Putin the Terrible
Around the world, the crisis of democracy and the rise of neomedieval memory politics go hand in hand. By falsifying and elevating the legacies of Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible, and other canonical figures, Vladimir Putin hopes to justify his own authoritarianism and neo-imperial wars of aggression.
Dina Khapaeva
ATLANTA – In early August, the Russian occupiers of the port of Mariupol demolished a monument to the city’s Ukrainian defenders.
Soon after, plans were announced to replace it with a statue of Alexander Nevsky, a thirteenth-century medieval Russian warlord known for his military exploits against the Swedes and the Teutonic knights.
Not long before, the Russian nationalist website Regnum had published an article entitled “New Assault on Rus: What Unites the Battle of the Neva and the Special Operation in Ukraine,” which favorably compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Nevsky.
Depicting Putin’s “special operation in Ukraine” as part of a war that the West has waged against Russia since the Middle Ages, the article warned that “the Fatherland is in danger,” and described both Nevsky and Putin as “national leaders” around whom the Russian people should rally.
Such medieval analogies are nowadays all too typical in Putin’s Russia.
In another recent article, published by FederalPress, Putin’s brutalization of Ukraine is likened to Russia’s tenth-century conversion to Christianity under another medieval Russian warlord, Vladimir the Saint.
Again, the West – and Ukraine especially – is said to represent “pagans” and “Satanists” who are threatening Russian traditional values.
And not to be left out, the Russian government’s official newspaper, Gazeta.Ru, recently published an article entitled “What Do the Baptism of Rus and the Special Operation in Ukraine Have in Common?”
Parroting Putin’s claim that the adoption of Christianity established the foundations of the Russian state, the article presents the “special military operation” as a kind of second baptism, implying that it is just as important as the original for fostering the Orthodox faith and Russia’s nationhood.
The article then goes on to slander the Ukrainian people:
“The Ukronazis have no morality, they do not reason in moral terms and are not afraid of God’s punishment for their atrocities.
Many of the Ukronazis are open Satanists and followers of misanthropic cults, who make sacrifices and commit ritual murders.”
The striking similarities between these analyses are not surprising.
According to Meduza, an independent Russian news agency based in Latvia, state-connected media outlets are simply cribbing directly (without attribution) from propaganda booklets by leading Kremlin ideologists.
Particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, the entire Russian propaganda machine has been cranked into high gear to justify the war on neomedieval grounds.
To those outside Russia, it might seem strange that the Kremlin expects Russians to believe such historically absurd and politically preposterous claims.
But the glorification of Russia’s medieval past has been a long-running domestic project under Putin.
For two decades, the Kremlin has been carrying out a “special operation” on Russians’ historical memory, aggressively reshaping their self-perception and understanding of the past.
By doubling down on this rhetoric now, Russia’s leaders are betting that their strategy will succeed.
THE MEDIEVAL LOOKING GLASS
While the cult of Nevsky has long played an important role in this multifaceted memory politics, Nevsky’s historical legacy is ambivalent.
The Prince of Novgorod did indeed win several military victories against the Swedes and the Germans.
But he ruled on behalf of the Mongols, whose brutal conquest is still remembered for the atrocities committed in what is now Russia.
As a loyal vassal, Nevsky not only paid tribute to the Mongols but also suppressed his own compatriots’ attempts to revolt against them.
Obviously, Nevsky’s submission to the Mongols complicates the Kremlin’s efforts to depict him as a model patriot.
That is why even mentioning the prince’s “collaboration with the Mongols” can get you a summons to the prosecutor’s office, as happened last year to Sergei Chernyshov, a college administrator in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, who dared to share that historical fact on Facebook.
Putin is not the first Russian despot to use Nevsky in his propaganda.
Nevsky was canonized in 1547 under Ivan the Terrible (1533-84), who relied on the cult of Nevsky to legitimize his rule.
Two centuries later, Peter the Great celebrated his own victory over Sweden in the Northern War (1700-21) by transferring Nevsky’s ashes to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in his new capital, Saint Petersburg.
In the twentieth century, the Soviet historical memory of Nevsky was heavily influenced by Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky, which focuses on the prince’s successful campaigns against Russia’s enemies in the West.
When Stalin addressed Russian troops in November 1941, five months after the Nazi invasion, he invoked Nevsky to inspire patriotism and courage in the ranks.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Nevsky’s name languished in obscurity until December 2008.
