There is a recurring question that comes up whenever people try to take the measure of the men who currently dominate the headlines: can a figure like Putin, or like Trump, actually change the course of history the way a Lenin or a Genghis Khan once did? The instinct is to answer by ranking personalities — to argue that these two are smaller men than the world-shakers of the past, or that the historical conditions simply aren’t ripe. I think that instinct, while not entirely wrong, misses the decisive point. The scale of a personality matters, yes. But what truly separates the man who reshapes the world from the man who merely disrupts it is not raw force of character. It is whether he carries an idea in his head — a developed picture of a future he intends to build. And it is precisely here that both Putin and Trump are empty.
What Lenin and Genghis Khan Had
Consider Lenin. Whatever one thinks of him, he did not simply seize power; he arrived with an ideology, a theory, a whole architecture of thought. He took Marxism and, as the old Soviet phrase had it, “creatively reworked” it — applied it in practice, watched it fail, and improvised corrections. War communism was tried in the name of doctrine, collapsed under its own dogma, and was replaced. World revolution was the original plan; when it did not come, he produced the concept of building socialism in a single country. The point is not that his ideas were correct — most of them were catastrophically wrong. The point is that there was a roadmap. There was a vision toward which all the maneuvering was directed, and that vision could capture minds, organize a movement, and outlive the man.
Genghis Khan is a stranger example but the same principle holds. We cannot read his private thoughts, but we can read his practice, and his practice was governed by a documented imperial design with rules. He had a guiding idea — to build an enormous empire on specific principles — and he pursued it with terrifying coherence. He borrowed techniques from the Chinese, harnessed the potential of conquered peoples, and acted on a logic so single-minded that he was willing to raze cities because cities only obstructed the conversion of the earth into pasture for Mongol horses. One may find this monstrous; one cannot deny it was a plan. A man with a plan can bend the world to it. That is the difference.
Now place Putin and Trump beside them. Trump has chaos where a doctrine should be — and he reproduces that chaos globally. There are people in his orbit who preach genuinely sinister ideas, the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” and its cousins, but Trump himself does not hold them in his head. What he holds is a slogan — “Make America Great Again” — that explains nothing. Great again compared to when? Why is it not great now? The slogan is a void dressed up as a promise. He writes with one hand and crosses out with the other; today a thirty-day ceasefire, tomorrow negotiations during active war; today fifty percent tariffs, tomorrow thirty. This is not a vision being executed in stages. It is improvisation mistaken for strategy by those who badly want it to be something more. Lenin had an idea. Genghis Khan had an idea. These two have power and money, and nothing behind it.
An Idea, Yes — But Not an Ideology
When I say Putin has no idea, I am always met with the same objection: what about the restoration of the empire? Isn’t that an idea? And the honest answer is yes — of course it is. Putin has an idea; he has several. He dreams, I suspect, of going down in history as the gatherer of Russian lands, the man who reverses what he calls the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. That is an idea. What it is not is an ideology.
The distinction is everything, and it is worth stating precisely. An ideology contains a theory and, above all, a vision of the future — a picture of the kind of country and the kind of world one means to bring into being. When the communists offered their idea to the world, behind it stood a fully developed body of doctrine, mistaken and false but detailed, coherent, and powerful enough to capture half the planet, especially among the intellectual classes. Nazism, too, for all its evil, was a complete ideology with its texts and its monstrous program — Mein Kampf was written, the plans were laid out, the future was specified down to its horrors. You could agree with these visions or recoil from them, but you knew what future they pointed toward.
The “Russian world” points toward nothing of the kind. It is, to borrow an image, a cloud in trousers — one cannot even say clearly what it is. Ask its defenders to describe the future it promises and you get fog: we are surrounded by enemies, and we will show everyone that we are better. But is that a vision of the future? Are we to remain forever encircled, forever proving a point? That is a mood, not a destination. The idea of empire, the idea of restoring the Soviet Union or the old Russian state, faces resolutely backward. It explains the past and glorifies it; it offers no blueprint for what comes next. By its very nature it is mythology, and mythology is a story about where we came from, never a map of where we are going.
