The Religious Component in Contemporary Russian Imperialism

Abstract

Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, various voices in the Russian public sphere have been trying to make sense of Russia’s new place in the world, its geopolitical horizons, and the identity of its people. One of the dominant trends that have emerged is Orthodox imperialism, which combines religious symbols and narratives with a geopolitical vision of Russian expansion and “reunification”. This article provides an overview of the Russian Orthodox imperialist voices, analysing the political norms and identities they have enabled. Our investigation shows that by advancing a programme that combines geopolitical restoration and eschatological religious mission, Orthodox imperialism offers an ideological solution to the problem of Russia’s lost great-power status. This solution, however, does not envisage a bright future for Russia or the world. On the contrary, it remains firmly fixated on the past, foretelling of an apocalyptic disaster if Moscow does not regain its former imperial glory and exercise its divine role as a “restrainer” to any global domination.

1. Introduction

The Soviet Union was often described as an empire: a search in the Library of Congress returns more than a thousand entries on the word combination of “Soviet” and “empire”. Before perestroika, however, this designation was used only in the West, while Soviet authors regarded it as an implicit calumny. For them, empires were either a thing of the past, such as the Tsarist Empire, or something created by Western capitalists. After the fall of the USSR, however, Russian authors have begun to use the term themselves not only about the communist period but also as a positive concept describing an ideal future for Russia. They often distinguish between bad empires, sometimes qualified as “quasi-empires”, on the one hand and “good” empires on the other. A crucial element in the second variety often appears to be religious mission, specifically the world historical significance of a strong state determined to preserve and promote Orthodox Christianity.

The religious ingredient in contemporary Russian imperialism supplies the concept of “empire” (however defined or implicated) with a lofty sense of higher purpose. Thus, “empire” is articulated not as a platform of conquest or subjugation but as a form of political agency that brings truth and salvation to the world. Very often, this thinking is situated in eschatology: the world is approaching the end, but the final doom can be postponed if there is a force holding back the reign of the Antichrist (Engström 2014).

Originating in Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the image of “the restrainer” (katekhon) has often been identified with the Roman Empire and, later, with its Christianized eastern part centered on Constantinople—the “Second Rome”. Even after the fall of Byzantium in the 15th century, the Antichrist did not come, testifying, as it were, that the katekhon was still operating. This, it is believed, could only mean that Muscovy took over the torch of the “restrainer” and carried it on as the “Third Rome” (Østbø 2016). This idea originated in the early 16th century, when the monk Filofei of Pskov wrote to Tsar Vasilii III that “two Romes have fallen, and the Third stands, and a fourth shall never be, for Thy Christian Empire shall never devolve upon others” (quoted in Sidorov 2006, p. 322). While marginal before the 19th century, this idea was revived in the context of Russia’s wars against the Ottoman Empire and its ambitions for political and spiritual leadership in Orthodox Europe (Sidorov 2006, p. 323). Marginalized again during the Soviet period, the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome reemerged after 1991 to designate today’s Russia as the direct katechonic heir to the Muscovy tsardom via the Saint Petersburg empire and the Soviet Union.

That kind of discourse of “missionary” continuity emerged at a time of great uncertainty and “ontological insecurity” after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Kazharski 2019). Indeed, the loss of status and clear state identity prompt various “political entrepreneurs” in Russia to find a way to fix the national self-image through narratives of mystic uninterruptedness. As Victor Shnirelman (2019, p. 351) contends in his study on Russian apocalyptic imperialism, from a Third Rome perspective, “Russia does not look like a less developed country”, “but one that is moving along its own path”. Thus, the combination of “eschatological” agency and (trans)historical imperial structure provides the kind of identity stability that the former superpower needed to preserve a collective sense of grandeur and exceptionality.

“Empire” discourses in Russia are tightly interconnected with contemporary Russian nationalism. While nationalism and imperialism are often understood as polar opposites (Motyl 1999; Rowley 2000), this is not necessarily the case everywhere and certainly not in Russia (Kolstø 2019). In his extensive studies of Russian nationalism, Emil Pain has identified what he calls “the imperial syndrome”. This is a nationalism which supports imperial aspirations and has appeared many times in Russian history, not least after the 2014 annexation of Crimea (Pain 2016, p. 46). This imperial nationalism, however, is not always shrouded in religious attire. The justifications for Russian annexations and expansion may follow the logic of purely secular realpolitik. Moreover, even when the apologists of Russian expansion are using religious narratives and symbols, the reasoning behind them may still operate according to a predominantly this-worldly logic. In order to gauge the depth of the religious component in this variety of Russian nationalism, it is necessary to examine the empire discourses in context.

In her study on the concept of “empire” in post-Soviet Russia, Olga Malinova (2010, pp. 62–63) distinguishes five basic interpretations of the term: (1) a “heterogenous state” as a polity that includes many distinct cultural communities, (2) a power relationship between center and periphery such as the one between metropolis and colonies, (3) an autocratic system of integrating territories and societies “from above”, (4) a vehicle of a messianic project driven by some “universal idea”, and (5) a great power capable of significant international influence.

Our focus on the religious dimension of the contemporary Russian discourses on “empire” has largely narrowed these basic interpretations to the last three. What they all have in common is a certain kind of restoration. That might be the restoration of a political system and ideology reminiscent of the former Russian Empire (autocratic centralized rule, close ties between church and state, devotion of the authorities to Orthodox tradition, etc.), or it can signify a programme for the spatial reconstruction of the “historical Russian state” based on a direct and explicit appeal for territorial expansion or at least some form of reintegration of the former imperial territories. In many instances, these two aspects go together, but not always. However, it may often be difficult to disentangle these two trajectories, and the proponents of these ideas may deliberately obfuscate their distinction. Likewise, although any concept of restoration in the Russian context implies cultural heterogeneity and certain internal power relations, these are rarely pushed to the forefront. As we shall see, the primary emphasis in what we call Russian Orthodox imperialism remains on strong centralized statehood, mission, and Russia’s status as a world historical force.

Empire and imperialism are both categories associated with the spatial expansion of power. Attributing power, however, “is not innocent, but implies that things could have been done otherwise” (Guzzini 2005, p. 508). An “empire” does not have to be currently expanding to be described as such. Any polity under criticism by autonomists or separatists can be retroactively described as imperial(ist). Thus, from a particular standpoint, the post-Soviet Russian Federation could be named an “empire” even before 2014. In this paper, however, we analyse “empire” as a signifier of the contemporary Russian political discourse and not as an analytical category. Likewise, by imperialism, we mean simply discourse on “empire” rather than a heuristic device designed to establish whether a certain discourse is or is not “imperialist” based on pregiven criteria.

In the following presentation, we scrutinise how the post-Soviet Russian discourses on “empire” interweave religious symbols and narratives together with (geo)political ideas, and we try to establish the political norms and identities these discourses enable. We attempt to present an analytical overview of Russian Orthodox imperialism in its various sources and manifestations. We identify three interrelated and cross-cutting discursive sites that appear to be the most influential in terms of their output volume, authority, accessibility, and outreach: the public communication of the Russian Orthodox Church, the publications produced by the nationalist civil society, and the content on Russian conservative media. We select authors and publications whose voices either reflect (and elucidate) the overall discourse in its basic parameters or demonstrate a certain diversity in representing Russia as an Orthodox empire. Thus, we arrive at a general picture of how religion and imperialism interplay in the contemporary Russian public discourse.

