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Religious populism has gained momentum in the last decade. Extensive research covers the evolution of it from both religious and political leaders perspective. However, limited attention is paid to religious populism in Orthodox states. This paper adresses this gap in the literature and aims to emphasize the populist religious narratives, from the perspective of Slavic Orthodoxy. It uses Russia as a case study due to its Orthodox majority, its particular internet infrastructure and active Orthodox Church at the socio-political level. The analysis draws on a new data set: online speeches disseminated by Ortho-bloggers in the orto-sphere of Russian RuNet. The results indicate the presence of populist religious narratives, on background of a particular ideology and a specific relationship between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church.

This article presents the role of selected motifs of prayer depicted in the works of first-wave Russian emigrants in the creation of a certain type of national mythology. The starting point of the considerations is a reflection on the status of emigrant literature at the time of its creation, during the period of political changes in the Soviet bloc, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and today. From the beginning, émigré literature has served as a certain treasury of images and symbols, which are treated as necessary elements for maintaining the national identity of emigrants. The article presents selected motifs from the works of Ivan Shmelev’s The Year of the Lord and Pilgrimage, and Boris Zaitsev’s Saint Sergius of Radonezh, showing prayer as an element of ritual, as a collective request, and as an act of deep contact with God. The analysis of the selected examples shows that regardless of the literary form, narrative perspective, or the way the subject was presented, the writers showed prayer motifs in a patriotic context, while mythologizing pre-revolutionary Russia and bringing the idea of “Holy Rus” to life. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been an increased interest in emigrant literature, and the ideas contained therein have proven to be very important for the formation of the new national consciousness of Russians. Today, due to another political change in Russia and its political isolation, émigré literature is of renewed importance in Russian circles. The writers whose works are discussed in this study are regarded as the main Orthodox writers of the twentieth century, and the image of praying Russia is again the basis for building a new national identity. The study concludes with the observation that the value of emigrant literature should be studied in the context of the time of its creation.

Neoeurasische Ideen, wie sie beispielsweise von Alexander Dugin formuliert werden, haben ihre semantischen wie inhaltlichen Bezüge zum orthodoxen Christentum. Die Vorstellung einer über die russischen Territorialgrenzen hinausgehenden Heiligen Rus bzw. einer orthodoxen Russischen Welt werden dabei auch von der Russisch-Orthodoxen Kirche vertreten. Im Kontext des Ukraine-Krieges ist Patriarch Kirill in verschiedenen Predigten an die Öffentlichkeit getreten, um den Angriff auf das Nachbarland theologisch zu rechtfertigen. Neben dualistischen Weltbildern, in denen die westlich-liberale Welt dämonisiert wird, sakralisiert Kirill die russische Nation und das russische Militär. Drei dieser Predigten dienen als empirisches Material dieses Artikels und erfahren eine vertiefte Betrachtung, um zwei Aspekten nachzugehen. Einerseits soll die politreligiöse Verschränkung von politischen und religiösen Sphären durch eine semantisch-orientierte Analyse der Predigten erkennbar werden. Andererseits wird mit Blick auf in den Predigten inszenierte und hergestellte Wissensdimensionen rekonstruiert, welche Rolle dem Konzept der Russischen Welt beigemessen wird und welche religionspolitische Dimension darin begründet liegt. Schlüsselbegriffe: Orthodoxie, Neoeurasismus, Russische Welt, Heilige Rus, Patriarch Kirill / “It is a spiritual fight”: Patriarch Kirill’s sermons in the context of the Ukraine war. Summary: Neo-Eurasian ideas, such as those formulated by Alexander Dugin, have a semantic and content-based connection to orthodox Christianity. The idea of a Holy Rus or an Orthodox Russian World that crosses Russian territorial borders is also promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church. In the context of the Ukraine war, Patriarch Kirill has now gone public in various sermons to justify the attack on the country’s neighbour theologically. In addition to dualistic world views in which the Western liberal world is demonised, Kirill sacralises the Russian nation and the Russian military. Three of these sermons serve as empirical material for this article and are examined in depth in order to explore two aspects. On the one hand, the entanglement of political and religious spheres will become evident through a semantic-oriented analysis of the sermons. On the other hand, regarding the dimensions of knowledge staged and produced in the sermons, the role of the concept of the Russian World and its religiopolitical dimension will be reconstructed. Keywords: Orthodoxy, Neo-eurasianism, Russian World, Holy Rus, Patriarch Kirill

The study focuses on the long-term struggle for an autocephalous status for Ukrainian Orthodoxy and also on the links between religion and nationalism. Theoretically it is based primarily on Rogers Brubaker's concept of religion as imbricated or intertwined with nationalism. However, particular forms of such intertwining are modified by the author, given the nature of the case being researched. The identified forms of overlapping and intertwining appear to be essential, and important for understanding the actions of major actors. The study highlights that the ideological basis of the conflict over the autocephaly of Ukrainian Orthodoxy is a clash of two historical-religious mythologies, which serve as an example of intertwining of religion and nationalism. They also have the potential to significantly shape not only the ecclesiastical or religious scene of Ukraine and the Russian Federation, but also the concepts of national identity and value attitudes of inhabitants of both countries.

