? His own words give us a disturbing clue” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/25/putin-mind-words-russia-victimhood
Michel Eltchaninoff氏は露西亜思想史の専門家。プーチンに影響を与えている２人の思想家に言及している。
先ずは民俗学者のLev Gumilev*2。所謂ネオ・ユーラシア主義の源流；
また、政治思想家のIvan Ilyin*3；
The contemporary “west”, in this vision, battles to contain Russia out of jealousy. Europe has collapsed into decadence, crushed by the weight of its humanism and political liberalism: tired, divided, at the mercy of every passing wind. The United States, mired in an instrumental, materialist culture and the contradictions of its own history, is in the process of losing its pre-eminence. Russia, by contrast, like its emerging ally, China, is on the rise in civilisational terms.Putin leans here on a strange theory advanced by the 20th-century historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilev. The son of two of Russia’s most famous poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev maintains that every people possesses a distinct life force: a “bio-cosmic” inner energy or passionate substance that he calls passionarnost. Putin may have known Gumilev in St Petersburg at the start of the 1990s. At any rate, he has embraced his ideas and never misses an opportunity to refer to them. In February last year, he said: “I believe in passionarnost. In nature as in society, there is development, climax and decline. Russia has not yet attained its highest point. We are on the way”. According to him, Russia carries the power and potential of a young people. “We possess an infinite genetic code”, he has said.
In addition to Gumilev, Putin relies on another thinker – a minor figure in the history of Russian thought. Last October, he spoke of regularly consulting a collection of political essays titled Our Tasks, the major work of Ivan Ilyin, who died in 1954. In one of the president’s preferred essays, “What does the world seek from the dismemberment of Russia?”, Ilyin denounces the country’s “imperialist neighbours”, these “western peoples who neither understand nor accept Russian originality”. In the future, he suggests, these countries will inevitably attempt to seize territories such as the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, central Asia and, especially, Ukraine. The method, according to Ilyin, will be the hypocritical promotion of values such as “freedom” in order to transform Russia into “a gigantic Balkans”. The final object is to “dismember Russia, to subject her to western control, to dismantle her and in the end make her disappear”.
*1:https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2022/02/24/211721 https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2022/02/27/091010
*2:See eg. Charles Clover “Lev Gumilev: passion, Putin and power” https://www.ft.com/content/ede1e5c6-e0c5-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889797 “Prominent Russians: Lev Gumilev” https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/science-and-technology/lev-gumilev/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AC%E3%83%95%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B0%E3%83%9F%E3%83%AA%E3%83%A7%E3%83%95
*3:See eg. Jerry D. Salyer “Read Ivan Ilyin to Understand Modern Russia” https://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/read-ivan-ilyin-understand-modern-russia See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilyin
