From Holy Rus to the Russian World

The ideology now called the “Russian World” did not appear suddenly. It cannot be explained only by contemporary geopolitics, only by Orthodox theology, or only by the personal role of particular church and state figures. It was formed from different historical layers: the baptismal memory of Rus, Byzantine ideas of Christian empire, the Muscovite sacralization of power, imperial confessional policy, Slavophile historiosophy, the Soviet experience of church survival and the post-Soviet search for a new historical wholeness.

This is why the question of the “Russian World” cannot be reduced to a simple one: who invented it? A more precise question sounds different: which older religious and historical symbols were gradually translated into the language of civilization, culture, canonical territory, diaspora, geopolitical mission and, finally, “holy war”?

The main thesis of this study is the following: the modern “Russian World” is neither a dogma nor a canonical principle in the strict ecclesial sense. It is a multilayered political-theological construction. In the official self-description of the Moscow Patriarchate and institutions connected with it, it is often presented as a spiritual-cultural and civilizational community. In critical theological literature, it is described as a form of ethnophyletism, nationalized Orthodoxy and the sacralization of imperial politics.

Both frameworks are important for understanding the dispute. If we see the “Russian World” only as a propaganda slogan, we miss its deep historical roots. If we see it as a direct continuation of ancient Orthodox tradition, we lose sight of later ideological reworkings. The reality is more complex: the modern concept arose where ecclesial language, cultural memory, imperial imagination, post-Soviet identity and geopolitical mobilization began to function as a single system.

This article does not claim that there is a direct and uninterrupted line between the Baptism of Rus and the modern “Russian World.” On the contrary, the main methodological risk lies precisely in retrospectively projecting a later ideology onto periods that did not themselves know it.

It is therefore important here to distinguish several levels:

1. premodern religious ideas about the holiness of Rus and its place in the Christian oikumene;
2. early modern and imperial forms of sacralizing power, the state and historical mission;
3. the post-Soviet institutionalization of the “Russian World” as a cultural-linguistic and civilizational project;
4. the transformation of this project after 2014, and especially after 2022–2024, into a harsher political theology of war.

This distinction allows us to hold two things together at once: the modern “Russian World” really does have deep historical preconditions, but it is not an ancient Orthodox teaching. It is a late construction assembled from real but ambiguously reinterpreted inheritances.

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The deepest historical layer of the future “Russian World” is not the term itself. It did not yet exist. The matter is different: a sacred geography that began to take shape after the Baptism of Rus.

In Old Rus literature, a link was gradually established between Vladimir’s baptism in Kyiv, the land of Rus and the Orthodox faith. Lives of saints, sermons, prayers and chronicle memory created an image of a people and a land that had entered Christian history. But it is important to stress: the special spiritual status of Rus was understood not as self-sufficient superiority, but as participation in the Byzantine-Christian world.

The first tension appears precisely here. On the one hand, baptismal memory truly became the foundation of a later religious-historical identity. On the other hand, Kyivan Rus was not a ready-made prototype of later Muscovite statehood or of modern civilizational ideology. Historically, it is more accurate to see it within a broad European and Byzantine framework.

The importance of Byzantium here can hardly be overestimated. From it, the lands of Rus received liturgy, canonical tradition, the idea of a Christian kingdom and the model of a normative conjunction between ecclesial and state power, which would later be described as symphonia. But here too caution is necessary. Byzantine symphonia had its own complex history, and in later Orthodox cultures it was often remembered already as an idealized model.

Therefore a direct path from Byzantine symphonia to the modern “Russian World” would be too simple an explanation. In the early sources, the primary issue is the Christianization of society, the holiness of the people of God and the entry of Rus into the Orthodox universe. There is not yet an idea of a self-sufficient supranational civilization with a special mission toward the whole world.

The expression “Holy Rus” should also be discussed with the same caution. It has a complex history. Related formulas are traceable in the early tradition neither directly nor continuously. The earliest reliable attestations of the expression “Holy Russia” belong to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and between that time and the nineteenth century it often remained primarily within the Old Believer milieu and did not become an official state ideology.

In other words, “Holy Rus” was above all a religious-cultural image, a sacred topology, a way of speaking about land, faith and memory. It was an important precondition for later ideologies, but not their ready-made content.

The fall of Constantinople changed the imagined map of the Orthodox world. After the disappearance of the Byzantine imperial center, it became possible to think about a new center of Christian legitimacy. It is in this context that the famous formula of Moscow as the Third Rome appears, associated above all with the letters of Philotheus of Pskov.

