I have as of late, I imagine with others across the country, been doing some reading on Russia. Generally suspicious of the certitude of the 24-hr news slurry, I’ve been working instead through a collection of essays put-out by The Center for Strategic and International Studies and MIT Press back in 2008. In particular I’ve been intrigued by the contribution of Clifford Gaddy and Andrew Kuchins in a chapter titled “Putin’s Plan” (pp. 201-216).
Setting aside those futural speculations that may or may not have gone according to the guesses of the authors in the years that lay between its publication and today, the chapter has been helpful in the way it illuminates —more than anything else I’ve found on offer— a way on understanding Putin’s motivating exigencies: he is a man married beyond all measure to a self-authored ideal (“The Plan”) which, like Sauron’s Ring, has become now so closely linked with its maker’s life that the two are mutually interdependent. And thus leaders like Gryzlov and Medvedev can make public references, respectively, to “Putin’s Plan” or “the author of that strategy” (quoted in Gaddy and Kuchins, p.202). The “author” and the “plan” share a common life.
And, as Gaddy and Kuchins point-out, this plan is not the nostalgic romanticism of a youthful classic Marxist-Leninist. It is the synthetic creation of a young Putin serving in Yuri Andropov’s KGB who married “Western business theory” with Soviet values in order to “search for the answer to the Soviet economic dilemma in the post-Stalin era” (202, 203). The goal of this vision Gaddy and Kuchins summarize as aiming to solve “how to achieve increased efficiency without losing control” (203).
The rest of the chapter does a magisterial job of explaining exactly what “The Plan” entails. I’ll allow those who want to read the rest of their essay to do that, and will conclude my interlocution with them by noting the way in which their conclusions do not seem to follow, or at least underestimate, the degree to which Putin and his Plan, as a single entity, will refuse anything other than The Plan into which Putin has poured all of his will and self.
I was moved in this reading by the analogy that Putin-and-his-Plan models for leaders of communities who can also become so married to their visions for their community that they become blind to all else. Efficiency and Control are the two nodes in an endless feedback loop of imagined continual progress towards the ever-receding horizon of abstract power. And if this is true of leaders in general it is true of pastors in particular. We are charged to lead and give and steward vision for the local parish entrusted to our care, but that vision must ultimately be something beyond the persona of the individual leader; our communities must be those we can imagine beyond the limits and foreclosures of our own leadership.
Bonhoeffer knew the reality of the temptation towards the Sauronic collapse of Plan and the Person of the leader: “Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream […] God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams” (26). Political leaders and church leaders alike can be warned of being so wedded to a Plan that, like Sauron’s Eye, they become blind to all else —even their own self-erasure. It is not that things like “vision” or “leadership” are at all wrong in and of themselves. They are good things. But like all good things they become twisted when set-up for evil purposes: the subjugation of other wills, and the pursuit of what Tolkien called “the iron crown of power”. In an age when much poor leadership is being exposed we need not reject outright the basic concept of leadership. Rather, we must be on-guard (and that begins by self-examination) against an attitude that “enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly” (27). To quote Bonhoeffer at some length, this person:
[…] stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself (27-8).
As we watch eastern Europe, as we journey through Lent, as we in our own way pursue American iterations of a vision looped between unlimited efficiency and total control, as we wrestle to lay all our efforts and dreams at the foot of the Cross, let us be ever mindful that “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble”.