Total War, the Culmination of Putinism

High-tech dehumanization and brutalization

In this enlightening text, the historian demonstrates that the ideology inspired by theories in vogue in post-World War I Germany and under the Third Reich has discreetly driven the trajectory of Putin’s regime since its inception. This ideology arises from the concept of total war. Françoise Thom warns of the danger: Europe is confronted with a conquering country under the influence of Third Reich doctrines, armed with the formidable techniques of political subversion well honed by the Bolsheviks.

« The return of forms of absolutism, albeit without an aristocracy—I mean without interior distancing—can lead to catastrophes whose magnitude still escapes our imagination. However, we can sense them coming... »

Ernst Jünger, October 25, 1941¹

« There are crimes that affect the world as a whole, in its structure and its raison d’être; the man of the Muses, in turn, can no longer devote himself to beauty, but must dedicate himself to freedom. »

Ernst Jünger, November 30, 1941²

« The cruelty of modern times is unique in that it no longer believes in anything indestructible in man. »

Gerhardt Nebel, February 2, 1942³

An article published on February 11, 2019, written by Vladislav Surkov, one of the architects of Putin’s system and an expert at articulating the aspirations of the Kremlin leadership, deserves attention. Surkov observes that the “new type of state” that has been built in Russia is still in its infancy. Russia “has returned to its natural state, the only one possible for it, as a large, growing community of peoples that expands its territory.” It is an openly “military-police” state that follows in the footsteps of the three previous successful models of Russian statehood: that of Ivan III, that of Peter the Great, and that of Lenin. This ”power machine has enabled the continuous rise of the Russian world for centuries.” Thanks to the discrediting of politics and the chaos in Western minds and societies, Putin’s regime “has considerable export potential,”because it is unabashedly the reign of force. A few months later, Surkov revealed another side to the Kremlin’s ambitions. In a futuristic article published on October 11, 2021, entitled “Democracy Deserts and Other Political Wonders of 2121,” he asserts that parliamentary representation is now obsolete since the wishes of the population can be communicated instantly via the Internet. In short, political representation must be consigned to oblivion and replaced by algorithms. Only computer scientists and siloviki will remain at the helm, directing the giants of artificial intelligence from behind the scenes. “The digitization and robotization of the political system will lead to the creation of a high-tech state and a democracy without people […] in which the hierarchy of machines and algorithms will pursue goals beyond the understanding of the people who serve them.” Thus, AI seems to hold the promise of an ultimate elimination of freedom, which has been the dream of Putin’s regime from the very beginning.

The two sides of “total war”

These writings summarize a paradoxical aspect of the ideology that is crystallizing in Kremlin circles: a mixture of archaism and futuristic high tech, which converge in a project of dehumanization. They also illustrate the reversal that is taking place around the central concept of “total war” in Putin’s ideology. Alexander Dugin, drawing on the theories of Carl Schmitt, once the official jurist of the Nazi regime, attributed to the “globalists” a project for a “new world order” that would lead to “total war” and saw Russia as “a gigantic empire of resistance fighters, acting outside the law, but guided by the great intuition of the Earth, the Continent, that ‘Great, Very Great Space’ which is the historical territory of our people.” Today, Russians no longer see themselves as resistance fighters waging war against the liberal order of the globalists. They feel they have won the decisive battle, the overthrow of American hegemony. The concept of “total war” emerging in Putin’s Russia increasingly resembles a carbon copy of the one Erich Ludendorff outlined in Der Totale Krieg, a bestseller published in 1936. The German general drew the lessons he had learned from the defeat of 1918. The ideas developed by Ludendorff were in the air in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1930, Ernst Jünger published an essay, Total Mobilization, which was a reflection on the implications of the 1914-18 war. Jünger believed that the “close alliance” between ”the genius of war and the spirit of progress” would cause “everything in man that was not a cog in the state machine” to disappear, including freedom. Human destiny was to be integrated into the colossal machinery of the state working for the war effort. And, ultimately, “the military order imposes its model on the public order of the state in peacetime.”

