In Moscow's Shadows

In Moscow's Shadows 232: the Black Priest vs the Death Cult

• Mark Galeotti • Episode 232

Share episode

A tabloid brands Zelensky’s Christmas address a “black mass,” complete with glassy eyes, hidden codes, and a trance to “hack the noosphere” to cast a death curse on Putin. Huh? What? Why are occult narratives creeping from the fringe into Russia’s mainstream? And, for that matter, why are notions such that Russia is now in the grip of a "nihilistic death cult" also warping Western thinking? A trip deep down into a bizarre rabbit-hole.

The Moskovsky Komsomolets article I discuss is here.

Earlier episodes of this podcast touching on some of these issues are In Moscow's Shadows 41: The Communist Party Embattled...And Occultism and Russian Politics (4 Aug. 2021) and In Moscow's Shadows 186: Why is Putin's Russia so Prone to Conspiracy Theories? (2 Feb. 2025).

The podcast's corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for innovative and immersive crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and similar situations.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials including the (almost-) weekly Govorit Moskva news briefing right here. 








Support the show

MG:

So we're going into another rabbit hole today. Looking at the conspiratorial occult theories of the world in Russia.

MG:

Welcome to my view of Russia in Moscow Shadows. This podcast, of varying length, frequency and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the Crisis Exercise software company Conducttr.

MG:

So be warned, I said we're going down a rabbit hole, and so we will be, but bear with me, even if you're here primarily for the news and such like, because how Russia understands itself and the world, and also how some people understand and frame Russia matters in terms of how the decisions that shape that news are made. Anyway, I hope you'll stay with me. And either way, buckle in for a weird ride, as in the first half I discuss and deconstruct a particularly bizarre article in the mainstream Russian press, and then in the second half spin this out into a wider analysis.

MG:

I've talked about the significance of occultism and conspiracy theories in Putin's Russia before, and I'll leave a link to a couple of previous podcasts in the programme notes. But I do want to return to this rich bubbling well of nonsense. And it's triggered not by something in the usual nutso end of the media spectrum, things like the Orthodox Nationalist Tsargrad news site, but by an article from the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, which is probably the second most widely read Russian newspaper. And this is an article that ran on, well, Christmas Day for most of us, if you're not Russian Orthodox, but 25th of December. Now, at first I was simply going to highlight this in my usual Govorit Moskva press roundup for paying patrons. But then I decided that it really needed more spotlight time. So, and again I'll leave a link to the original article in the programme notes, what I'm going to do first is go through the whole article in its bizarre psychedelic splendour with my observations before we go on further.

MG:

So this is Moskovsky Komsomolets, 25th of December 2025. And you already know the kind of thing we're in for from the headline: What's behind the Christmas address of the overdue president of unfortunate Ukraine? Oh boy.

MG:

Anyway:

MG:

"This Christmas Ukraine saw not a president but a village sorcerer performing a black mass live on air. A psychological portrait and physiognis of Zelensky's New Year's address reveal a dire diagnosis. The nation is being sacrificed to a dark cult."

MG:

Now, it is interesting that there is also a school of thought in Western studies of Russia. That talk of Putinism, not that I really believe there is such an ism in the sense of a distinct and articulated ideology, as a death cult. And I'll be talking about that at the end of this podcast. But nonetheless, you know, we have a clear sense already, and it's quite striking about the overdue president, again, hyping this notion that in fact he is no longer the legitimate president because his term of office has technically ended, putting aside the impossibility of actually having an election in a time of this kind of existential war. But also on unfortunate Ukraine. Again, the idea that in fact Ukrainians are hostages to this regime that insists on sacrificing them needlessly, which is, I think, quite an interesting reversal of one of the ways one can actually look at Russia. He goes on.

MG:

"A professional analysis of Volodymyr Zelensky's appearance, motor skills, and verbal codes in his Christmas address forces us to abandon political science and turn to psychiatry and religious studies. We're no longer confronted with a field commander or administrator. We are witnessing the final stages of personality disintegration, attempting to maintain power through the inversion of sacred meanings."

MG:

By the way, I'm not going to read every single line of this article, be reassured, but I think this is important to set the tone. And then the next we have the subhead,

MG:

"Black Priest Syndrome.

