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.  

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.  

This week, after signing a $95 billion military-aid package into law, President Joe Biden announced that crucial weapons are being rushed to Ukraine. The passage of this bill, which includes funding for Israel, Taiwan, and other foreign allies, marks the end of the drawn-out fight in Congress over foreign funding. Still, lawmakers continue to contend with the future of party leadership on Capitol Hill: Will there be political ramifications for Biden and House Speaker Mike Johnson?

Johnson also traveled to Columbia University on Wednesday, where, along with other Republican lawmakers, he spoke to students as demonstrations against the war in Gaza have erupted on campuses across the country. At Columbia, Johnson was met with boos and pro-Palestinian chants from students. Meanwhile, Biden also faces questions about whether his policy on Israel could hurt his standing among young voters in November.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; David Drucker, a senior writer at The Dispatch; and Mara Liasson, a national political correspondent for NPR.

Watch the full episode here.

One day in the early ’90s, my father came home with a used, champagne-toned Mercedes-Benz 300D four-door sedan. I was 9 or 10 and didn’t know anything about cars. But I was drawn to the luster of the diesel-powered slab of metal, the way the perforated leather smelled as it enveloped me, and how the wood grain on the dashboard and door panels made me feel as if I was involved in something far grander than merely commuting. The car, and the one that eventually replaced it—a larger, metallic-blue beauty, also preowned—felt substantive, meaningful, and distinctive.

The tougher boys in our neighborhood cared enough about Benzes to steal their hood ornaments. My older brother and friends would eventually school me on the finer points of German engineering, as well as its drawbacks (my parents’ eyes watered at the price of replacing a headlight or windshield wiper). But even as the most unsophisticated passenger, I could never mistake the interior of my father’s old Mercedes with that of any other car.

My daughter is 10 now, and she recently rode in a Tesla taxi for the first time. How was it? I asked. “Kind of cool,” she said, half-heartedly, “because it was like my iPad.” She understood that the Tesla is basically a computer full of distracting and gratuitous applications, and it just happened to perform some locomotive functions.

This iPad-ization of consumer reality is becoming harder and harder to resist. Vacuums now come equipped with screens, so do toasters, and even trash cans have motion sensors and voice control and companion apps you can download to your smartphone. Finding the analog versions of every product can take effort, and nowhere has this become truer than in the automotive realm.

[Rich Cohen: Here’s to a new generation of classic cars]

This is not an issue specific to electric vehicles—virtually all modern cars are now just slick screens connected to giant, mobile computing systems that operate with a complexity, and often a fragility, none of us can handle independently. But the “innovations” have introduced a slew of new problems. Long gone are the days when a handy guy like my brother could perform a Sunday-afternoon tune-up in his driveway. Several years ago, when he owned a brand-new Range Rover Sport—as wildly depreciating an asset as you can imagine—one of the quirks of its high-tech internal circuitry was that it would not start if parked under direct sunlight. He often had to drive complimentary rental cars while his state-of-the-art SUV was being serviced by the experts. Just last week, he met me for lunch in a U-Haul truck because the computer in his girlfriend’s BMW X6 had stopped safely regulating the car’s suspension.

On the level of aesthetics, the supposed innovations have led only to conformity and mediocrity. Even the interior of a new Mercedes-Benz S-class, luxurious as it is, with its immersive flatscreens and pastel-purple mood lighting, resembles every other new car—or indeed a hookah lounge—more than it does the singular models that preceded it.

Electric vehicles are simply at the forefront of the soul-crushing tendency to reduce everything that was once seductively human and endearingly—sometimes transcendentally—imperfect and unique to the impersonal, tech-saturated level of pretty nice. Could a child ever dream about a Lucid or Rivian? These are generically good-looking, low-emissions vehicles that only a cyborg could lust over. They are songs sung through Auto-Tune, with clever and forgettable lyrics composed by ChatGPT. (The one exception is Tesla’s otherworldly Cybertruck, whose jointless, audacious geometry looks more sculpted than welded, an extraordinary example of forward-looking design.)

In late March, the Biden administration announced, according to The New York Times, “one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.” I may not have not have noticed the announcement, except that, with awful timing, it came the same week a friend of mine from college died horrifically when his EV’s battery exploded. Supposedly this happens rarely, but in New York City alone last year, EVs caused more than 250 fires and killed 18 people. Heat moves through the battery cell by cell until it sets off a chain reaction called a “thermal runaway.”

(Courtesy of Thomas Chatterton Williams)

Like everyone I know, climate change concerns me, a worry always simmering on my mind’s back burner. But the filthy, all-too-often coal-based power that fuels EV batteries is not going to save us without far more serious and pervasive energy reforms and innovations. Procuring the lithium for those batteries is a dirty business, as is disposing of it. All of this and more is why, when I moved to France in 2011 and my New York State driver’s license expired, I didn’t bother to renew it. The world didn’t need another car owner. I lasted more than a decade relying on my feet, bikes, scooters, subways, and Ubers—happily not driving.

[Annie Lowrey: Why did cars get so expensive?]

That changed last winter, when I began spending part of the year teaching in New York’s Hudson Valley. What you can get away with in densely populated urban environments is inconceivable upstate. I had to retake the tests for my license and quickly find a car to get to campus.

Every new option I considered was either far too expensive or looked profoundly uninspiring. Then I talked with a friend of my brother’s—one of those kids who used to yank off the hood ornaments. He now works as a mechanic for Audi and in his spare time buys used German cars at auction and repairs them. Sometimes he keeps them, and sometimes he sells them to friends.

Which is how I found myself with a silver 2004 Mercedes-Benz E 320, in which the scent of the interior never fails to work its Proustian sorcery. It has buttons to press and switches to flip and no touch screens; the dashboard isn’t digital. There is a lot of toasted walnut to contrast with the gray of the leather. The car exerts a weight over the pavement, and you feel a tactile heft to the steering wheel’s slow rotation—the polar opposite of the video-game-controller levity of cars today, which you can manipulate with a single index finger.

I love this Benz, which is so old now, it no longer looks dated. It has nothing in common with the many other technologies that have permeated my waking hours. The time I spend in this car, I feel liberated from the artificial, algorithmic superstructure that surrounds me, focused with undivided intensity on the road that is peeling back beneath me. Driving has become a periodic deliverance back into the real.

I do not ever intend to buy a new automobile. I don’t want to drive an EV—and I certainly don’t want it to drive me—just as I have no desire to pay for another internal combustion engine to be created. I want to give fresh life to old, reliable cars, the way the friends of mine who care the most about music want to sink into their sofas and listen to vinyl records.

I know I’m not the only one overcome by this sense of nostalgia. “God, I love that smell,” my friend Aatish said when I picked him up for dinner recently. He has two cars upstate, a brand-new Audi and a very old Ford Bronco. The last time I saw him, he was feeling shaken. The battery in his Audi had failed on the highway and then, he said, because everything in the car was electronic, the rest of the car failed too—all the way “down to the gas pedal. It was like being in Apollo 13.”

He was back to driving his Bronco.