Ludendorff, who as early as 1916 advocated “enlisting the entire population in the service of the war economy,” blamed the collapse of November 1918 on the betrayal of politicians (the “stab in the back” myth). [Editor’s note: the armistice was in fact decided by the German general staff]. Putin and the KGB attribute the defeat of the USSR in 1991 to the betrayal of some CPSU leaders and to political intrigues within the Party under Gorbachev. The convergence between Russian ideologues such as Dugin and the thinkers of the German conservative revolution (1918-1932) can be explained by the similar conclusions drawn from a shared experience, defeat, and the chaos that followed. The German conservative revolution was anti-bourgeois, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal. It rejected Western humanism and had nothing but contempt for parliamentarianism. What mattered was the human capacity for sacrifice, a notion that Russian Eurasian ideologues render with the word passionarnost.

The ideology inspired by theories that were popular in post-war Germany and under the Third Reich has discreetly shaped the trajectory of Putin’s regime since its inception. The obsession with unity embodied by the leader, the rejection of pluralism in all its forms, the hatred of individualism, and the attraction to the “total state”, all denote the influence of Nazi Germany’s jurists, whose ideas Dugin has popularized. Ernst Forsthoff, a jurist who espoused National Socialism, contrasts the “total state” with the “liberal state,” which he criticizes for being “minimized and annihilated by its fragmentation, because of legal guarantees determined by laws serving particular interests.” He held that only a state capable of controlling all elements of society could ensure the salvation of the nation. In Carl Schmitt’s view, a truly total state is a strong state that “does not allow any force to arise within it that is hostile to it, hinders it, or divides it”⁴—which is exactly Putin’s approach. We need to bear in mind that the crucible of Putin’s regime is war. It was the Second Chechen War that brought Putin to power, enabling him to turn Russian public opinion around and channel it toward the great power objectives of the Chekist cabal installed at the top of the state by Putin.

Since that initial impetus, the Putin regime has gradually stripped itself of the democratic trappings it had tolerated in its early days, and its militaristic tendencies have become increasingly apparent. Russia has gone from war to war, first in Chechnya, then Georgia, then Ukraine, the “collective West,” and finally Europe. Starting in 2012, Putin broke the implicit contract he had made with the Russian people at the beginning of his reign: “You don’t get involved in politics, and I’ll improve your standard of living.” Shocked by the protests of winter 2011-2012, he set about ruining the Russian middle class, which he considered too rebellious. He started to prepare a major confrontation with the West, which he now saw as his mission. Huge sums of money were allocated to rearmament. Putin began to hoard resources in anticipation of future war: investments that were withheld from the country’s civilian economy. As political scientist Kirill Rogov pointed out, “one would search in vain for another leader capable of inflicting on his country the damage that Putin has managed to inflict in such a short time on the Russian economy (which was doing rather well).” The Russian president seems to follow Ludendorff’s recommendations to the letter: “Total politics must already in peacetime prepare to support this vital struggle in wartime.” The economy must be militarized in peacetime. Banking, industry, and agriculture must have only one goal: self-sufficiency and the production of war machinery. The state must have absolute control to ensure that the army lacks nothing. Like Ludendorff, Putin considers the spiritual unity of the people (seelische Geschlossenheit, “cohesion of souls” in Ludendorff’s words) to be essential. Like him, he is concerned that “military power” may be compromised by the “decline in births.” Like him, he believes in the influence of evil “occult powers” (the Jews and the Roman Catholic Church for Ludendorff). Imbued like Ludendorff with social Darwinism, Putin is incapable of imagining a compromise peace. He is convinced that war, that “earthquake testing the foundations of all buildings” (Jünger), automatically gives victory to authoritarian regimes over liberal ones: cornering democracies into war is tantamount to forcing them to give up their freedoms or perish.