2. Orthodox Imperialism in the Russian Church

Neither Patriarch Kirill nor any other official spokesperson of the Moscow Patriarchate articulate “empire” explicitly as a horizon for Russia’s future (although, as we see, quite a few Russian Orthodox priests and lay people do). That does not mean that the ecclesiastical leadership is satisfied with the ROC being a church for the Orthodox believers within the Russian Federation only, far from it. In both the Czarist Empire and the Soviet Union, the Moscow Patriarchate could claim undisputed canonical jurisdiction over the entire territory of the state and the regions where Orthodoxy was not the religion of the majority population, such as the Baltics and Central Asia. The breakup of the Soviet Union confronted the Patriarchate with a major challenge: it regarded and still regards the entire Soviet space as its “canonical territory”, even if it now encompasses 15 independent states. The only exceptions are Georgia, where the local Orthodox Church has enjoyed autocephaly (full jurisdictional independence) since 1943, and, until recently, Armenia, whose national church belongs to the family of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, but which also hosts a small Eastern Orthodox minority considered (since 2021) to belong to the ROC’s canonical territory.1

In several of the other former Soviet republics—both traditionally Orthodox, such as Moldova and Ukraine, and states where the Orthodox represent only a minority, such as Estonia—the position of the ROC is challenged by rival Orthodox churches which deem the ROC’s continued insistence on exclusive jurisdiction in their country as an intolerable encroachment on their political and spiritual autonomy (see Rimestad 2014; Avram 2014; Wasyliw 2014). The Moscow Patriarchate’s determination to preserve its spatial scope was among the key reasons John B. Dunlop characterized the Russian Orthodox Church as an “empire-saving institution” already in 1995. Indeed, he claimed, “If the Russian church could maintain a grip on the Orthodox churches in the other union republics, then that success would objectively assist efforts by Russian empire savers to reassemble the Soviet Union” (Dunlop 1995, p. 21).

Furthermore, the Moscow Patriarchate is taking practical steps to expand its influence beyond its canonical territory by poaching on the jurisdictions of the other patriarchates. In the tug of war between Constantinople and Moscow, most other Orthodox churches remain uncommitted, while only a few have openly sided with the Ecumenical patriarch. Most important among them is the Patriarchate of Alexandria and all of Africa. Moscow no longer recognizes Alexandria’s exclusive jurisdiction on the African continent, and in December 2021, it established its own church structures—an exarchate—for Africa. In several African countries, local priests have been enticed—or bribed—to switch sides. As the former Patriarchal Exarch of Africa, metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachev) (2021–2023) announced, by this act, “the Russian Orthodox Church has declared itself to be a/the universal (vselenskoi) Orthodox Church, that is, a/the Church that can lead people beyond any relationship” (Melnikov 2022).2

However, preserving (and expanding) an imperial-scale “canonical territory” was not the only means the Russian Church—or at least some of its representatives—employed to promote “empire saving” (Luchenko 2023). Just a couple of weeks after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Kirill—then head of the Church’s external relations department—publicly declared that the former union republics should opt for a “voluntary self-restraint in exercising their sovereignty” in order to avoid “causing moral damage to society and provoking the gravest social consequences” (Kirill (Gundiaev), cited in Lukichev 2016, pp. 80–81).

In 1993, the first World Russian People’s Council (WRPC), held in the Danilov Monastery under the auspices of the Moscow Patriarchate, issued an “Address on understanding the national interests of Russia and the Russian people”. A key point in this document, co-authored by ROC representatives, was that the “desire of some forces in the world to prevent the restoration of Russia as a great power … undermines the stability of the [global] balance [of power] … that could lead to a Third World War” (Sobor 1993). What the authors of the address meant by great power restoration was that Russia must inherit “the military-strategic space of the USSR as a zone of its strategic interests and responsibility” (Sobor 1993).

In 2014, just a couple of months after Russia annexed Crimea, the Moscow Patriarch-led WRPC—by then an established organization with observer status at the United Nations—issued another collective statement articulating how contemporary Russia can combine “all the best and most valuable things from different epochs of our history in a great synthesis” (Sobor 2014). These were, namely, “the religious ideals of Ancient Russia, the state and cultural achievements of the Russian Empire, the social imperatives of solidarity and equality proclaimed in the Soviet society, and the fair aspiration for the realization of civic rights and freedoms in post-Soviet Russia” (Sobor 1993).

In 2015, talking to the deputies in the State Duma, Patriarch Kirill reiterated this “great synthesis” formula and elaborated on its meaning. In particular, he explained that through the Russian Empire, “a small country turned into a colossal world empire from ocean to ocean” and that the WRPC “have found a word that describes this reality—derzhavnost”. Notably, the head of the Russian Church claimed that along with faith, solidarity, and dignity, derzhavnost “retains its intransient value for contemporary life” (Kirill 2015).

Such an equation of empire with great power appears to be a constant in Kirill’s discourse. In 2005, while still a metropolitan, he declared:

“Without the sacrifices made by the Russian people [russkim], … Russia would have remained a relatively small mono-national state on the Central Russian Uplands. Russia can be a great state only as a united family of many peoples. That is why xenophobia and nationalism are incompatible with the very nature of Russia” (Kirill 2005).

Leaving aside the fact that this statement perfectly illustrates imperial nationalism –simultaneously denouncing nationalism and affirming ethnic Russians’ superiority over other peoples under Moscow’s power—Kirill’s argument unequivocally fuses the ideas of greatness and heterogeneity. Furthermore, he upholds that being a great power is Russia’s “very nature”, suggesting that maintaining this status amounts to preserving the state’s essence.

This point was vigorously restated by Mikhail Tyurenkov—Press Secretary of the WRPC and lay member of the Inter-Council Commission of the ROC.3 In 2021, he published a text called “Russia Was, Is and Will Be an Empire or Will Disappear from the World Map”. There, he argued that the concept of empire implies the “supranational character of the state” and “its universalist and missionary character”. Furthermore, Tyurenkov maintained that “empire” should be understood as a “sovereign state-civilization” based on “religious and missionary grounds”, united by the language and culture of the “state-forming people” but not being the latter’s nation-state (Tyurenkov 2021). Instead, he insisted that “empire”, by definition, has a multiethnic and multinational character. Thus, the Russians’ superiority as a “state-forming people” (now included even in the country’s constitution) is never articulated as domination. Instead, as in Kirill’s speech from 2005, it is represented through family metaphors suggesting that the various groups living in Russia cohabitate harmoniously in a common house—the Russian state, which, however, has been built by the ethnic Russians.

In March 2024, that is, at the beginning of the third year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the World Russian People’s Council issued a precept (nakaz), which further elaborated the relationship between the Russian people and the Russian state:

“Building the millennial Russian statehood is the highest form of political creativity of Russians as a nation. The division and weakening of the Russian people and the deprivation of its spiritual and vital forces have always led to the weakening and crisis of the Russian state. Therefore, restoring the unity of the Russian people, of its spiritual and vital potential, are the key preconditions for the survival and successful development of Russia … in the XXI century” (Sobor 2024).

Leaving aside the apparent subordinate relationship that the nakaz constructs between the people and the state, the document suggests that the reunification of the Russian people in one state should become one of the priority tasks of Russia’s foreign policy (Sobor 2024). In that sense, according to the WRPC representatives, the so-called “special military operation” constitutes a “national liberation struggle of the Russian people against the criminal Kyiv regime and the collective West behind it” (ibid). Indeed, from that point of view, the war in Ukraine appears as a struggle of the Russian people to “defend their life, freedom, and statehood, their civilisational, religious, national, and cultural identity, as well as the right to live on their own land within the borders of the united Russian state” (Sobor 2024).

