Putin’s Attack on Ukraine Is a Religious War. Incredible insight to the schism of Russian orthodoxy
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Putin and the Muslim world | The Spectator
Putin and the Muslim world
Julius Strauss
(Getty)
Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are reportedly massing on the edge of Kiev. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines. Is Vladimir Putin running out of Christians for his war machine?
The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. Up to 7,000 Russian infantry have been killed since the invasion began, according to US estimates. That would put Russian casualties at more than the entire American losses in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 14,000 Russians may have been injured. Military experts say that once a battle group has exceeded about a 10 per cent casualty rate – dead, wounded or captured – it is no longer fully combat effective. Russia must surely be surpassing that level of losses in some theatres.
So what can Putin hope to achieve by drafting in Muslim warriors? For one, there have been widespread reports of desertions by young Russians. Some captured prisoners report that they didn't even know they were going into Ukraine to fight and would have baulked at the idea of killing men Putin himself describes as ethnic and religious cousins. The Kremlin's Muslim allies will not, presumably, be weighed down by such sensitivities.
Then there is the question of battlefield experience. Moscow has said that up to 16,000 of Assad's Syrians are on the way, each with precious time spent fighting in cities. Reports suggest that Syrians who join the frontlines will each receive £2,280 a month from the Russian government, a princely sum. Some fighters claim to have been offered up to £5,300 a month.
But how will the Russian public respond to Putin's Muslim fighters killing Orthodox Christians in a war that has been sold as a crusade to reunite the Russian Holy lands?
Stalin, of course, never had such problems. During world war two he had many advantages in terms of selling the war at home. Firstly the very existence of Mother Russia was indisputably at stake. If Hitler had had his way he would have driven the Russian Slavs into the steppes beyond the Urals and repopulated their lands with German-speaking colonists and other Aryans. Putin may have been selling the war in Ukraine as existential – something that seems absurd to westerners – but judging by protests at home, not all Russians have accepted that pitch either.
Secondly, Stalin, despite the carving up of Poland and the war on Finland, could legitimately portray the war as a defensive action. Russians are convinced to this day, and with much justification, that their historic mission was to save the world from domination by Nazis, a feat for which they paid an enormous price. Moreover Stalin, despite being a seminary student as a young man, was unencumbered by having hitched his horse to the cart of Russian Orthodoxy. The two men who hung the Kremlin's flag over the German Reichstag in 1945 were both reported to be Muslims – one a Kazakh and the other a Dagestani – but it mattered little. Both were, more importantly, Soviets.
Putin, born and raised a communist, has moved in the opposite direction to Stalin. Religious scholars say that when the former KGB man came to power he was unburdened by belief. But since then he has apparently converted – and moved into an ever deeper embrace with the Russian Orthodox Church. Increasingly he has also surrounded himself with Russian nationalists and spiritual advisors who believe in the historic mission of reuniting Russia, Belarus and Ukraine and creating a single holy space.
Their influence came through loud and clear in an essay that Putin penned last year questioning Ukraine's right to exist. Metropolitan Tikhon, thought to be Putin's confessor, has often travelled with the Russian leader and is rumoured to have an outsized influence over him. Putin has frequently been photographed and filmed praying, crossing himself, and in the company of priests.
Putin and Tikhon at a monastery in Moscow in 2017 (Getty)
I worked as a newspaper correspondent in Moscow in the 2000s during the early years of Putin's rule. Returning 15 years later I could not help but notice the plethora of new churches that had sprung up. Among the congregations were the old and the poor, but also many young families as well as trendy urbanites in ripped jeans. At one, the church of St Matryona in Moscow, I watched on a Sunday morning as a long line of people queued in the hot sun. One by one they each placed money in a small golden collection box. Then they approached the icon of Matryona, a blind holy woman born in the early years of the 20th century, crossed themselves three times, placed their hands on the icon and kissed it. Every few minutes a lady came out with a cloth and wiped the icon clean.
The increasing religious symbolism is difficult to miss for those who have watched the Russian capital change over the last few decades. The studio of a television station called Tsargrad – owned by a former investment banker and Russian monarchist named Konstantin Malofeyev – the decor is a fusion of Byzantium and hipster-modern.
Malofeyev, who wears a bow tie, told me when we met: 'Putin is an openly Christian leader. There are 30,000 to 40,000 new priests in Russia. In the west, churches and becoming bars and discos.' But, if shiny new churches were going up in Moscow, so too were shiny new mosques.
Estimating the population of the Russian capital is notoriously difficult because so many residents are unregistered but it is believed to be home to up to four million Muslims. Most are from Central Asia and have travelled to Moscow for work. I met one, an Uzbek called Anvar, at a railway station in a shabby part of the city far from the centre. 'We came here to sell our labour,' he said. 'With the money we make we get married, build homes, have children. You know how things are: the gypsies beg, the Azeris trade and we Uzbeks work. It's in our traditions.' Anvar took me to a mosque, a few metro stops away. He wanted to pray.
I expected something modest but it turned out to be an enormous building with a golden dome and turquoise roofs. Putin had opened the mosque in 2015, one of Europe's largest. It can accommodate 10,000 worshippers at one time and cost around £135 million to build. The mosque was a nod both to Russia's growing Muslim population, estimated at around 20 million, and to the Kremlin's ties to hard-line leaders in the Muslim world. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's President, and Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinians, were in attendance at the opening. Much of the funding was reported to have come from Saudi Arabia.
Moscow Grand Mosque, opening by Putin and President Erdogan of Turkey in 2015 (Getty)
As we approached the mosque, Anvar seemed to grow in stature, shaking off the toil of the working week. He beamed with pride. 'Isn't it beautiful?' he said. I talked to a 29-year-old man from Kyrgyzstan called Nurbek. 'We like it in Moscow,' he said. 'We are respected as Muslims.'
On the other side of town, I visited the Park of Victory where there is a large museum and memorial to world war two. Inside new recruits were being inducted into an elite military regiment. Orthodox priests and Iranian government officials were among the crowds. On the edge of the park was another mosque, smaller than its cousin but still capable of holding 3,000 worshippers. I talked to a man there called Radik from Tatarstan, a Russian republic, who was selling copies of the Koran. He had trained for ten years in Saudi Arabia where he had learned about Islam and studied Arabic.
'I am comfortable being a Muslim in Russia,' he said. 'Russia is very different from the West. Islam arrived in the West only 60 or 70 years ago but Russia is a multi-confessional country.' I asked an imam at the mosque called Assad about the fact that an estimated 1,800 Russian citizens joined Isis. 'It is very difficult for me when Islam kills and terrorises,' he said.
At the Tsargrad television station, Malofeyev said there was no contradiction between promoting Islam and Orthodoxy. 'We have lived with Islam for 1,000 years,' he said. 'We know how to deal with them. Liberal anti-family values are a much bigger threat.' Like any successful long-serving leader, one of Putin's greatest skills has been to build a coalition of support among different classes of Russians.
In his displays of piety, he has wooed Russian Orthodoxy. By railing against the effete and godless values of the West, he has won over social conservatives – both at home and abroad. And by creating a semi-nationalised hydrocarbon economy that allowed for the generous disbursement of patronage, he has fed the greed of the kleptocratic former communists.
But now there are the first signs of cracks in his veneer of legitimacy. Support among key constituencies may be beginning to wear thin. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is still onside and has publicly blessed the invasion of Ukraine, as he did Russian intervention in Syria. But Kirill is a malleable man who in his youth served general secretaries Brezhnev and Andropov and worked closely with the KGB.
The leader of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine by contrast, Metropolitan Onufrii, who leads the single biggest grouping of Orthodox Christians in that country, has come out against the invasion. Holy Men abroad are even more scathing, both of Putin and Kirill.
Marcin Przeciszewski, director of Poland's Catholic Information Agency, toldthe National Catholic Reporter. 'The old discourse about Catholic and Orthodox leaders sharing in the defence of traditional Christian values all looks like nonsense now. The only values Kirill is defending are those of Russian imperialism.'
Some Orthodox religious scholars argue that Putin never was a real Christian, but merely draped himself in the flag of post-Soviet religiosity. They say that under pressure Putin is now reverting to KGB type. For all his flirtations with religion, they point out, he is primarily a man of violence who is onto his fifth war: Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine 2014 and Ukraine 2022.
And in his hour of need, it seems, Putin has turned to men of extreme violence. The fact that they are Muslims seems to be secondary. 'He is desperate and is now calling in favours,' a western official who has long studied Russia explained.
And as for the Russian people, it seems likely that those who have swallowed the Kremlin's line in the war up to now will not baulk at his use of Muslim mercenaries. A friend who lives near Odessa told me: 'Those who watch Russian television and believe Putin will continue to believe. A few Muslims on the frontline won't change that.'