MG:

"The first thing that catches the eye of any non-verbal communication specialist" ( again, clearly here we have an attempt to, and we've already seen this happening, by the author to establish expertise. So trust me, I'm an expert. Ha.) "is the change in visual code. Zelensky demonstratively abandoned his usual khaki camouflage. This year he donned a black paramilitary uniform" ( which of course we have seen, not least in Zelensky's visits to the White House of late.) "In this context, the viewer's subconscious interpret black not as mourning, but as the colour of the clergy, in its distorted sectarian sense. It is not a soldier's uniform but the robe of the high priest of a nation at war. It's a claim to the status of spiritual leader, entitled to rule not only over people, but also over their souls."

MG:

Now must admit the first thing that struck me after reading this claim about what was meant by Zelensky's outfit is what he's describing could just as easily be Vladimir Solovyov, the Russian TV and radio host, who affects these monkish black clothes and a distinctive line in toxic hyperbole. Remember, this is Solovyov who has suggested that a nuclear attack could be launched on the UK, and that those who left the country are in fact the 'vomit of Russia.' Bless him. So, you know, again, this is this is a on one level a familiar trope in some ways to Russians, but one that they probably associate actually with one of their own. Anyway, he goes on to talk about how Zelensky looked. The fact that his his lips and jaw exhibit spasmodic tension. It shows that he's focused on hatred.

MG:

Then says, "a characteristic glassy gleam is observed in the eyes. An abnormally infrequent blinking occurs when the curse keys are pronounced. Combined with dilated pupils, this indicates either a deep trance state or, more likely, powerful pharmacological stimulants."

MG:

Oh dear. We're back to this whole notion that Zelensky is a drug addict. Now look, this is a rumour that originated during the rather nasty knockdown and drag out Ukrainian politics. In the 2019 presidential elections, Zelensky's rival had challenged him to a drug test. I think again suggesting, well, these showbiz folk, they're always into drugs. Zelensky took the test and it came back negative. Nonetheless, pro-Russian sources have repeatedly shared doctored videos and images to support the idea that Zelensky is a drug addict, including an interview from 2019, which was edited to take his own language when he was talking about his love of coffee and daily exercise routine to make it look like he was discussing cocaine. And there was another fake video, which I think circulated in 2022, which added some white powder to a desk of his during a video conference to suggest that he was just about to break off and snort some cocaine. And it's interesting that this is something that the Russians have tried in other ways. In 2025, for example, there was this video showing Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Keir Starmer on the train back from Kiev sitting around a table, and there was a piece of little crumple piece of paper or something on the table that Macron picked up and held in his fist, and there was this empty claim being made that it was a little bag of white powder, cocaine again. So the idea is again, so so here we have this drug addict decked out in black high priest's outfit, consumed by hatred.

MG:

"The most terrifying thing that happened on a semantic level, Zelensky committed an act of so-called inversion of the sacred. Christmas is the archetype of birth and love. The primary imperative is love your enemies. What does Zelensky do? He's holding a classic black mass. The liturgical form is preserved, but the content is inverted. Instead of a prayer for the salvation of the soul, there's a curse for the destruction of the body. God, the source of life, is invoked as the instrument of murder."

MG:

Now, this is because Zelensky, in his Christmas address, did say, in a scarcely veiled hope, that we should all hope that he dies. In other words, Putin. And yes, one could argue that maybe that was less than statesmanlike, one could also argue that was entirely human in the circumstances. But nonetheless, this is being turned into a deliberate attempt to invoke some kind of curse on Putin. And worst of all, he does so in the context of a Christmas message. Except, of course, during the Orthodox Christmas, Putin, in his message to the country, said, 'We often call the Lord the Saviour because he came to earth to save all people. In the same way, Russia's warriors have always carried out this mission, defending the fatherland, saving the motherland and its people. And throughout Russia's history, soldiers have been viewed as people performing a holy mission on God's behalf.' So actually, Putin himself did exactly the same. He used this festival of love to praise the soldiers that he was unleashing on Ukraine.

MG:

But anyway, the author goes on to talk about exactly how basically Zelensky was trying this sort of cabalytic ritual. Apparently, he was attempting to hack noosphere. Now, you may well not know what the noosphere is. It's a term that we don't really use in English. It's got more traction in Russia ever since it emerged that it was part of the topic of the dissertation of Anton Vaino, the head of the presidential administration. And maybe it's actually Noosphere, I don't know. Anyway, it's a term to mean the sphere of human thought. In other words, the totality of human consciousness and knowledge. But anyway, so the idea is that what Zelensky's trying to do is to synchronize the thoughts of millions of people into a single, what he calls a death impulse. "The level of farmstead black magic."

