When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it would annihilate all life on the North American continent. Siberia will grow to be one of many most secure locations on Earth—which is but another excuse “the Anglo-Saxon elites” wish to seize the area from Russia.
So says Nikolai Patrushev, the second-most highly effective man in Moscow. Presently the top of Russia’s Safety Council, Patrushev has been a colleague of Vladimir Putin’s for the reason that two served within the Leningrad KGB within the Seventies and is now the president’s confidant and prime adviser. A normal of the military and a former director of the FSB—the successor company to the Soviet KGB—Patrushev can also be the de facto overlord of the nation’s different secret companies. Amongst Kremlin courtiers, he alone seems licensed to talk for Putin on strategic issues, together with nuclear weapons, the struggle in Ukraine, and Russia’s view of the U.S., Europe, and NATO.
Following Putin’s lead, many prime Russian bureaucrats compete in conjuring up monstrous conspiracy theories. But even on this cracked-up crowd, Patrushev stands out for the luridness and depth of his anti-West—and particularly anti-U.S.—animus. The hyperbole of his feedback would make the Soviet propagandists of my youth blush: His prominence is a reminder that, if Putin had been to lose energy tomorrow, his potential successors might be extra warlike and expansionist, not much less. Individuals ought to fear about how a lot Patrushev’s outlook reinforces his boss’s—and about how his delusional, more-belligerent-than-Putin fulminations in lengthy interviews with top-circulation Russian newspapers grow to be the get together line, which deafening propaganda then inculcates within the thoughts of hundreds of thousands of Russians.
In Patrushev’s telling, the West has been maligning and bullying Russia for half a millennium. As early because the sixteenth century, “Russophobic” Western historians besmirched Russia’s first czar, Ivan IV—a mass assassin and sadist higher often known as Ivan the Horrible. Patrushev insists that Ivan is merely a sufferer of a concocted “black legend” that “portrayed him as a tyrant.”
To the Safety Council chief, the West’s Twentieth-century siege of Russia had nothing to do with communism and the Chilly Battle. Actually, the autumn of the mighty Soviet Union made the nation a softer goal for the Western plotters, and america strove to use the chance by forcing Russia to surrender its “sovereignty, nationwide consciousness, tradition, and an impartial international and home coverage.” The conspiracy’s closing aims are Russia’s dismemberment, the elimination of the Russian language, the nation’s removing from the geopolitical map, and its confinement to the borders of the Duchy of Muscovy, a small medieval realm.
In Patrushev’s world, the U.S. invents new viruses in biological-weapons labs to annihilate the peoples of “objectionable states,” and the COVID-19 virus “may have been created” by the Pentagon with the help of a number of of the most important transnational pharmaceutical companies and the “Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros, and Biden foundations.”
Patrushev’s biggest present fixation is “all this story with Ukraine”—a confrontation supposedly “engineered in Washington.” In 2014, by his account, the U.S. plotted the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv—a “coup d’état”—that pushed out a pro-Moscow president and sought to fill Ukrainians with “the hatred of every thing Russian.” Immediately, Ukraine is not more than a testing floor for growing old U.S. armaments in addition to a spot whose pure sources the West would favor to use mercilessly—and “with out the indigenous inhabitants.” Preserving Ukraine as a sovereign state will not be in America’s plans, Patrushev claims. Afraid of attacking Russia straight, “NATO instructors herd Ukrainian boys to sure loss of life” within the trenches. Certainly, the West is basically perpetrating an “annihilation” of the Ukrainians, whereas Russia’s purpose is to “put an finish to the West’s bloody experiment to destroy the fraternal folks of Ukraine.”
That is the image of the world that Patrushev serves as much as Putin. The adviser supplies “a framework” for the Russian president’s imaginative and prescient, the distinguished Russian political sociologist Nikolai Petrov has argued.
Repeated and internalized by its viewers, propaganda captures and imprisons the propagandist. Patrushev stated final Might that Western particular companies had been coaching terrorists and saboteurs for “committing crimes on the territory of our nation.” Russian civilians have suffered due to that view. Weeks earlier than Islamic State terrorists attacked a music corridor in a Moscow suburb late final month, U.S. intelligence officers instructed the Russian authorities a couple of menace to the venue. Putin dismissed the U.S.’s warning as “apparent blackmail” and a “plot to scare and destabilize our society.”