That year, viewers of the TV show Name of Russia voted Stalin “the most important state leader of the past,” apparently demonstrating the success of a re-Stalinization campaign that Putin’s Kremlin propaganda machine had been carrying out through media proxies.
But because the Kremlin did not want to go too far, it intervened to revise the ranking, replacing Stalin as Russia’s main national hero with Nevsky, who seemed a more neutral symbol of military glory.
Then, in June 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, Putin announced plans to celebrate Nevsky’s 800th birthday in 2021.
And in 2017, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, did his own part to boost the prince’s image in the minds of the faithful. According to Kirill:
“Those who tried to control Russia from the East were interested in our purses, while those who tried to control us from the West were interested in our souls. [...]
Russia did not lose its identity in the aftermath of captivity by the Horde [the Mongols], it did not lose its faith, it didn’t even lose its state structure.”
In contrast, Kirill continued, if the crusaders or Westerners had succeeded in conquering it, “Rus as a historical, cultural, spiritual phenomenon would have ceased to exist.”
When 2021 rolled around, the Kremlin held an exhibition featuring the prince’s ashes, organized several conferences, and sponsored performances honoring him in Yekaterinburg, Astrakhan, Novgorod, Vladimir, and other cities.
Addressing attendees at one of the major Nevsky conferences, Putin called him “a great son of our Fatherland.”
Today, two churches dedicated to Nevsky are currently under construction, and a 50-foot monument now stands on the banks of Chudskoe Lake, located on the border with Estonia, where Nevsky won his battle against the crusaders.
This installation is especially belligerent, because it is visible in Estonia and clearly meant to be interpreted not only as a reminder of past military confrontations, but of Estonia’s long subjugation within the Russian and Soviet empires.
CZARRY-EYED HISTORY
Putin’s exaltation of Nevsky emerged from his earlier efforts to rehabilitate the historical memory of Ivan the Terrible.
In the 2010s, the Kremlin launched a massive campaign celebrating this most vicious of Russian czars, but it soon ran into resistance.
As his name suggests, Ivan established a regime of brutal state terror, known as “the Oprichnina” (1565-72), and, until recently, his legacy was rightly damned.
But in 2016, the first (in Russian history) equestrian monument to Ivan the Terrible was erected in the city of Orel, and others have since appeared in Alexandrov (the capital of the Oprichnina), Moscow, and Cheboksary.
Through government-financed films and TV series, state-sponsored historical conferences, and exhibitions, Ivan is now commended as a great state leader and empire builder.
Even his use of terror is now extolled as the most effective means of governing Russia.
But this campaign to glorify Ivan met with pushback in Russia’s then-surviving liberal media and in Tatarstan, an autonomous republic with a large Muslim population, whose capital, Kazan, Ivan conquered in 1552.
In seeking a broader base for its neomedieval politics, the Kremlin thus shifted its focus to Nevsky.
As a saint who fought against the abhorrent West and not against the ancestors of the Kremlin’s current subjects, he is far less controversial in today’s domestic context.
Moreover, Nevsky is an ideal avatar for the Kremlin’s antidemocratic values.
A return to a society of estates, theocratic monarchy, and empire have been propagated most aggressively by the Kremlin’s proxies – Aleksandr Dugin’s neofascist International Eurasia Movement and the Izborsky Club, the main forum of the Russian far right.
In addition to Ivan the Terrible and Nevsky, Putin has also sought to glorify Prince Vladimir, the tenth-century ruler of Kievan Rus’ best known for his adoption of Orthodox Christianity in 988.
In November 2016, a 57-foot monument to Vladimir was placed in front of the Kremlin in Moscow, most likely in celebration of the annexation of Crimea.
Both Russia and Ukraine claim the prince as their own, and the Moscow monument was clearly designed to compete with the 1853 Prince Vladimir Monument in Kyiv.
At the dedication ceremony, Putin said:
“Prince Vladimir will forever be remembered as a gatherer and defender of the Russian lands – a farsighted politician who laid the foundations of a strong, unitary, centralized state that unified mutually equal peoples, languages, cultures, and religions into one large family.”
Andrei Kravchuk’s 2016 neomedieval propaganda film Viking throws additional light on the agenda behind the monument.
The film – which the Kremlin now touts as a paramount achievement of post-Soviet cinema – tells the story of the Viking prince Vladimir and his conquest of Korsun (the Slavic name for Chersonesus, an ancient Greek city in Crimea).
