A New European Russia: An Updated Response to Thuletide

August 2023 Revision

A man by the alias of Thuletide runs a blog that I rather enjoy, as well as a Telegram channel. He once had a Twitter, through which I have interacted with him in DMs, and he comes across a pleasant bloke. I have no idea what his real name is, which I suppose is a sign that he takes OpSec seriously (or at least isn’t a complete bonehead about privacy).

Lately, however, I have had a growing disagreement with Thuletide. He points out, and rightly so, that there was nothing “based” about the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet oligarch-run Russian Federation. He is also correct about the People’s Republic of China being antithetical to tradition and it being the technocratic success (for the elites who run it, though, not for the actual Chinese) that the United Nations wishes to emulate globally. Lastly, his history of the origins of Western “cultural” Marxism and its relation to the modern structures of technocratic globalism should be read by anyone who wishes to be taken seriously as a reactionary.

My disagreement rests on his characterization of modern Russia. Let me make it clear right now: I am a reactionary traditionalist. I am not pro-Aleksandr Dugin. I have no sympathy for Eurasianism, “Fourth Political Theory,” a “Red-Brown alliance,” or any of that nonsense. I am not in the business of trying to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin or the USSR as some sort of reactionary bastion (I’m well aware of the Bolshevik’s financiers and of the early USSR’s pro-degeneracy stances). I have a personal hatred of the Chinese Communist Party, and do not want to see any sort of Sino-Neo-Soviet bloc. Now that the necessary disclaimer is out of the way, let us begin in earnest.

Thuletide brings to light several connections between Putin and Jewish oligarchs, as well as with the aforementioned glowing schizo Dugin. His criticisms can be summarized as follows: 1) Putin and his regime are enthusiastic participants in the World Economic Forum’s Agenda 2030 Great Reset plans, 2) Russia’s embrace of Dugin’s ideology means that they effectively form a hostile non-European civilization bent on Eurasianism and the destruction of Europe proper, 3) modern Russia has never moved past its degenerate Bolshevik origins, and 4) Putin is working for the same Jewish figures as Western leaders who are already recognized as subversives by the Right. Thuletide’s criticisms of oligarchical Russia are valid, but I have reason to believe that Vladimir Putin’s 2023 Russia is driven by a different ideology than the Russia of 2002.

Prior to the developments of 2022, I would still be inclined to side with Thuletide on Russia. But one interesting thing I noted even back then was that for all of Dugin’s connections to the GRU and Russian military, Putin has kept the weirdo at arm’s length. Dugin would have preferred that Putin go further than he had gone by 2014, going all the way through to the Baltic States and Poland, annexing all of the Caucasus before turning east and reviving the old dream of Yellow Russia in (Inner) Manchuria, as well as incorporating Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Turkestan, and Sinkiang for good measure. Putin seemed to have no interest in that back then, and certainly shows none now. He kept Belarus in close orbit, retook Crimea, carved out two de facto buffer states in the eastern Ukraine, grabbed South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, and then more or less stopped until February 2022. Dugin was not all that pleased at this, but there was nothing he could really do.

I heard the idea of a united Eurasia get floated once since the Spring 2022 invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, and it was merely in some niche Telegram channel that I then left. As for Putin’s regime, the reasoning for the invasion is fairly clear, even beyond the whole “get NATO off of our front porch” justification. Specifically, I am referring to an article written by the President of the Russia Federation himself. In the article, titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” he outlines his geopolitical goal of reintegrating the Ukraine into Russia, and not once does it mention anything about some supposed Eurasian union. Instead, Putin speaks of history, on the Kievan Rus and its development from its formation until it fragmented once and for all under the conquests of the Mongols and the Poles before being reunited under Moscow by the Tsars. The purpose of the article, which seems to be aimed primarily at Russians (and to an extent, Ukrainians and Belarussians), is to illustrate that the three Rus peoples, who he refers to instead as Velikorussians (Great Russians), Malorussians (Little Russians), and Byelorussians (Green Russians), comprise a single composite nation, sharing a common heritage across both pagan and Christian times. To this end, he goes as far as to repeat the words “Let [Kiev] be the mother of all Russian cities.”

Another interesting note about the article is how Vladimir Putin speaks of the Soviet Union and its Bolshevik government. He does not appear to speak of them as Russian, but more or less regards them as a foreign entity that was occupying Greater Russia. This is abundantly clear when he gets to the enlargement of the Ukraine SSR eastwards at the expense of the Russian SFSR, an event in which Novorossiya, a region regarded by everyone at the time as part of Russia proper and not of the Ukraine, was carved away to give to the Kiev CPSU:

The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.