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgentis the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image. In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith. Russian Orthodoxy Resurgentargues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.

This new and abridged edition of Scenarios of Power is a concise version of Richard Wortman's award-winning study of Russian monarchy from the seventeenth century until 1917. The author breaks new ground by showing how imperial ceremony and imagery were not simply displays of the majesty of the sovereign and his entourage, but also instruments central to the exercise of absolute power in a multinational empire. In developing this interpretation, Wortman presents vivid descriptions of coronations, funerals, parades, trips through the realm, and historical celebrations and reveals how these ceremonies were constructed or reconstructed to fit the political and cultural narratives in the lives and reigns of successive tsars. He describes the upbringing of the heirs as well as their roles in these narratives and relates their experiences to the persistence of absolute monarchy in Russia long after its demise in Europe.

The Mandate of the XXV World Russian People’s Council of 27 March 2024 framed the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine as a “holy war”. This paper presents an in-depth textual analysis of the Mandate followed by an extended thematic and contextual analysis. The findings indicate that the Mandate’s mainstream discourses of eschatological–apocalyptic holy war and katechon state were not previously expressed at the level of official church leadership. They contribute to the ideological escalation of the Russian confrontation with Ukraine and the West around declared traditional values and the holy mission of the Russian people, while the involvement of Orthodoxy in the Russian ‘holy war’ narrative is neither exclusive of other religious referents nor of disbelief in ecclesial doctrine. The main referent of the Self (and correspondingly, of the sacred) is the (Russian) ‘nation’ or ‘people’, for which ‘spiritual’ and ‘civilizational’ are comprehensive religious markers of cultural identity. While two religious adversaries of the Russian geopolitical agenda of Ukraine—the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Ukrainian Orthodoxy—are not directly mentioned in the Mandate, it nevertheless attempts to re-formulate an Orthodox ‘just war’ theory, intensifies antagonistic inter-Orthodox relations in the Russia–Ukraine dimension and strengthens the resolve of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Russian Federation to retain Ukraine’s Orthodox Church as an exclusively Russian space.

The author argues that in addition to biblical, historical, hagiographic, eschatological, and liturgical texts, the anonymous chroniclers of Kievan Rus also made use of the OCS Synaxarion (Prologue) translated from Greek in early 12th century at the latest. This can be seen in the Chronicle of Suzdal (Laurentian Codex) under the year of 1217 where the princely convention in Isady is described. During the event, six early Rus princes were murdered by order of their brothers and cousins, Gleb Vladimirovich of Ryazan and his brother Konstantin. While describing the murder, the chronicle names as historical precedent the Kievan prince Sviatopolk I who had murdered his brothers Boris and Gleb (1015) and makes a fragmentary but clear paraphrase of the Synaxarion passage on the Holy Innocents (29 December), which describes their slaughter by order of Herod the Great. Besides this implicit parallel which is not claimed in the text, but can be seen through its textual sources, there is another passage which juxtaposes Sviatopolk I of Kiev with Herod Agrippa 1. This is present in the Primary Chronicle under the year of 1019 where Sviatopolk's death is described using a textual fragment of the Brief Chronicle (Chronikon syntomon) by George Hamartolos about Herod Agrippa's death. From the two parallels associating Sviatopolk with two different Herods, his comparison with Herod the Great should be viewed as the primary one, despite its reflection in a chronologically later source. The main reason for this is its compatibility with another implicit parallel identified in the anonymous Life of Boris and Gleb where a verbatim citation from the homily on Herod and the Holy Innocents by John Chrysostom (Proclus of Constantinople) is used. Here Boris and Gleb are implicitly juxtaposed with the Holy Innocents which requires an analogy between their murderers Sviatopolk and Herod the Great respectively. Keywords Kievan Rus Literature; Primary Chronicle; Chronicle of Suzdal; Laurentian Codex; Synaxarion; Holy Innocents; Herod the Great; Herod Agrippa; Boris and Gleb; Sviatopolk I of Kiev; Gleb Vladimirovic of Rjazan'.