MG:

So we have this terrible, terrible curse being levied. And that there are three hidden signals, hidden codes that are buried within Zelensky's address. One is what he calls the Abraham Code of Sacrifice. And because he says, "We make one wish for all." The idea is that this erases all the individuality of Ukrainians, bringing them into a kind of a hive mind of hatred, in which their personal life has no meaning, the only meaning is Putin's death.

MG:

The second is what he calls the "occult blackmail of the West." The shift to openly satanic rhetoric, which of course is nothing of the sort. There's nothing satanic about what Zelensky said, but never mind. It's "a signal to Western elites who have always been fascinated by neo-paganism," he says, though actually perversely it's much, much more prevalent in Russia, but never mind. That "Zelensky is demonstrating, I am ready to transcend any moral horizon. I am your ideal instrument of chaos." Because we know, after all, that the West loves chaos.

MG:

And the circus the third element, the third code is what he calls the psychotropic element. "Monotonous rhythm, fixed gaze, alternating archetypes of night, dream, and death," essentially to more or less hypnotize Ukrainians. So they're forbidden to live and instead they're only allowed to wish death on others. Oi.

MG:

So the the verdict at the end -- again, an interesting verdict, which implies kind of that the writer has a position of authority in which to pass judgment -- "Zelensky is in a state of existential nihilism. Political rhetoric has been completely supplanted by archaic magical rhetoric. He no longer appeals to law, the logic of war, or Western partners. He appeals to the miracle of the enemy's death, a sign of the collapse of rational strategy." And basically it says that it won't end well for Zelensky. I will not tax your patience by reading any more.

MG:

But who wrote this, let's say, rather extraordinary screed? Well, it's one, Ruslan Pankratov. Now he's described as a political scientist, international relations expert, and expert on the Baltic states, trained as both psychotherapist and information analyst. No doubt leaped all buildings at a single bound as well. He was a high-profile member of the Russian community in Latvia. He was a member of the Riga City Council for years. And he was author of the book 'Descendants of the Salaspils Prison Guards: Everything You Need to Know About Latvia.' A title which in and of itself, I think, tells you everything you need to know about Ruslan Pankratov. You know, Latvians are clearly all still Nazis, descended from Nazis and such like. Now he spoke out in favour of the invasion of Ukraine and was arrested by the Latvian authorities. And in 2023, he apparently swam across the border with Russia in a wetsuit and requested political asylum. So he's now another one of this collection of tame emigre pundits singing for both their supper and security.

MG:

So, does this just, I don't know, count as fun in the Russian propaganda noosphere? A weird pseudo-scholar indulging himself? I don't know, maybe Moskovsky Komsomolets needed some extra text. Maybe someone owed someone a favour, or I don't know what. But I wonder if there is something more to it. I mean, yes, this is barking mad. But nonetheless, I can't help but feel that I've seen more of this bizarre, occultic narrative attempts to explain the world creeping out of its usual niche, publications like Yes, Tsargrad or Argumenti i Fakti, I'm looking at you, into more mainstream outlets. In the last, I don't know, very subjectively, year, year and a half. Why is that?

MG:

Well, in some ways I'm gonna be deploying one wacky psycho-social explanation to try and explain another. But I wonder if it reflects the and I'm gonna get pretentious here, the epistemic tension within the Russian intelligentsia these days. They know so much of what is said to them, especially about this so-called special military operation, is absolute nonsense. But it's not just that they don't have the courage to call it out. It's also that they don't necessarily regard the regime as totally alien or evil. They are still patriots ultimately. Now that in many ways is not new, but crucially, they don't have a faith in order to mediate this tension. So let me just stop there. We'll have a break, and then let me dig more into this.

MG:

Just the usual mid-episode reminder that you're listening to the In Moscow Shadows podcast. Its corporate partner and sponsor is Conducttr, which provides software for crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counter-terrorism, civil affairs and the like. But you can also support the podcast yourself by going to patreon.com slash In Moscow Shadows. And remember that patrons get a variety of additional perks depending on their tier, as well as knowing that they're supporting this peerless source on all things Russian. And you can also follow me on Twitter at MarkGaleotti or on Facebook, Mark Galeotti on Russia. Now back to the episode.