He breaks with the former Russian Federation policy of trying to claim the Soviet-Bolshevik legacy as its own. He outright condemns them, and palpably despises their vision of utopia. On the matter of the interwar years, Putin also makes multiple references to how various post-Imperial Ukrainian governments sought to join Russia proper, only to be thwarted by internal changes of government or, in one case, outright denial by Vladimir Lenin. In particular, he quotes Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, leader of the reactionary Ukrainian State, as saying, “Ukraine is to take the lead in the formation of an All-Russian Federation,” an assertion which necessarily implies that Ukraine is, in some way, Russian.

The overarching theme of the article is that Vladimir Putin seeks a reunification of the descendants of the Ancient Rus on the basis of them being “a triune people” who were only divided by external forces, and to end the artificial Ukrainian national identity that had been propped up first by Polish-Lithuanians, Austro-Hungarians, and Germans for the sake maintaining their empires in competition to the Tsardom, then by Republicans, Bolsheviks, and Soviets to weaken the Rus identity to facilitate a more thorough revolution, and now by the institutions of global government such as NATO, the United Nations, and the “European” Union as a way of driving a wedge between Kiev and Moscow, to rip away and pervert the original heartland of Rossiya now that Muscovy has successfully revolted against both the Soviet technocracy and the Western technocracy that took over after the Soviet collapse in 1991.

On the matter of Putin’s connections to Israel, I will simply point out that RT News publicly blamed Mossad for instigating the Wagner mutiny and that Israel overtly supports Ukraine. I see no evidence of Tel Aviv playing both sides in this war; they have picked one rather plainly and are giving it guns and money. The World Economic Forum has quietly disowned Putin in the wake of the war as well, removing mentions of him from their websites. Whatever bridges once existed seem to be burnt now. Furthermore, with regards to the oligarchs specifically, it is hardly a secret that Putin has been working to rid his government of their influence since he first achieved power. The events surrounding the oligarchs in the wake of the United Nations’ wave of sanctions are rather revealing. Putin and his family managed to move all of their assets in Russia long before the sanctions took force. The oligarchs, on the other hand, got pretty screwed. Some eagle-eyed autists online managed to track the flights of their private jets, and several of them got out of Russia prior to the clampdown upon air travel out of Russia, with the majority going to London and the rest going to the usual assortment of European cities. Putin then turned and condemned them on national television, calling them Westerners who pretend to be Russian.

Considering that Putin has been trying to purge the oligarchs for a while, he seems to have gotten what he wanted. The disloyal ones who fled are likely never going back to Russia, at least not for a long time. Their influence has been cut off, and their assets have likely been seized by the Federal government. The oligarchs who stayed in Russia are now disconnected from their finances outside the country. And they’re also stuck in Russia, right where they can be watched and controlled. Russia is sometimes called a land of degeneracy due to its high abortion rates, low church attendance, and various other statistics. Yet looking at the historical numbers for all of these metrics, it becomes clear that they are each either the lingering effects of atheist Soviet rule or remnants of the Yeltsin-led post-Soviet decline. In any case, they have been trending in the right direction: abortion and alcoholism are falling while birthrates are up. This is in contrast to the West, where these trends are virtually all going in the wrong direction.

Another major development is the change in identity of the modern Russian state. I first noticed it in an RT New editorial wherein Ivan Timofeev, an author for Russian state media, critiques Soviet socialism just as harshly as he does Western liberalism, almost echoing Julius Evola when he characterizes both as being based on “progress, rationality and emancipation,” and notes how both systems have reached a synthetic convergence in Western states. The most important words in the article come after the tirade against Bolshevism and progressive globalism, however, in the clause “Russia is a European and Western country.” Despite being buried rather deeply in the piece, its significance cannot be understated. Russia has not considered itself European, much less Western, since the Red Army victory in the Civil War. In many senses, including the state’s very raison d’etre, the Russian Federation of the 2020’s is closer to the Russian Empire than to the USSR. The Bolshevik-initiated reorientation of Russia into a “third civilization” that is neither Western nor Eastern seems to have been reversed and abandoned, and this reversal has extended to Transnistria as well, as documented by Callum in his travels to Tiraspol. The old structures are Soviet, but the new architecture is more German, deliberately reminiscent of the Tzarist Imperial days, underscored by the large statue of Catherine the Great in a park near the city center. As if to reinforce the point, President of Transnistria Vadim Krasnoselsky stated in February of 2023, “They consider us a ‘legacy of the Soviet Union,’ …etc. No, it’s not true. We are a ‘splinter’ of the Russian Empire.”