In 2012, Putin launched a policy of planned impoverishment of the Russian people (with the exception of the oligarchs). In his view, the decline in his subjects’ standard of living can only benefit them, as it will detach them from the deleterious influence of the West. Lenin had already understood this: an alternative reality is easier to impose on a miserable population obsessed with survival than on prosperous citizens capable of holding those in power to account. Duma deputies see the icing on the cake, putting forward the idea that the impoverishment of the population could solve the demographic problem. For it is well known that “the higher the standard of living, the fewer children people have.”

On March 10, 2020, the Duma declared that it was canceling Putin’s previous terms of office to allow him to be re-elected until 2036. This violation of the Constitution foreshadows that of Ukraine. Propaganda began to trumpet that a major clash with the West was inevitable. Putin had lost all legitimacy and had no choice but to turn himself into a warlord if he wanted to justify his absolute power for life. For in the event of war, “the people must be ready to follow their leader wherever he goes and do everything to bring the war to a victorious conclusion” (Ludendorff). Putin sees himself very much as a Feldherr, a warlord in the mold of Ludendorff, very different from babbling politicians, accountable to no one, wielding full political and military power to ensure unity of command, with the right to sacrifice an entire army or a province without having to justify himself to a parliament.

Planned savagery

French writer Georges Bernanos saw it coming: ”Modern warfare or total war works for the totalitarian state, providing it with its human material. It forms a new breed of men, softened and broken by the ordeal, resigned to not understanding, to ‘not seeking to understand’, according to their famous saying, seemingly rational and skeptical, but terribly uncomfortable in the freedoms of civilian life, which they have unlearned once and for all and will never relearn”⁵.On February 24, 2022, when Putin launched his offensive against Ukraine, he most certainly did not have a long war in mind. The unexpected resistance of the Ukrainians and their successes in 2022 are deeply humiliating for the Russian army. But, as always, Putin recovered and shifted toward a war of attrition. Russia is slowly drifting toward the practices of war communism. Of course, Putin has not forgotten that it was economic collapse that brought down the USSR. His support for technocrats trying to save the Russian economy, such as Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank, shows that he has no desire to return to the inflation of the 1990s. But he is allowing himself to be drawn into the vortex of total war because he sees it as a means of securing his power for life, even if it irresistibly pushes Russia back toward Bolshevik methods. Spoliation and redistribution of assets has been on the rise since 2022. Ration cards are making a comeback; restrictions on price freedom are multiplying. The administration of the war effort is insidiously replacing civilian structures.

Putin has understood that, in the long run, war has exactly the same effect on people’s minds as his propaganda: it instills a distaste for democracy and parliamentarianism, contempt for reason, cynicism, suspicion, a feeling of powerlessness, passivity, and an obsessive preoccupation with the immediate necessities of existence—food and sleep. It atrophies the moral sense and narrows the intellect. War is an operation of planned brutalization, both in Russia and in Ukraine. Ukrainians are fighting for human dignity. The Russian army is one of the instruments with which the Russian regime cauterizes this feeling in those who have dealings with it. The last vestiges of morality are swept away, including the sense of family that the regime claims to defend against the decadent mores of the West. Those who enlist to kill people whom propaganda otherwise presents as Russians are paid handsomely. Ninety-nine percent of soldiers are fighting for money⁶. Mothers urge their sons to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense and show off on television in front of the car that generous death benefits have allowed them to buy (the families of soldiers killed in action receive compensation of 7 million rubles, about $100,000). Some encourage their friends to sign a contract in order to receive the 500,000 ruble referral bonus. Start-ups run by “black widows” are popping up here and there. Enterprising pimps scour areas frequented by homeless people, seduce a drunk with a bottle of vodka, take him to the military police station where he signs a contract, and then marry him to a woman from their network. The man is promptly killed in a “bloody assault,” and the happy bride shares the millions in death benefits with her accomplice. The soldiers on the Pokrovsk front are left to fend for themselves, abandoned by their officers, without water, food, or warm clothing. Officers engage in racketeering, forcing their men to pay them huge sums of money to avoid these bloody assaults. Those who have just signed a contract are fleeced from day one. “If you don’t pay, you die,” the officer tells them. The officers beat the soldiers, seize the credit cards of the dead and empty their accounts. They extort bribes from the wounded by threatening to send them back to the front. Those with minor injuries can receive certificates of serious injury in exchange for money⁷. People are capable of anything for money: this is the main message of Putin’s gospel. Abroad, it is the Trump administration that has undertaken to prove it.