Yet modern historiography increasingly warns against reading this idea too straightforwardly. The familiar image of the Third Rome as an early, already coherent and expansionist state ideology is greatly exaggerated. Evidence of the active use of this theme in properly Muscovite sources is rare, especially before the end of the sixteenth century.

This clarification is fundamental. In later Russian and especially post-Soviet memory, the Third Rome often functions as a ready-made ancestor of modern imperial claims. But if we follow the historical evidence, continuity here is nonlinear. We see not one direct road, but several waves of actualization: early modern ecclesial-political rhetoric, imperial and national-religious thought of the nineteenth century, and then historiosophical and civilizational reconstructions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Between Philotheus and today’s “Russian World” there is not an unbroken bridge, but a long series of reinterpretations.

At the same time, Moscow did develop its own forms of sacralizing space and power. Images of the New Israel, the New Jerusalem, the special vocation of the tsar and Muscovite holy places gradually linked the people, the land, ecclesial truth and state mission. The modern “Russian World” draws not from a single formula of the Third Rome, but from a broader habit of thinking religious truth, historical space and political power as parts of one order.

The Third Rome should therefore be treated in the genealogy of the “Russian World” not as a ready-made origin, but as one of the key nodes of memory. It posed the question: can Moscow think of itself as the heir to a fallen Christian imperial center? The answer to that question changed from century to century. In the twenty-first century, what will be especially drawn from this tradition is not so much the literal text of Philotheus as the very logic of historical transfer: if the former center has fallen, a new center can present itself as the guardian of truth, a political stronghold and a civilizational “restrainer.”

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In the Synodal and imperial periods, what became decisive was no longer only the sacred Muscovite inheritance, but also the practical conjunction of Orthodoxy with imperial construction.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Orthodox Church existed within a complex imperial system: state-building, territorial expansion, multiethnicity, secularization and religious pluralism constantly interacted with one another. Orthodoxy was supposed to be the “dominant confession” and at the same time the integrative principle of the empire. But it was precisely in this role that its internal limits became visible.

On the peripheries of the empire, church policy could be perceived as an instrument of Russification and confessional assimilation. Instead of simple integration, it often produced opposite effects: ethnicization, resistance, religious alienation. This is important for understanding the future “Russian World,” because here the idea is formed that Orthodoxy, Russian culture and state unity constitute a natural complex.

But this line too cannot be transferred mechanically into the present. The imperial formula was primarily state-confessional. The modern “Russian World” would later reformat it differently: not as an empire in the legal-political sense, but as a supranational civilization. This gave the concept greater flexibility. An empire has borders and institutions; a civilization can be imagined more broadly, more softly and at the same time more dangerously — as a space of language, memory, faith, values and historical destiny.

Slavophilism and Pan-Slavism added another element to this process: the idea of Russia’s special historical path and moral-religious vocation. Here too, however, it is important not to identify them with the “Russian World.” Pan-Slavism as a movement did not arise among the East Slavs but in Central Europe, and only later acquired Russian and imperial variants. The modern “Russian World” is not a simple continuation of Pan-Slavism. Rather, it borrows from it the motif of cultural-historical unity and anti-Western mobilization, but places them no longer in a purely Slavic framework, but in a civilizational-Orthodox one.

To this layer was added Russian religious philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vladimir Solovyov and other thinkers of the religious renaissance tried to rethink the relationship between Christianity, nation and universality. Here a duality emerged that would later become important for the “Russian World” as well: on the one hand, the affirmation of a special historical path; on the other, the claim to speak not only on behalf of one’s own nation, but also on behalf of a broader moral order.

Thus a vocabulary took shape without which the later construction would have been impossible: sacred land, a special people, historical mission, Orthodox culture, imperial unity, sobornost, universal vocation. But by the end of the imperial period this was still not the “Russian World” as a modern doctrine. It was a set of images and meanings that would only later be assembled into a more coherent ideological form.

At first glance, the Soviet period should have broken religious continuity. But it was precisely the Soviet experience that made the later ideology especially tense.

In the twentieth century, the Russian Church passed through repression, forced cooperation, dissidence, emigration and limited survival within a system that for a long time was hostile to religion. The destruction of church infrastructure, control over church life and then the partial return of the Church to the public sphere created a traumatic memory. Within this memory, the question of the Church became connected with the question of the state, historical catastrophe and national salvation.

But the Soviet period did not only destroy. It also developed certain international skills within the Moscow Patriarchate: church diplomacy, experience of external contacts and the habit of speaking beyond its own territory. Even under state control, the Church learned to exist in an international field. After the collapse of the USSR, this experience became important when it was necessary to reassemble ties with the diaspora, the abroad and what was increasingly called “historical Russia.”

