,
Belarus, southern and eastern parts of
Ukraine, northern and eastern
Kazakhstan, and the
Georgian breakaway states of
Abkhazia and
South Ossetia. The "Russian world" is a vaguely defined term, mostly used to refer to communities with a historical, cultural, or spiritual tie to Russia. Its proponents believe Russia is a "
unique civilization" and a bastion of "
traditional values" and
national conservatism. In the 1990s, Russian
neo-fascist philosopher
Aleksandr Dugin began writing about Russia as a unique
Eurasian civilization. among the most important of which was the
Russian language. Observers describe the concept as a tool of Russian
soft power. The
Financial Times described the "Russian world" as "Putin’s creation that fuses respect for Russia's Tsarist, Orthodox past with reverence for the Soviet defeat of fascism in the Second World War. This is epitomised in the
Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, 40 miles west of Moscow, opened in 2020".
The Economist says that the "Russian world" concept has become the basis of a crusade against the
West's "
liberal" culture and has fed a "new Russian cult of war". It says that
Putin's regime has debased the "Russian world" concept with a mixture of obscurantism, Orthodox dogma, anti-Western sentiment, nationalism,
conspiracy theory and security-state
Stalinism.
Russian government Eventually, the idea of the "Russian world" was adopted by the Russian government under Vladimir Putin. In 2001, he said "The notion of the Russian World extends far from Russia's geographical borders and even far from the borders of the Russian ethnicity". For the Russian Orthodox Church, the
Russian world is "a spiritual concept, a reminder that through the
baptism of Rus, God consecrated these people to the task of building a
Holy Rus". Patriarch Kirill's 2009 tour of Ukraine was described by Oleh Medvedev, adviser to Ukraine's prime minister, as "a visit of an imperialist who preached the neo-imperialist Russian World doctrine".
Orthodox condemnations In the wake of the February 2022
Russian invasion of Ukraine, 1,600 theologians and clerics of the
Eastern Orthodox Church issued the ''Declaration on the 'Russian World' Teaching'', commonly known as the
Volos Declaration. It condemned the "Russian world" ideology as being heretical and a deviation from the
Orthodox faith. This declaration called the "Russian world" a
heresy that is "
totalitarian in character". They condemned six "pseudo theological facets" of the "Russian world" concept: replacing the
Kingdom of God with an earthly kingdom; deification of the state through a
theocracy and
caesaropapism which deprives the Church of its freedom to stand against injustice; divinization of a culture;
Manichaean demonization of the
West; refusal to speak the truth and non-acknowledgement of "murderous intent and culpability". Following this, among the
Orthodox Patriarchates from the
Pentarchy, two have condemned the ideology as contrary to the teachings of
Christ, linking it to
phyletism, an ideology condemned as an heresy by a
General Synod in
Constantinople in 1872. The first to do so was the
Church of Alexandria and all-Africa and their Patriarch,
Theodore II. They were followed by the
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the first
Orthodox Church in rank and honor. In their epistolary exchange of early 2023, the
Ecumenical Patriarch,
Bartholomew I and the
Archbishop of Cyprus,
George III, discussed the issue extensively. == Russia's war against Ukraine ==