I’VE been staring into Putin’s face for the last few days, trying to hear what ticks within. My own preference for explaining history is materialism and class interest – that “great men”, even as they maraud about, are in modern times backed by (and hold together) diverse interests and forces.

However, as Russia is ripped out of the Western system by sanctions and shutdowns – with a great pinging of wires and fizzing of circuits – the geopolitical commentators (of my bent) are generally confused.

There was an underlying deal, they say, that Putin struck with the oligarchs and state managers. They would have access to the benefits of globalised capitalism. This meant a lucrative trade in commodities, private schools for their children and hangouts with celebrities and footballers, in London and the South East. In exchange, a blind eye would be turned to Putin’s autocratic grip on domestic power.

So why this 20thC (even 19thC) exercise, this colonial-style land grab and regime change over Ukraine, uniting the democracies of the West in outrage? Why is Putin tipping over the oligarchs’ gravy train, ripping up their web of wealth? If these actions are inexplicable, in terms of material interest, maybe we need to look into Putin’s psyche for answers.

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You feel powerless enough as an ordinary citizen in circumstances like this. But at least some insight into the motivations and formation of Putin helps with your depressing fury at the zero-sum battling of male leaders.

I’ve found a few compelling experts, whose readings and testimony is worth the effort. For example, I’ve been gripped by the various testimonies of Gleb Pavlovsky, who was a close Putin advisor (alongside the infamous “political technologist” Vladislav Surkov) from late 1999 to 2011.

The journal New Left Review contains a revelatory interview with Pavlovsky from 2012. The Putin described here holds a cynical and pragmatic vision – much more Machiavelli than Mad Vlad.

Putin “feels comfortable and assured in his position; he’s not afraid of arguing his corner. He thinks: look at those people in the West, here’s what they say, and here’s what they do in reality”, says Pavlovsky.

“There is a wonderful system with two parties, one passes power to the other, and behind them stands one and the same thing: capital. Now it’s one fraction of capital, now another”, continues Pavlovsky. “And with this money they’ve bought up all the intelligentsia and they organize whatever politics they need. Let’s do the same!”

Pavlovsky on Putin’s 2012 thinking on economy is even more bracing. “His thinking was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. If we had made more money than the western capitalists, we could have just bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t have.

“That’s all there is to it. It was a game and we lost, because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs.”

Well, that sounds like Putin the materialist (and no doubt, the man that Bush, Blair and Merkel thought they could do business with in the 2000s).

I checked on Pavlovsky’s thoughts in recent weeks, Referring to Putin’s fevered rhetoric on Ukraine’s danger to Russia, Pavlovsky now says: “I have no clue where he got all that; he seems to be reading something totally strange…He’s become an isolated man, more isolated than Stalin was.”

What Putin is “reading”, as he strafes Ukrainians with thermobaric bombs and makes nuclear-apocalyptic threats, may seem like the most minor of concerns. But perhaps not, if the “realist” schools of geopolitical thinking are baffled by his actions.

Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin is written by Michel Eltchaninoff, editor of France’s Philosophie magazine, who specialises in Russian thought. He’s read and analyzed Putin’s speech-making for decades, and points to some very regular intellectual touchstones.

From the Crimean to Ukrainian invasions, Putin is gripped by the belief that the West (and the West in Ukraine) “has only one objective: to prevent the development of Russia”. Eltchaninoff sources this in a few writers that are regularly and ostentatiously quoted by Putin.

For example, the ethnographer Lev Gumilev held that there is (according to the Financial Times) “a quantifiable measure of the mental and ideological energy at the disposal of a given nation at a given time” called passionarnost.

In Febuary 2021, Putin 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… Russia carries the power and potential of a young people…We possess an infinite genetic code.”

So far, so worryingly neo-fascist. It doesn’t get much better with Putin’s allegiance to the essayist Ivan Ilyin. His 1954 book Our Tasks “is always by my side, at my fingertips”, Putin said last year.

In these pages, Ilyin believes the West wants to “dismember Russia in order to bring it under Western control, defeat it and finally make it disappear.” The Russian alternative is a “democratic dictatorship”, as Eltchaninoff summarises Ilyin, whose leader “strikes the enemy instead of pronouncing empty words; directs, instead of selling to strangers.”

This is indeed “something totally strange”, as Gleb Pavlovsky puts it. The advisor parted from Putin, disagreeing with the idea that he should return to being President in 2011-12. Putin adopted a more authoritarian and divisive cast to his powers and policies—reacting brutally to Pussy Riot, lecturing the country on Russian history and values.

“This is so much unlike the Putin of 17 years ago”, recalls Pavlovsky in 2017 on PBS’s Frontline show, “that sometimes I get the impression that it’s a different man”.

Yet one of his earlier 2012 comments seems like an explanation. Putin bases his views, says Pavlovsky, “on the idea that the Russian people are ready at any moment to pounce on the authorities and tear them into bloody pieces”.

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So there’s some takes from a French historian of ideas, and an ex-Putin advisor. It’s hardly an authoritative briefing. But one last striking item I read this week recalls the speech Putin made, in perfect German, to the Bundestag in Berlin, a few weeks after 9/11.

“I would like to stress right away that talking about any ‘war between civilizations’ is inadmissible”, Putin states at one point. He does seem like an entirely different manner of statesman.

It’s very far from the talk among the international relations experts I’ve been reading. All of them are trying to imagine what the “off-ramp” might be for an isolated, paranoid, nuclear-threatening pariah, perhaps in various forms of poor health, who may need his manifest failure to look like partial success.

It’s been wearisome, and slightly nauseating, looking into Vladimir Putin’s face this week. But it’s been useful too. When (and why) does a Machiavellian money-man shift into being a near-mystic civilisational warrior? It’s at least a question to explore, something active to do, than just passively spectating on the “great men” – damn them all.