Crucial here is the WRPC’s definition of the “Russian people”. According to the authors of the precept,

“Russia should return to the doctrine of the triunity of the Russian people, which has existed for more than three centuries, and according to which the Russian people consists of three branches (sub-ethnicities): Great Russians, Malorussians, and Belarusians. [Here] the concept of ‘Russian’ covers all Eastern Slavs [who are] descendants of historical Rus’. [T]he triunity doctrine should be enshrined in law, included in the normative list of Russian spiritual and moral values, and receive appropriate legal protection”.

(Sobor 2024)

This definition is closely related to another family metaphor—that of the “fraternal peoples”, frequently evoked by church officials (see, for instance, Kirill 2023). Accordingly, the Belarusians and the Ukrainians constitute little siblings to the big Russian brother, who has the duty to protect them from malign extra-familial influences. Furthermore, the metaphor of “descendants of historical Rus’” positions the Russian state as a father figure, indeed as a creator of these “fraternal peoples”, part of which have forgotten the “spiritual and moral” value of Moscow’s paternal embrace, understood here as a Russian-led geopolitical unity.

This wartime narrative has been preceded by a much earlier account conveyed in the “Russian Doctrine”, a massive 850-page programme for “the modernization of Russia based on traditional spiritual-moral values” (Kirill 2007). One of its key points is that “Our empire acts as a protective mother, giving opportunities to different nationalities, estates and classes, without destroying or crushing them, letting them reveal their potential” (Averyanov et al. 2016, p. 80).

3. Orthodox Imperialism in Russian Nationalist Civil Society

The Russian Doctrine was written in the first half of the 2000s by a group of Russian nationalist intellectuals close to the ROC. It was announced in 2005, and then in 2007 its revised version was presented at the World Russian People’s Council, when it was endorsed by Metropolitan Kirill (2007). The latest edition from 2016, published by the Institute of Russian Civilization, bears the name “Russian Doctrine. State ideology of Putin’s era” (Averyanov et al. 2016).

Already in 2005, the Doctrine presented a comprehensive programme for social policy, economics, foreign policy, nation-building, and empire-building. The authors claimed that the Russian Empire was a historical “masterpiece” that avoided the mistakes of the other empires, which had collapsed in the 19th century. The latter had fallen since they tried to level all the national groups within the state and press them into one form. Allegedly, Russia as “a kind of ‘genuine’ empire” was different: “We have been constructing not a universally binding standard for all, but an ‘interface’ for [a plurality of] standards, a container and shelter in which different ways of life could co-exist without irritating each other” (Averyanov et al. 2016, p. 80). Russian imperial rule is thus deemed to “freeze” and “preserve” traditions, and it is praised for slowing down their decomposition and disintegration.

Accordingly, the ability of the Russian imperial rule to maintain peace is considered intimately linked to preserving local identities and cultures. In that sense, Russia had and still has two primary historical responsibilities: keeping other states from achieving world domination, which is the external side of the Russian imperial mission, and the duty to safeguard traditions and ways of life within the state, which is the internal task (Averyanov et al. 2016, p. 80). In both the first and the second case, “we are dealing with apocalyptic signs”, the Doctrine maintains. Those are, first, “the Gogs and Magogs of the end times”, which refers to the evil forces opposed to the people of God, and second the “wine of whoredom” that “the Harlot named Babylon gives to the kings and all nations”, understood here as the godless “mixing of tongues” (Averyanov et al. 2016, p. 80), that is, the cultural amalgamation brought by globalization.

The ROC’s most important public theology document—the Basis of the Social Concept—made the same point in less apocalyptic but equally assertive language:

The spiritual and cultural expansion [of the globalist elites] fraught with total unification should be opposed through the joint efforts of the Church, state structures, civil society and international organisations for the sake of asserting in the world a truly equitable and mutually enriching cultural and informational exchange combined with efforts to protect the identity of nations and other human communities.

(Basis 2000, chp. XVI, para. 3)

At the same time, the document stated that “the Church welcomes the tendencies for unification of countries and nations, especially those with common history and culture” (Basis 2000, chp. XVI, para. 1), clearly referring to the re-integration of Moscow’s former spheres of influence.

The “Russian Doctrine”, however, is explicit and claims that two of the main objectives of Russia’s national security should be the preservation of “the territory of historical Russia within its geographical boundaries” and the control over the “geopolitical borders of historical Russia, i.e., territories beyond its geographical boundaries, the occupation of which by an aggressor would jeopardise the lives of the people, our territorial integrity and sovereignty” (Averyanov et al. 2016, pp. 401–02).

Thus, restoring and protecting Russia’s “historical” borders becomes equal to maintaining a geopolitical balance of power in the world, both being not just a matter of national security but essentially the basis of Russia’s eschatological mission. Indeed, for the authors of the Doctrine, there is not just a connection, but rather an equal sign between miroderzhavie [world-powerness] and “Orthodox restraining” (Averyanov et al. 2016, p. 80). The ambiguous concept of miroderzhavie, “first encountered probably in Nikolay Danilevskii” as the authors claim (Averyanov et al. 2016, p. 80), operates here as a wordplay—a double or even three-fold entendre. It signifies both the status of great power (derzhava) and the action of holding (uderzhanie) the world in equilibrium, i.e., in peace (the word for which in Russian is mir, also meaning “world”) by restraining (uderzhivanie) the forces “craving domination over all tribes and peoples” (Averyanov et al. 2016, p. 78).

Several leading public intellectuals in the nationalist-imperialist spectrum have been involved in the authorship of the Doctrine. One of them is Oleg Platonov—general director of the aforementioned Institute of Russian Civilization. Platonov is a self-described disciple of the reactionary Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Ladoga, Ioann (Snychev), and a member of the great power nationalist think tank/lobby group Izborskii klub. As Kåre Johan Mjør argues, through his membership in that club, Platonov emerged from the relatively marginal position he held in the 1990s to the forefront of nationalist public discourse (Mjør 2020, p. 191).

In addition to his extensive activity as a publisher, Platonov has also written several books in his own name, among which the most relevant in our context is “Russia will be an Empire” (2015). Here, Platonov argues that the Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian Empire and that the “inner imperial feeling” remained in the Russian people even after the fall of Soviet power (Platonov 2015, p. 389). Furthermore, he claims that the fate of all humankind is to be decided in a confrontation between the “Slavic-Russian” and “Western” civilizations because “if Western civilization finally won, the world would turn into a gigantic concentration camp, behind the barbed wire of which, 80% of the world’s population will create resources for the remaining 20%” (Platonov 2015, p. 13). Platonov’s remedy for this danger is simple: Russia should become an empire again, however, “not in the Western sense, but in the Orthodox understanding—as a kingdom of kingdoms” (Platonov 2015, p. 389), that is, as Holy Rus’:

But what is Holy Rus’? It is [to be found in] the special grace-filled properties of the Russian people, making them God’s chosen people, chosen not to suppress other peoples but to prevail over world evil. … It is … the Orthodox state, the Orthodox people; it is the desire for monarchism and imperial feeling; it is patriotism. After faith in God, patriotism is the highest expression of man’s spirituality. These are the most significant achievements obtained by the Russian nation and which a part of the Russian people has been able to preserve until now. This is our advantage over the West.