Putin's Fascism
Putin's Fascism
On March 2, Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies published a statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It condemns “Vladimir Putin’s deliberate, coldhearted, and Orwellian abuse of the language of the Holocaust.” In Putin’s claim “that Russia must invade Ukraine to “denazify” and end a “genocide,” it finds numerous evils, including “a diversion from his own fascism” and “an expression of antisemitism.”
If Putin’s invasion has been justified in part by employing expressions of antisemitism, how does this square with the fact that Putin has made it a point to disassociate himself from the racist and antisemitic legacy of Nazism? To help decode the Russian leader’s position, it’s instructive to look at the positions espoused by Alexander Dugin, a Russian intellectual who has done much over the years to formulate what appears to now be the Kremlin’s dominant ideology. While often described in Western media as “Putin’s brain,” Dugin’s influence on Russian leaders has waxed and waned over the years. More than political influence, his major contribution has been his ability to make the geopolitical ambitions of Putin’s post-Soviet Russia intelligible.
Dugin began his intellectual career as a critic of the Soviet Union, identifying with underground nationalist and spiritual movements. Some of these groups, such as the ultranationalist Pamyat, promoted antisemitic sentiments. Eventually he disavowed these ties and emerged as a leading spokesperson for Eurasianism, a political movement that sees Russia playing a central role in the geopolitical order bridging the divide between Europe and Asia.
The French scholar Marlene Laruelle has described Dugin’s political philosophy as an attempt “to rehabilitate fascism in Russia” by stressing its nationalist orientation while disowning its associations with Nazism and racism. Tellingly, Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine has exemplified this vision.
Alexander DuginWikipedia
Fascism embraces a mythic past, where the nation, once great, has experienced humiliation and loss of land, the result of weakness and decadence brought on by liberal democracy. To make up for these losses, real and supposed, fascist leaders encourage violent reassertion of previous greatness, as well as the destruction of liberal democracy in favor of a one-party state or, more typically, a single autocratic ruler who is synonymous with the nation.
In the Russian nationalist version of the mythic past, Ukraine is central. According to this mythology, there are no Ukrainians—just lost Russians living, whether they know it or not, in the heart of historic Russia. Under Putin, Russia has been harshly sexist and homophobic, familiar manifestations of fascist ideology. But Russia’s violent imperial war against a neighboring cosmopolitan democracy that it seeks to absorb is the clearest manifestation yet that its animating ideology is something akin to classical fascism.
Dugin and Putin both claim to be opposed to racism and Nazism. They insist that their primary enemy is not any one people, religion, or race, but rather “confused” cosmopolitans, liberals, and secularists. This 20th-century set of chiefly antisemitic stereotypes is also used to describe liberal democracy.
Putin has enjoyed the support of Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, and Dugin counts right-wing Israeli Zionists among his comrades. As Dugin explained in April 2021 in the Israeli journal Dehak:
The Gaon of Vilna said: in the End of Days the main enemy will not be the husk of Ishmael [Islam] or the husk of Rome [Christianity], but rather the husk of Jacob [Jews], those who are designated as the mixed multitude, the assimilated people who, according to the Gaon of Vilna, have underwent modernization and colonization. [In the End of Days], the chief enemy of the Jewish tradition will come from its own house and not from the outside in the form of Christianity and Islam. The chief enemy … is the Jewish People. They are the chief enemy of traditional Judaism … Perhaps this is not well understood, but I think this interpretation is very important. In our own community, in a similar way, the chief enemy of the Russian nation are liberal Russians and not the representatives of other groups. ... In my opinion, it follows, we need a deep de-colonization of [the forces of modernization] from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Israel, in Russia and Europe and in the United States. In the United States this means being made free from the heavy hand of the elite-racist ultra-liberal that seeks to annihilate American values.
Here, Dugin represents himself as the champion of Judaism—or at least his conception of traditional Judaism—against the forces that would destroy it: Jews themselves. Dugin represents “traditional” Jews as those who are attached to the land of Israel. The enemy of Judaism are the assimilated, cosmopolitan Jews, those who are part of “modernization.” More generally, Dugin says that each national community’s existential threat consists of members of that community—the ones who embrace cosmopolitanism, liberalism, tolerance, and democracy.
Dugin’s appeal here is transnational—it is made to the traditionalists in every group opposed to feminism, secularism, LGBT rights, and liberal tolerance. For Dugin, the enemy of each group is to be found within its midst: those who support multicultural, liberal societies. Traditionalists can and do operate within the parameters of liberal democracy, of course. But in the new Russian fascism, traditionalism is seen as inconsistent with and opposed to liberal democracy.
Increasingly, the global far right denounces racism and antisemitism even while working to extinguish liberalism and multiculturalism. By identifying “real” Jews as the ones connected with the land—specifically Israeli nationalists—the global far right believes it is justified in its repeated use of antisemitic tropes aimed at Jewish targets.
Thus, for many in Putin’s circle, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not really Jewish. Similarly, former New York City Mayor and Donald Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani—along with Brexit backers Raheem Kassam and Andy Wigmore—have sought to challenge the Jewish identity of George Soros, in the context of attacking him for his philanthropic and political efforts. Never mind that the rabbis, the State of Israel, and Adolf Hitler would all consider Soros a Jew—“I’m more of a Jew than Soros is,” said Giuliani. That’s because for them, “real” Jews are religiously traditionalist and quintessentially nationalist—and not invested in, say, liberalism or democracy.
According to nationalists and traditionalists, liberals, cosmopolitans, and progressives undermine defined and necessary ethnic and religious identities. It is this set of values that contemporary Russian nationalism associates with democracy. Dugin’s Russian nationalism tries to appeal to what it imagines as traditionalist Jewish allies in an attempt to justify violent opposition to liberal democracy.
The Duginist invocation of traditionalism is clearly meant to appeal to members of minority groups historically targeted by fascism, above and beyond merely using them as tokens for narrow political purposes. But is Russian fascism free from racial, ethnic, gender, and religious hierarchies? Is it free from the antisemitism that is central to so many traditional European versions of fascism?
When a contemporary society’s institutions were formed under conditions of explicit discrimination, they will continue to contain practices that perpetuate various disparities, even if no one within those structures has an explicitly discriminatory attitude (a key insight of critical race theory). Far-right movements and political parties often campaign on a platform of eliminating attempts to reform or replace these discriminatory practices, as well as introducing new ones, like opposing immigrants, women’s rights, religious and sexual freedoms, and the freedom to teach history.
In a very straightforward sense, this traditionalism is not free from antisemitism. A majority of the world’s Jews still choose to live outside of Israel, and most of them would not meet Dugin’s standards of religious traditionalism. A majority of Jews, then, are Dugin’s—and Putin’s—enemies.
It is one thing to wage cultural battles within the boundaries of liberal democratic politics, which preserve minority rights and allow the regular replacement of political leaders by democratic means. Traditionalists can and often do operate within this sphere.
Fascism breaks these boundaries. In fascist ideology, liberal democracy is itself the existential threat to traditionalism. Putin’s willingness to massacre people he falsely regards as his own points to his real enemy: cosmopolitan liberal democracy.
In Putin’s ideology, it is Ukrainian liberal democratic citizenship that represents the real threat to Russian greatness. Traditionalism demands a “deep decolonization” of these modernizers everywhere, perhaps especially the Jewish ones.
Man On Fire
All Star
PART 2:
Putin’s Attack on Ukraine Is a Religious War
Above all, the schism rendered Moscow white-hot with rage. The ROC viewed this as a direct attack on its “canonical territory” and on world Orthodoxy itself. The Kremlin, too, made no effort to conceal its outrage here. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quickly denounced the Ecumenical Patriarch as Washington’s puppet: “His mission, obviously, is being prepared by the Americans and they do not hide that they are actively cooperating with him, using the slogan of ‘freedom of religion and belief’…Bartholomew’s mission, obviously, is to bury the influence of Orthodoxy in the modern world.” A few weeks later, Lavrov added fuel to the fire by castigating the OCU as "this travesty of history, and pursuing the objective of sowing discord between Russia and Ukraine in addition to preventing our peoples from being friends are essentially a crime [by the current Ukrainian regime] against their citizens.” A few months after that, Lavrov reiterated that this tragedy was all America’s fault: the ROC “is currently under tremendous pressure from a number of Western countries, primarily the United States, which set itself the goal of destroying the unity of world Orthodox Christianity.”
It's an article of faith in the Kremlin that the creation of the OCU is an American project designed to destroy world Orthodoxy and harm Russia. It’s painful for me to state this but the Russians have good reason to think this. Unlike absurd Kremlin propaganda lines about “Ukrainian Nazis” perpetrating “genocide” against Russians, the idea that Washington wanted the split of Orthodoxy in Ukraine is a reasonable inference upon examination of recent U.S. Government conduct. What’s the evidence?
