“Some want to take a “bigger” piece from us, others help them. They help them, believing that Russia (…) always poses a threat to someone. (…) Terrorism is, of course, only a means to achieve these goals. » It was with these revealing words that Vladimir Putin commented, on September 4, 2004, on the hostage-taking in a school in Beslan [ville russe du Caucase] by Chechen terrorists and separatists, causing around a thousand victims.
If we had to remember one mistake made by the West in its relationship with Russia, it is not having paid enough attention or taken seriously the speeches of the Kremlin and the Russian political-military elites. Putin’s anti-Western, paranoid and virulent speech in Munich in 2007 was, from this point of view, not a break. Beliefs and ideas have never really changed since 1991. Analysis of speeches and archives would have allowed the“West” to avoid many surprises.
What is remarkable about post-Soviet Russian politics, as demonstrated by the reactions of the Kremlin, political-military elites and the Russian media to the attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow, is not the unpredictability, but the continuity, those of the ruling elites and their cognitive frameworks, partly shaped by the Soviet era. By almost immediately accusing Ukraine, and therefore the West, of having ordered the attack, while the Islamic State organization [au Khorassan, filiale afghane de l’EI] had clearly claimed it and that Washington, despite the surrounding hostility, had had the altruism to warn Moscow of the imminence of the attack.
Putin is not making a bet, he is acting in a predictable and consistent manner with a traditional line among the political-military elites, of which he is an emanation. First, these elites have deeply rooted and historical beliefs and thinking that lead them to believe that the radically hostile and omnipotent West is behind every destabilizing event. Tendency to deny chance and contingency, deterministic reasoning and the impression that phenomena are interconnected and often hidden… For Russian political-military elites, the individual is necessarily manipulated: or he is the object of the shenanigans of the enemies of Russia, or he is brought back into line by the State, supposedly for his own good. Furthermore, actors sometimes resort to conspiracy theories to explain contradictions and avoid questioning their central beliefs: here, the idea that a hostile West is besieging and wishing to destroy Russia.
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