De-Europeanization

In 1863, at the time of the Tsar’s repression of the Polish uprising, when tensions with Europe threatened to escalate into armed conflict, Russian writer Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile, hoped that war would bring about the return of old Russia, ridding it of the dross of Europeanization that had accumulated since Peter the Great. War is seen by Slavophiles as a means of Russifying imperial power. In today’s Russia, war fulfills the same role. Nationalist journalist Mikhail Demurin echoes the concerns of the Slavophiles of yesteryear when he points out the link between the war of expansion, the autarkic ambition that has been driving Kremlin ideologues for years, and the thirst for internal purging: “The military operation that our country is conducting against the fascist regime that seized Kiev in 2014 is increasingly taking on the character of a political operation of internal purification. It is lancing, one by one, the abscesses that formed on Russia’s body thanks to the efforts of the West in the 1990s and which were not cleaned up in the 2000s.”

Putin and the “turbopatriots” welcome the fact that the war is enabling large-scale purging: “Every people, and the Russian people in particular, will always be able to recognize scum and traitors, spit them out as one would spit out a fly that has entered one’s mouth… I am sure that such a real and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, our cohesion, and our ability to meet all challenges,” Putin said on March 15, 2022. Deputy Alexander Borodai echoes this sentiment. Ultimately, the important thing is not to have conquered a few territories: “The main thing is that our society has shaken itself up and purified itself.” The war is eliminating Russia’s Europeanized populations through emigration and forming a new elite more to Putin’s liking, chosen from among the veterans of the war in Ukraine—men hardened by crimes that have gone unpunished, desperate men.

The return of terror

Ludendorff lists the measures to be taken to ensure national cohesion in wartime: “The most rigorous censorship of the press, the harshest laws against the betrayal of military secrets, the banning of meetings, the arrest of at least the leaders of the ‘dissidents,’ the monitoring of rail traffic and radio.“ The Kremlin leaders have surveillance and control tools at their disposal that the general could only have dreamed of. Thanks to technological advances, the state can tighten its grip on all areas of public life and erect a digital Gulag. So-called “spreading of fake news” and “discrediting” of the armed forces is now punishable by law. The laws targeting “foreign agents” have been tightened. Searching the internet for so-called “extremist content” is also punishable by law. Since December 2022, all companies that collect citizens’ biometric data have been required to transfer it to the Unified State Biometric System (EBS). The law does not prohibit law enforcement agencies from accessing this data. This creates a technological basis for the widespread use of facial recognition systems, which are already actively used to identify and arrest participants in protests and “enemies of the state.” Between 2025 and 2026, the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Digital Development plans to spend 2 billion rubles (more than $25 million) on the creation of a unified AI platform to process security camera footage throughout Russia. Another electronic system, the register of persons subject to military service, aggregates personal data from other government databases and is fueled by information provided by employers and banks. Conscripts are automatically prohibited from leaving the country and are subject to other restrictions, including a ban on driving, until they report to the military commissariat. In August 2025, when the state messaging service MAX, to which law enforcement agencies have full access, was launched, Roskomnadzor (the Russian agency responsible for internet censorship) blocked the ability to make audio and video calls via Telegram and WhatsApp. Since 2024, the FSB has been stepping up arrests of prominent figures in the regime, and since 2025, it has even been given the right to have its own prisons, escaping the supervision of the Ministry of Justice.

