Kirill and Putin, courtesy the website of the president of Russia, creative commons license attribution 4.0

Lt Col Dustin M. Hart and Dr. Robert S. Hinck writing about Putin as “Theologian-Propagandist” at Air University’s Wild Blue Yonder.  Excerpt:

As war rages in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s reputation as the “most evil man in the world” continues to grow across the Western world. Despite this critical international view, Putin has maintained a two-decade stranglehold on Russian power in part by projecting a spiritual persona reconnecting himself and Russian identity to the Orthodox Church. This spiritual resurgence may seem odd considering that, for nearly 75 years of communist rule, Christianity in the Soviet Union was violently repressed at the hands of the very same government Putin himself served and protected as an intelligence agent. However, upon closer examination, one can see that this religious revival serves a strategic purpose. That is, Putin’s usage of Orthodox Christian faith and its connection to Russian history acts as a central component of his domestic and international efforts to return Russia to glory by promoting domestic cohesion, justifying malign foreign policy actions, and generating cultural friction within and amongst his Western rivals.

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Since taking power in 1999, President Putin has regularly professed and used religious connections to the Orthodox Church for political gain. In doing so, he has re-crafted Russian society and placed himself at the center of a newly established Russian theological identity; one professing a traditional set of conservative values standing in contrast to the West, which functions to bolster domestic cohesion and support claims of Russian leadership and authority over its neighbors.

Propaganda campaigns achieve greater impact when featuring a “hero” for the masses to admire and emulate. For Russia and the Orthodox Church, Putin is that hero. Putin has managed to artfully craft a religious backstory by claiming his mother was a closeted Christian and had him baptized as a baby. Putin has built upon this narrative, like the Czars of old, by connecting his state authority to religious symbology. At his first inauguration, Putin had the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church present him with religious relics and a personal prayer. Putin then announced that the Russian nation owed the Church a huge debt of gratitude and credited the Church for preserving Russia’s “century-old traditional spiritual and moral values, which would have been otherwise lost irretrievably.”

 

Given the turbulence in Russian society following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent political infighting that followed, Putin’s invocation of such religious themes helped reestablish the connection between the Russian people and state by bringing back a much-needed sense of cultural unity and history, which Putin used to further consolidate state power. Such messaging is best understood as a form “integration” propaganda, which seeks to build long-term commitment and participation of people into society through an imagined, mythical cause.

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While challenging, the US has several options for countering Putin’s religious propaganda. To best approach a counter strategy, the US should target the various aspects of the Russian disinformation chain, starting first with its leadership and then moving through the propaganda organs, amplification channels, and finally the consumers of the information. First, there are ample opportunities for the US and Western partners to highlight the hypocrisy of Russian actions in comparison to Putin’s religious narratives. Repression of human rights within Russia, the sordid personal lives of senior leaders, and the government’s heinous foreign policy actions provide plenty of examples where the “Christian bastion” has fallen well outside most religious norms. 

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Putin is not the first and certainly won’t be the last leader to abuse religious faith as justification to conduct heinous actions. The US and Western partners must counter this latest example of religious appropriation to solidify Putin’s “evil” reputation before more of the world views the unexpected theologian as the “miracle defender of Christianity.”

Glory to Ukraine!