Our Kyiv embassy congratulated the OCU for its birth and the selection of its first primate, then the State Department in Washington amplified the same. Celebrating Constantinople’s grant of autocephaly, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hailed it as a “historic achievement for Ukraine” which represented America’s “strong support for religious freedom.” Pompeo’s statement left no doubt about America’s backing the OCU against the UOC. Pompeo’s position in the worldwide Orthodox schism was made clear by his subsequent meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch, whom the Secretary of State hailed as “a key partner as we continue to champion religious freedom around the globe.” Neither was this a partisan project, since the position of the Biden administration on this issue is identical to its predecessor’s. Four months ago, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also met with the Ecumenical Patriarch, reaffirming U.S. commitment to religious freedom, which in Moscow unsurprisingly looked like support for the OCU.
Since very few Americans, and functionally no non-Orthodox ones, noticed any of this, it’s worth asking why the State Department felt compelled to take a public position on any of this. Does Foggy Bottom side with Sunni or Shia? What about Lutheranism versus Methodism? Who in Washington thought it was a good idea to throw its weight behind the OCU, since anybody who knew anything about Putinism and its religious-civilizational mission had to be aware that such statements were guaranteed to raise Moscow’s ire.
That ire has now taken the form of air strikes, missile barrages, and advancing tank battalions. Just last month, Lavrov restated his government’s position that the United States stands behind the “current crisis in Orthodoxy.” As he explained without any word-mincing, Washington caused “the most serious dispute in the entire Orthodox world,” adding, “The United States of America had an immediate hand in the current crisis in Orthodoxy. They created a special mechanism, a special agency for the freedom of religious confession, which actually is not dealing with freedom but most actively set up and financed Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew so that he conducted a device for schism, particularly in Ukraine, in the first place, for creating there the schismatic, uncanonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”
We should not indulge Muscovite conspiracy theories nor countenance Russian aggression. However, the facts are plain enough. Simply put, by recognizing the OCU and hailing its creation, Washington changed the Kremlin’s game in Ukraine, making Putin’s long-term plans for his neighbor untenable. Without a united Orthodox Church across the former lands of Rus, answering to Moscow, the “Russian World” concept falls apart. Every secular geostrategic challenge cited as a reason for Putin’s aggression – NATO expansion, Western military moves, oil and gas politics – existed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to limit his attacks on Ukraine to Crimea and the Southeast. What’s changed since then that makes his effort to subdue all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the Kremlin? The creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, with official American backing, is the difference, and Moscow believes this was all a nefarious U.S. plot to divide world Orthodoxy at Russia’s expense. Clearly Putin has decided that reclaiming Ukraine and its capital, “the mother of Russian cities,” for Russian Orthodoxy is worth a major war. Make no mistake, this is a religious war, even if almost nobody in the West realizes it.
As soon as
won the election Putin started sending troops to Ukraine. This is an Illuminated last stand against Putin
economist.com
Russia’s Orthodox Church paints the conflict in Ukraine as a holy war
The Economist
6-7 minutes
In an unholy alliance, it is helping Vladimir Putin to justify his war at home
RUSSIA’S CATHEDRAL of the Armed Forces was consecrated in 2020. It sits in Patriot Park, a military theme park in Kubinka, around 60km to the west of Moscow. The church is khaki green, topped with a gold Orthodox cross. The diameter of the main dome, at 19.45m, references the end of the second world war. Nazi tanks were melted to make the floor. Angels gaze down on Russian soldiers in a mosaic commemorating the country’s role in Syria’s civil war, the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
In Russia, church and military go hand in hand. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, implicitly supports Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He spouts Kremlin propaganda, claiming that Russia is not the aggressor and that genocide is being perpetrated by Ukrainians against Russian speakers in the Donbas. Nor is his endorsement of this war unique. During his tenure, Russian priests have blessed bombs destined for Syria and Crimea. Bishop Stefan of Klin, who presides over the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, leads the church’s department for co-operation with the army. Before taking holy orders he was an officer in the missile-defence force.
The Russian church was suppressed for decades under communism. Church property was seized by the state. Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral was blown up in 1931 to make way for a political convention centre (it was never completed). But the link between faith and national identity was not severed. In 2015, 71% of Russians identified as Orthodox and 57% said following the faith was an important part of what it meant to be Russian. Many perceive the church to be of growing importance in their lives, although few attend. This makes it a powerful tool of propaganda—a conduit through which to promote a single vision of Russian values, at odds with Western liberal societies.
That is probably why Mr Putin has championed its resurgence. According to “First Person”, a collection of interviews with the Russian leader published in 2000, he wears a cross given to him by his mother when she had him secretly baptised as a baby. He has long chosen to present himself as a devout Orthodox Christian (charming George W. Bush, the American former president, with his piety) and promotes conservative religious values as a key tenet of nationalism. In 2007 he described nuclear armament and Orthodoxy as the two pillars of Russian society, guaranteeing external security and the moral health of the country respectively. But under Mr Putin’s leadership, the church might be better seen as a tool of internal security, promoting a vision of Russian identity compliant with the goals of his regime. It is perhaps no surprise that when p*ssy Riot, a female punk band, protested against his premiership in 2012, they did so in a Moscow cathedral.
Patriarch Kirill is a staunch ally of Mr Putin. In 2012, he described his presidency as a “miracle of God”. It has certainly benefited the church. On Mr Putin’s watch, Russia has passed laws that restrict the rights of rival religious groups, retrieved religious artefacts that were sold off under communism, and built thousands of churches. All that has bolstered the power that church leaders have to influence large swathes of the population. In 2007 the church reunited with many Russian parishes outside the country, healing a rift of 80 years. This boosted its power as a tool of foreign policy in the diaspora too.
Church support for the invasion of Ukraine benefits the Kremlin in two important ways. First, the church emphasises the historic links between Ukraine and Russia. Kyiv, today the capital of Ukraine, was the seat of Orthodoxy when it arrived in tenth-century Kyivan Rus, a kingdom that at its height spanned modern-day Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia. Moscow oversaw the sole legitimate Orthodox church in Ukraine until 2019, when a new Ukrainian Orthodox Church was proclaimed. Patriarch Kirill has never accepted its autonomy. This month he described the peoples of Russia and Ukraine as coming “from one Kievan baptismal font” and claimed that they “share a common historical fate”. That argument helps to justify Russia’s spurious claims that it is liberating its neighbour.
Second, Patriarch Kirill has long attacked the West for its perceived decadence, contrasting its “sinfulness” with conservative Russian values. He has painted the breakaway regions of Ukraine as victims of encroaching liberal influence, and seemed, bizarrely, to claim the war was happening in part because people in the Donbas do not want gay-pride parades to be imposed upon them. In a letter responding to the World Council of Churches, which had called on him to mediate for peace, he claimed his country was not the aggressor and that the “tragic conflict” had become part of a “geopolitical strategy aimed, first and foremost, at weakening Russia.”
This untempered support of Kremlin propaganda has divided the church. More than 280 Russian Orthodox priests from around the world have signed an open letter condemning the invasion. Many of Moscow’s clerical supporters in Ukraine are now omitting Patriarch Kirill from their prayers. A parish in Amsterdam has resolved to quit the church; it intends to join the Istanbul-based Patriarchate of Constantinople, Orthodoxy’s oldest see.
The dissent is unlikely to sway church leaders in Moscow. The patriarch has begun to cast the conflict as a holy war, with implications that he says go beyond politics. “We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” he warned the faithful in his sermon on Forgiveness Sunday, the last day before Lent in the Orthodox calendar. The Armed Forces Cathedral’s mosaic commemorating the Russian wars that God has supposedly smiled upon leaves room for future conflicts. Ukraine may soon join the list.
Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis
Russia’s Orthodox Church paints the conflict in Ukraine as a holy war
The Economist
6-7 minutes
In an unholy alliance, it is helping Vladimir Putin to justify his war at home
RUSSIA’S CATHEDRAL of the Armed Forces was consecrated in 2020. It sits in Patriot Park, a military theme park in Kubinka, around 60km to the west of Moscow. The church is khaki green, topped with a gold Orthodox cross. The diameter of the main dome, at 19.45m, references the end of the second world war. Nazi tanks were melted to make the floor. Angels gaze down on Russian soldiers in a mosaic commemorating the country’s role in Syria’s civil war, the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
In Russia, church and military go hand in hand. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, implicitly supports Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He spouts Kremlin propaganda, claiming that Russia is not the aggressor and that genocide is being perpetrated by Ukrainians against Russian speakers in the Donbas. Nor is his endorsement of this war unique. During his tenure, Russian priests have blessed bombs destined for Syria and Crimea. Bishop Stefan of Klin, who presides over the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, leads the church’s department for co-operation with the army. Before taking holy orders he was an officer in the missile-defence force.