(Platonov 2015, p. 391)

Platonov goes on to warn of the coming “total chaos”, which will also reach Russia. In this apocalyptic prediction, all the authoritative institutions in the country will collapse, losing their importance and ability to govern people. However, Platonov pins his hopes on the Russian mentality, which is “internally programmed for imperial consciousness” (Platonov 2015, p. 398). And this national consciousness will lead, naturally, to the creation of a “national dictatorship”, which in turn “will give us a national leader—a charismatic leader who will be trusted by the absolute majority of people” and who will eventually “become a monarch” (Platonov 2015, p. 398). “With the restoration of the monarchy in Russia”, Platonov concludes his argument, “the real revival of Russia as a great empire will begin” (Platonov 2015, p. 398).

Another key figure behind the Russian Doctrine project is Egor Kholmogorov—an influential publicist and a public intellectual of the “imperial revanchist kind” (Sidorov 2006, p. 329). According to one of the early researchers of the post-Soviet uses of the Third Rome metaphor, Dmitrii Sidorov, Kholmogorov revived a kind of “Orthodox geopolitics”, which envisages Russia as the restraining world power that needs to strengthen its status as a strong state in the global system to exercise that role. Furthermore, Sidorov argues that Kholmogorov articulated a programme of geopolitical “Byzantism” that “aims at establishing an Orthodox political order” and restoring “the infrastructure of salvation” in the territories where Orthodoxy defines national identity and culture. This, Sidorov claims, logically leads to Kholmogorov’s call for “Russian irredenta” and “Orthodox missionary expansionist claims” (ibid, p. 330).

Indeed, in his book, “Russian Nationalist” (Kholmogorov 2006), Kholmogorov claimed that Russia needs “a Russian ideology of irredentism”, an ideology for the return to the Russian Federation of “those territories of historical Russia that it has a historical and moral right to” (Kholmogorov 2006, p. 314). For the Russians, he maintained, that imperial power is not a burden but an essential component of their national identity. Drawing a common historical parallel, he rhetorically asked if, in antiquity, the Romans could have remained true to themselves if they had been confined to Italy. “Russians need an empire”, Kholmogorov explained, “not because they owe anything to anyone in terms of education, civilization, ‘white man’s burden’, no, they need it for their own full self-realization” (Kholmogorov 2006, p. 328). Jardar Østbø convincingly argues that “despite all his talk of the nation, Kholmogorov is a hardcore imperialist” (Østbø 2016, p. 189).

This assessment can be confirmed by Kholmogorov’s latest book, “Russians. Nation, Civilization, Statehood, and the Russians’ Right to Russia” (2020). In it, he contends that “Russian nationalism historically developed as an empire-integrating great-power patriotism with a distinct cultural and religious emphasis. The ethnic aspect was actualized [through] the predominant role of Russians within the empire” (Kholmogorov 2020, p. 62).

Furthermore, Kholmogorov goes on to narrate what he calls “the Russian turn of the 1960s and 1980s” as providing a “medium-term historical perspective” for the transformation of the USSR “into a Russian nation-state, into a national empire of the same pattern that was destroyed in 1917” (Kholmogorov 2020, p. 95). Finally, he asserts that contemporary Russia acts as “the successor of the Russian Empire as well as of the Soviet Union” (Kholmogorov 2020, p. 220) and that the “infrastructure of salvation” can be protected only by “a great state” (ibid, p. 285). Here again, great-powerness is fused with the image of Holy Rus’, defined by Kholmogorov as “that stable condition, that manifestation of Christ and His true Church in the world, which justifies the very continuation of the course of world history” (Kholmogorov 2020, p. 186). What is more, unlike Platonov, who attributes to Russia “only” an eschatological task, Kholmogorov ascribes to the Russian people and their “historical energy and tradition” the very “gravity that allows the Heavenly Church to be fully present on earth” here and now (Kholmogorov 2020, p. 186).

Vitaly Averianov, a member of Izborskii klub and a co-author of the Russian Doctrine, is even more explicit in his Orthodox imperialism. Closely connected to the “imperial-minded milieu comprising both the clergy and military” (Shnirelman 2019, p. 355), Averianov is a prolific writer and the director of the Institute of Dynamic Conservatism. In his book “The Nature of Russian Expansion”, Averyanov argues that “the most dominant constant of our civilization is Russian great power [derzhavnyi] imperialism” (Averyanov 2003, p. 342). In 2014, he published another book called “Empire and Will. Catching up with ourselves”. There, he articulated an extensive account of the nature of “empire” and its meaning for Russia. His “definition” of empire is worth quoting at length:

“Empire can be interpreted as a political pseudonym of an independent civilization. Or as a certain indication of the political aspect of an independent civilization. Sometimes, it is appropriate to speak of empire as the political facet of a civilization at the stage of its full disclosure”.

(Averyanov 2014, p. 144)

Writing in the year of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Averianov contended that it was about time for Russia to disclose itself again. Indeed, he argued, Russians have no choice but to undertake “a new compensatory expansion, to retake the positions [they] lost in 1991” in order to achieve “regeneration”, a restoration of “the nation-state tradition” (Averyanov 2014, p. 62).

The essence of that tradition is Orthodoxy. However, in the opinion of Averianov, Orthodoxy was established “not least” for Russia and the Russians. In his view, if Russia is to be “eliminated”, Orthodoxy itself “may lose its meaning” (Averyanov 2014, p. 84). Indeed, “the truth” of Russia’s existence, Averianov claimed, might be “not less significant than many theological dogmas” (Averyanov 2014, p. 85). From his perspective, Russia is a “living, personal subject”, and such things as “faith”, “culture”, and “state” are only “forms” in which this subject lives; they are “its home, its tools” (Averyanov 2014, p. 84).

This account perfectly illustrates the tendency of many Russian Orthodox imperialists to reify Russia, that is, to turn the idea of Russia into an entity with its own will and agency. Moreover, in Averianov’s narrative, Russia appears to be sacred in and by itself, taking precedence even over the Orthodox faith.

The boundary between Russia’s sacredness as such and Russia’s sacred mission has been blurred in Orthodox imperialist discourses from early on. As the abovementioned Metropolitan Ioann argued already in 1995, “Russian Autocracy is not so much a political system as a religious one” (Ioann 1995, p. 36).

Metropolitan Ioann was one of the most prominent representatives of Orthodox imperialism in the 1990s. He was known for his propagation of monarchism and strident anti-Semitism (Slater 2010) as well as for his endorsement of the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The higher ROC hierarchy (which he criticized) tried to silence him, but in vain (Slater 2010). Five books and hundreds of articles were published in his lifetime, as well as five more books posthumously, many of which were compiled and maybe also written by his devotees and collaborators. Ioann inspired and continues to inspire many Russian imperialist nationalists. As Victor Shnirelman (2019, p. 351) argues, the metropolitan influenced a whole milieu in contemporary Russia, which actively participates in the public political debate.

In his book Russian Symphony, Metropolitan Ioann explained that historically, there have been two types of empire—the false, secular Western variety and the true Orthodox Christian variety as embodied in the Byzantine and the Russian empires. This latter model, the metropolitan claimed, could and should be resurrected in Russia: “The basic truth of imperial statehood, which makes it possible to distinguish it from historical forgeries and distortions, is sovereignty in its Christian understanding” (Ioann 1998, pp. 421–22). The idea of empire, as we have seen in the texts of his followers, reflects the “great-power instinct of the Russian people” based on “sound Christian imperialism” (Ioann 1998, p. 419).