“War will erase everything” (Russian proverb)

Putin seems to think, like 18^th Century French memorialist Manon Roland, that ”it is through the accumulation of crimes that impunity is ensured.” War allows for social engineering experiments that would be impossible in peacetime, for example, getting rid of human ballast. Here again, we see parallels with the ideology and practices of the Third Reich. In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a document, backdated to September 1, 1939, which read as follows: ”Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with expanding the powers of some doctors to be named. These doctors will be able to grant a merciful death to patients who have been judged incurable according to the most rigorous assessment possible.” Approximately 300,000 mentally ill people and others with disabilities were murdered under the guise of “euthanasia” in the German Reich and the occupied territories. The aim was to ”purify the body of the people of those who are nothing but dead weight,” to rid it of “lives unworthy of being lived.” Putin, for his part, enlists “a bunch of alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, disabled people… These people are sent to the meat grinder” (assault troops). He shares with Nazi ideologues their conception steeped in social Darwinism: this is evidenced, for example, by the astonishing remarks he made during his meeting with soldiers’ mothers, when he explained to them that without the war, their sons would in all likelihood have died of alcoholism or in a road accident, whereas those who had fallen on the battlefield in Ukraine had not perished in vain. In short, the Russian president suggests that he did them a favor by freeing them from their ”lives unworthy of being lived,” to use the Nazi propagandists’ phrase. What a wonderful view of the Russian people from a man who constantly accuses Europeans of being “Russophobic”! The idea of raising the retirement age by 10 years is along the same lines: fewer useless mouths to feed. Better still, propagandist Sergey Mardan proposes abolishing pensions: “Those who have had children will have enough to live on when they are old. The others can just croak.” In Nazi Germany, writes French historian Johann Chapoutot, ”the procreation of children became a political imperative,” a Dienst am Führer “encouraged by the state and propaganda⁸.” The same is true in Putin’s Russia.

Putin is also concerned with what the Nazis called “racial hygiene,” as the government disproportionately targets ethnic minorities and populations in the poorest regions. Eighty percent of the mobilization orders handed out in Crimea in September 2022 were addressed to Tatars [Editor’s note: Tatars make up only 20% of the regional population]. “In Buryatia, there is no question of ‘partial’ mobilization. What we are seeing is total mobilization,” observes a local activist. According to independent analyses, men belonging to minority groups in Russia are four times more likely to be killed in Ukraine than men of Russian ethnicity, and 100 times more likely than Muscovites.

Darwinian calculation also appears in the war of attrition against Ukraine. The ultimate goal is to exchange the ballast of the Russian population for control over the Ukrainian population, which is considered more enterprising, harder-working, and more combative than the Russian population. Ukrainian prisoners of war report that the Russians offered them the chance to switch sides and join the Russian forces in order to “occupy Europe together.” But to reach this goal, the national spirit in Ukraine must be eradicated. Ludendorff pointed out that the 1914-18 war “was not only waged by the military powers of the belligerent states, which sought their mutual destruction; the peoples themselves were put at the service of the war, the war was also directed against them and plunged them into the deepest suffering […]. In addition to the struggle against the enemy’s armed forces […] there was the struggle against the morale and vitality of the enemy peoples, with the aim of disintegrating and paralyzing them.” He recommended terrorizing the civilian population with bombings so that they would beg their government to stop the war: “This is a war of annihilation. If we do not understand this, we may defeat the enemy today, but thirty years later we will have to fight them again.” This is exactly what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. Their propagandists agree with Ludendorff: it is no longer a question of defeating the enemy army, but of breaking the enemy nation’s will to live. The war of attrition aims to eliminate the Ukrainian national elites, so that only the corrupt, the cowardly, and the opportunists who can be integrated into the “Russian world” remain in the country. 