MG:

So why are we seeing, or seem to be seeing, more of these occultic and arcane attempts to explain the world? Well, as I say, I mean, in some ways it is precisely about this tension. It is a lot easier to navigate a world that doesn't seem to make sense if you have faith. Faith, after all, says, don't worry your pretty little head about this. Yes, of course, there are, well, if we can quote Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. In other words, there are things you're not meant to know. Just relax and and go with the flow. So unthinking religiosity does the trick, accepting that there is an ineffability about the world. And in many ways, the more counterintuitive the world seems, the more it doesn't seem to make sense, the more precious is the faith that accepts it. And once, yes, there was Russian Orthodoxy. Then there was an ideology that for me, frankly, was a faith. The Party is always right. The seeming contradictions are just part of the complexities of the dialectic, and will work out once thesis and antithesis have brought forth synthesis. You know, Marxism, Leninism, and frankly the very fact that we saw Lenin's pickled body stuck in a mausoleum as a secular saint, you know, it was always, for all its invocations of scientific materialism, just as much a faith as Russian Orthodoxy.

MG:

Now, there is knowledge without faith. There is doubt without safe spaces in which to express or explore it. So what fills this gap? What cognitive dissonance kicks in? It's quite hard to be unflinchingly honest with yourself and recognize both that something is Wrong, but that away from the kitchen table, one is too scared to say so. So something emerges to fill that gap, and we've seen this before, particularly in the late 80s and the 1990s. I think it's often forgotten just how far occultism and mysticism suddenly became so, so widespread in late Soviet times and then early post-Soviet Russia. We had the huge audience for Kashpirovsky, this TV hypnotist who said that through the medium of the TV set he could cure your ills. We had renewal of efforts to prove that, for example, the Tunguska explosion in 1908, this massive explosion that levelled huge areas of forest and was almost certainly a meteor hitting. But that nonetheless it was claimed, of course, that was a UFO. We had all kinds of weird and not so wonderful stories proliferating, again, even in the mainstream press, often under such slightly kind of deniable rubrics like Ne Mozhet Byt, it can't be true, about, for example, giant mutant rats in Moscow's sewers, or cannibal cults in farthest far east, and that kind of thing.

MG:

Now, look, today there's still a healthy or maybe sometimes unhealthy side industry in palmistry, tarot, faith healing and the like. But again, it's hard, that's hardly unique to Russia. And then, look, and I discussed this from a different angle back in, I had to look it up, August 2021 In Moscow Shadows number 41, in which there is a political dimension. I talked about red battle witches supporting the Communist Party and a Shaman seeking to exorcise Putin. So there's been something of a return of this. And back then I suggested that, well, what are this as a result of?

MG:

Well, one of them is anomie, a sense of rootlessness, of being lost and undisconnected. There's nothing in which you can believe.

MG:

Secondly, pattern recognition. That sense that in fact you can see a logic to a world that sees none, even if you have to invent it. It's a very human thing. We tend to create patterns where they may not exist. And if I were a cynic, I'd suggest that a lot of the so-called Kremlinology is often just actually making up explanations for what are often disconnected factoids.

MG:

And also, more broadly, in an age of growing uncertainty about the future, war, inflation, what's going to happen after Putin, that kind of thing, it is comforting to tell yourself that you somehow know some arcane hidden truth. It's to feel that you have just a little bit more control over this uncertain future. So understanding politics based on that handful of data points becomes akin to, I don't know, predicting futures based on the flights of birds or the state of a sacrificial goat's liver.

MG:

That was then. Since then, I would suggest that the world, and one could frankly argue not just for Russians, has become an even more confusing and complex place. Especially when, as Russians are, you face a regime that is not just actively deceitful, but that is also instinctively prone to secrecy. Secrecy creates another vacuum. A vacuum that gets filled by half truths, water cooler gossip, conspiracy theory, misunderstandings and misinformation. Remember, and this is something that Anna Arutunyan has pointed out, skepticism begets gullibility. Russians are used to being lied to, and therefore, and this is something that Putin himself also falls prey to reflexively look for a deeper truth on everything. And so even when, as is usually the case, what you see is what you get, there is that sense that there needs to be something deeper. I mean, I once heard this, I've had the very uh unlikely and one-off opportunity to talk to someone who had actually in the past briefed Vladimir Putin. And what really came out from this conversation was that sense that for Putin there was always some deeper, 'ah, but what do they really want?' kind of meaning. Whereas in fact the world often is relatively straightforward. But no, this is the trouble. Putin will create artificial meanings because he can't accept that what you see is what you get. Anyway, so this is something that actually I think we find generally amongst Russians, especially these days. Every news story has to have been ordered by someone who sort of paid for it. Every suicide is a Kremlin murder. I mean, it's not just Russians who fall prey to that particular one. Every corruption prosecution is actually a bit of score settling. Every business collapse is really because of corporate raiding or some kind of insider conspiracy.

