Putin leans here on a strange theory advanced by the 20th-century historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilev. The son of two of Russia's most famous poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev maintains that every people' possesses a distinct life force: a "bio-cosmic" inner energy or passionate substance that he calls passionarnost. Putin may have known Gumilev in St Petersburg at the start of the 1990s. At any rate, he has embraced his ideas and never misses an opportunity to refer to them. In February last year, he 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". According to him, Russia carries the power and potential of a young people. "We possess an infinite genetic code", he has said. 

In addition to Gumilev, Putin relies on another thinker - a minor figure in the history of Russian thought. Last October, he spoke of regularly consulting a collection of political essays titled "'Our Tasks", the major work of Ivan Ilyin, who died in 1954. In one of the president's preferred essays, "What does the world seek from the dismemberment of Russia?", Ilyin denounces the country's "imperialist neighbours", these "western peoples who neither understand nor accept Russian originality'. In the future, he suggests, these countries will inevitably attempt to seize territories such as the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, central Asia and, especially, Ukraine. The method, according to Ilyin, will be the hypocritical promotion of values such as "freedom" in order to transform Russia "a gigantic Balkans". The final object is to "dismember Russia, to subject her to western control, to dismantle her and in the end make her disappear".

It is necessary, then, to understand that what is actually happening in Ukraine is the result of a vision of Russia that is deeply embedded in the mind of Putin. In2008, he punished Georgia for its desire to leave the orbit of the old imperial power. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and prevented Ukraine from joining Nato by starting the Donbas conflict. But that is not enough for him. He wants a confrontation with - and a victory over - a west that he holds responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, for the weakness of Russia in the 1990s, and for the autonomous tendencies of the old Soviet republics.

       China's post-Cold War leaders, having compulsively studied the Soviet example, sought to avoid repeating it by transforming Marxism into consumer capitalism without at the same time allowing democracy. They thereby flipped what they saw as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's greatest error: permitting democracy without ensuring prosperity. This latest "rectification of names" - the ancient Chinese procedure of conforming names to shifting realities - seemed until recently to have succeeded. The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's post-Mao pro-market reforms solidified support for the regime and made China a model for much of the rest of the world. Xi, on taking power, was widely expected to continue along that path.

       But he hasn't. Instead, Xi is cutting off access to the outside world, defying international legal norms, and encouraging "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, none of which seems calculated to win or retain allies. At home, he is enforcing orthodoxy, whitewashing history, and oppressing minorities in ways defunct Russian and Chinese emperors might have applauded. Most significant, he has sought to secure these reversals by abolishing his own term limits.

      Hence our second unknown: Why is Xi undoing the reforms, while abandoning the diplomatic subtlety, that allowed China's rise in the first place? Perhaps he fears the risks of his own retirement, even though these mount with each rival he imprisons or purges. Perhaps he has realized that innovation requires but may also inspire spontaneity within his country. Perhaps he worries that increasingly hostile international rivals won't allow him unlimited time to achieve his aims. Perhaps he sees the prevailing concept of world order itself as at odds with a mandate from Heaven, Marx, or Mao.        Or it could be that Xi envisions a world order with authoritarianism at its core and with China at its center. Technology, he may expect, will make humnan consciousness as transparent as satellites made the earth's surface during the Cold War. China, he may assume, will never alienate its foreign friends. Expectations within China, he may suppose, will never find reasons not to rise. And Xi, as he ages, will gain in the wisdom, energy, and attentiveness to detail that only he, as supreme leader, can trust himself to provide.

      But if Xi really believes all of this, then he's already losing sight of the gaps between promises and performance that have long been Catch-22s for authoritarian regimes. For if, like Gorbachev's predecessors did, you ignore such fissures, they'll only worsen. But if, like Gorbachev himself, you acknowledge them, you'll undermine the claim to infallibility on which legitimacy in an autocracy must rest That is why graceful exits by authoritarians have been so rare.

       We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. To grieve is to lament, to let sorrow inhabit one's very being.

       Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, 'leaving poetry free to go its way in tears." Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish---to let others vanish--without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art. 