The Russian church was suppressed for decades under communism. Church property was seized by the state. Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral was blown up in 1931 to make way for a political convention centre (it was never completed). But the link between faith and national identity was not severed. In 2015, 71% of Russians identified as Orthodox and 57% said following the faith was an important part of what it meant to be Russian. Many perceive the church to be of growing importance in their lives, although few attend. This makes it a powerful tool of propaganda—a conduit through which to promote a single vision of Russian values, at odds with Western liberal societies.
That is probably why Mr Putin has championed its resurgence. According to “First Person”, a collection of interviews with the Russian leader published in 2000, he wears a cross given to him by his mother when she had him secretly baptised as a baby. He has long chosen to present himself as a devout Orthodox Christian (charming George W. Bush, the American former president, with his piety) and promotes conservative religious values as a key tenet of nationalism. In 2007 he described nuclear armament and Orthodoxy as the two pillars of Russian society, guaranteeing external security and the moral health of the country respectively. But under Mr Putin’s leadership, the church might be better seen as a tool of internal security, promoting a vision of Russian identity compliant with the goals of his regime. It is perhaps no surprise that when p*ssy Riot, a female punk band, protested against his premiership in 2012, they did so in a Moscow cathedral.
Patriarch Kirill is a staunch ally of Mr Putin. In 2012, he described his presidency as a “miracle of God”. It has certainly benefited the church. On Mr Putin’s watch, Russia has passed laws that restrict the rights of rival religious groups, retrieved religious artefacts that were sold off under communism, and built thousands of churches. All that has bolstered the power that church leaders have to influence large swathes of the population. In 2007 the church reunited with many Russian parishes outside the country, healing a rift of 80 years. This boosted its power as a tool of foreign policy in the diaspora too.
Church support for the invasion of Ukraine benefits the Kremlin in two important ways. First, the church emphasises the historic links between Ukraine and Russia. Kyiv, today the capital of Ukraine, was the seat of Orthodoxy when it arrived in tenth-century Kyivan Rus, a kingdom that at its height spanned modern-day Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia. Moscow oversaw the sole legitimate Orthodox church in Ukraine until 2019, when a new Ukrainian Orthodox Church was proclaimed. Patriarch Kirill has never accepted its autonomy. This month he described the peoples of Russia and Ukraine as coming “from one Kievan baptismal font” and claimed that they “share a common historical fate”. That argument helps to justify Russia’s spurious claims that it is liberating its neighbour.
Second, Patriarch Kirill has long attacked the West for its perceived decadence, contrasting its “sinfulness” with conservative Russian values. He has painted the breakaway regions of Ukraine as victims of encroaching liberal influence, and seemed, bizarrely, to claim the war was happening in part because people in the Donbas do not want gay-pride parades to be imposed upon them. In a letter responding to the World Council of Churches, which had called on him to mediate for peace, he claimed his country was not the aggressor and that the “tragic conflict” had become part of a “geopolitical strategy aimed, first and foremost, at weakening Russia.”
This untempered support of Kremlin propaganda has divided the church. More than 280 Russian Orthodox priests from around the world have signed an open letter condemning the invasion. Many of Moscow’s clerical supporters in Ukraine are now omitting Patriarch Kirill from their prayers. A parish in Amsterdam has resolved to quit the church; it intends to join the Istanbul-based Patriarchate of Constantinople, Orthodoxy’s oldest see.
The dissent is unlikely to sway church leaders in Moscow. The patriarch has begun to cast the conflict as a holy war, with implications that he says go beyond politics. “We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” he warned the faithful in his sermon on Forgiveness Sunday, the last day before Lent in the Orthodox calendar. The Armed Forces Cathedral’s mosaic commemorating the Russian wars that God has supposedly smiled upon leaves room for future conflicts. Ukraine may soon join the list.
Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis
Putin Admits His Attack on Ukraine is a Holy War
Putin Admits His Attack on Ukraine is a Holy War
It’s always helpful when the Kremlin says the quiet part out loud from the very top
John Schindler4 hr ago
This newsletter has repeatedly pointed out that Russia’s aggressive war against its neighbor, which is about to enter its second month, has a distinctly religious character, even if few Western analysts have noticed it. Indeed, that the Kremlin’s campaign to subdue Ukraine, returning it to Moscow’s control, plainly resembles a holy war is something that’s stated openly by the very top of the Russian Orthodox Church, which views the Ukraine war as nothing less than a struggle for the fate – and soul – of mankind itself.
Now we can add the comments of President Vladimir Putin himself to the case for Ukraine-as-Russia’s-holy-war. Last Thursday, Putin, who is widely reported to be infuriated by the slow progress of his plodding and costly war against Kyiv, delivered an angry nighttime speech in which he castigated his enemies, including “national traitors” and “scum” plus the supposed “fifth column” plotting Russia’s defeat. He added that the country needed “self-detoxification” from such disloyal elements, including “people who can’t live without foie gras, oysters or what they call ‘gender freedom’.” Unable to conceal his rage, Putin ominously added that such traitors “belong to a higher caste, to a higher race. Such people are ready to sell their own mother if only they are allowed to sit in the hallway of this very highest caste.” The Kremlin boss went further, stating that “their goal is to destroy Russia” with Western help, but Russia was nevertheless winning:
Any nation, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth, spit them onto the pavement.
The petulantly fascistic tenor of that speech was widely noted outside Russia, but Putin outdid himself the very next day at a rally to commemorate the eighth anniversary of Moscow’s theft of Crimea from Ukraine. The celebratory event, held at Luzhniki Stadium in southwest Moscow, featured large crowds waving Russian flags. Exactly how many were in attendance is unclear, amid rumors that some of the “patriotic crowds” were in fact government employees required to show up; then there was an odd technical glitch while Putin spoke. None of that should distract from the Russia’s leader’s comments, however, which merit our attention.
Predictably, Putin’s speech last Friday extolled the heroism of the Russian “Little Green Men” who delivered Crimea and its (ethnic Russian) population from the “humiliation” of life in Ukraine. Putin portrayed the theft of Crimea in 2014 as a moral necessity for Moscow: “It was necessary to pull Crimea out of that humiliating position, from that humiliating state in which Crimea and Sevastopol were immersed when they were part of another state that financed these territories.” He continued, claiming that “Crimeans and Sevastopol residents did the right thing when they put a hard barrier in the way of neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists,” alleging – as Moscow so often does, without evidence – that Ukraine was perpetrating “genocide” against Russians. Putin went on:
It is to save people from this suffering, from this genocide – this is the main, main reason, motive and goal of the military operation that we launched in the Donbas and Ukraine, this is precisely the goal. And here, you know, words from the Holy Scriptures come to my mind: there is no greater love, than if someone gave his life for his friends. And we see how heroically our guys act and fight during this operation.
There the Kremlin strongman channeled, nearly verbatim, the Gospel of John 15:13, which is usually rendered in English as, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”* Putin kept going:
These words are from the Holy Scriptures of Christianity, from what is dear to those who profess this religion. But the bottom line is that this is a universal value for all the peoples and representatives of all faiths in Russia, and specifically for our people, primarily for our people. And the best confirmation of this is how they fight, how our guys act during this military operation: shoulder to shoulder, they help, support each other, and if necessary, they cover their own brother with their bodies from a bullet on the battlefield. We haven’t had such unity for a long time.
Here Putin portrayed Russia’s high casualties in the Ukraine war – which must never be referred to in Russia as a war, rather as the Ukrainian “special operation” (спецоперация), a term with a distinctly Chekist flavor – as a positive, at least in a spiritual sense. Putin’s distinct brand of Stalinist nostalgia meets mystical Russian Orthodox nationalism was very much on display here. Still, he saved the best for last:
It so happened that the beginning of the operation coincided – quite by chance coincided – with the birthday of one of our outstanding military leaders, canonized as saints, Fyodor Ushakov, who never lost a single battle in his entire brilliant military career. He once said that these thunderstorms will go to the glory of Russia. So it was then, so it is today, and so it will always be!
Admiral Fyodor Ushakov is far from a household name in the West, but he’s well known in Russia, despite being dead for over two centuries. His fame comes from his reputation as the tsars’ winningest admiral, Russia’s Lord Nelson – though, as Russian sailors like to remind, Ushakov never lost a ship or a battle, unlike his better-known British contemporary. Ushakov was an aggressive fighter and an innovative tactician with an unsurpassed record in battle, most often against the Ottoman Turks, including as commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (which is currently waging war – sorry, “special operation” – against Ukraine). His fame in naval circles extended far beyond Russia.
Ushakov retired from the service after over 40 years in uniform, undefeated, choosing to retire more over imperial court politics than anything to do with the navy, and in an only-in-Russia twist, he decided to become an Orthodox monk. Ushakov had always been a pious man, giving generously to charity and sincerely caring for his sailors. He never married, having placed his career first, and Ushakov therefore spent the last decade of his life in prayer and contemplation at a monastery in rural south-central Russia where his uncle had served as the abbot. The admiral-turned-monk died there in 1817, at age 74, and is buried there still today, as is his uncle.