MG:

As I said, this has been a pattern for a while, but it is, I would suggest, increasingly significant. After all, first of all, they are, you know, Russians are living in times of increasing uncertainty, and ironically, the very prospect of an end to the war in Ukraine, with that constant on again, off again, will there be a deal, will there not be a deal, simply has added to that.

MG:

Secondly, there is a growing sense of the unreality of official discourse, of the disconnect between what Putin says about how everything's going to be fine and the lived experience of Russians themselves. Because after all, their lives are one of increasing insecurity. Yes, a lot of this is about the economy. But it's also about, well, will the war shift to a mobilization phase? Will it also lead to increasing repression? This is the irony. It's not that, for example, in recent years I would suggest there's that much more oppression as such. It is more about the drip, drip, drip effect on people's psyches of continued period of low-level sporadic and often unpredictable repression. And the degree to which this creates, I suppose it's a kind of Samosud. Samosud was the peasant self-justice of the village back in Tsarist times. So, you know, a horse thief, you wouldn't bother trying to hand over to the authorities, you would hang them yourself. There were crimes that the village itself policed. Well, in some ways, we have a kind of bizarre self-policing these days, but a political self-policing more often. They may not be told to do so, but school administrators, office managers, or whatever trying to police the political views, even the morality of those under them because they think that that's what they're expected to do, or they fear that's what they're expected to do, and therefore they will do it. So that actually you have you have a state, for example, that is committed to a natalist policy that is encouraging people to have more kids, but is not bringing about the kind of deeply intrusive social controls that, for example, we have seen in China. But on the other hand, people may well think, well, I'm expected to police the wombs of my employees, and that therefore I will try and encourage them to have kids. So, you know, you actually have all these kind of tensions in that it's it's the whole notion of, you know, there was the notion of Stalinism from below, Putinism from below, if Putinism existed.

MG:

Now, look, this is therefore contributing, I'd say, to this increasing sense of a world that makes no sense unless you start to step beyond the normal bounds of rationality. A belief that is both mirrored and then magnified in the media that it's all about plots and arcane conspiracies. Now, that said, do they actually believe in well, Pankratov's black masses and so forth? No, of course not, they are not imbeciles. But believe that, for example, the West is trying to bleed both Russians with Ukrainians, but also Ukrainians by fighting the Russians, because in fact the West fears and hates all Slavs? Oh, well, that's perhaps within the realms of what people might think of, as I say, kind of acceptable conspiracy theory. Or indeed that China is manipulating Russia and the West to bring them both down in order to expedite its own rise. Just generally, that all Russian politics is because of the manipulations and manoeuvres of clans and cabals. Yes, this kind of falls within that category.

MG:

And the great virtue of these kind of conspiracy theories and this kind of occult, arcane understanding of the world, is that it leaves the ordinary person essentially impotent. Now, why is it good to be impotent? It is because it's your excuse not to act. It's your excuse to be able to opt out, to basically, yeah, maybe you have to mouth what the platitudes of the moment and the slogans, but basically speaking, you can opt out of the wider world of politics with a big or a small P, and instead just focus on your your day-to-day life, because there's nothing you could do anyway. Remember, yes, Russians continue to protest and resist against Putinism in all its various manifestations, and I'm using Putinism just simply as a shorthand for the things that the Putin regime does, but also particularly about the war in Ukraine. Most of them are not, because they have convinced themselves, in most cases, I think probably rightly, that actually it's more dangerous than it's worth, and that they basically can't achieve anything. If you feel impotent, it's good to be able to justify it as the fact of because the world is this complex and conspiratorial place.

MG:

However, what I think is also worth noting is that this this pattern that we've seen within Russia, and this is actually something that really concerns me, is also being manifest in a tendency from some quarters in the West to grasp on arcane and even occasionally occult explanations for how Russia operates. Now, arcane explanations are, for example, that you know it's all about the money. It's not about any of the ostensible grounds, it's about wanting to take Donbas for its coal and other raw materials, or Crimean annexation was really about Black Sea hydrocarbons and such like, which I really don't think holds water, but nonetheless, it's it's one way of trying to explain that it's all about something else, really, or it's all about clans struggling for power in Moscow and such like.