To preempt arguments stemming from Russian cooperation with China, I remind that virtually everyone with any grasp of geopolitics and history can see that the “alliance” is an unnatural one born purely out of shared dislike for U.S. domination. Russia is a close ally of India, who is famously not a friend of China. The Russian Federation sees itself as the savior of White European civilization. It will take allies where it can because it is not in a position to choose them at the moment. In a world where Putin did not need Xi, there would be no Sino-Russian friendship. In fact, Putin would very much prefer it to be that way. The presence of the non-Slavic ethnic Republics within Russia hardly constitutes evidence of a continued Eurasian self-identity, either. Far from being a means to assimilate non-Russian regions, they are imperial constructs, a way of detaching the non-Russian areas from Russia proper into something akin to protectorates; they allow Moscow to hang onto non-European lands and their peoples without having to accommodate them in the Russian national identity itself.

Taken together, all of this points to a very different Russian regime coming into focus, one not driven by globalist-allied oligarchs, neo-Bolsheviks, and Eurasianists, but by actual Russian patriots and irredentists, flanked by Tsarists, Orthodox reactionaries, and even the occasional Kievan Rus revivalist. Hell, I’ve even managed to run into one or two neo-Scythian folks. As shown by the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts, the war Putin and Shoigu are waging is old-fashioned in motivation. They are conducting a war in pursuit of blood and soil, for God and fatherland. It is a struggle to extend the borders of Russia itself, not to carry out “regime change.” It may even be described with some accuracy as a modern Crusade in the literal sense. To those decrying Putin for being more of an imperial statist instead of a true nationalist, I must ask: What is the problem? Nationalism is only a positive force per se insofar as it stands in opposition to Soviet internationalism or Western technocratic globalism, both of which have been sufficiently neutralized within Russia. Nationalism is, ultimately, still a collectivizing and leveling phenomenon—it stands against the aristocratic and the noble, seeking to bring everything down to the mass-level of the “nation,” leaving no room for true statesmanship or any higher pursuits beyond the collective. A Russian state identity built upon the legacy of the Tsardom is far superior to one built purely on popular nationalism, ethnic or otherwise. Vladimir Putin is not a nationalist; he is an imperialist, a Tzarist, and a reactionary statist, which makes him far more fit as a statesman than any committed nationalist.

None of this is to say that I have no reservations about the invasion. Most of the patriotic Ukrainian soldiers being wiped out by Russian military power and Kiev’s incompetence aren’t pro-globalist subversives, but are otherwise right-wing Ukrainians who see themselves fighting for their homeland. I would also prefer not to see Chechen Muslims killing White Christians (although I am perfectly fine with the Azov Battalion degenerates getting what they deserve). In the end, however, it is clear that the side backing Kiev is also the side backing the managed destruction of the West through promotion of degeneracy and policies of demographic replacement.

I must side with Russia and wish for a decisive victory and the dismantlement of the rotten state in Kiev. The government of the (literal) Jewish comedian Volodymyr Zelensky is corrupt and degenerate. Russian military operations may damage infrastructure, but the worst crimes against the Ukrainian people have been perpetrated by their own governing officials. Of particular note when it comes to outright evil are the LARPers of the Azov and Aidar Battalions, who, far from protecting their countrymen, execute them in their own cars on the side of the road (dashcam video of which I have seen, unfortunately). They are not even National Socialists in the real sense; they worship the cartoonishly evil caricatures created by Hollywood and proceed to ape them as part of a twisted fantasy.

I have watched Ukrainian civilians, pushed to reckless action by their government, attempt to throw Molotov cocktails at Russian military vehicles (and getting half of the flaming liquid into their own cars), and the Russians, instead of justifiably opening fire on those who have made themselves partisans, show almost saintly restraint in simply brushing it off. Russia could have leveled all the barracks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the opening hour (the way they liquidated most air defenses, runways, and logistical hubs), but they chose not to. They could take the gloves off and vaporize the Ukrainian frontline with a continual barrage of rockets, missiles, artillery, tank rounds, and air strikes, but they don’t. I have seen as Ukrainian government claims are repeatedly shown to be false by bored Twitter anons while Russian government claims hold true even under scrutiny of the entire Western propaganda apparatus.

I think we on the Right have become too used to seeing the entire world as against us. We have become, and understandably so, trained to see controlled opposition and false pretenses everywhere we look. But perhaps this has blinded us so much that when there is a country that might actually be in open revolt against the globalist regime, we instinctively mutter that it’s “fake” and label anyone who sees real potential in it as a “GRU spook” or as “having fallen for the psyop.” Maybe, just maybe, it’s worth considering the possibility that Russia’s invasion is not merely another fake event designed to actually further globalist ends, and that we are indeed seeing the first real break from the United Nations by a major power in a very long time.

And Thuletide, if you’re reading this, I’d love to have another conversation. You might remember me as that one “Star Trek But Racist” LARP account who asked you about the higher incidence of mental illness among those mixed racial descent. Here is a link to all the platforms which I have a presence on. I am confident that you can easily find a way to contact me. Telegram would probably be the easiest for the time being, given your perennial bans from Twitter (or X, since that’s what it’s apparently called now).