Metropolitan Ioann argued that there could be no primitive restoration of the Russian empire, no literal return to the situation before 1917. “From our pre-revolutionary past, as well as from the tragic “Soviet” period, we will have to take only the most valuable” (Ioann 1995, p. 244). Monarchy can be restored only as a creative development of the mechanisms of Russian statehood while preserving its fundamental, traditional values and shrines intact.

These ideas were well-received by people such as Platonov and Averianov and can be found developed and expanded in the documents of Izborskii klub. The latter appears to be a meeting place of Russian nationalists and imperialists of various hues, some Soviet nostalgic, others adhering to politically conservative positions. Marlene Laruelle (2016, p. 637) maintains that “Orthodox values and the sanctity of Russia are major themes in Izborsky klub’s overarching narrative…. Orthodoxy is integrated as the club’s predominant discourse as it validates Russia’s statehood and universal mission”.

In 2019, the Club published a compendium of articles and reports called “We believe in Russia. From the Russian Doctrine to the Izborskii Club” (Averyanov 2019). There, Platonov, Averianov and their colleagues openly advocated for “neoimperialism” as an alternative to the “globalist geopolitical and geoeconomic” project aiming to create a “world government” that would control the Earth’s entire population and resources as a “complete master” of global governance (Averyanov 2019, p. 741). Instead, the Izborskii klub visionaries suggest the formation of “macro-regional geo-economic and geopolitical blocs”, in which “one can distinguish the features of the old empires”. “Thus”, they claim, “old keys could open the locks of new doors—the doors to the future” (Averyanov 2019, p. 741).

The idea of taking “the most valuable” from each era of Russian history, which we saw in both Metropolitan Ioann and later, in the WRPC’s documents and Patriarch Kirill’s statements, is best condensed in the so-called “myth of the Fifth Empire”. According to this myth (as the authors of “We Believe in Russia” call it themselves), contemporary Russia is to synthesize Kyiv Rus’, Moscow Rus’, St. Petersburg’s Empire, and the Soviet Union (“the Red Empire”), because “Russia is one and indivisible not only in space but also in time” (Averyanov 2019, p. 865).

The spatial dimension of the Fifth Empire is outlined in a rather straightforward fashion: (1) “reunification” of the states where the majority of the “divided Russian people” live: Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and (2) Eurasian integration based on an internal “multipolar neo-imperial space with a common ideology of harmony and brotherhood of peoples and cultures” (Averyanov 2019, p. 752). At the same time, Averianov et al. argue that the priority in their programme for “the return and reunification of those territories of Russia to which it has a historical and moral right” should be the first of all, the “reunification” with Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan (Averyanov 2019, p. 368). The authors of the “updated” Russian Doctrine go on to specify Russia’s first steps in this whole process:

“At this stage, it is important for Russia not so much to change the real status of all the territories of the near abroad as to change their ideological and socio-psychological status from ‘independent’ and ‘post-Soviet’ to temporarily ‘post-Russian’”.

(Averyanov 2019, p. 45)

Aleksandr Prokhanov developed the Fifth Empire concept already in the 2000s. Unlike Averianov and collaborators, however, Prokhanov advocated for the reunification of “all the peoples that have inhabited the Soviet Union” (Prokhanov 2007, p. 60). At the same time, he ascribed to the ethnic Russian minorities in the “near abroad” a special role: “The Russians in Crimea, Kharkov, Semipalatinsk, Transnistria, and Narva will not be the doomed rearguard of the fleeing, defeated armies of the Fourth Empire, but the fighting vanguard of the attacking Fifth Empire—the guard of the “imperial spaces” (ibid).

Mikhail Smolin, a historian and follower of the staunch Orthodox monarchist Lev Tikhomirov (1852–1923), argued in the same vein that each and every nation which has grown into the role of a world power will strive to build its own empire, and “Russians are born imperialists (imperialisty)” (Smolin 1999, p. 9). Smolin, who is a member of the Union of Writers of Russia and head of the Orthodox Center for Imperial Political Studies (as well as the editor-in-chief of various nationalist journals), sees “empire” as the ideal state formation, the via media between globalism and ethnic seclusion. In the first of these two extremes, the nation loses its national face and its distinct life; in the other, it will make no great historical breakthroughs. “It will gradually wither away, burying its national talent in the earth for the sake of an illusionary tranquillity” (Smolin 2004, p. 8). By contrast, an empire gives the nation a chance to become a creator of world history. All other nations are either stateless or create only small states and must remain content with their role as extras in the drama of world history.

Unlike Prokhanov and Averianov, however, Smolin believes that the Russians’ regaining their position as an imperial nation requires enormous efforts. They have to overcome fierce resistance from alien peoples (inorodtsy) as well as from “asocial elements” within the ethnic community. He drew the logical conclusion that this can be achieved only by introducing dictatorship in Russia (Smolin 2004, pp. 12–15).

Among the Russian Orthodox public intellectuals discussing “empire”, one figure stands out as an exception with some of his views: Aleksandr Shchipkov. Shchipkov is currently the Rector of the Russian Orthodox University of St. John the Theologian and the First Deputy Chairman of the Synodal Department for Church’s Relations with Society and Mass Media. In 2021, he published a book called “The Discourse of Orthodoxy. Description of the ideological space of modern Russian Orthodoxy”. His discussion of imperialism there was short but dense:

“Russia and the Russian people […] have been developing in an imperial format for centuries. This is a huge advantage. However, this advantage also has a disadvantage: imperial bureaucracy is, by definition, anti-national. [In the past,] [t]he Russian ruling stratum has constantly forced the people to abandon their historical experience. And this factor damaged the Russian identity, destroyed the national tradition”.

(Shchipkov 2021, p. 24)

Furthermore, Shchipkov articulates “empire” as a negative concept, assigning it to contemporary Ukraine, which he describes as “a patchwork empire sewn together from different nations like the historical Austria-Hungary” (ibid, pp. 51–52).

4. Orthodox Imperialism in Russian Conservative Media

Besides the Orthodox imperialists who have established institutes, written and published books and programs, there is a whole community of public intellectuals on the Runet (the Russian language Internet) and the Russian media space more broadly. Two of them deserve special attention: Tsargrad and Russkaia narodnaia liniia (RNL). Tsargrad is owned by “the Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev and is, first and foremost, a TV channel, but it also posts some articles. Russkaia narodnaia liniia is far more active. It has found a niche in the digital market with its blend of conservative Orthodoxy, hard-hitting nationalism, conspiracy theories, and support for Putin. Thrown into this mix is also a dash of Stalinism. A number of the authors are priests in the Russian Orthodox Church. Some of the articles are rather lowbrow, while others are quite sophisticated. Of the many articles on RNL discussing “empire” as an ideal and a vision for the future of Russia, we can present only a selection.

Gearing up for the 300th anniversary of Peter I’s proclamation of Russia as an empire in 1721, the priest Gennadii Belovolov argued in an article for RNL that after the momentous event of that proclamation, Russia has always remained an empire, especially in the 20th century. The country has changed its national anthems and flags, but it has always been, and it will always be, an empire:

“One can say that Empire is the calling of Russia, the natural state of its life. And the process is irreversible. …Imperialism is an ideology that today can unite the peoples of Russia as well as the peoples of the neighboring countries. Everyone wants to live in a big, strong, and protected state”.