Ushakov’s memory as an unsurpassed warrior has been greatly esteemed ever since in Russia and both the Imperial Navy and its Soviet successor named ships after the great man (there is a Sovremenny-class destroyer bearing his name in service with the fleet today, homeported in Kaliningrad). Stalin approved the Order of Ushakov during the Second World War for award to successful naval commanders, and it’s still bestowed by the Russian Federation today. And that’s just the secular, worldly side of Ushakov’s enduring legacy.
In 2001, just two years into the Putin era, the Russian Orthodox Church glorified the admiral as a saint for his works as a monk (although icons of “the blessed warrior” St Fyodor customarily depict him in his naval uniform, not monastic garb) and declared him the patron saint of the Russian Navy. Four years later, Patriarch Alexy II declared St Fyodor the patron as well of Russia’s nuclear-armed strategic bomber force, observing that “His strong faith helped St Fyodor Ushakov in all his battles,” offering the blessing: “I am sure he will become your intermediary as you fulfil your responsible duties to the fatherland.” Ushakov’s memory is cherished and venerated in Russian military circles, while the Putin regime ardently propagates the admiral-monk’s holy memory.
In many ways, Ushakov represents the Putinist ideal: a devout Russian patriot, Orthodox believer, and successful warrior in battle against the country’s enemies. If you’re an Orthodox believer too, it’s difficult to avoid noticing that Putin consecrated his Ukraine war to Admiral Ushakov’s memory and placed the “special operation” under the saint’s patronage with his speech last Friday. When the Kremlin strongman says that his attack on Ukraine “quite by chance coincided” with St Fyodor’s birthday, February 24, don’t believe him.
*Linguistic note: John 15:13 is usually rendered in Russian as «Нет больше той любви, как если кто положит душу свою за друзей своих», while Putin’s comment was: «Hет больше любви, как если бы кто-то отдал душу свою за друзей своих». In both cases, the Russian version literally refers to “soul” (душу) not “life” as in the standard English translation.
This is why conservatives LOVE russia:
Translation:
Comment Society
“When V.V. Putin, I have never had to hide in basements.
All pedagogical universities cancel the teaching of social sciences and world culture. Future teachers of Russians do not need all this
This article was published in issue 31 of March 25, 2022. Friday
Read number
09:30, March 23, 2022Alexey Tarasov,Reviewer
448941
The Ministry of Education decided to improve the quality of education in Russia, the prestige of the teaching profession, for which the country's pedagogical universities are being unified like an army system: they are introducing uniform standards for the training of teachers, saving them from humanitarian "excesses". Minister Sergei Kravtsov spoke about plans for such a “modernization” — in pursuance of the president’s order — last summer, mentioning the working title of the program — “Teacher of the Future Generation of Russia.” Now, the more its outlines become clearer, the more vague this future seems: it was decided to significantly lower the bar for a reasonable person in the coming Russia. The world is getting more complicated, but we have a “special way”. Perhaps, according to the Strugatskys: "A fool has become the norm, a little more - and it will become an ideal."
And there are objective reasons for this, and there will be explanations. For life in a besieged fortress, for extracting oil, for pumping it to China, humanitarian disciplines are not only unnecessary - they are harmful: thoughts interfere. And then, degradation is not for everyone and not always bad - primitive designs are stronger.
But whatever explanations may be found, we must imagine what awaits us.
Nina Lobanova. Photo from personal archive
The consequences of the reform are commented on by Nina Lobanova , Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Sociology and Religious Studies of the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University. V.P. Astafieva:
“Their social illiteracy seems to be even lower than their literary one. They do not know the history of literature, they read little of the classics, they study reality from newspapers. These words of A.M. Gorky wrote in 1928 about aspiring writers. Very little time will pass, and the same can be said about our school teachers - and it would be great if they even read the newspapers. And this is almost a hundred years after that gigantic educational breakthrough that the whole world, including the USSR, made.
What gives grounds for such an optimistic forecast? Another innovation of the Ministry of Education: one of the most impressive is the abolition of the teaching of sociology, cultural studies and political science in all pedagogical universities in the country.
Pedagogical universities are moving to new curricula based on the “Core of Higher Pedagogical Education”. Instead of separate disciplines there will be modules. Within the framework of the social and humanitarian module, the teaching of philosophy, history, economics and law is preserved. And the teaching of sociology, cultural studies, the MHC (world artistic culture) and political science is excluded. Fully.
Paradox! The social and humanitarian module lacks key social and human sciences!
Some may think that these changes in the curriculum are of a private nature and in no way affect the overall quality of teacher training.
However, it is not. To be convinced of this, it suffices to recall where the applicants for teacher training colleges are recruited from.
Pedagogical universities are not among the best universities in the country (with the exception of the Moscow State Pedagogical University and the Herzen State Pedagogical University). This means that admission to pedagogical specialties takes place according to the leftover principle: pedagogical universities, as a rule, are chosen by those who could not enter federal, flagship or national research universities. Accordingly, students of pedagogical universities differ from those who study at highly selective universities by their initially lower level of knowledge and literacy.
Future teachers often discover Andrey Rublev's "Trinity" and Venus de Milo only at MHC seminars. Memories of the first (in their life!) visit to a theater or a museum for many are associated not with their parents, but with a cultural studies teacher who organized a visit to the “Night at the Museum” for them.
With the restructuring of the curriculum, they are deprived of this opportunity. In fact, the introduction of the concept of "The Core of Higher Pedagogical Education" can be seen as an attempt to draw a cultural "Pale of Settlement" for teachers (to designate their cultural "ceiling"). The result of this will be a growing gap in the quality and volume of the cultural capital of students of pedagogical universities and students who have received a classical education (which, in turn, cannot but affect the quality of the subject training of future teachers).
Photo: Sergey Savostyanov / TASS
The point, however, is not only in knowledge (that is, in information, in information) - the point is in abilities, a special kind of mental skills and abilities that allow the development of the disciplines of the socio-humanitarian cycle.
Who, for example, can find ten differences between modern Russia and the Soviet state without studying political science and sociology?
How to develop the sociological imagination without the help of these disciplines?
I want to warn you of possible misunderstandings: today the sociological imagination is not a luxury, but an "essential item". To illustrate this idea, I will cite an excerpt from a recent student work: “When V.V. Putin, I have never had to hide in basements, I have had a peaceful sky above my head all my life.” I’m not even talking about how the joy of leaving the dungeons looks like in the realities of the modern world. The fact that at the same time when these lines were written, the fact that ... ["special operation"] is taking place does not fall into the field of view of the author of this work.
The lack of sociological imagination is an unfortunate but natural result of the functioning of our entire education system (from high school to graduate school). But now this child at least has a chance to expand the horizons of his perception. Acquaintance with sociology, cultural studies and political science gives him the opportunity to see the world as it is, to imagine how diverse and multifaceted it can be.
With the transition to curricula based on the concept of the “Core of Higher Pedagogical Education”, only one of all perspectives will remain, in which the world will be presented as it should be from the point of view of public policy.
Article 43. p. 1 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation says: "Everyone has the right to education." It should be added: "For quality."
Pedagogical universities have significant problems with the latter. Given this, the conclusion suggests itself that the training of teachers should be compensatory. Curricula should be structured in such a way as to improve the general cultural and linguistic level of students (which implies not the exclusion of basic socio-humanitarian disciplines from the curriculum, but the allocation of additional hours for their teaching, as well as the inclusion in the mandatory part of the curriculum of such a science as cultural / social anthropology is absolutely necessary for orientation in the modern, complex, global, multicultural world).
Photo: Donat Sorokin / TASS
Instead, the concept of the “Core of Higher Pedagogical Education” and the approach developed on its basis, depriving students of pedagogical universities of the opportunity to master at least the cultural minimum that students of other universities have the right to count on, will only increase the cultural deprivation of future teachers.
If the decision to exclude sociology, cultural studies, political science from teaching in pedagogical universities is not canceled,
the teachers who come to the school will not differ much from their students in terms of their social and cultural competence.
Colleagues, teachers of other pedagogical universities are silent today or their voices are not heard; it seems that there is no one who could give an adequate analysis of this "Nucleus of Higher Pedagogical Education". Only the voices of official officials are heard, in a very streamlined way, arguing about the need for this step and not saying a word about what real changes and educational losses this step will entail. We are told that it is useless to protest: the decision has been made at the level of the ministry. Apparently, they believe that there is no need for future teachers to be socially literate and culturally enlightened: they will have enough of the knowledge that they are given to prepare for the Unified State Examination in social science.
If this decision is not reversed, the words of Yaroslav Kuzminov that “we are graduating social morons” can rightfully be attributed not only to school graduates, but also to those who are being trained by Russian pedagogical universities. And it certainly will not be the fault of the graduates.
