The Russian World

The first decree approved as soon as the ceremony for the start of his fifth term is about the ‘Fundamentals of Historical Education Policy’. The anxiety to rewrite history is the sentiment that stirs Putin's conscience most of all, as well as that of the entire generation afflicted by the resentment of the end of the Soviet Union. And it is this global and eschatological vision that Putin is now also trying to embody side by side with Xi Jinping in Tiananmen Square.

On several occasions, Putin said that he had no intention of staying in power for life, but the matter was shelved long ago. During the latest presidential inauguration, Patriarch Kirill invoked upon him God's blessing “until the end of your existence and until the end of time, as we say.”

During the Holy Thursday service, Patriarch Kirill recited a special prayer ‘for the victory of holy Rus’", which intensifies the war litanies imposed on priests, on pain of deprivation of clerical status if they refuse to pronounce them. The Easter celebrations must recompose the people of believers to show that Russia has defeated the evil within, finding the right path to sobornost.

Because of the war in Ukraine, the country is drifting into an era of denial and distancing from the "enemy", to assert spiritual, moral, political, and economic "orthodoxy". Today, new "global models" are being imposed, which are not easily digestible, not only in Russia or the East, but also in Europe and in English-speaking countries. The persona of the president now overlaps with that of the tsars of the past.

The question of post-colonialism in Russia is the great underlying theme imposed by the Russian war in Ukraine. Behind the claims of the 'Russian world' are the aspirations of the many peoples who for centuries have been subjected to the imperial domination of different ideologies, from the Tsarist to the Soviet, and today by the Kirill-Putin Eurasian vision, which by taking on Ukraine has in fact uncovered the Pandora's box of all Russian history.

According to the head of the Levada Center, Russia's leading sociological research institute, “only 10 per cent of Russians are actively interested in politics, and the war involves a super-politicisation of a minority in the face of the depoliticisation of the masses.” Only 30 per cent of Russians are willing to trust people outside their ever-shrinking circle of relatives and friends.

The reflections of the Moscow attack overshadow proclamations of victory in Ukraine. A text by the Sobordella of the Orthodox Church goes beyond the ideological motivations of the war and defends the 'purity' of the Russian people from 'invading migrants'. The fight against foreign 'ghettos' in the cities and the 'return' to the 'traditional' division between population and productive forces in the territory.

Gutted by last week’s terrorist attack, the concert venue inside a Moscow mall was a symbol of the city’s post-Soviet “reconstruction”. Russians now fear leaving their homes and getting into a taxi driven by a Tajik. In the meantime, state-sponsored public events have been halted while “different” ones have been banned.

The terrible terrorist attack on Krokus City Hall takes away the Russians' illusion of living under an unbreakable glass bell. In a Russia that 25 years after the attacks of the first war in Chechnya and a week after Putin's apotheosis finds itself once again at its year zero.

As Russians go to the polls, the outcome of the presidential election and the turnout have already been decided. The dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is virtually interred in a Siberian concentration camp, described the support for Putin's regime as nothing more than the product of “terror and apathy". The eternal tsar is but the face of a system that excludes the human soul.

Naval'nyy has once again succeeded in overcoming repression and with his death has brought a new 'flower revolution' to the streets. They bring a flower to the small grave in one of the capital's most peripheral and neglected cemeteries where the heart of Russia now stands, the counterbalance to Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square, in front of which the guns and cannons parade.

Medvedev would like to send the Zhduny to Siberian concentration camps for re-education. In Russia, attacks on "traitors" are not only attempts to instil terror in the population, which has long been accustomed to passive consent, but are also calls to "come forward", out of the restless need to identify the internal enemy, whoever they may be because, without enemies, power has no identity.