Nietzsche exalted Russia as a dark, patient, durable power that promised a lot more than what he saw as the weak and decaying Europe. The ideas driving Putin’s war against Ukraine are a lot more Nietzschean, and European, than many like to admit, argues John Milbank.

In one of his last works, The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche declares Russia to be ‘the only power that has durability in it, which can wait, which can still produce something…the antithesis of that pitiable European petty-state politics and nervousness, with which the foundation of the German Reich has entered its crucial phase…’. Earlier, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche had already made the same claim that only Russia possessed a real collective and institution-building will, whereas liberalism and democracy, which allow and celebrate passive weakness, were causing European institutions to disintegrate. These and other comments now seem prescient, demonstrating the Nietzschean roots of Putin’s ideology.

One of the things Nietzsche draws attention to is Russia’s different timescale, its ‘patience’ that derives from ‘a power to will that has been stored and accumulated for ages’. He then suggests that a weakening of this power, which ultimately threatens Western Europe, would require more than just a defeat of Russia in India and ‘complications in Asia’. It would also need ‘an atomisation of the [Russian] empire into many small bodies and above all the introduction of parliamentarian nonsense, including the compulsion for everyone to read his newspaper while eating his breakfast’.