Translation:
Comment Society
“When V.V. Putin, I have never had to hide in basements.
All pedagogical universities cancel the teaching of social sciences and world culture. Future teachers of Russians do not need all this
This article was published in issue 31 of March 25, 2022. Friday
Read number
09:30, March 23, 2022Alexey Tarasov,Reviewer
448941
The Ministry of Education decided to improve the quality of education in Russia, the prestige of the teaching profession, for which the country's pedagogical universities are being unified like an army system: they are introducing uniform standards for the training of teachers, saving them from humanitarian "excesses". Minister Sergei Kravtsov spoke about plans for such a “modernization” — in pursuance of the president’s order — last summer, mentioning the working title of the program — “Teacher of the Future Generation of Russia.” Now, the more its outlines become clearer, the more vague this future seems: it was decided to significantly lower the bar for a reasonable person in the coming Russia. The world is getting more complicated, but we have a “special way”. Perhaps, according to the Strugatskys: "A fool has become the norm, a little more - and it will become an ideal."
And there are objective reasons for this, and there will be explanations. For life in a besieged fortress, for extracting oil, for pumping it to China, humanitarian disciplines are not only unnecessary - they are harmful: thoughts interfere. And then, degradation is not for everyone and not always bad - primitive designs are stronger.
But whatever explanations may be found, we must imagine what awaits us.
Nina Lobanova. Photo from personal archive
The consequences of the reform are commented on by Nina Lobanova , Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Sociology and Religious Studies of the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University. V.P. Astafieva:
“Their social illiteracy seems to be even lower than their literary one. They do not know the history of literature, they read little of the classics, they study reality from newspapers. These words of A.M. Gorky wrote in 1928 about aspiring writers. Very little time will pass, and the same can be said about our school teachers - and it would be great if they even read the newspapers. And this is almost a hundred years after that gigantic educational breakthrough that the whole world, including the USSR, made.
What gives grounds for such an optimistic forecast? Another innovation of the Ministry of Education: one of the most impressive is the abolition of the teaching of sociology, cultural studies and political science in all pedagogical universities in the country.
Pedagogical universities are moving to new curricula based on the “Core of Higher Pedagogical Education”. Instead of separate disciplines there will be modules. Within the framework of the social and humanitarian module, the teaching of philosophy, history, economics and law is preserved. And the teaching of sociology, cultural studies, the MHC (world artistic culture) and political science is excluded. Fully.
Paradox! The social and humanitarian module lacks key social and human sciences!
Some may think that these changes in the curriculum are of a private nature and in no way affect the overall quality of teacher training.
However, it is not. To be convinced of this, it suffices to recall where the applicants for teacher training colleges are recruited from.
Pedagogical universities are not among the best universities in the country (with the exception of the Moscow State Pedagogical University and the Herzen State Pedagogical University). This means that admission to pedagogical specialties takes place according to the leftover principle: pedagogical universities, as a rule, are chosen by those who could not enter federal, flagship or national research universities. Accordingly, students of pedagogical universities differ from those who study at highly selective universities by their initially lower level of knowledge and literacy.
Future teachers often discover Andrey Rublev's "Trinity" and Venus de Milo only at MHC seminars. Memories of the first (in their life!) visit to a theater or a museum for many are associated not with their parents, but with a cultural studies teacher who organized a visit to the “Night at the Museum” for them.
With the restructuring of the curriculum, they are deprived of this opportunity. In fact, the introduction of the concept of "The Core of Higher Pedagogical Education" can be seen as an attempt to draw a cultural "Pale of Settlement" for teachers (to designate their cultural "ceiling"). The result of this will be a growing gap in the quality and volume of the cultural capital of students of pedagogical universities and students who have received a classical education (which, in turn, cannot but affect the quality of the subject training of future teachers).
Photo: Sergey Savostyanov / TASS
The point, however, is not only in knowledge (that is, in information, in information) - the point is in abilities, a special kind of mental skills and abilities that allow the development of the disciplines of the socio-humanitarian cycle.
Who, for example, can find ten differences between modern Russia and the Soviet state without studying political science and sociology?
How to develop the sociological imagination without the help of these disciplines?
I want to warn you of possible misunderstandings: today the sociological imagination is not a luxury, but an "essential item". To illustrate this idea, I will cite an excerpt from a recent student work: “When V.V. Putin, I have never had to hide in basements, I have had a peaceful sky above my head all my life.” I’m not even talking about how the joy of leaving the dungeons looks like in the realities of the modern world. The fact that at the same time when these lines were written, the fact that ... ["special operation"] is taking place does not fall into the field of view of the author of this work.
The lack of sociological imagination is an unfortunate but natural result of the functioning of our entire education system (from high school to graduate school). But now this child at least has a chance to expand the horizons of his perception. Acquaintance with sociology, cultural studies and political science gives him the opportunity to see the world as it is, to imagine how diverse and multifaceted it can be.
With the transition to curricula based on the concept of the “Core of Higher Pedagogical Education”, only one of all perspectives will remain, in which the world will be presented as it should be from the point of view of public policy.
Article 43. p. 1 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation says: "Everyone has the right to education." It should be added: "For quality."
Pedagogical universities have significant problems with the latter. Given this, the conclusion suggests itself that the training of teachers should be compensatory. Curricula should be structured in such a way as to improve the general cultural and linguistic level of students (which implies not the exclusion of basic socio-humanitarian disciplines from the curriculum, but the allocation of additional hours for their teaching, as well as the inclusion in the mandatory part of the curriculum of such a science as cultural / social anthropology is absolutely necessary for orientation in the modern, complex, global, multicultural world).
Photo: Donat Sorokin / TASS
Instead, the concept of the “Core of Higher Pedagogical Education” and the approach developed on its basis, depriving students of pedagogical universities of the opportunity to master at least the cultural minimum that students of other universities have the right to count on, will only increase the cultural deprivation of future teachers.
If the decision to exclude sociology, cultural studies, political science from teaching in pedagogical universities is not canceled,
the teachers who come to the school will not differ much from their students in terms of their social and cultural competence.
Colleagues, teachers of other pedagogical universities are silent today or their voices are not heard; it seems that there is no one who could give an adequate analysis of this "Nucleus of Higher Pedagogical Education". Only the voices of official officials are heard, in a very streamlined way, arguing about the need for this step and not saying a word about what real changes and educational losses this step will entail. We are told that it is useless to protest: the decision has been made at the level of the ministry. Apparently, they believe that there is no need for future teachers to be socially literate and culturally enlightened: they will have enough of the knowledge that they are given to prepare for the Unified State Examination in social science.
If this decision is not reversed, the words of Yaroslav Kuzminov that “we are graduating social morons” can rightfully be attributed not only to school graduates, but also to those who are being trained by Russian pedagogical universities. And it certainly will not be the fault of the graduates.
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The Economist is also reporting on this now...
The new Russian cult of war
Reactionary, obscurantist and having a day in the sun
The new Russian cult of war
It has been growing unnoticed for some time
On march 22nd, in a penal colony 1,000km north-east of the front lines around Kyiv, Alexei Navalny, the jailed leader of Russia’s opposition, was sentenced to another nine years imprisonment. To serve them he will probably be moved from Vladimir, where he has been kept for more than a year, to a yet harsher maximum-security jail elsewhere.
The crime for which he was sentenced is fraud. His true crime is one of common enterprise with that for which the people of Ukraine are now suffering collective punishment. The Ukrainians want to embrace many, if not all, the values held dear by other European nations. Mr Navalny wants the same for Russia. Vladimir Putin cannot countenance either desire. As Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, told The Economist, “If Russia wins, there will be no Ukraine; if Ukraine wins, there will be a new Russia.” That new Russia is as much a target of Mr Putin’s war as Ukraine is. Its potential must be crushed as surely as Mr Navalny’s.
This crusade against a liberal European future is being fought in the name of Russkiy mir—“the Russian world”, a previously obscure historical term for a Slavic civilisation based on shared ethnicity, religion and heritage. The Putin regime has revived, promulgated and debased this idea into an obscurantist anti-Western mixture of Orthodox dogma, nationalism, conspiracy theory and security-state Stalinism.
The war is the latest and most striking manifestation of this revanchist ideological movement. And it has brought to the fore a dark and mystical component within it, one a bit in love with death. As Andrei Kurilkin, a publisher, puts it, “The substance of the myth is less important than its sacred nature…The legitimacy of the state is now grounded not in its public good, but in a quasi-religious cult.”