MG:

But then you also have this sort of semi-occult psychodramatic explanations of Russia. You know, and when people and they do talk about Putin's Russia being a nihilistic death cult, they don't, apart from the occasional loony, mean this literally, envisaging dark masses in the main military cathedral, or Putin's Sardaukar soldiers receiving a sacrament of victims' blood in Red Square. (Sardokar getting sacrament of blood was a particularly effective scene in the latest Dune film, which is, if the reference passed you by as it might well). But instead, what they do is they claim that Putinism, and they often actually do think that it is an ism, is characterized somehow specially or uniquely by the glorification of death, of sacrifice, of military martyrdom. It's more than just a victory cult, glorifying successes in wars like the Great Patriotic War, but it's outright, well the term sometimes used is thanatopathy. Always mistrust, anything that needs the creation of a whole new word to explain it. An ideological glorification or obsession with death, especially in the context of war, as somehow something noble, purifying, a valuable achievement in itself rather than something to be feared. The sociologist Dina Khapayeva describes this as an elevation of the death drive to a heroic ideal, offering, quote, the joy of death instead of another quote, a meaningless, hopeless, impoverished life. And idea being that this therefore justifies wasteful tactics, which sees human life being traded for a metre of territory here or there, the so-called death economy, whereby people essentially decide to go and fight even with the sense that they may well die because of the money they're being paid, or even the atrocities being carried out by Russian troops on a sense that it has desensitized the population widely to the death of their own.

MG:

I will be honest, I regard this as obscene, wholly inaccurate, and an ideological construct every bit as pernicious and scandalously xenophobic as anything you'd hear from Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova or the aforementioned Vladimir Solovyov. First of all, the idea that, oh well, the state elevates sacrifice in time of war is something particularly distinctive about Russia. Look, this is this is nonsense. I mean, why should we be surprised if the Russian state tries to basically say that this is a a righteous struggle and therefore these are righteous deaths? Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. I mean that was a line from the Roman poet Horace that was then made famous by Wilfred Owen's World War I poem, exposing it as the what he called "the old lie", but one that was nonetheless at the time mobilised by British politicians. Look, of course, in times of major war, when you're trying to get people to hurl themselves into a meat grinder, you are going to tell them that it is for some grand purpose. And there's very little evidence that it's something special here. I mean, Khapaeva, for example, raises as evidence a speech that Putin delivered in front of the mothers of fallen soldiers, in which he essentially told them, this is the quote, your son lived and his goal has been achieved, and that means he did not leave life in vain. But let's be honest, what is he meant to say? Sucks to be you and your kid died for nothing? Of course not.

MG:

Then the idea that Russians live meaningless, hopeless, impoverished lives, such that death is a release, is appallingly elitist and dehumanizing. Who is to say that an unemployed farm worker in Tyva's backwoods, precisely the kind of person most likely to sign up, is living a hopeless, let alone meaningless life? Why does the state have to offer so much money to overcome people's resistance to go and fight if they are all brainwashed suicide drones? It just doesn't add up.

MG:

And more to the point, it is deeply orientalizing. It is assuming that Russians are alien, that they are so different from us, so different from everyone else. They're not. They live in difficult times, but not terrible times. People who describe Russia as some kind of backward hellscape just don't know what they are talking about. It's it's a common conceit. I mean, I remember there was this article in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty back in 2019 that claimed that a quarter of all Russian homes didn't have indoor toilets. And that's a stat, a factoid, a deeply misleading factoid that has been time and time again reused to prove that somehow Russia is still some kind of 19th-century backwater. Well, apart from that, that that was old data. But more to the point, it was, as I say, very misleading. Because homes, that category of homes that the statistic was drawn from includes people's dachas. A lot of people have a second home in the countryside, which is much more likely to have an outhouse rather than plumbed toilets inside the dwelling. But that does not mean that people are forced to live in atrocious conditions. It's just simply that they're second homes. And, you know, there are also some cases in particularly far-flung villages in especially hard-to-reach territory where there isn't the same plumbing. Sure, I'm not going to say that Russia is too entirely West European standards, let's say. But the point is it fit a nice neat vision of what Russian life is like when the idea that there's a real Russia away from glitzy Moscow and St. Petersburg, and that therefore people didn't interrogate it. So, sorry, that was a little um ranty sideline. But the idea is that Russians are just so alien in their life's styles and cycles than ours. Well, look, it's not true.