After 1991, what began was not simply a religious renaissance. It was a struggle for a new formula of historical wholeness. The post-Soviet Russian Church entered this era with a memory of repression, collaboration, distance and emigration. Its identity could not be simple. At the same time, it quickly occupied a visible place in public life, and from the 2000s onward it interacted ever more closely with the state in projects of historical memory, patriotic education and external symbolic influence.

It was on this soil that a new assembly of old symbols became possible. “Holy Rus” could no longer function only as a religious formula of spiritual memory. After the collapse of the USSR, a language was needed that could speak at once about culture, the Russian language, history, diaspora, the post-Soviet space and canonical wholeness. Thus begins the transition from premodern and prerevolutionary symbols to a new intellectual construct — the “Russian World.”

If we look for one of the early programmatic formulations of the modern concept, an important point is Petr Shchedrovitsky’s text “The Russian World and the Transnational Russian,” published in 2000. In it, the “Russian world” is already imagined not simply as a state, but as a networked, transnational structure of large and small communities. This is not yet an ecclesial or fully state doctrine. Rather, it offered a language that different actors would later begin to use.

State institutionalization came in 2007, when the Russkiy Mir Foundation was created by presidential decree. At this stage, the concept was formulated primarily in cultural-linguistic and humanitarian categories: support for the Russian language, strengthening its position in the world, and work with Russia’s humanitarian influence. The “Russian World” then functioned above all as soft power — a network of language, culture, memory and compatriots, not as a theological formula or a military manifesto.

The participation of the Church, and within the Church above all of Patriarch Kirill, became a turning point. At the Third Assembly of the Russkiy Mir Foundation in 2009, he connected the future of Russian culture and the “Russian World” with the challenge of globalization. The Assembly materials already record important theses: the Russian Orthodox Church is named as the spiritual foundation of the “Russian World”; the word “Russian” in the Church’s name is interpreted not as ethnic but as cultural; the Russian Church Abroad is presented as part of the gathering of the fragmented world of Russian tradition.

The main point is visible here: Kirill did not invent the concept from nothing. But it was he who translated it from the sphere of a cultural project into an ecclesial-civilizational language.

At the Fourth Assembly of the “Russian World” in 2010, this language became still more definite. Kirill spoke not simply about socialization, but about the integrative cooperation of equal sovereign states that had arranged their life in the space of Holy Rus. This is an important formula. It shows that in his vocabulary the “Russian World” was from the outset identical neither with the Russian Federation nor with a purely ecclesial community. It is imagined as a post-imperial, supranational, yet historically connected space.

By 2014, this language had become still firmer. In an official report of the Patriarchate, Kirill directly called the “Russian World” a special civilization that goes back to the Kyivan baptismal font, and stressed that it is not the world of the Russian Federation and not the world of the Russian Empire, but a broader community. According to this logic, it includes Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and even non-Slavs who have assimilated its spiritual-cultural content.

Later, at the Twenty-Fifth World Russian People’s Council, Kirill again emphasized that for him the “Russian World” is not an ethnic concept and can include peoples of other religions who share common values of social life. This is an important self-description. It shows that Kirill acts not as the “creator” of the term in the strict sense, but as its main systematizer, civilizational interpreter and institutional promoter.

At the same time, in the official corpus of the main documents of the Moscow Patriarchate, the “Russian World” does not appear as a basic dogmatic category. The Statute, the Basis of the Social Concept, documents on dignity, freedom and human rights speak about the Church, nation, state and society, but do not raise the “Russian World” to the rank of dogma. Moreover, the social concept itself emphasizes the supranational character of the Church. This means that the “Russian World” is not derived directly from dogma. It is built on another level — the level of social doctrine, cultural memory and political theology.

By the beginning of the 2010s, the “Russian World” was already performing several functions at once. It helped speak about Russia’s identity in the post-Soviet space, about the soft power of the Russian language and culture, about the ecclesial historical community of the East Slavs, and about canonical and historical wholeness beyond the present borders of the Russian Federation.

Therefore, after 2014 it is impossible to speak of the sudden birth of a new ideology. Rather, what happened was the political exposure of an already formed mixture of religious, historical and civilizational language.

The year 2014 became a turning point because the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas moved the “Russian World” out of the ambiguous sphere of a humanitarian project and into the space of open political conflict. The concept came to be read not only as a cultural network or a memory of compatriots, but as a composition of religious, nationalist and imperial narratives. This was not the beginning of the genealogy, but the beginning of its radical political actualization.