(Belovolov 2021)

This paternalistic vision is also shared by the popular former priest and media personality Ivan Okhlobystin (see also Shnirelman 2019, pp. 358–59). In September 2011, Okhlobystin addressed thousands of people at the Olympic (Luzhniki) stadium in Moscow, presenting his “Doctrine-77”, which was supposed to boost his (ultimately failed) bid for the presidential elections the following year. The Doctrine states that the purpose of the new Russian empire is to help Russians “regain their lost dreams and continue their development” (Okhlobystin 2011). According to Okhlobystin, “empire” is the “only organic form of state structure” for Russia, and this structure follows the logic of building “an ideal society, according to the Creator’s predetermined plan” (Okhlobystin 2011). Indeed, for Okhlobystin, Russia needs what he calls “imperial pedagogy”: “Gift your children with the tale of a beautiful future, of a great empire, which we Russians must build, which we must build on the ashes of the past. And our children will retell the tale to their children, and those—to their children, until the tale becomes a reality. And it will” (Okhlobystin 2011).

Another Orthodox priest and regular contributor to RNL, Alexander Shumskii, has written several articles on the need to establish an Orthodox empire in Russia (Shumskii 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2013). In 2011, when Russian ethnonationalists were actively mobilizing against the Putin regime in the streets of Moscow, he issued several warnings against them: There is no more dangerous and utopian idea than the idea of a “national” Russian state, he claimed. Such a state will not be able to defend itself since the nuclear shield is an attribute of an empire. Nationalism, at its core, is a provincial and effeminate ideology, and it is impossible to fight with such a psychology. Therefore, the Russian Empire must be built, and since an empire by definition is a hierarchically organized state, a “liberal” empire, such as the one proposed by the influential 1990s politician and economist Anatolii Chubais, is a contradiction in terms. At the same time, Father Shumskii maintained that the future Russian empire must be built on Orthodoxy. For that reason, he criticized Alexander Prokhanov for not leaving enough space for religion in his imperial model (Shumskii 2011a).

Some Russian Orthodox empire enthusiasts are fervent tsarists. Father Roman Zelenskii (Zelenskii 2016) describes the last tsar as an “earthly Christ” who, enduring terrible torment, gave his life for his people, a people who, for the most part, betrayed God and violated the oath of allegiance they had sworn in 1613 when the first Romanov was elected. Nikolai II was forced to step down from the throne in order to carry out a redemptive feat for the sake of the future of the Russian people. “By calling Tsar Nicholas ‘redeemer’, we glorify in him the Divine Redeemer Jesus Christ. Our sovereign gave his life so that Tsarist Russia would be resurrected. The grain, falling into the soil, dies in order to bear fruit” (cfr. John 12:24). Father Zelenskii is only one step away from deifying the last tsar. The ROC has canonized Nikolai II and his family but not as martyrs, only as passion bearers: they were murdered by the Bolsheviks and accepted their fate gracefully but were not killed for their faith.

While many Russian imperialists abjure communism and the legacy of the Soviet Union, for others, it is imperative to stress the chronological continuity of the Russian empire from the Middle Ages to the present day. As argued in one unsigned RNL article, anti-Sovietism is a type of Russophobia. The Soviet Union was a moral society in which primordial Christian values were latently preserved and with high social security (Russkaya narodnaya liniya, 2021). The imperial policy of the Soviet Union, aimed at protecting its geopolitical interests in the world, is a continuation of the imperial ideology of the Third Rome, even if the Soviet authorities probably did not recognize this geopolitical and historical background for their foreign policy. Not least, Joseph Stalin, who managed to increase the territory of the Russian/Soviet empire significantly, must be included in the imperial pantheon.

Another author on the RNL, Aleksei Shvechikov, maintains that under Lenin and Trotsky, the Soviet Union veered from the true path of Russian empire-building. Still, thanks to Joseph Stalin, the country again found its proper place in history—and beyond. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union was—without anyone being fully aware—a divine instrument, fulfilling the function of the Third Rome as a katekhon and thereby holding back the reign of the Antichrist (Shvechikov 2017).

Indeed, Stalin was God’s chosen one (izbrannik Bozhii), Shvechikov argues. While being an ethnic Georgian, Joseph Vissarionovich became a Russian in mentality. “But a Russian person, Dostoevsky argued, is great when he is Orthodox. This means that Stalin, as a great Russian man, was, by definition, Orthodox, sharing the Orthodox idea of Moscow as the Third Rome” (Shvechikov 2017). Purportedly, in the twenties and thirties, Stalin was unable to stop the persecution of Christians launched in 1918 by the Communist Party, but during World War II, he resurrected the Church.

The notion that the Stalinist regime saw itself as a secularized modern carrier of the Third Rome legacy can be backed up with some historical evidence. In 1945, the Soviet state, represented by the Council for Relations with the Russian Orthodox Church (CROC), allowed/instructed the ROC to invite all the other Orthodox churches to a pan-Orthodox council. When the archives were opened during perestroika, it became clear that a major objective for convening the council would be to proclaim the Russian patriarch as the Ecumenical Patriarch (Kalkandjieva 2015, p. 326). Writing on RNL, Viacheslav Makartsev claims that this was done because the Ecumenical Patriarch had lost authority in the Orthodox world, and no other eastern Patriarch could fill this role. In antiquity, “the New (Second) Rome elevated the Church of Constantinople due to its geopolitical position”, and in the 20th century, only the Russian Church could shoulder this task (Makartsev 2019).

Another frequent contributor to the RNL is Fedor Papayani. He hails from the community of Pontic Greeks around the Black Sea and is a resident of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. In his view, the imperial paradigm is essential for the peoples in the Donbas as well as in the other unrecognized pro-Russian states in the former Soviet Union: Transnistria, Ossetia, and Abkhazia. They have all retained a political consciousness of former imperial provinces but have not been able to establish a viable economy and defence on their own. Furthermore, the imperial paradigm should also concern “all other peoples of the former USSR, unless they want to share the fate of Ukraine or Libya” (Papayani 2015).

Papayani declares that the primary political trend in world history has been and remains the desire to form empires. Empires, however, come in two different varieties: civilized and barbarian. The barbarian Anglo-Saxon empire is a hidden dictatorship under the guise of democracy and liberalism, something which the American blacks and Native Americans know all about. By contrast, the Orthodox empires grant all ethnic groups equal rights (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”). It unites people for mutual benefit. Crucially, for Papaini, the Slavic tribes received the Orthodox empire as a gift from Byzantium:

“It is no coincidence that Russia has regained its main imperial symbol—the double-headed eagle as the state’s coat of arms, inherited from the Byzantine Orthodox Empire. Every symbol carries spiritual energy. This symbol has absorbed the energy of fifteen centuries of the Orthodox spirit! The double-headed eagle as the state’s coat of arms means that the spirit of the Orthodox empire is alive”.

(Papayani 2013)

The moderator of the RNL website, Anatolii Stepanov, an influential actor in nationalist and Orthodox circles in Russia, also supports the notion that the Soviet Union played the role of Third Rome (Stepanov 2019). In 2021, he convened a roundtable in the editorial offices of RNL to discuss the role of Russia as the Third Rome in the contemporary world. The participants agreed that the Third Rome is an eschatological entity: Russia as the Third Rome is the force which, according to Saint Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, holds back the reign of Antichrist.

The Third Rome is a special ministry of the One who keeps the world from sliding into the abyss. The Third Rome is an Empire of a special, peace-keeping type, different from the European, barbarian empires, since in the spirit of barbarism, they distorted the essence of imperial service, dividing territories into metropolises and colonies. That is why all the forces of evil are taking up arms against the Third Rome since it is the restrainer (Stepanov et al. 2021).