The proof is in the world’s response. Name a single country that has taken up the “Russian world” as its own. There is none. There is support for Putin here and there as a strong partner, a useful counterweight, a strongman others can do business with — that exists. But no nation has adopted the “Russian world” as an idea to live by, because there is nothing in it to adopt. It contains no future anyone could move toward. Communism and Nazism, whatever else they were, were exportable; people in distant lands became communists and fascists by conviction. Imperial nostalgia is not exportable. You cannot be a believer in someone else’s lost empire. And so the doctrine that was supposed to remake the world has not even managed to leave the country that invented it.
Fascism Without an Ideology
Here a sharp objection arrives, and it deserves a straight answer. If the regime has no codified ideology, how can it be called fascist? Some thoughtful people insist that ideology is the essential criterion of fascism — that without a body of theory you have something else, some lesser tyranny. I do not accept that the absence of a formal ideology disqualifies a regime from being fascist. Why should it? Putin’s regime meets all the core characteristics of fascism — the cult of the leader, the worship of force, the imperial expansion, the crushing of independent thought, the open contempt for liberal democracy. That it happens to lack a written doctrine makes it a specific variety — call it ideology-free fascism — not a different species altogether. If a person loses a leg, they do not stop being a person; they are a one-legged person. The same logic applies here.
And in any case the missing ideology does not leave a vacuum — it is filled, and what fills it is mythology. In place of a theory of the future, the regime manufactures an image of the past. This is the real function of its court historiography: not to discover what happened but to construct a usable national legend. The whole project rests on a single corrosive premise — that historical truth is whatever corresponds to the state interests of a given country. Once you accept that, history ceases to be a science at all. It fragments into as many irreconcilable national versions as there are states, each “true” for its own people, none answerable to evidence. This is buffoonery dressed in academic robes, and it is precisely what a regime needs when it has glory to invent and no future to promise. The myth-makers are not there to argue; they are there to paint the backdrop against which the leader can pose as a great historical figure.
This also settles a related confusion. People sometimes ask why today’s Russia should be called fascist rather than communist — aren’t its slogans a hundred years old, aren’t its parades draped in Soviet symbols? The answer is that the driving idea is not communist at all. Putin has no communist project; he does not aim to revive that ideology. His idea is imperial restoration — of the Soviet territory, and behind it the older Russian Empire. That is why the regime has far more in common with fascism than with communism. The red bunting is set decoration. The engine underneath is empire.
A Project That Is Ending
There is a final implication, and it is the one I find most clarifying. People expend enormous energy debating what ideology Russia ought to have, what alternative vision could replace the “Russian world,” what positive idea might fill the void. I have come to think much of that debate is beside the point — because Russia as it has existed is a historical project that is ending. What we are living through is not the birth pang of a new ideological order but the prolonged, drawn-out final collapse of the Russian Empire. Empires do not survive defeat; the pattern repeats across the whole modern history of this state, from the Russo-Japanese war through the First World War to Afghanistan. Defeat returns home in the form of broken, brutalized men by the hundreds of thousands, and no regime and no propaganda can absorb that shock. A society can be told many lies, but it cannot be told that a rout was a triumph. The fog clears, sooner or later, and reveals the emptiness behind it.
This is why the question of the regime’s missing ideology is, in the end, almost academic. You do not draft a vision of the future for a project that is concluding. The “Russian world” was never going to reshape history, because it was never a picture of any future — it was a backward glance dressed up as a destiny, a myth about a vanished empire offered as a program for a coming one. And a myth, however loudly proclaimed, cannot build anything. It can only postpone, for a while, the recognition that there is nothing there to build. Lenin and Genghis Khan, in their very different and terrible ways, carried the future in their heads. The men who claim to be remaking the world today carry only power, only money, and a story about the past. That is the whole measure of them, and it is why, for all the noise and all the blood, they will not bend history to their will.