Whereas furnishing his compatriots with elaborately paranoid interpretations of the world, Patrushev vigorously participates in shaping it. Increasingly more a coverage maker in his personal proper, he regularly stands in for Putin in important negotiations with prime allies, decreasing International Minister Sergei Lavrov to ceremonial duties and the signing of meaningless treaties. Because the exiled Russian journalist Maxim Glikin has identified, Patrushev is the place international coverage meets struggle. This nexus expands inexorably.
After Russia’s drubbing in Ukraine in the summertime and fall of 2022, Patrushev flew to Tehran in November of that 12 months to barter the sale of Iranian drones. He has traveled to Latin America to fulfill with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. With Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, Patrushev mentioned “America-orchestrated colour revolutions,” the “damaging actions” of nongovernment organizations, and the dispatching of Cuban troops to Belarus “for coaching.”
Patrushev works the darker aspect of Putin’s insurance policies as effectively. He was doubtless concerned within the 2006 poisoning in London of the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko. The tried killing in Salisbury, England, of the previous double agent Sergei Skripal 12 years later would have required his sign-off. Patrushev can also be plausibly suspected of firsthand involvement in final August’s killing of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the rebellious commander of the Wagner mercenary group. The judicial homicide of the distinguished regime opponent Alexei Navalny, too, couldn’t have occurred with out Patrushev’s approval. Certainly, because the Russian-opposition essayist Alexander Ryklin has identified, the one officers who may have approved the sluggish execution of Navalny had been Putin and Patrushev.
Maybe most chilling, Patrushev has some sway over Russia’s nuclear technique. In October 2009, he introduced in an interview with the nationwide newspaper Izvestia that Russian nuclear weapons weren’t only for use in a “large-scale” struggle. Opposite to the restriction spelled out within the 2000 model of Russian navy doctrine, Patrushev proposed that Russia’s nukes might be deployed in a standard regional battle or perhaps a native one. He additionally thought that in a “crucial scenario,” a preventive strike in opposition to an aggressor “might not be excluded.” 4 months later, Putin signed a revision of the doctrine. As Patrushev had steered, a battle would not must be “large-scale” for Russia to achieve for its atomic bombs and missiles. (Patrushev’s agitation for preventive nuclear assaults has but to make the textual content of the doctrine, however Putin’s blunt nuclear blackmail prior to now two years means that Patrushev might finally get his want.)
In its efforts to grasp Russia’s intentions, america has tried to get to know Patrushev higher. Nationwide Safety Adviser Jake Sullivan’s first name to Patrushev was on January 25, 2021, 5 days after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Sullivan and Patrushev would go on to talk on the cellphone 5 extra occasions, along with assembly in Reykjavik in Might of that 12 months. After their dialog in November, in response to The New York Instances, Patrushev reported discussing methods of “enhancing the ambiance of Russian-American relations.” A joint assertion indicated that Sullivan and Patrushev had mentioned “rising belief between the 2 international locations.”
13 weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. One in every of not more than a handful of officers who’d identified about Putin’s plan—and reportedly a driving power behind it—Patrushev presumably loved weaving an internet of dezinformatsiya round his American counterpart.
This might have been all of the extra gratifying due to the Kremlin’s conviction that point was on Russia’s aspect. In Patrushev’s view, the West is slowly expiring. European civilization has no future, he has stated. Its politics are within the “deepest ethical and mental decline”; it’s headed for the “deepest financial and political disaster.”
America’s downfall can also be nigh, portended not solely by ashes at Yellowstone however by the nation’s primary geography. The US is however “a patchwork quilt” that would “simply come aside on the seams.” Moreover, Patrushev instructed the essential authorities newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the American South might be drifting towards Mexico, whose lands the U.S. grabbed in 1848: “Past doubt,” America’s “southern neighbors” will reclaim the stolen lands, and a passive U.S. citizenry will do nothing to protect the “wholeness” of the nation.
On this and plenty of different methods, Patrushev’s worldview will appear totally alien to most Individuals. However his monumental affect underscores that Putin is much from the one power stopping Russian politics from reorienting towards a extra liberal regime.
The pendulum of Russian historical past has typically oscillated between brutal, bellicose regimes and softer, much less repressive autocracies that retreat from confrontation with the West. However this sample might not maintain for the post-Putin future. After 1 / 4 century below Putin, Russia’s secret companies, the muse of his regime, have degraded all different establishments and monopolized energy. Patrushev, who turns 73 in July, is a 12 months older than the president. But ought to he survive Putin, Patrushev is for certain to deploy his secret military to assist information the transition and will effectively have a shot at popping out on prime. As he likes to say, fact is on his aspect.