After 2022, another mutation occurred. The international theological “Declaration on the ‘Russian World’” described this teaching as a doctrine of a transnational Russian sphere or civilization, called Holy Rus and including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the diaspora. The Declaration condemned it as a form of ethnophyletist and nationalist distortion of Orthodoxy. In the scholarly and theological literature that followed, a dispute unfolded over the theological status of the concept: for some it is a false teaching; for others, an example of abuse of an otherwise generally legitimate civilizational language.

But regardless of how one evaluates the declaration itself, it accurately identified the central problem: the modern “Russian World” claims not only to describe a cultural community. It begins to sacralize a historical-political order.

The culmination of this process was the Decree of the Twenty-Fifth World Russian People’s Council, approved on 27 March 2024 under the chairmanship of Patriarch Kirill. In the official publications of the WRPC, Russia is named the creator, support and defender of the Russian World, whose borders are broader than the state borders of the Russian Federation. There too, the highest meaning of the existence of Russia and the Russian World it created is described through the image of the universal “Restrainer,” defending the world from evil.

It is here that the language of civilization finally merges with the language of eschatology and war. Recent studies interpret the Decree as an attempt to raise the war to a higher sacred, cosmic and apocalyptic level; other authors note that the document characterized the war against Ukraine as a “holy war.”

In this light, Kirill’s role is especially clear. He was not the sole author of all the meanings that entered the “Russian World.” The term and some post-Soviet usages preceded him. But it was he who consistently transformed heterogeneous material into an ecclesial-public language of a large community, then into the language of civilization and, in the most recent phase, into the language of a sacralized historical mission.

Therefore the most precise definition of his role is not “creator,” but systematizer, institutional promoter, theological interpreter and, later, sacralizing legitimizer.

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From a theological point of view, the decisive issue remains the distinction of levels. If we look at dogma and canon, the “Russian World” does not have the status of a universally binding church teaching. The main documents of the Russian Orthodox Church speak about the Church, nation, state, human dignity, war and peace, but they do not raise the “Russian World” to the rank of dogmatic truths.

Moreover, the official social concept emphasizes the supranational character of the Church and recalls that in Christ there is no division according to ethnicity. Therefore, when the “Russian World” is presented as an almost self-evident continuation of Orthodox doctrine, what we are dealing with is not a doctrinal necessity but a later political-ecclesiological interpretation.

But this does not mean that the concept has no religious content. Its strength lies precisely in the fact that it rests not on emptiness, but on genuine layers of tradition: the memory of the Kyivan baptism, the image of Holy Rus, the experience of the diaspora, the idea of sobornost, the Byzantine inheritance and the real historical connection between the Church and the culture of the East Slavs.

The problem begins where these elements are rearranged. Ecclesiological community begins to merge with historical civilization, civilization with a political body, and the political body with the strategic destiny of the state. At that moment, theological language ceases to be only a language of witness and becomes a language legitimating force.

It is here that what critics of the concept call its main deformation is located.

The answer to the main research question must be composite. The modern “Russian World” is neither primarily theological nor primarily purely geopolitical. It is a synthesis of the cultural, historical, ecclesial, civilizational, post-imperial and political.

But in the course of its development its center of gravity changed. In the early stages, memory, sacred topology and ecclesial-cultural community predominated. In the imperial era, confessional-state integration did. In the early post-Soviet period, the cultural-linguistic and diasporic framework did. With Kirill, there was civilizational-ecclesiological systematization. After 2014, defensive geopolitical mobilization. After 2022–2024, an apocalypticized political theology.

This is why it is historically inaccurate to speak of the “Russian World” as a simple ancient Orthodox tradition. But it is equally inaccurate to consider it a completely artificial new invention without deep roots. It is more precise to see it as the result of a long ideological reworking of real historical and religious inheritances.

Ultimately, the modern formula of the “Russian World” became possible because in Russian history there repeatedly arose a need to think the Church, the people, the state and space in categories of a single destiny. But each new era filled this form with its own content.

From this follows the main criterion of distinction. Where the issue is baptismal memory, holiness as a liturgical and spiritual quality, the universal nature of the Church and pastoral care for the diaspora, we are dealing with genuine Christian and historical foundations. Where these foundations are turned into proof of a natural right to political domination, territorial guardianship or “holy war,” what begins is no longer simply tradition, but ideological reconstruction.

The path from Holy Rus to the Russian World is a history not only of continuity, but also of deep transformation. A religious symbol once connected with the memory of baptism, holiness and ecclesial belonging gradually became a language of civilizational sovereignty, political mobilization and the sacralization of power.

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