俄羅斯與烏克蘭背後戰役的思想脈絡心得

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 "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".

It is necessary, then, to understand that what is actually happening in Ukraine is the result of a vision of Russia that is deeply embedded in the mind of Putin. In 2008, he punished Georgia for its desire to leave the orbit of the old imperial power. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and prevented Ukraine from joining Nato by starting the Donbas conflict. But that is not enough for him. He wants a confrontation with - and a victory over - a west that he holds responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, for the weakness of Russia in the 1990s, and for the autonomous tendencies of the old Soviet republics.

心得：俄羅斯和烏克蘭戰役背後的戰爭，其實牽扯到更複雜的思想脈絡。普丁長年受到一些思想家的影響，這些思想在他心中成形，淺移默化影響今天的行動與決策，他在公開場合所公開的理論與觀點，從他所透露的世界觀和思想邏輯就可見端倪。

或許我們從小到大所接觸的內容不管媒介是從人、書、電腦、手機等等，都會悄悄塑造他的思想體系，最終影響行為。以前接觸的朋友，多是談論ㄧ些不健康內容，導致後來在求學過程偏離課業，腦袋近是些污穢，完全提不起學習的動力。現在回頭看，如果一個人從小接觸的思想不夠純正，很可能就在混沌中浪費掉十幾二十年。等清醒後，已是而立、強仕之年了。在這個資訊爆炸時代，能如何吸取正確思想、保持心智清明，恐怕是每個人都要面對的一場大考驗。