MG:

Russians are, of course, exposed to often outre propaganda, and some will believe it, and often though, it will be ignored or even mocked. Russian daily life is perfectly livable to most, and certainly no worse than in rural poverty in so many other parts of the world. But it's not moulded by the state any more than every German who went through schooling in the 1930s became a lifelong diehard Nazi. Of course, some Russians do believe, and others, probably many others, will pretend to do so because that seems the safest option. But when it comes down to it, and I know it's a tremendously banal observation, but people are people.

MG:

And above all, I think this notion of Russia, the death cult, and generally these kind of extreme ideological constructs, demonstrate a perverse intellectual alliance between Putin's most devoted adherents and his most incontinent enemies. Both of them choose to believe that what the state decrees society believes. So, of course, the same logic would suggest that the Soviet population were totally committed to Marxism-Leninism, and that the Soviet Union wasn't underpinned by corruption, careerism, absenteeism, despair, suicide, alcoholism, and defection. And so elections in modern Russia aren't rigged massively to create the illusion of widespread popular support. I mean, come on, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim that this is an illegitimate regime that distorts the democratic process, that oppresses its masses, and yet at the same time say that these people are all entirely hook line and sinker taken in by official propaganda.

MG:

Or can you have it both ways? Because again, this is where faith comes in. Faith allows you to reconcile the irreconcilable.

MG:

Now, the reason I'm tearing into the obscurantist, occult, adjacent explanations of modern Russia isn't just because I don't see why we in the West should try and lower ourselves to the frothing lunaces of the Ruslan Pankratovs and their ilk. But also because this kind of pseudo-analysis gets in the way of our understanding the complexities of modern Russia and how it really works. First of all, if we believe that this is actually a faith-based project, then we exclude any scope for negotiation, compromise, and pragmatic engagement. It is a war to the knife or nothing. Secondly, we also misunderstand the system and therefore fail to be able to predict its actions and its reactions. And that's dangerous for us. Look, if you genuinely believe that Putin believes all this nonsense, and that thus isn't afraid to die because he believes in the value of sacrifice and the fact that he will be welcomed into heaven by that sacrifice, then what is there to stop him from unleashing his nuclear weapons? And if you think thermonuclear Armageddon is a serious possibility, and you don't want to die, of course you are going to do whatever you can to talk him down from pressing the button. You give him an extraordinary degree of power. Thirdly, if you assume that all Russians buy this too, or a majority or a plurality or whatever, then basically you're in zombie movie territory. The best you can really hope for is to not die in this scene. How demotivating is that for our attempts to find some kind of not just resolution to the war in Ukraine, but way of at least coexisting with the Putin state in as less dramatic and dangerous way as possible? And finally, it denies us the scope to try and open divides within Russia if we assume that the Russians have all been mobilized into this ideological project. I've banged on about this in the past, and I do think that it's something where the West has done far too little to try and fight a political war with the Kremlin. And we've just really thought that sanctions plus arming Ukraine, plus stern lectures about international law, is enough of a strategy without actually trying to reach out to ordinary Russians, both for the possibility of undermining the war effort now, but also to prepare the ground for post-war and above all post-Putin relationship with a country that isn't going away.

MG:

So, for all of these reasons, I don't really think it is helpful, just as it is certainly not accurate to see Russia as a death cult. Russians, I can actually understand why they fall prey to the arcane and occult understandings of the world. Because it does reflect that sense of insecurity and impotence. I don't think we have the same excuse.

MG:

Now, maybe of course, the people who are pushing the death cult line do so precisely because they don't want to end the war. They don't want any long-term accommodation. They just like seeing Russia isolated and Russians dying even at the cost of Ukrainian lives. But no, surely not. Surely that's just another conspiracy theory, isn't it?

MG:

Well, that's the end of another episode of the In Moscow Shadows Podcast. Just as a reminder, beyond this, you can follow my blog, also called In Moscow Shadows. Follow me on Twitter at MarkGaleotti or Facebook, Mark Galeotti on Russia. This podcast is made possible by generous and enlightened patrons, and you too can be one. Just go along to my Patreon page, that's patreon.com slash in Moscow Shadows, and decide which tier you want to join, getting access to exclusive materials and other perks. However, whether or not you contribute, thank you very much indeed for listening. Until next time, keep well.