In late July, the Moscow Patriarchate’s publishing house released Patriarch Kirill’s new book, Za predelami vidimykh prichin i sledstviy (“War. Beyond Visible Causes and Effects”). Meduza asked Ilya Venyavkin, author of Khram voiny (“The Temple of War”) — a book about the ideas that made Russia’s invasion of Ukraine possible — to read it and explain the ideology Kirill lays out and how he justifies the war.
In the fifth year of the full-scale war, Russia’s political regime finds itself in a somewhat peculiar position. Nearly all the infrastructure for ideological control is already in place. The state bans and blocks independent media, and it hands down real prison sentences — sometimes enormous ones — for antiwar statements.
Meanwhile, a kind of contest has been underway for several years now over who can best articulate the ideology of the new militarized state. Vladimir Medinsky writes school history textbooks that cast the war with Ukraine as the latest chapter in Russia’s centuries-old confrontation with the West. The political bloc of Russia’s Presidential Administration has overseen the creation of a mandatory university course called “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood”, complete with its own concept of Russia as a distinct “civilization-state,” its own set of values, and a special chapter devoted to the “image of the future.” New exhibitions and monuments to “heroes of the SVO” keep appearing across the country.
But the state is still better at banning things than at making meaning. It has learned to explain what cannot be said and whom to treat as an enemy — but it struggles far more to explain exactly what society should live, fight, and die for.
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