What Putin’s No. 2 Believes About the West

When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it will annihilate all life on the North American continent. Siberia will become one of the safest places on Earth—which is yet another reason “the Anglo-Saxon elites” want to capture the region from Russia.  

So says Nikolai Patrushev, the second-most powerful man in Moscow. Currently the head of Russia’s Security Council, Patrushev has been a colleague of Vladimir Putin’s since the two served in the Leningrad KGB in the 1970s and is now the president’s confidant and top adviser. A general of the army and a former director of the FSB—the successor agency to the Soviet KGB—Patrushev is also the de facto overlord of the country’s other secret services. Among Kremlin courtiers, he alone appears licensed to speak for Putin on strategic matters, including nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s view of the U.S., Europe, and NATO.

Following Putin’s lead, many top Russian bureaucrats compete in conjuring up monstrous conspiracy theories. Yet even in this cracked-up crowd, Patrushev stands out for the luridness and intensity of his anti-West—and especially anti-U.S.—animus. The hyperbole of his comments would make the Soviet propagandists of my youth blush: His prominence is a reminder that, if Putin were to lose power tomorrow, his potential successors could be more warlike and expansionist, not less. Americans should worry about how much Patrushev’s outlook reinforces his boss’s—and about how his delusional, more-belligerent-than-Putin fulminations in long interviews with top-circulation Russian newspapers become the party line, which deafening propaganda then inculcates in the mind of millions of Russians.

In Patrushev’s telling, the West has been maligning and bullying Russia for half a millennium. As early as the 16th century, “Russophobic” Western historians besmirched Russia’s first czar, Ivan IV—a mass murderer and sadist better known as Ivan the Terrible. Patrushev insists that Ivan is merely a victim of a concocted “black legend” that “portrayed him as a tyrant.”  

To the Security Council chief, the West’s 20th-century siege of Russia had nothing to do with communism and the Cold War. In fact, the fall of the mighty Soviet Union made the country a softer target for the Western plotters, and the United States strove to exploit the opportunity by forcing Russia to give up its “sovereignty, national consciousness, culture, and an independent foreign and domestic policy.” The conspiracy’s final objectives are Russia’s dismemberment, the elimination of the Russian language, the country’s removal from the geopolitical map, and its confinement to the borders of the Duchy of Muscovy, a small medieval realm.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

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 “could have been created” by the Pentagon with the assistance of several of the largest transnational pharmaceutical firms and the “Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros, and Biden foundations.”

Patrushev’s greatest current 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 everything Russian.” Today, Ukraine is no more than a testing ground for aging U.S. armaments as well as a place whose natural resources the West would prefer to exploit mercilessly—and “without the indigenous population.” Preserving Ukraine as a sovereign state is not in America’s plans, Patrushev claims. Afraid of attacking Russia directly, “NATO instructors herd Ukrainian boys to certain death” in the trenches. Indeed, the West is essentially perpetrating an “annihilation” of the Ukrainians, whereas Russia’s goal is to “put an end to the West’s bloody experiment to destroy the fraternal people of Ukraine.”

This is the picture of the world that Patrushev serves up to Putin. The adviser provides “a framework” for the Russian president’s vision, the prominent Russian political sociologist Nikolai Petrov has argued.

Repeated and internalized by its audience, propaganda captures and imprisons the propagandist. Patrushev said last May that Western special services were training terrorists and saboteurs for “committing crimes on the territory of our country.” Russian civilians have suffered because of that view. Weeks before Islamic State terrorists attacked a music hall in a Moscow suburb late last month, U.S. intelligence officials told the Russian government about a threat to the venue. Putin dismissed the U.S.’s warning as “obvious blackmail” and a “plot to scare and destabilize our society.”

While furnishing his compatriots with elaborately paranoid interpretations of the world, Patrushev vigorously participates in shaping it. More and more a policy maker in his own right, he frequently stands in for Putin in essential negotiations with top allies, reducing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to ceremonial duties and the signing of meaningless treaties. As the exiled Russian journalist Maxim Glikin has pointed out, Patrushev is where foreign policy meets war. This nexus expands inexorably.

