Starting in September 2025, Russian heart and highschool scholars will likely be passed a brand new textbook titled “My Family.”
Revealed in March 2025, the textbook’s co-author Nina Ostanina, chair of the State Duma Committee for the Coverage of the Circle of relatives, claims that it is going to educate scholars “traditional moral values” that may strengthen “the demographic situation in the country” as a part of a “Family Studies” path that was once rolled out within the 2024-2025 college yr.
However a few of the ones courses for contemporary dwelling come from a less-than-modern supply. A few of the fabrics borrowed from in “My Family” is the sixteenth century “Domostroi” – a selection of regulations for keeping up patriarchal home order. It was once written, supposedly, via Sylvester, a monk-tutor of czar Ivan the Horrible.
Unsurprisingly, some teachings from “Domostroi” appear out-of-keeping with nowadays’s sensibilities. For instance, it states that it’s the appropriate of a father to coerce, if wanted via pressure, his family – on the time, this may consult with each relations and slaves – in response to Orthodox dogmas.
“Husbands should teach their wives with love and exemplary instruction,” reads one of the most Domostroi quotations repeated within the textbook.
“Wives ask their husbands about strict order, how to save their souls, please God and their husbands, arrange their home well, and submit to their husbands in all matters; and what the husband orders, they should agree with love and carry out according to his commands,” reads any other extract
Czar Ivan the Horrible and the priest Sylvester.
Wikimedia Commons
The usage of “Domostroi” within the textbook each references the previous whilst evoking the present govt’s politics of decriminalizing circle of relatives violence. A 2017 legislation, for instance, got rid of nonaggravated “battery of close persons” from the record of prison offenses.
It additionally suits a much wider trend. As a pupil of historic reminiscence, I’ve noticed that references to the Russian Heart Ages are a part of the Kremlin’s broader politics of the usage of the medieval previous to justify present agendas, one thing I’ve termed “political neomedievalism.”
Certainly, President Vladimir Putin’s govt is actively prioritizing projects that use medieval Russia as a fashion for the rustic’s long run. In doing so, the Kremlin unites a long-nurtured dream of the Russian a long way appropriate with a broader quest for the success of Russian imperial ambitions.
Whitewashing Ivan the Horrible
In February 2025, only a month ahead of “My Family” was once printed, the federal government of Russia’s Vologda area – house to over 1 million other people – established nongovernmental group known as “The Oprichnina.”
The group is tasked with “fostering Russian identity” and “developing the moral education of youth.”
However the team’s identify conjures up the primary reign of brutal state terror in Russian historical past. The Oprichnina was once a state coverage unleashed via Ivan the Horrible from 1565 to 1572 to ascertain his unrestrained energy over the rustic. The oprichniks have been Ivan’s non-public guard, who hooked up a canine’s head and a brush to their saddles to turn that they have been the czar’s “dogs” who swept treason away.
Chroniclers and overseas vacationers left accounts of the sadistic tortures and mass executions that have been performed with Ivan’s participation. The oprichniks raped and dismembered ladies, flayed or boiled males alive and burned kids. On this frenzy of violence, they slaughtered many hundreds of blameless other people.
Ivan’s reign resulted in a duration referred to as the “Time of Troubles,” marked via famine and armed forces defeat. Some students estimate that via its finish, Russia misplaced just about two-thirds of its inhabitants.
Ivan IV, czar of Russia from 1547 to 1584, referred to as Ivan the Horrible.
Rischgitz/Getty Photographs
Right through Russian historical past, Ivan the Horrible – who amongst his different crimes murdered his eldest son and had the pinnacle of Russian Orthodox Church strangled for dissent – was once remembered as a repulsive tyrant.
Alternatively, because the mid-2000s, when the Russian govt beneath Putin took an more and more authoritarian flip, Ivan and his terror have gone through a state-driven strategy of reevalution.
The Kremlin and its far-right proxies now paint Ivan as an excellent statesman and religious Russian Orthodox Christian who laid the principles of the Russian Empire.
