Shakespeare’s plays endure because their characters and stories echo through the ages. Vladimir Putin reflects Lady Macbeth’s blood-soaked ambition.
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Lady Macbeth was as mad for power as Putin. Neither let anything stand in the way of taking the throne. She implores the spirits to fill her “from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty” and pushes her husband to assassinate Kind Duncan. He obeys, saying “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
But while Lady Macbeth is impulsive, Putin thinks long-term. He patiently occupied middling posts before becoming prime minister, acting president, and elected president. Having ruled for two decades, he has modified the constitution to reign indefinitely.
Deception is a rule for both. Lady Macbeth persuades her husband to be cheerful as he hosts Banquo, one of Duncan’s generals, before having him killed. Putin has done the same, seeming to pardon mutineer Evgeny Prigozhin before exploding him.
Acting as an extension of his wife, Macbeth uses his own hands and blades to slay the sleeping Duncan and his guards, emerging covered in blood, before hiring several murderers to stab Banquo.
Though the young Putin was a street fighter in St Petersburg, his killing is now done by others, by poisoning, a pistol, defenestration, or a bomb on an airplane. Much is also done by modern technology at scale, from tanks to glide bombs.
Like Putin, bad advice confirms Lady Macbeth’s wishful thinking ― while Putin’s is from his sycophants, Lady Macbeth’s comes via her husband’s encounter with the three witches. The witches anticipate Kremlin-style disinformation, proclaiming “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
The main difference from Putin is that Lady Macbeth and her husband realize they have done terrible things and often regret it, while Putin seems oblivious. Macbeth deemed Duncan a good king whose “virtues will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued,” while he also worries about teaching “bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague th’ inventor.”
Lady Macbeth doubts she could ever be clean. She washes her hands as she relives her dastardly deeds. “Out, damned spot, out, out, out, out, I say! … All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
The bloodbaths and subsequent civil war take Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into the realms of madness and death in which stopping the bloodshed seems impossible. “Blood will have blood,” Macbeth says after his encounter with Banquo’s ghost. “I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Lady Macbeth kills herself and her husband fatalistically dies in combat.
An observer of Putin’s Russia might agree with Duncan’s son Malcolm, who says Scotland “sinks beneath the yoke. It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash.” Its top leader is “bloody, luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin that has a name.”
As to consequences, no update is needed. The results of Putinism are much like those of the tyrants dissected by Shakespeare. Cherished institutions seem fragile, political classes are in disarray, economic misery fuels populist anger, people knowingly accept being lied to, partisan rancor dominates, and spectacular indecency rules.
Putin displays the infantile psychology and unquenchable appetites of demagogues ― along with the cynicism and opportunism of the various enablers and hangers-on who surround them.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Harvard University Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University. His latest book is Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (Westphalia, July 2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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