       I was initiated into the poetry of grief---of raw, heroic, aboriginal grief---on a windy autumnal moming in late October 1968. I was eighteen years old. I knew I had found what I was unknowingly seeking on the day my freshman humanities teacher-- a petite woman with an immense vocabulary, the only person I'd ever met who spoke in perfectly formed sentences--stood up in class and started talking about Achilles's desperate response to the death of his friend Patroclus. I felt something obscure oping inside me, I recognized some unknown, some unassuaged rage of feeling, a frenzied internal sobbing, a delirium of grief. I looked out the window and saw the mad leaves swirling and falling everywhere. I was transported. 

       Here is the passage in Richmond Lattimore's translation. It is from Book 18 of The Tiad. Nestor's son Antilochus has just given Achilles the message that his closest friend, his trusted ally and brother-in-arms, had been killed wearing Achilles's own armor. Now enemies were fighting over Patroclus's naked body:

        He spoke, and the black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilles. In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it over his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance, and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic. And he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay at length, and took and tore at his hair with his hands, and defiled it.

       My teacher must have gone on to talk about Achilles's feelings of guilt and shame, his deep sense of responsibility over his friend's death. This is a pivotal incident in The Tiad because it triggers Achilles's reentry into battle and therefore assures the. destruction of Troy. It's the only way to account for his uncharacteristically savage revenge on Hector. But I couldn't follow closely what she was saying because some part of my mind was stuck on the primal image of Achilles smearing his face with dirt and tearing out his hair. I recognized the image from somewhere...

       States have a long history. In the ancient world clearly defined political institutions exerted control over city-states. In The Peloponnesian Wars, for example, Thucydides describes the conflicts that took place between the ancient Greek cit states of Athens and Sparta. However, these types of ancient structures differ from the modern state. They were generally confined to the city and had no clearly defined territory, and lacked the highly institutionalized bureaucracies of the modern state. Indeed, the citizen-territory-state nexus of the modern state system, defined by both its internal authority vis-a-vis the population and its external authority, defined by states' mutual recognition, is a creation of the seventeenth century and emerged within a European context.

       Medieval Europe was characterized by feudalism, which in its most basic form can be understood as the granting of land in return for military service. The land- owning nobility would provide land and property rights to people in exchange for allegiance and security. In this context, different monarchs or aristocrats would control different areas of land and society. Within the Holy Roman Empire, religion played an important role in maintaining these structures. Each prince or nobleman would have the right to determine the religion of his own domain, defining its own religious denomination, and often basing its alliances with other territories mainly upon commonality of this denomination.

       Over time, the rise of powerful monarchies with central bureaucracies gave a number of countries the characteristics of the modern state. The monarchies of England, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, for example, grew powerful enough to raise armies and to exercise internal authority through the nobility that they controlled. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg allowed the monarchies in different areas to define themselves as Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist. This laid the groundwork for the subsequent Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which is commonly regarded as heralding the birth of the modern sovereign state. The Peace of Westphalia initiated a new order in Europe based on the concept of national sovereignty. For the first time, it created clearly defined internal political boundaries within Europe and brought about the mutual recognition of different monarchies' right to define their own religious and political choices within their territory, superseding the feudal society of the Middle Ages.

       Gradually, the idea of the nation-state evolved. In a European context, centralized states began to develop the bureaucratic mechanisms for identifying their populations, raising taxation, raising armies through conscription, and holding the monopoly of violence on their territories. Ideologically, nationalism began to emerge as a means to legitimate the modern nation-state. The emergence of inventions such as the flag and the printing press raised awareness of the nation-state, enabling people to develop a sense of shared identity and allegiance. With the rise of nationalism, new states were created through the process of unification that took place in states such as Germany and Italy.

       Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction from everyday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator's preferred form of escapism. It is remarkable how rapidly things have changed.More and more, the news is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention.

       As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news - and more news providers began to compete for readers - a subtle inversion began: the reader's attention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an attentional arms race, every news provider - and ultimately, every news story - competes against all others to worm its way into consumers' minds. Beginning in the 19th century. entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hit upon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, pack it with |urid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who were effectively buying access to readers' attention. This naturally encouraged exaggeration and fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme. lurid and even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercial imperatives don't even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it is maximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logical conclusion to, a media economy "optimised for engagement." 

       It's worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlying purpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest in news has evolutionary origins, that's because there are obvious survival advantages in staying aware of local and immediate threats to one's own life and tribe. One major achievement of civilisation is that we've expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn't affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pumnmels us ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it's in our power to relieve it. The belief that we're morally obliged to stay plugged in - that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world - begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.