The cult was on proud display at Mr Putin’s first public appearance since the invasion—a rally at the Luzhniki stadium packed with 95,000 flag-waving people, mostly young, some bused in, many, presumably, there of their own volition. An open octagonal structure set up in the middle of the stadium served as an altar. Standing at it Mr Putin praised Russia’s army with words from St John’s gospel: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
His oration, delivered in a $14,000 Loro Piana coat, made much of Fyodor Ushakov, a deeply religious admiral who, in the 18th century, helped win Crimea back from the Ottomans. In 2001 he was canonised by the Orthodox church; he later became the patron saint of nuclear-armed long-distance bombers. “He once said that the storms of war would glorify Russia,” Mr Putin told the crowd. “That is how it was in his time; that is how it is today and will always be!”
A cathedral dome 19.45 metres across
In both his broad appeals to religion and his specific focus on the saintly Ushakov Mr Putin was cleaving to Stalin’s example. After the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in 1941, the sometime seminarian turned communist dictator rehabilitated and co-opted the previously persecuted Orthodox church as a way of rallying the people. He also created a medal for outstanding service by naval officers called the order of Ushakov and arranged for his remains to be reburied.
This was not a mere echo or emulation; there is a strand of history which leads quite directly from then to now. Links between the church and the security forces, first fostered under Stalin, grew stronger after the fall of Communism. Whereas various western European churches repented and reflected after providing support for Hitler, the Moscow Patriarchate has never repented for its collusion with Stalin in such matters as the repression of Ukrainian Catholics after 1945.
The allegiance of its leaders, if not of all its clergy, has now been transferred to Mr Putin. Kirill, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, has called his presidency “a miracle of God”; he and others have become willing supporters of the cult of war. An early indication of this possibility was seen in 2005, when the orange and black ribbons of the Order of St George, a military saint venerated by the Orthodox church, were given a new pre-eminence in commemorations of the 1941-45 struggle against Germany, known in Russia as the “great patriotic war”. Its garish culmination can be seen in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka, 70km west of Moscow, which was inaugurated on June 22nd (the day Hitler launched his invasion) in 2020 (the 75th anniversary of the war’s end) with Mr Putin and Kirill in attendance.
The cathedral is a Byzantine monstrosity in khaki, its floor made from melted-down German tanks. But it is not devoted solely to the wars of the previous century. A mosaic commemorates the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the country’s role in Syria’s civil war: angels smile down on the soldiers going about their holy work.
In keeping with this attitude Kirill has declared the current war a Godly affair and praised the role it will play in keeping Russia safe from the horrors of gay-pride marches. More zealous churchmen have gone further. Elizbar Orlov, a priest in Rostov, a city close to the border with Ukraine, said the Russian army “was cleaning the world of a diabolic infection”.
As the cathedral shows, the Russian people’s sacrifice and victories in the great patriotic war, which saw both the loss of 20m Soviet citizens and the creation of an empire greater in extent than any of the Tsars’, are central to Mr Putin’s new ideology of the Russian world. Today, though, the foes and allies of the 1940s have been shuffled around, allowing the war to be reframed as part of an assault on Russia’s civilisation in which the West has been engaged for centuries. The main culprits in this aggression are Britain and America—no longer remembered as allies in the fight against Nazis, but cast instead as backers of the imaginary Nazis from which Ukraine must be saved.
Project Russia
More important to the cult even than the priests are the siloviki of the security services, from whose ranks Mr Putin himself emerged. Officers of the fsb, one of the successors to the kgb, have been at the heart of Russian politics for 20 years. Like many inhabitants of closed, tightly knit and powerful organisations, they have a tendency to see themselves as members of a secret order with access to revealed truths denied to lesser folk. Anti-Westernism and a siege mentality are central to their beliefs. Mr Putin relies on the briefs with which they supply him, always contained in distinctive red folders, for his information about the world
In this realm, too, a turn towards the ideology now being promulgated was first seen in 2005, when a faction within the fsb produced an anonymous book called “Project Russia”. It was delivered by courier services to various ministries dealing with security and Russia’s relationship with the world, warning them that democracy was a threat and the West an enemy.
Few paid much heed. Though Mr Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000 was helped by his willingness to wage war in Chechnya, his mandate was to stabilise an economy still reeling from the debt crisis of 1998 and to consolidate the gains, mostly pocketed by oligarchs, of the first post-Soviet decade. His contract with the Russian people was based not on religion or ideology, but on improving incomes. Only dedicated Kremlin watchers, astute artists such as Vladimir Sorokin and a few political activists paid much attention to the new ideology of isolationism appearing in some of the darker corners of the power structure. At a time of postmodernist irony, glamour and hedonism it seemed marginal at best.
Two years later the new way of thinking became much more obvious to the outside world. In his Munich speech in 2007 Mr Putin formally rejected the idea of Russia’s integration into the West. In the same year he told a press conference in Moscow that nuclear weapons and Orthodox Christianity were the two pillars of Russian society, the one guaranteeing the country’s external security, the other its moral health.
After tens of thousands of middle-class city dwellers marched through Moscow and St Petersburg in 2011-12 demanding “Russia without Putin” the securocrats and clerics started to expand their dogma into daily life. A regime which sustained, and was sustained by, networks of corruption, rent extraction and extortion required religion and an ideology of national greatness to restore the legitimacy lost during the looting. As Mr Navalny remarked in a video which revealed Mr Putin’s palace in Sochi, covering up things of such size requires a lot of ideology.
Broken destinies
At that point it was still possible to see the ideology as a smokescreen rather than a product of real belief. Perhaps that was a mistake; perhaps the underlying reality changed. Either way, the onset of the covid-19 pandemic two years ago brought a raising of the ideological stakes. At the time, the most discussed aspect of the constitutional changes that Mr Putin finagled in July 2020 was that they effectively removed all limits on his term in office. But they also installed new ideological norms: gay marriage was banned, Russian enshrined as the “language of the state-forming people” and God given an official place in the nation’s heritage.
Mr Putin’s long subsequent periods of isolation seem to have firmed up the transformation. He is said to have lost much of his interest in current affairs and become preoccupied instead with history, paying particular heed to figures like Konstantin Leontyev, an ultra-reactionary 19th-century visionary who admired hierarchy and monarchy, cringed at democratic uniformity and believed in the freezing of time. One of the few people he appears to have spent time with is Yuri Kovalchuk, a close friend who controls a vast media group. According to Russian journalists they discussed Mr Putin’s mission to restore unity between Russia and Ukraine.
Hence a war against Ukraine which is also a war against Russia’s future—or at least the future as it has been conceived of by Russia’s sometimes small but frequently dominant Westernising faction for the past 350 years. As in Ukraine, the war is intended to wipe out the possibility of any future that looks towards Europe and some form of liberating modernity. In Ukraine there would be no coherent future left in its place. In Russia the modernisers would leave as their already diminished world was replaced by something fiercely reactionary and inward looking.
The Russian-backed “republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk may be a model. There, crooks and thugs were elevated to unaccustomed status, armed with new weapons and fitted with allegedly glorious purpose: to fight against Ukraine’s European dream. In Russia they would be tasked with keeping any such dream from returning, whether from abroad, or from a cell. ■
The new Russian cult of war
Reactionary, obscurantist and having a day in the sun
The new Russian cult of war
It has been growing unnoticed for some time
On march 22nd, in a penal colony 1,000km north-east of the front lines around Kyiv, Alexei Navalny, the jailed leader of Russia’s opposition, was sentenced to another nine years imprisonment. To serve them he will probably be moved from Vladimir, where he has been kept for more than a year, to a yet harsher maximum-security jail elsewhere.
The crime for which he was sentenced is fraud. His true crime is one of common enterprise with that for which the people of Ukraine are now suffering collective punishment. The Ukrainians want to embrace many, if not all, the values held dear by other European nations. Mr Navalny wants the same for Russia. Vladimir Putin cannot countenance either desire. As Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, told The Economist, “If Russia wins, there will be no Ukraine; if Ukraine wins, there will be a new Russia.” That new Russia is as much a target of Mr Putin’s war as Ukraine is. Its potential must be crushed as surely as Mr Navalny’s.
This crusade against a liberal European future is being fought in the name of Russkiy mir—“the Russian world”, a previously obscure historical term for a Slavic civilisation based on shared ethnicity, religion and heritage. The Putin regime has revived, promulgated and debased this idea into an obscurantist anti-Western mixture of Orthodox dogma, nationalism, conspiracy theory and security-state Stalinism.
The war is the latest and most striking manifestation of this revanchist ideological movement. And it has brought to the fore a dark and mystical component within it, one a bit in love with death. As Andrei Kurilkin, a publisher, puts it, “The substance of the myth is less important than its sacred nature…The legitimacy of the state is now grounded not in its public good, but in a quasi-religious cult.”
