On Easter Sunday Vladimir Putin released a seemingly boilerplate message celebrating Christian “joy and love”. The missive ended, however, with a jarring statement that expressed thanks for the Russian Orthodox Church’s “support for the defenders of the Fatherland” – an unmistakable reference to the soldiers waging war in Ukraine. Hours earlier, the Russian president had declared a 30-hour truce for “humanitarian” reasons to mark the Christian holiday. Nonetheless, attacks against Ukrainian forces and civilians rose throughout Easter Sunday. Was the truce the latest use of Christianity as a “weapon” – or more evidence of how the Kremlin has contorted religion into a new, militarised form?
Putin’s Russia portrays itself as the world’s sole defender of true Christianity, a bastion of “traditional values” defending humanity against degenerate and forgotten Christianity. Putin paints himself as a pious Orthodox believer. He is regularly pictured attending church services and claims, in an improbable bit of mythologising, to have been baptised at birth in the atheist USSR. Indeed, over the past 25 years, Putin’s government has poured vast sums into constructing new churches and repairing old ones, returned religious education to the school curriculum, and built increasingly close ties with officials of the Russian Orthodox Church. Today’s war against Ukraine is often painted as an act of Christian love: Russia is saving, not destroying, Ukraine from the threat of Western “satanism”.
Despite these claims to religiosity, Russia’s war is one of vicious destruction against a neighbour that has, in three years of full-scale conflict, caused up to a million casualties. Horrific stories of murder, torture, and rape perpetrated by the Russian armed forces continue to emerge from the frontline and from occupied territories in the east of Ukraine. This is a country whose president can embrace Christian love and authoritarian violence simultaneously.
Yet, viewed from the Kremlin, the contradiction is not as glaring as it may seem. Russia’s real religion is not Orthodox Christianity: it is a religion of war created and propagated by state and Church officials alike. The most important date in this religion’s calendar is not Easter – it is Victory Day on 9 May. This year’s Victory Day in Russia will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of what it calls the “Great Patriotic War” and renew its commitment to an eternal spiritual war.
Under Putin, Second World War celebrations have become central to state ideology. The young president attended a Victory Day parade on Red Square just two days after ascending to office in 2000, and he has since transformed the day into a centrepiece of state religion. The increasingly bombastic celebration of Russia’s role in the Second World War has been described many ways, from “cult” to pobedobesie, a Russian neologism that decries the obsession as “victory fever”. But above all, this celebration bears all the hallmarks of a religion. It has its own holidays (on 9 May and other dates that mark great victories); its own temples (which take the form of memorial and museum complexes both Soviet and new); and holy scripture in the form of novels, films, and textbooks that reiterate a myth of religious sacrifice.
In the story propagated by these scriptures, millions of Russians sacrificed themselves in the 1940s to save their nation and the whole of humanity from the German threat. A militarised distortion of the story of Christ, this gospel holds that Russians had to fight and die in order to bring humanity back from the dead in 1945. Equally, today’s Russian troops are purportedly “saving” Russia, and Ukraine too, from a West destroying itself, and every Christian nation, through the promotion of – as Putin has repeatedly claimed – gender ideologies, paedophilia and satanism.
Each of these touchpoints, whether holiday, temple, or story, reiterates the message that Russia is fated to be surrounded by enemies. The country’s inexorable religious mission is to embark on crusade after crusade to rescue humanity from heathen destroyers – fascists, Nazis, Germans, Americans, the British. Such was the case in 1812, when Russia repelled the Napoleonic invader, and in 1941-45, and so must it be today.
Over the past 25 years, the state has blended this cult of war with the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church to create a new official religion. That religion promotes endless war as an expression of “joy and love”. Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, act as joint high priests. Each mark both Easter and Victory Day as the key moments of “resurrection” in the country’s calendar through appearances at churches and memorials. Together, they tour exhibitions dedicated to remembering the Great Patriotic War hosted in churches and museums. The state funds as many grandiose new war memorials, museums, and online “immersive exhibits” hailing the sacrifices of the war as it rebuilds actual churches. The most important of these sites, the monolithic Cathedral of the Armed Forces, was consecrated in 2020 in the presence of political, religious, and military leaders. Inside, the vast edifice seamlessly blends Christian and Russian military symbolism in its architecture and decoration.
