Russophobia in the West has (re)grown enormously, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, and commonly demonizes Putin as an evil dictator. The situation is not that simple, but to understand it requires far more understanding of history, and of the Russian lived experience, than the great majority of commentators have.
This article by David Truman includes some material from a longer piece by the esteemed Professor Augusto Zimmermann titled Wokeshevism: Putin’s critique of ‘Western Bolshevism’, published on 19 March 2025.
Religion in Russia
For over seventy years the Soviet communists tried to suppress religion, especially the Orthodox Church. From immediately after their seizure of power in November 1917 [New Style] they launched a vicious and murderous anti-religious campaign, and strove mightily to make atheists out of all Soviet citizens. This was a tremendous onslaught on the culture. Over a thousand years earlier, in 988, Grand Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus (the predecessor of today’s Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) took Christianity from Constantinople and instigated the Baptism of Rus. Over a millennium, for the great mass of the population, being Orthodox was an essential part of what it was to be a Russian.
During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or sent to gulags. In the years 1917–1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested; 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad. During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot. Over subsequent decades, the total number of Christian victims of the Soviet state’s atheist policies was somewhere between twelve and twenty million. In 1928, anti-religious education was made mandatory in the school curriculum from the first grade up.
This 1919 painting by Ivan Vladimirov shows a Landowner and Priest sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal, during the Civil War.
In Moscow over 400 churches and monasteries were dynamited, including in 1931 the famous Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to less than 500 – just one-sixtieth.
This absolutely contemporary painting from 2023 shows how today’s Russians have been revisiting their history: Sofia Shelyapina: Bolsheviks arresting an Orthodox priest. The artist graduated from St Petersburg’s prestigious Repin Academy in 2023.
A stupendous turnaround
On 7 May 2000, Vladimir Putin took the presidential oath of office in the nation’s first democratic transfer of power. In his inaugural address, the new Russian leader boldly declared that he was taking on a “sacred duty” to restore Orthodox values and preserve the nation’s unity. After that, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Alexei II, pronounced a solemn blessing and offered him a personal prayer. This stupendous development formally reversed three quarters of a century of persecution of Christianity.
What of the West, by contrast? The new Western leaders are notoriously woke globalists, demonstrating increasingly Christophobic inclinations. And this precisely so at the very moment that Russia has decidedly embarked on a new phase of proud restoration of its rich Orthodox values and traditions. Arguably, a Western leader could have carried on an intellectual debate with his Soviet Marxist counterpart, but it appears simply impossible for the present Western ‘woke’ leaders to do so with a Russian Orthodox nationalist counterpart.
In 2021 President Putin delivered an address to the Valdai Club, and drew parallels between current disturbing cultural trends in the West and those from the Russian experience. He referred to the destruction of monuments in the United States [something we see in Australia too], where monuments to past heroes have been torn down, just as the monuments to the Tsars were torn down in 1917 and monuments to Lenin after 1991. Déjà vu for the Russians.
At Valdai in 2021 Putin spoke also of guilt among Westerners concerning slavery, leading now to discrimination against white people. This, according to Putin, is similar to the Bolsheviks moving the aristocrats out from their apartments and resettling Bolshevik activists there for the sake of “social justice”. And it is European guilt about their colonial past that makes them open up their borders to millions of unskilled migrants from Africa and the Middle East, to the detriment of native inhabitants and inexorable cultural suicide.
Putin specifically criticised ‘critical race theory’, as a form of neo-Bolshevism. If one replaces the word ‘proletariat’ with ‘race’ then everything else looks pretty much the same.
Putin is sharply critical of the ongoing assault on the traditional family. Under the guise of tolerance, homosexuality and other “alternative” sexual practices are taught to children at schools regardless of the preference of parents. Putin believes that the traditional family is under assault in the post-Christian West, where the words “father” and “mother” have even been discarded and replaced by “parent one” and “parent two”. Christian values have been thrown out and anybody with enough courage to disagree is labelled a racist or a homophobic reactionary.
The Russians have already seen all that destructive Marxist ideologies can generate and are immune to this new form of Western Bolshevism. The overwhelming majority of the Russian population have decisively rejected Cultural Marxism. They do not wish to emulate the West’s moral decadence and abandonment of common sense. They want Russia to follow a separate path from the West.
Putin signed bills banning medical procedures and surgeries used to change one’s biological sexual orientation. The changing of public records and personal identification to declare changes in gender are not legal including same-sex marriage licenses. In September 2022, the court in St. Petersburg uphold a prosecutor’s appeal to declare that social media posts which condone or promote LGBTQ and transgenderism as socially acceptable norms are illegal in Russia.
In some of his public speeches, the Russian leader directly attacks the Western ‘woke’ elites for practising what he vividly describes as a form of “religious Satanism”, where even the lives of little children are sacrificed. He says that the West is promoting a culture of death, provoking gender confusion, and even altering the physical nature of children, thus leading, in Christ’s words, these “little ones to stumble.” In Russia there’ll be no drag queens reading to small children in schools and libraries!
In a State of the Nation address in February 2023, Putin accused the “decadent” West of deliberately waging a culture war against Russian Orthodox culture. “Look at what they do to their own people: the destruction of the notion of family, culture and national identity. Perversion, child abuse, and even paedophilia are declared the norm … I would like to say to you: Look at the Holy Scripture, the sacred books of all the other religions of the world. It’s all said there – including the fact that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. But even these sacred texts are now being revised. It has become known that the Church of England plans to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God. What can I say? May God forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”
If in the early years of Putin’s presidency merging with the West was a goal, now a conservative Orthodox movement has begun to define Russia’s separate path. The Russians want to be a civilization in its own right. Putin believe that his country’s greatest strength lies in its traditional Orthodox values and national social cohesion, and that isolation from the irremediably decadent West allows the Russians to preserve their own Byzantine inheritance and Slavonic culture, untouched by the socially destructive trends destroying Western Europe and North America.
Putin is now calling for a “healthy conservatism” based on respect for traditional family values and Christian Orthodox morality. Russia is not abandoning its rich cultural heritage. It is the West that has completely abandoned its own cultural heritage in favour of multiculturalism and other socially detrimental ideologies that effectively mimic Bolshevism.
From 1994, a million Muscovites donated to the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and the completed Cathedral was consecrated on Transfiguration Day, 19 August 2000. Since Putin first took office, over 35,000 churches have been built. Moscow has more than 1,000 churches and, each year, another 10-20 are being built in the city.
So what are we to make of Putin, widely referred to in the Western media as an “evil dictator”?
Putin is hardly destroying Russia. But what about the (now thankfully gone) previous Democrat administration in the USA? And Keir Starmer in Britain – introducing laws to combat the unicorn of “Islamophobia” while imprisoning Tommy Robinson? And the appalling, arrogant Ursula von der Leyen of the EU – trying to force member states to take unassimilable Muslim and African migrants they see, rightly, as a threat to their cultural identity and survival?
The West needs a reality check, and a swathe of changes in leadership, but also, a reexamination of its own values and serious consideration of what sort of future it wants to have. The answer, really, is not just in politics but in a widespread return to our Christian roots, uncorrupted by fashions from the prevailing, deeply anti-Christian culture.