It is understandable why Putin seeks to prolong the war: it is a time bomb under the young Ukrainian state. It is an incubator for collaborators, as shown by the French, Chechen, and Georgian cases. In France, hatred of parliamentarianism, which blossomed in the trenches, fueled extreme parties, both the far right, such as Action Française, and the left, which was increasingly tempted by communism. One must read Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night to understand the state of mind of Ukrainian soldiers at the bottom of their freezing trenches, trying to survive from one day to the next for weeks and months on end. Admittedly, for them, the war is far from absurd, as it might have seemed to the combatants of the First World War, since it is a matter of national survival. But under heavy enemy artillery fire, seeing the Russian hordes closing in around them, they too can reach the “generally resigned nihilism” observed in the poilus by a French military doctor. They too could despise and hate those who were hiding away at the rear, the politicians and their fine speeches, their venality. They too could suspect betrayal. The war of attrition, reinforced by the barrage of psychological warfare, paves the way for the forced Russification of a Ukraine bled dry.

Addiction to war

While the majority of the Russian population seems increasingly tired of the “special military operation” and stubbornly refuses to embark on “total war,” it seems that part of the Russian elite can no longer conceive of their national existence outside of war. They dream of installing Russia in war. Pyotr Tolstoy, the vice-president of the Duma, cannot hide his excitement at the bright prospects of the sacrifices to come: “Everyone needs to realize that mobilization and a world war to the death await us. Some will lose their jobs, some will lose their businesses, many will be maimed, and even more of our compatriots will be carried off by death. War is our national ideology!” Ludendorff advocated massive support for large families to guarantee the “battalions of 1950.” Alexander Dugin sees just as far ahead. In his view, the soldiers who will sacrifice themselves for Russia in 20 years’ time must be born today. Deploring the fact that Russian women have their first child at the age of 30, he exclaims: ”It’s too late. Far too late! I never tire of repeating it: Russia will be at war for at least 40 years, perhaps 50 or 60 years. The soldiers who will fight for Russia in 20 years should be born now, this year, next year, the year after. We need to start giving birth to our heroes right now…” War is no longer a limited phenomenon; it is becoming the normal modus operandi in Russia. Through war, Putin’s regime seems close to achieving its ultimate goal: the complete elimination of human freedom, in accordance with Ernst Jünger’s concept of “total mobilization”: a “radical requisition” that “requires the reorganization of even the most internal market and the most tenuous nerve center of activity.” It involves “increasing restrictions on individual freedom […] with the aim of eliminating everything that is not a cog in the state machine.” Russian leaders would like to be able to say of their compatriots what Ernst Jünger observed in Total Mobilization: “Here we see the astonishing spectacle of millions of men who, renouncing all personal freedom, rush enthusiastically into the furnace, as if obeying a magnetic call.” But nothing helps; money remains the main motivation in Russia. Putin’s propaganda kills even fanaticism.

The “war of all the people”

One wonders what ideological toxins Putin’s regime has used to paralyze the Russian population to the point of making it accept without batting an eyelid a bloodbath unprecedented since World War II. A repressive arsenal does not explain everything. The corrosion of intelligence and the erosion of morality induced by the policy of dumbing down the people, pursued by Putin’s regime since its inception, are bearing fruit.

The invocation of union sacrée masks the Russian authorities’ intention to “drag” all Russians into the crimes committed in Ukraine. It started at the top. On February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin convened a Security Council meeting which, in an unprecedented move, was filmed and then broadcast on Russian television and the internet. The aim was to show the unanimity of the Russian dignitaries summoned to approve their leader’s decision to recognize the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, in reality to give their consent to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We remember the hesitations of Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence, who, visibly paralyzed, stammered, evoking the possibility of giving Ukraine a “last chance” to follow the peace process, while Vladimir Putin rebuked him like a schoolboy caught out of line. Now, the entire Russian people are being made to understand that there is no turning back, that they must follow Putin into the abyss: such is the role of the massacres in Bucha, much like when Hitler’s regime, in the fall of 1943, leaked information about the Holocaust to the Wehrmacht to signal to the military that all bridges with the West had been burned. “We have so much on our conscience that we must win, otherwise our entire people will be wiped out,” Goebbels wrote in his diary (June 16, 1941). RT Editor Margarita Simonyan, one of the stars of Putin’s propaganda machine, takes up Goebbels’ argument and strives to convince her compatriots that all Russians, from the greatest to the smallest, are in the same boat, and that all will be considered guilty by the West if Russia loses the war: “The Hague will even go after the street sweeper who cleans the cobblestones behind the Kremlin.”