“Why did the Lord choose Russians to be his instrument?” Stepanov muses. It could be because Russians, more than other nations, had embodied two main Christian qualities—humility and patience. Another possible explanation is that the Russians live in the geographical space most suitable for the Empire of the Third Rome: “The Third Rome must always be a great power in order to be able to enforce peace on other nations. […] The Third Rome is a political structure with a sovereign right to form a legal space that would facilitate the implementation of protective functions, from the point of view of soteriological thinking” (Stepanov et al. 2021).

While Russia, as the Third Rome, is God’s chosen instrument in the final battle at the end of times, Satan also has a geopolitical tool for pushing apostasy and preparing for the coming of the Antichrist. Throughout history, it has appeared under different guises; in antiquity, it was Carthage, “a geographically nomadic and mimicking construction”, while in today’s world, it is the United States. “Before that, it was probably Great Britain, and even earlier, perhaps the Netherlands and Venice. In the future, it may be Hong Kong and China” (Stepanov 2019). This explicit demonization of the Western world—plus hypothetically China—precedes Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after which such rhetoric became mainstream in official Moscow. This imagery was relatively marginal and exotic in the 1990s, but it has been increasingly moving into the center of political discourse in Russia in the last decade.

The above-mentioned “Orthodox oligarch” and chairman of the media group Tsargrad, Konstantin Malofeev, is an important figure in Russian public life. Besides his role as a media mogul, he is the chairman of the All-Russian Public Organization Society for the Promotion of Russian Historical Development Tsargrad and was also a deputy head of the World Russian People’s Council between 2019 and 2024 (Laruelle 2025). He uses the media outlets of Tsargrad and the WRPC to spread his ideas, both by writing his own articles and by letting their websites report on meetings he has had with the public.

Malofeev’s message is centred around two favourite themes: Russia as an empire and the approaching End of the world. In his mind, these two issues are intimately connected: the antichrist will not appear on earth as long as there is a force holding him back, and this has at all times been the Christian, Orthodox empire. This has been foretold by the church fathers, in particular by St. John Chrysostomus. Only one state on earth today fits this bill and that is Russia, the Third Rome, the heir to the First and Second Rome. This means that Chrysostomus, even if he lived more than 1500 years ago, talked about the role of Russia in God’s plan for saving mankind (Malofeev 2024). “We must remember that we are the only Empire in the world. Not an Empire as Lenin understood it, but an Empire in the highest sense of the word” (Malofeev 2023a). Russia is responsible for the security of the entire world. This, Malofeev explains, is the rationale behind the war in Ukraine (Malofeev 2023b). There is, however, a certain vacillation in Malofeev’s utterances on the issue. While he sometimes insists that Russia is an empire, other times he argues that Russia must become one (see, e.g., Malofeev 2023c).

The difference between Russia as an empire and pseudo-empires is that Russia is imbued with a Christian, Orthodox spirit: the Church is the soul, and the state is the body of the Empire (Malofeev 2022b). This is the so-called “symphonic” state model, and it can be established in Russia already today, even if the country is not (yet) formally an empire. “If people realize that the purpose of their life is the salvation of the soul and the attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven, then they will understand the meaning of this temporary life. Then we can say that ‘the Empire borders on the Kingdom of Heaven’” (Malofeev 2022b).

These ideas were presented in more elaborate form in a massive four-volume book called simply Empire, published in Malofeev’s name but probably written by several ghostwriters. In this book, Malofeev presents world history as a battle between good and evil forces. Russia represents “the civilization of honour”, and the evil forces are “the civilization of money”. Like Stepanov, Malofeev takes the Phoenicians, the Venetians, the Dutch, and today the Anglo-Saxons as the historical manifestations of the perennial evil. They are collectively called Canaan, the people the Israelites fought against in the Old Testament. Canaan is hellbent on defeating the power of Russia since Russia is the force that stands between it and world domination. The battleground is Ukraine. Modern Ukraine was conceived as a separatist, anti-Russian entity, artificially torn away from the body of Russia. The 2014 borders of Ukraine first appeared as a result of the shameful Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, when the traitors Lenin and Trotsky, with one stroke of the pen, granted these territories to their German sponsors.

Malofeev believes that a reversal of Russia’s disintegration has already begun: thanks to the Russian Spring in 2014, the world has changed (Malofeev 2022a, p. 395). In March 2014, Vladimir Putin delivered his historic “Crimean speech”, and in Malofeev’s view, the president outlined the inevitability of Russia’s revival as an empire and the policy of returning the united Russian people to a single political home. The period of submission to the global Canaan had supposedly come to an end (Malofeev 2022a, p. 390). Seven years later, on 12 July 2021, in his article “On the historical unity of the Russians and Ukrainians”, Putin showed that modern Russia is the historical successor of ancient Holy Rus’ and the Russian Empire.

However, an Empire without an Emperor is not a real Empire, unable to withstand the corrupting power of global Canaan. “A power vertical is solid only when it passes from God to the Tsar, and from the Tsar to the people”, Malofeev insists. “Power, by its very nature, is hierarchical, not democratic” (Malofeev 2022a, p. 475). In support of this view, Malofeev quotes copiously from the writings of Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev). Monarchy must be resurrected in Russia, but then a new question arises: should Russians restore the Romanovs dynasty (some candidates exist) or elect a new one, as they did in 1613? Malofeev has an answer: “Today, when Russia is at war with the entire world Canaan for the revival of the Empire, the best candidate seems obvious to us. This is the head of the Russian state, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin…” (Malofeev 2022a, p. 483).

As we saw in the accounts of other Orthodox imperialists, the battle between Russia and Canaan is not just about great-power competition but about “soteriology”. Russia is God’s chosen instrument to hold back the Antichrist; the country is the prophetic restrainer. To reiterate the banal trope by now, Russia inherited the secret power of the true Christian Empire after the First and Second Romes had fallen.

Today’s Russia is no less the Third Rome than the Russian Empire before the monarchy’s fall in 1917. Logically, the Soviet period must also be regarded as one leg in the historical Canaan relay. Even if Malofeev is a monarchist and anti-communist, he is prepared to draw this corollary. The Soviet victory over the Third Reich proved that the USSR had indeed become the Third Rome (Malofeev 2022a, p. 41).

Stalin and Zhdanov, in the face of the mortal Nazi threat, returned Russianness to Russia, but the Third Rome and the Third International could not coexist within the framework of the Soviet ideology. The result was the revenge of the “communist Canaan” under Khrushchev: banal consumerism won, which led the USSR to Perestroika and the oligarchy of the Yeltsin regime. Putin returned power to the state, but the state itself grew out of the liberal constitution of 1993, which was adopted to legalize Yeltsin’s coup. This was the time of the greatest humiliation of Russia, when the West was celebrating its victory in the Cold War (Malofeev 2022a, p. 476).