Previous to that alteration of Russian historic reminiscence, just one different Russian head of state had held Ivan in such top esteem: Josef Stalin.
Even so, no public monuments to Ivan existed till 2016, when Putin’s officers unveiled the primary of 3 bronze statues devoted to the horrible czar. But, the cinematic propaganda outmatched the commemorations of Ivan in stone. By means of my rely, from 2009 to 2022, 12 state-sponsored movies and TV sequence paying tribute to Ivan the Horrible and his rule aired in high time on Russian TV channels.
Russian revisionism
The post-Soviet rehabilitation of Ivan the Horrible is going again to the writings of Ivan Snychov, the metropolitan, or top rating bishop, of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga. His e book, “The Autocracy of the Spirit,” printed in 1994, gave upward thrust to a fundamentalist sect referred to as “Tsarebozhie,” or neo-Oprichnina. Tsarebozhie requires a go back to an autocratic monarchy, a society of orders and the canonization of all Russian czars. The realization that Russian state energy is “sacred” – a central dogma of the sect – was once reaffirmed on April 18, 2025, via Alexander Kharichev, an reputable in Putin’s Presidential Management, in a piece of writing that has been likened to an instruction handbook for the “builder of Putinism.”
The canonization of Ivan the Horrible in particular is a most sensible precedence for individuals of this sect. And whilst the Russian Orthodox Church has but to canonize Ivan, Tsarebozhie have garnered important improve from Russian clergymen, politicians and laypersons alike. Their efforts take a seat along Putin’s yearslong push to provide public improve for Ivan. No longer unintentionally, Putin’s minister of overseas affairs, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly named Ivan the Horrible amongst one in every of Putin’s 3 “most trusted advisers.”
In Snychov’s worldview, Russians are a messianic other people, a part of an imperial country this is uniquely liable for fighting Devil’s domination of the sector. In his explicitly antisemitic pseudo-history of Russia, the Oprichnina is described as a “saintly monastic order” led via a “pious tsar.”
An outline of Russian atrocities in Livonia in 1577, whilst Ivan was once czar. From Johann Jakob Wick’s Sammlung von Nachrichten.
Positive Artwork Photographs/Heritage Photographs/Getty Photographs
For the reason that Nineteen Thirties, when Stalin used Ivan to justify his personal repressions, Ivan and Stalin – the Oprichnina and Stalinism – turned into historic doubles. The whitewashing of Ivan via the Kremlin is going hand in hand with Putin’s rehabilitation of Stalin as commander in leader of the Soviet Union’s victory in International Battle II.
Selling the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” – because the 2nd International Battle has formally been known as because the Soviet duration – has been central to Putin’s militarization of Russian society and a part of the propaganda effort to foster improve for the invasion of Ukraine. The regret for the lack of empire and want to revive it underlies Moscow’s discourse during the last twenty years.
Medieval danger to democracy
The rhetoric of absolving Stalinism is going hand in hand with popularizing the state’s model of the Russian Heart Ages via public media channels.
Putin’s neomedieval politics have followed the Russian far-right trust that the rustic must go back to the traditions of medieval Rus, because it existed ahead of the Westernization reforms undertaken via Peter the Nice within the early 18th century.
Over the last 15 years, Russian TV audience have gained a mean of 2 state-funded films monthly, promoting some great benefits of Russian medieval society and praising Russian medieval warlords.
This use of Russian historic reminiscence has allowed Putin to normalize his use of state violence in another country and at house and mobilize improve for his suppression of the opposition. The main function of political neomedievalism is to legitimize large social and financial inequalities in post-Soviet society as part of Russia’s nationwide heritage.
To serve the aim of undermining the rule of thumb of legislation and democratic freedoms, as my analysis demonstrates, the Kremlin and its proxies have promoted the Russian Heart Ages – with its theocratic monarchy, society of estates, slavery, serfdom and repression – as a state-sponsored selection to democracy.