After Russia’s drubbing in Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2022, Patrushev flew to Tehran in November of that year to negotiate the sale of Iranian drones. He has traveled to Latin America to meet with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. With Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, Patrushev discussed “America-orchestrated color revolutions,” the “destructive activities” of nongovernment organizations, and the dispatching of Cuban troops to Belarus “for training.”

Patrushev works the darker side of Putin’s policies as well. He was likely involved in the 2006 poisoning in London of the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko. The attempted killing in Salisbury, England, of the former double agent Sergei Skripal 12 years later would have required his sign-off. Patrushev is also plausibly suspected of firsthand involvement in last August’s killing of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the rebellious commander of the Wagner mercenary group. The judicial murder of the prominent regime opponent Alexei Navalny, too, could not have happened without Patrushev’s approval. Indeed, as the Russian-opposition essayist Alexander Ryklin has pointed out, the only officials who could have authorized the slow execution of Navalny were Putin and Patrushev.

Perhaps most chilling, Patrushev has some sway over Russia’s nuclear strategy. In October 2009, he announced in an interview with the national newspaper Izvestia that Russian nuclear weapons were not just for use in a “large-scale” war. Contrary to the restriction spelled out in the 2000 version of Russian military doctrine, Patrushev proposed that Russia’s nukes could be deployed in a conventional regional conflict or even a local one. He also thought that in a “critical situation,” a preventive strike against an aggressor “may not be excluded.” Four months later, Putin signed a revision of the doctrine. As Patrushev had suggested, a conflict would no longer have to be “large-scale” for Russia to reach for its atomic bombs and missiles. (Patrushev’s agitation for preventive nuclear attacks has yet to make the text of the doctrine, but Putin’s blunt nuclear blackmail in the past two years suggests that Patrushev may eventually get his wish.)  

In its efforts to understand Russia’s intentions, the United States has tried to get to know Patrushev better. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s first call to Patrushev was on January 25, 2021, five days after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Sullivan and Patrushev would go on to speak on the phone five more times, in addition to meeting in Reykjavik in May of that year. After their conversation in November, according to The New York Times, Patrushev reported discussing ways of “improving the atmosphere of Russian-American relations.” A joint statement indicated that Sullivan and Patrushev had discussed “increasing trust between the two countries.”

[Anna Nemtsova: Putin’s ‘rabble of thin-necked henchmen’ ]

Thirteen weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. One of no more than a handful of officials who’d known about Putin’s plan—and reportedly a driving force behind it—Patrushev presumably enjoyed weaving a web of dezinformatsiya around his American counterpart.

This would have been all the more gratifying because of the Kremlin’s conviction that time was on Russia’s side. In Patrushev’s view, the West is slowly expiring. European civilization has no future, he has said. Its politics are in the “deepest moral and intellectual decline”; it is headed for the “deepest economic and political crisis.”

America’s downfall is also nigh, portended not only by ashes at Yellowstone but by the nation’s basic geography. The United States is but “a patchwork quilt” that could “easily come apart at the seams.” Furthermore, Patrushev told the main government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the American South could be drifting toward Mexico, whose lands the U.S. grabbed in 1848: “Beyond doubt,” America’s “southern neighbors” will reclaim the stolen lands, and a passive U.S. citizenry will do nothing to preserve the “wholeness” of the country.

In this and many other ways, Patrushev’s worldview will seem utterly alien to most Americans. But his enormous influence underscores that Putin is far from the only force preventing Russian politics from reorienting toward a more liberal regime.   

The pendulum of Russian history has generally oscillated between brutal, bellicose regimes and softer, less repressive autocracies that retreat from confrontation with the West. But this pattern may not hold for the post-Putin future. After a quarter century under Putin, Russia’s secret services, the foundation of his regime, have degraded all other institutions and monopolized power. Patrushev, who turns 73 in July, is a year older than the president. Yet should he survive Putin, Patrushev is certain to deploy his secret army to help guide the transition and may well have a shot at coming out on top. As he likes to say, truth is on his side.