A Mishmash of Ideology and Religion

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

The greatest influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brand of authoritarianism has been a right wing think tank, the Izborsk Club, founded in 2012. It’s named after the place of its first meeting, the city of Isborsk in northwestern Russia.

The Izborsk Club aimed to unite the “Reds” (national Communists) and the “Whites” (anti-Soviet nationalists). Russian writer Aleksandr Prokhanov, its founder, sees his dream of reconstructing the Soviet empire and righting the “monstrous injury” committed against Russian history in 1991, through the current war in Ukraine.

Prokhanov is a leading figure in “national patriotism,” an ideological movement that arose during the last days of the Soviet Union, to oppose Russia’s “Occidentalists” and liberal democrats.

It brought together intellectuals nostalgic for imperial Russia and the Soviet political-military establishment that opposed the liberalisation programme of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Throughout the 1990s, Zavtra (Tomorrow), the newspaper Prokhanov founded, was the rallying point for Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s opponents.

Regular contributors included the “Eurasian” thinker Alexandr Dugin, who argues that Russian civilisation is entirely distinct from that of the West; radical National Bolshevik writer Eduard Limonov; and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. Dugin credited Prokhanov with being “the godfather” of the ultra-right opposition during the 1990s.

What bound this eclectic group together was their virulent critique of post-Soviet democracy, economic liberalisation, the power of the oligarchs, the Westernisation of Russian society, and American dominance of the international order.

They often spoke in apocalyptic terms about the future of Russia. “Yeltsin has killed 2.2 million Russians,” ran one Zavtra headline in 1995, calling Yeltsin’s economic policy a “genocide” of the Russian people.

For them, the traditional faith of the Russian people and Russia’s nuclear shield are two things that strengthen Russian statehood and create the necessary conditions for ensuring the country’s internal and external survival.

In that vision, “Russia” is a spiritual empire of historical-religious origin, one of virtue. The geographic empire may have collapsed, but its spiritual legitimacy survives irrespective of transitory national borders. The Ukraine cannot be independent because it is Eurasian and inescapably a part of spiritual Russia.

 

Putin also benefits from support by the religious authorities. He has allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to return to prominence and supported it in a way unheard of since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Church has, in turn, provided some of the intellectual and cultural backing for Putin’s vision for Russia and the wider Russian sphere of influence.

As Putin has looked to reinforce a sense of ethnic and linguistic “Russianness” even beyond the Russian Federation borders, the Church has been a valuable part of that process. It considers itself the defender of the canonical borders of the church -- particularly in relation to Russian operations in Ukraine and the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

On March 6, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Church and a long time Putin ally, speaking from the altar of the city’s cathedral of Christ the Saviour, denounced any form of “capitulation and weakness” in the fight against “so-called Western values.” He expressed his view that behind the war in Ukraine there is a spiritual difference between the West and the Orthodox world, and the latter is superior.

Despite their shared origins in 10th century Kievan Rus', the Orthodox Church of Ukraine broke away from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2018. Disappointed, Moscow then cut its ties with the Istanbul-based Eastern Orthodox Church, which backed the independence of the Ukrainian clergy and today opposes the war. But the nominal head of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, Patriarch Bartholomew I, has no real authority over churches other than his own. 

Cyril Hovorun, a Professor of Ecclesiology and International Relations at the Sankt Ignatius Theological Academy in Sweden, described the Russian Orthodox Church’s relationship to the state as complex.

“It is not just about the church’s complete submission to the political authorities,” he told Al Jazeera. “The church also tried to influence the Kremlin. In a sense, the Russian Orthodox Church was successful, because the Kremlin at some point adopted the political language of the church, which became known as the ideology of the ‘Russian world.’ This ideology originated in the church and then was weaponised by the Kremlin.”