Starting on September 21, 2022, propaganda was ordered to launch the slogan of “the war of all the people.” We are back to one of Ludendorff’s key ideas. Total war is “the struggle of the people for their lives.” At stake is the survival of the entire people. “In conducting the war, it is necessary to deploy and maintain to the utmost the intrinsic and material forces of the fatherland (and today, I would add, especially the spiritual forces).”Sergey Kirienko, the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration, formulated the new line: “Russia has always won its wars provided that they were fought by all the people. It has always been this way. We will win this war: the hot war, the economic war, and the psychological and informational war that is being waged against us. But for this to happen, everyone must be involved in the war.” Russians are being fed the idea that their survival as a state and civilization depends on the outcome of the war: “The goal of this war, which is already quite open, is an attempt to eliminate Russia as an independent sovereign state,” Kirienko insisted. Russia is drifting imperceptibly into a religious war. An official from the Ministry of Justice solemnly explains that anyone who is not aware of the “spirituality” of what is happening [the war against Ukraine] has no place in Russia. The Ukrainians are paving the way for the Antichrist, the propagandists hammer on. Russia’s role is to save humanity, and to do so it must win, even if it means resorting to nuclear weapons, explains political scientist Sergei Karaganov. “Our mission is to fight Satan,”screeches propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. The theme of a war against “the collective West” is gaining momentum. And this is a centuries-old conflict, since Europe has always wanted to destroy Russia. The analogy with Third Reich propaganda is striking: “The confrontation with the USSR is presented and experienced by the Nazis as the final episode in a racial gigantomachy that has spanned centuries of history, a battle of Titans pitting the Aryan race against its Jewish enemy and its minions,” writes Johann Chapoutot.

Ludendorff’s theories, so popular in Nazi Germany, ultimately contributed to a very large extent to the defeat of the Reich. Indeed, Ludendorff’s contempt for politics was one of the causes of Germany’s defeat in the USSR. If Hitler, like Stalin, had played the subversion card from the outset of his offensive, for example by proclaiming an independent Ukrainian state and dissolving kolkhozes, instead of relying on brute force, things might have turned out differently. Today, we are facing a Russia that has adopted the methods of total war, but is careful not to neglect the political instrument, thanks to which the Kremlin has succeeded in bringing the Trump administration over to its side. In Europe, its propaganda is swelling the ranks of right-wing nationalist parties, which still do not understand that they are being manipulated and remotely controlled by Moscow to scuttle their nation, just like Donald Trump’s United States. For the Russia they are turning to denies nations the right to real, not folkloric, existence, as shown by its relentless war against Ukraine. It projects itself as a hegemonic power on the European continent, dominating in the manner of empires, through corrupt elites it has co-opted and controls. This is the danger we face: a conquering country under the sway of Third Reich doctrines, armed with the formidable techniques of political subversion well honed by the Bolsheviks.In early January 2026, Françoise Thom will publish a new book, La Guerre totale de Vladimir Poutine (Vladimir Putin’s All-out War), published by À l’Est de Brest-Litovsk. You can already pre-order it on the publisher’s website.

1. Ernst Jünger, Premier journal parisien, Christian Bourgois éditeur, 1980, p. 58.
2. Ibid., p. 71.
3. Quoted in: Ernst Jünger, op. cit., p. 98.
4. Quoted in: Johann Chapoutot, Nazism and All-out War: Between Mechanics and Mysticism, Sens public, March 7, 2005.
5. Georges Bernanos, France Against the Robots, in: Scandal of Truth, Éditions Robert Laffont, 2019, p. 1067.
6. Testimony of Captain Oleg Miller.
7. Ibid.
8. Quoted in: Johann Chapoutot, Nazism and All-out war: Between Mechanics and Mysticism, Sens public, March 7, 2005.