Quoting Metropolitan Ioann, Malofeev argues that the Russian monarchy can only be restored as “an Orthodox state power” (Malofeev 2022a, p. 479). In antiquity, the Patriarch of Constantinople was elevated to a status as Ecumenical patriarch for one reason only: he resided in the city of the Emperor. Today, this is no longer the case. Constantinople has become Istanbul, located in a predominantly Muslim country. Furthermore, the Patriarch of Constantinople is the head of one of the smallest patriarchies in the Orthodox world, and it is high time that this honour is passed on to a successor, the Patriarch of the Third Rome—Moscow. Constantinople received its position as Primus inter pares among the Orthodox patriarchs due to the schism in 1054 when the First Rome allegedly left the true church. A new schism occurred when, in 2019, the Patriarch of Constantinople egregiously misused his prerogatives by recognizing a schismatic church in Ukraine. After that fatal misdeed, as Malofeev sees it, he can no longer be honoured as the first among equals in the Christian world (Malofeev 2022a, p. 488). Malofeev therefore proposes the holding of an Ecumenical Council in Moscow to reshuffle inter-Orthodox and church-state relations:

“The holding of an Ecumenical Council in Moscow will symbolize that the Church recognizes the revived Empire as the world Katekhon… the Empire is the Katekhon that keeps the world from evil. That spiritual victory over evil is possible only with the church’s power, the head of which is the Lord God Jesus Christ himself. Without the symphonic union of Kingdom and priesthood, the Empire would not be able to resist ‘the new world order’”.

(Malofeev 2022a, p. 493)

In Malofeev’s scheme, it is almost impossible to disentangle hard-nosed geopolitics and conspiracy from apocalyptic theology. In political terms, he operates within the limits of the Putinite system but wants to reform if not revolutionize it. His account represents a bold and detailed program for the establishment of a Russian eschatological theocracy. In addition, Malofeev advocates on behalf of the Russian Orthodox Church for the Moscow Patriarchate to become a major global player in ecclesiastical politics. Such objectives were announced once before, in the 1940s, by the secular Soviet authorities, who hoped to use the Church as an instrument in their foreign policy. This time, however, the idea comes from sources closer to the ROC, albeit not from the hierarchs themselves, but rather from Russian Orthodox imperialists with links to the top church leadership.

Such an ecumenical aspiration—an ambition that we can call ecclesiastical imperialism—transcends the boundaries of “historical Russia”. However, it appears to be strikingly reminiscent of the idea of the Communist International. Like the Comintern, a hypothetical Ecumenical Patriarchate in Moscow would serve as a platform for ideological leadership of a given geopolitical bloc: this time—of the imagined “Orthodox world”. Thus, Malofeev’s ecclesiastical imperialism also fits the restoration paradigm, albeit by adding a distinctively religious twist to it.

5. Conclusions

As we see from the various Russian Orthodox discourses on “empire”, this concept signifies, first and foremost, great power. As Andrei Tsygankov (2022, p. 39) points out, three ideas converged in the concept of derzhava: “the (quasi) religious nature of authority, concentrated political power, and sovereign, independent great power status recognized by other major states”. Respectively, in the Orthodox imperialist discourses, empire-as-derzhava captures the notions of (1) sacred statehood destined to fulfil a divine mission, (2) a centralized and strong state dominating social relations for the sake of the greater good, and (3) a world historical force that maintains a certain global geopolitical equilibrium, the destruction of which would have apocalyptic consequences.

However, in the discourses we discussed, the realization of empire-as-derzhava comes across as backwards-looking, for it aims to invest Russia with a great power status by reviving its former glory. The Orthodox imperialist discourses articulate expansionism as a historically justified return of Russia’s unredeemed territories. Thus, we are dealing with a kind of imperialist irredentism and revanchism that oscillates between the “reunification of the divided Russian nation” and the reintegration of the lands they have historically conquered and inhabited.

This programme for restoration, reunification, and reintegration of the former imperial spaces appears to be a shorthand for a larger desire to reinstate Russia’s place and role in the world. It seems that Russians’ loss of collective political meaning after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been displaced by a concern for Russia’s loss of territories. The great power status which the Soviet Union enjoyed was based on its aspirations for ideological leadership throughout the world, its military strength to the point of parity with the United States, its technological progress, and its offer for alternative modernization. When independent Russia lost all of these great-power attributes, it was left only with four remnants: its permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council, its nuclear arsenal, its sheer size as the largest country in the world, and its memory of the glorious past. They all played a role in reimaging Russia’s post-Soviet identity, together with the rediscovered Orthodoxy and its powerful symbolic capital.

The official Russian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Kirill, saw that political rediscovery of Orthodoxy provided a chance to assert the Church’s place and role in Russia and beyond. Against the background of the official ecclesiastical embrace of Orthodox imperialism, the explicitly anti-imperial voices in the ROC were few but emblematic. One of them is Sergei Chapnin, a former employee of the Moscow patriarchate and erstwhile editor of one of its official journals, who deplored that the end result of the church renaissance under perestroika was the establishment of “a Church of the empire” (“Cerkov’ imperii”: Chapnin 2018, p. 9): “After 2000, … the Russian state abandoned the democratic model for an imperial one. It did so out of a desire to play a larger role in international politics and to overcome, in the eyes of Russians, the humiliation it had suffered with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the state became imperial, so did the Church (Chapnin 2015)”. Chapnin has left both the Moscow Patriarchate and Russia and now resides in the United States.

A similar case is Archimandrite Cyril (Hovorun), who worked closely with Patriarch Kirill for many years. Disenchanted with the direction in which the ROC was developing, Hovorun left Moscow already in 2012 and was finally defrocked in December 2023. As a theologian, he has written extensively on Orthodox ecclesiology’s political dimensions. Ukrainian himself, Hovorun is among the most critical theological voices deploring the failure of many Orthodox churches to distance themselves unambiguously from Russia’s aggression and the ROC’s support for it. An explanation for this failure he sees in a lingering legacy of imperial thinking in Orthodoxy: “I think many Orthodox churches nowadays perceive Russia as a sort of new Byzantium, as a reincarnation of the old imperial authority, which favoured Orthodoxy. They are prepared to forgive everything that this new empire does, just for this dream of Byzantium” (Cyril 2024).

Yet, at the level of Russian Federation, Orthodox imperialism is currently the norm among both ecclesiastics and officials. Censorship and coercion are only part of the explanation. The emergence and consolidation of Orthodox imperialism could be also explained by the persuasive solution it offers to Russia’s fused post-Soviet “tragedies”: loss of a common political narrative and the loss of territories and sphere of influence. The domestic political and economic grievances were transposed onto the international and the geopolitical. The strive to repair the “geopolitical catastrophe”—as Vladimir Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union—came to displace the civic endeavours to find again shared meaning in public affairs. Thus, the desire to rehabilitate Russia’s status and its citizens’ self-respect appears to have been channelled through the appeal of reviving former imperial power.

But this programme could hardly be justified with such a self-centred cause as restoring Russians’ lost pride and dignity. The reintegration of the former imperial body is better recounted as a necessary condition for the revival of Russia’s “true soul”. The myth of the Third Rome destined to restrain the godless rule of the Antichrist resonates well with the deep-seated narratives about Russia’s resistance against Napoleon and Hitler. Furthermore, the Soviet Union’s identity, at least during the Cold War, was primarily based on restraining, as it were, Western capitalism and imperialism—first in the Second World and then in the Third. Thus, the religious idea of katekhon matches perfectly with the post-Soviet secular geopolitics of “balance of power” and “multipolarity” (see Makarychev and Morozov 2011).

However, Russian Orthodox imperialism is ultimately pessimistic about the prospects of Russia in this world. The Third Rome does not offer “a bright future” for the Russians or humanity. Its only goal seems to be to postpone the inevitable doom. Russia is to become an empire and a great power only to meet the end of times as the last resort of truth and means for salvation. This perspective, although sanctifying Russia, demonstrates the profound nihilism—in the literal sense—of Russian Orthodox imperialist imagination. The world is destined for a downfall regardless of whether Russia fulfils its mission. But as the Russian state television host Dmitrii Kiselyov said recently, “Why do we need a world if Russia is not in it?”.4