Meanwhile, ordinary Russians are prompted to participate in rituals that mix religious tradition and remembrance with militaristic celebration. On Victory Day, the Immortal Regiment parade, which began in the mid-2010s, sees ordinary Russians take to the streets in parades bearing images of their soldier ancestors aloft. The ritual, which now involves millions of Russians in both physical and virtual iterations, seems to echo the Christian Orthodox veneration of saintly icons. Elsewhere, Russians can take quasi-pilgrimages to the same sites of memory that Putin and the Patriarch visit. Indeed, the Cathedral of the Armed Forces is encircled by the “Road of Memory,” a mile-long immersive multimedia “memorial complex” where the Russian faithful can “relive” the war – and are encouraged to tag themselves as visitors on social media platforms. Modern day pilgrims make use of modern media technology to engage with the state’s military religion.
Under Kirill’s leadership, church officials have drawn on ideas originating in the Soviet era’s portrayal of the “Great Patriotic War” to construct a shaky theological justification that deems the invasion of Ukraine a “holy war”. Kirill has claimed that Russian servicemen are “displaying amazing examples of courage and self-sacrifice,” the qualities that “have distinguished our people for centuries”. This Easter the Patriarch even inverted Putin’s message of “joy and love” by celebrating the festival as a “victory day” in its own right. Sacrificing oneself for the nation equally imitates crucified Christ and the martyred soldiers of the Second World War. In turn, Russia’s war dead are absorbed into the cultish pantheon of the saints. Their portraits now accompany those of their forebears in the Immortal Regiment parades and in war memorials newly installed across the nation.
When troops from today’s war march across Red Square to mark the 80th anniversary of victory on 9 May, they will be accompanied not by veterans of the Second World War – almost all of whom are now deceased – but by members of Russia’s youth paramilitary groups, the next generation of Moscow’s warring soldier saints. Together, they will embody not memory of war past but the sainted Putinist religion of war – a war against the outside that, theologically speaking, can never end. Nonetheless, according to the state’s flawed logic, pursuing that war is the only means to save Russia and Russians from spiritual obliteration. Resurrection must, logically, follow death and conflict; yet further threats and more war will follow resurrection.
In today’s Russia, state, Church, and War have become inseparable. Vladimir Putin did not create the cult around the Great Patriotic War. But his state – with the support and participation of the many millions of Russians who eagerly participate in rituals and pilgrimages around days like 9 May – has blessed the cult with shaky Orthodox theology. This cocktail of militarism and spirituality drives patriotic engagement with and support for the war against Ukraine. Today, the religion of war is Russia’s official religion (indeed, the state continues to target “non-traditional” religions through oppressive and arbitrary legislation).
Russia’s politicians, priests, and propagandists state repeatedly that “the collective West” seeks to destroy both the memory of the Great Patriotic War” and any trace of Russian Orthodoxy. In these absurd claims, the faithful hear the call to an eternal crusade. The motto “We can do it again” – implying that Russia is ready to fight fascism today as it did in the past – has swept through Russian patriotic circles in recent years. A more accurate phrasing might be “We have to do it again”. For the pious, the threat of obliteration is cyclical. War must and will return.
Russians may yet tire of the devastating war in Ukraine. Nonetheless, the faithful will still perceive the world as an eternal battle between good (Russia) and evil (the outside). That worldview leaves them no choice but to wage war in the name of “joy and love”. As Western leaders begin to envision what form a future relationship with Moscow might take, and as Donald Trump’s White House pushes for peace at almost any cost, the deep spiritual significance of Russia’s religion of war may provide the greatest long-term obstacle to an enduring rapprochement.
[See also: The war to end all peace]
Content from our partners
Related