The cult was on proud display at Mr Putin’s first public appearance since the invasion—a rally at the Luzhniki stadium packed with 95,000 flag-waving people, mostly young, some bused in, many, presumably, there of their own volition. An open octagonal structure set up in the middle of the stadium served as an altar. Standing at it Mr Putin praised Russia’s army with words from St John’s gospel: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
His oration, delivered in a $14,000 Loro Piana coat, made much of Fyodor Ushakov, a deeply religious admiral who, in the 18th century, helped win Crimea back from the Ottomans. In 2001 he was canonised by the Orthodox church; he later became the patron saint of nuclear-armed long-distance bombers. “He once said that the storms of war would glorify Russia,” Mr Putin told the crowd. “That is how it was in his time; that is how it is today and will always be!”
A cathedral dome 19.45 metres across
In both his broad appeals to religion and his specific focus on the saintly Ushakov Mr Putin was cleaving to Stalin’s example. After the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in 1941, the sometime seminarian turned communist dictator rehabilitated and co-opted the previously persecuted Orthodox church as a way of rallying the people. He also created a medal for outstanding service by naval officers called the order of Ushakov and arranged for his remains to be reburied.
This was not a mere echo or emulation; there is a strand of history which leads quite directly from then to now. Links between the church and the security forces, first fostered under Stalin, grew stronger after the fall of Communism. Whereas various western European churches repented and reflected after providing support for Hitler, the Moscow Patriarchate has never repented for its collusion with Stalin in such matters as the repression of Ukrainian Catholics after 1945.
The allegiance of its leaders, if not of all its clergy, has now been transferred to Mr Putin. Kirill, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, has called his presidency “a miracle of God”; he and others have become willing supporters of the cult of war. An early indication of this possibility was seen in 2005, when the orange and black ribbons of the Order of St George, a military saint venerated by the Orthodox church, were given a new pre-eminence in commemorations of the 1941-45 struggle against Germany, known in Russia as the “great patriotic war”. Its garish culmination can be seen in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka, 70km west of Moscow, which was inaugurated on June 22nd (the day Hitler launched his invasion) in 2020 (the 75th anniversary of the war’s end) with Mr Putin and Kirill in attendance.
The cathedral is a Byzantine monstrosity in khaki, its floor made from melted-down German tanks. But it is not devoted solely to the wars of the previous century. A mosaic commemorates the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the country’s role in Syria’s civil war: angels smile down on the soldiers going about their holy work.
In keeping with this attitude Kirill has declared the current war a Godly affair and praised the role it will play in keeping Russia safe from the horrors of gay-pride marches. More zealous churchmen have gone further. Elizbar Orlov, a priest in Rostov, a city close to the border with Ukraine, said the Russian army “was cleaning the world of a diabolic infection”.
As the cathedral shows, the Russian people’s sacrifice and victories in the great patriotic war, which saw both the loss of 20m Soviet citizens and the creation of an empire greater in extent than any of the Tsars’, are central to Mr Putin’s new ideology of the Russian world. Today, though, the foes and allies of the 1940s have been shuffled around, allowing the war to be reframed as part of an assault on Russia’s civilisation in which the West has been engaged for centuries. The main culprits in this aggression are Britain and America—no longer remembered as allies in the fight against Nazis, but cast instead as backers of the imaginary Nazis from which Ukraine must be saved.
Project Russia
More important to the cult even than the priests are the siloviki of the security services, from whose ranks Mr Putin himself emerged. Officers of the fsb, one of the successors to the kgb, have been at the heart of Russian politics for 20 years. Like many inhabitants of closed, tightly knit and powerful organisations, they have a tendency to see themselves as members of a secret order with access to revealed truths denied to lesser folk. Anti-Westernism and a siege mentality are central to their beliefs. Mr Putin relies on the briefs with which they supply him, always contained in distinctive red folders, for his information about the world
In this realm, too, a turn towards the ideology now being promulgated was first seen in 2005, when a faction within the fsb produced an anonymous book called “Project Russia”. It was delivered by courier services to various ministries dealing with security and Russia’s relationship with the world, warning them that democracy was a threat and the West an enemy.
Few paid much heed. Though Mr Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000 was helped by his willingness to wage war in Chechnya, his mandate was to stabilise an economy still reeling from the debt crisis of 1998 and to consolidate the gains, mostly pocketed by oligarchs, of the first post-Soviet decade. His contract with the Russian people was based not on religion or ideology, but on improving incomes. Only dedicated Kremlin watchers, astute artists such as Vladimir Sorokin and a few political activists paid much attention to the new ideology of isolationism appearing in some of the darker corners of the power structure. At a time of postmodernist irony, glamour and hedonism it seemed marginal at best.
Two years later the new way of thinking became much more obvious to the outside world. In his Munich speech in 2007 Mr Putin formally rejected the idea of Russia’s integration into the West. In the same year he told a press conference in Moscow that nuclear weapons and Orthodox Christianity were the two pillars of Russian society, the one guaranteeing the country’s external security, the other its moral health.
After tens of thousands of middle-class city dwellers marched through Moscow and St Petersburg in 2011-12 demanding “Russia without Putin” the securocrats and clerics started to expand their dogma into daily life. A regime which sustained, and was sustained by, networks of corruption, rent extraction and extortion required religion and an ideology of national greatness to restore the legitimacy lost during the looting. As Mr Navalny remarked in a video which revealed Mr Putin’s palace in Sochi, covering up things of such size requires a lot of ideology.
Broken destinies
At that point it was still possible to see the ideology as a smokescreen rather than a product of real belief. Perhaps that was a mistake; perhaps the underlying reality changed. Either way, the onset of the covid-19 pandemic two years ago brought a raising of the ideological stakes. At the time, the most discussed aspect of the constitutional changes that Mr Putin finagled in July 2020 was that they effectively removed all limits on his term in office. But they also installed new ideological norms: gay marriage was banned, Russian enshrined as the “language of the state-forming people” and God given an official place in the nation’s heritage.
Mr Putin’s long subsequent periods of isolation seem to have firmed up the transformation. He is said to have lost much of his interest in current affairs and become preoccupied instead with history, paying particular heed to figures like Konstantin Leontyev, an ultra-reactionary 19th-century visionary who admired hierarchy and monarchy, cringed at democratic uniformity and believed in the freezing of time. One of the few people he appears to have spent time with is Yuri Kovalchuk, a close friend who controls a vast media group. According to Russian journalists they discussed Mr Putin’s mission to restore unity between Russia and Ukraine.
Hence a war against Ukraine which is also a war against Russia’s future—or at least the future as it has been conceived of by Russia’s sometimes small but frequently dominant Westernising faction for the past 350 years. As in Ukraine, the war is intended to wipe out the possibility of any future that looks towards Europe and some form of liberating modernity. In Ukraine there would be no coherent future left in its place. In Russia the modernisers would leave as their already diminished world was replaced by something fiercely reactionary and inward looking.
The Russian-backed “republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk may be a model. There, crooks and thugs were elevated to unaccustomed status, armed with new weapons and fitted with allegedly glorious purpose: to fight against Ukraine’s European dream. In Russia they would be tasked with keeping any such dream from returning, whether from abroad, or from a cell. ■
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The infamous "ideologist of the Russian World" Aleksandr Dugin has given a long interview to the Russian tabloid MK.
If anyone in Russia has given up on capturing Kyiv, it is definitely not Dugin.
A , if you can stomach it.
He says: Russia has been battling for Kyiv since the middle ages in a "conflict between Great Russians and the Galicians", so "Kyiv will be ours".
He says: "The siege of Kyiv is a battle for the unity of Eastern Slavs and the creation of a sovereign civilization of the Russian World, which is directed against the West."
He says: "We are waging an eschatological military operation, a special operation between Light and Darkness in the sitution of the end of times..."
He says: "Truth and God are on our side. We are fighting the absolute evil, embodied in Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism..."
Asked about nuclear weapons, he says: "We are always balancing on a tightrope. Any weapon is created to be fired... nuclear weapons in certain circumstances, if it's a clash of civilizations, can become offensive weapons. Of course, Russia will never fire first."
He says Russia is "an empire in a sense, which absorbed everything... it won't be complete until we have united all Eastern Slavs and all Eurasian brothers into a common big space."
Asked "how to explain to Russian mothers from Mariupol that it's all a blessing", he says explanations will follow "as soon as the flag of East Ukraine, Russia, freedom and independence is raised over Kherson and Novorossiya" and republics are created in other Ukrainian regions.
Asked if Putin reads his work, he says: "I think we read the same letters written in gold in the sky of Russian history".
Now would be a good time for someone to reassure us all that Dugin is not as influential as his reputation suggests. Please?
For several thousand more words of this toxic, terrifying BS, see
Александр Дугин: «солнечный» Путин победил «лунного»
Это его портретами в 2014-м были увешаны улицы Харькова. Его последователи Стрелков и Бородай первыми возглавили отколовшуюся от Украины ДНР. С его цитатами в головах ехали на Донбасс русские добровол…
Александр Дугин: «солнечный» Путин победил «лунного»
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