Kravchuk depicts Vladimir as a noble, fearless warrior and a wise, pleasantly engaging leader.
The film’s militant tagline, “To Korsun we go!,” evokes the infamous 2014 “Crimea is ours!” campaign. Kravchuk thus echoes Putin’s own justification for annexing Crimea.
Both speak of “Korsun,” the place “where Prince Vladimir was baptized prior to baptizing Rus’,” as Putin put it in his December 2014 address to the Federal Assembly.
RELEGISLATING THE PAST
Russian state officials consider any criticism of Russia’s medieval history and its rulers to be part of an eternal “information war” that the West is waging against Russia to advance its eternal goal: the dissolution of the Russian state.
Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s minister of culture between 2012 and 2020, actively promoted this conspiracy theory – along with the veneration of Ivan and Nevsky.
Putin’s neomedieval memory politics are not limited to propaganda and cultural exhibitions.
In 2004, Putin did away with the Soviet tradition of commemorating the October Revolution on November 7.
Instead, Russians would mark a new state holiday, National Unity Day, on November 4, in memory of Russia’s “liberation from the Polish occupation of 1612,” which ended the catastrophic period known as the Time of Troubles.
This period – an outcome of Ivan’s own policies (an irony that is perhaps lost on Putin) – included Russia’s defeat in the Livonian War (1558-83), widespread social unrest, and a large-scale famine.
While hinting that Putin’s accession to power terminated the 1990s “Time of Troubles,” the new holiday also suggested continuity between Russian czarism and Putin’s rule.
Similarly, in 2020, Putin engineered a constitutional amendment to include a reference to “Russia’s millennial history” (and mentions of God), as well as an explicit claim on Ukraine.
As the place where the history of Rus began, Kyiv supposedly has been an integral part of Russia ever since the Middle Ages.
More recently, Putin made these claims explicit in a long article that he published in July 2021, in which he invoked Russia’s medieval past and argued that Russia and Ukraine “are the same people.”
A GLOBAL MOVEMENT
In pressing the politics of neomedieval history, Putin’s purpose is to deny the viability of democracy and to justify social inequalities, autocracy, terror, and an aggressive imperial foreign policy.
His ultimate objectives are thus hardly unique.
Medieval fantasies are typical of right-wing movements around the world.
In the United States, neomedieval symbols have featured prominently among far-right marchers and rioters from Charlottesville to the US Capitol.
Those hoping to overturn the 2020 election have even adopted the Kraken, a gigantic sea creature in ancient Scandinavian folklore.
The QAnon conspiracy theory with its claims that former President Donald Trump is fighting a Satan-worshipping cabal, is distinctly neomedieval.
Trump and his associates frequently allude to this fantasy world.
Faced with criticism that his US-Mexico border wall was “medieval,” Trump replied, “They say it’s a medieval solution, a wall.
It’s true, because it worked then, and it works even better now.”
Similarly, Trump’s White House strategist Steve Bannon openly declared that he would “like to go back to the old times of Tudor England.
I’d put the heads on pikes.
I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”
And, of course, some of the insurrectionists at the Capitol wore Viking costumes and wanted to “Hang Mike Pence.”
Admirers of neomedievalism are naturally attracted to violence, regardless of where they live.
When confronted with the fact that Putin “is a killer,” Trump defended him, asking, “You think our country’s so innocent?”
And Bannon speaks approvingly of both Putin and Dugin, a fascist who wants to subjugate Ukraine and eradicate Ukrainian nationhood.
True, the US lags far behind Russia in its embrace of neomedieval politics.
But like Putin and his cronies, Trump and his fellow Republicans increasingly share the same goal.
They want to undermine democratic institutions and replace them with older alternative forms of political and social organization.
Appeals to the “past” – especially a medieval one – serve to historicize and excuse existing inequalities, while advancing a new system of political subjugation.
The crisis of democracy has contributed significantly to the rise of neomedieval memory politics around the world.
Although Russia (that Jurassic Park of previously extinct ideologies) is infamous for pushing atavistic ideas far out of proportion, Putinism nonetheless is a warning for others.
Its nostalgic fixation on turning back the Enlightenment has immense political potential and cannot be dismissed as a purely aesthetic or nostalgic movement.
Dina Khapaeva is Professor of Russian at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The second edition of Crimes sans châtiment (Crimes without Punishment, Éditions de l’Aube, 2012) is forthcoming in January 2023.
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