“Holy Rus”: The Geopolitical Imagination in the Contemporary Russian Orthodox Church

Abstract

The author analyzes the geographical and geopolitical ideas inherent in the concept of “Holy Rus” as used by Patriarch Kirill and other hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.

This article is the republished version of:

"Holy Rus": The Geopolitical Imagination in the Contemporary Russian Orthodox Church

Notes

^1. “I have tried not to preach where the name of Christ is (already) known, in order not to build on someone else's foundation” (Romans 15:20).

^2. Compare the popular rhetoric concerning “spiritual security” in Anderson (2007, pp. 194–95), Payne (2010), and Viktorov (2009).

^3. The concept of “internal colonization” is developed in application to Russia in the works of A. Etkind (see, e.g., Etkind 2002, 2011).