The Russian World

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.

The eagerness to insert himself into global power struggles is not just a personal propensity of Putin's, but somehow a typical characteristic of Russian nature, which needs to find self-confirmation elsewhere, so as not to loose itself among the forests and steppes of its boundless territory.

A man full of life, passion, and humour, he was able to adapt to the harshest conditions. His soul, more than his ideas and programmes, counted. With death, Alexei Navalny becomes the embodiment of a defeated Russia, showing the inconsistency of its claims to domination and empire. And it lays bare the shame of Putin's Russian world.

The Ukrainian autocephalous Orthodox Church has removed the memorial of the holy Russian prince Aleksandr Nevsky from its liturgical calendar, teh saint who defeated Westerners in the 13th century and was the forerunner of the alliance with the Asian empires. While Kirill would like to canonise the great generals of Russian military history.

Internationally, 27 January is Holocaust Remembrance Day, but in Russia it also commemorates the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad. Now for Russians, the Holocaust is no longer about the extermination of the Jews, but as a Nazi crime against various peoples, starting with the Soviets. In Kirill and Putin’s version, Moscow is presented as the bastion against the "hegemonic genocide" of the West.

Russian state media depict Lenin as "the inventor of Ukraine", therefore the real culprit of the ongoing conflict, as opposed to the enlightened leadership of Stalin. In reality, Putin is the inventor of a new mythological Russia, who rereads ancient and recent stories in his own way to impose a new empire.

The final celebration of the Christmas season, which took place yesterday according to the Orthodox tradition, includes immersion in icy water in Russia as an experience of physical and spiritual rebirth. As the ritual is celebrated, the philosopher Alexander Shchipkov penned an article outlining the features of an “education in moral values", the heart of the union between religion and politics in vogue today in Moscow.

All private military companies similar to Wagner have now been assimilated by the new imperial opričnina. As at the end of Ivan's reign, even in Putin's twilight, after the final deification of the presidential elections next March, the real question will be how far the teams of power-mongers will be able to maintain an internal balance among themselves.

In Russia, Christmas falls on 7 January following the Julian calendar, highlighting especially this year, the proclamation by the Moscow Patriarchate that it is the "one true Church”. Yet, the revival of patriotic faith is not the only definition of Russian Orthodoxy today. There is also the path of those who, like the exiled Protoiereus Andrey Kordochkin, pray with the words: “Give me back my mother!”