The Russian government is announcing a program for refugees fleeing neo-liberalism, and it is anchored in what the Russians see as years of religious warfare against Christians.
The program will reportedly allow applicants an expedited process for residency in Russia if they reject their home countries’ “destructive neoliberal ideals.”
In a literal sense, neoliberalism means “a type of liberalism which favors a global free market without government regulation, with reduction in government spending and businesses and industry controlled and run for profit by private owners.”
However, that is not how neoliberalism is understood in its everyday usage. Russian President Vladimir Putin defined the idea in 2019 through his criticisms of Germany to the Financial Times.
“This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder, and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected. Every crime must have its punishment,” Putin said.
Putin added, after stating that Russia has “no problem” with people who are LGBTQ, “Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions, and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”
He also noted, “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
Several years before the FT interview, Russia’s government enacted laws that criminalized informing children about homosexuality. Just before the laws passed, Lady Gaga famously protested the legislation at one of her concerts, saying, “I believe that men and women deserve to love each other equally. Cuff me, Russia! Arrest me! I don’t give a f**k!”
Madonna made similar comments while also in Russia.
“Gay people here and all around the world have the same rights,” Madonna said.
Subsequently, the Russian government denounced Lady Gaga and Madonna for violating their visas, an act widely reported to be a shot across Western popstars’ bows for violating Russia’s laws.
Around this same time, Putin leaned into religion to explain his views.
Putin said, “We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual.“
By 2022, Putin’s views had hardened. He was talking in even more stark terms and framing the West in a more satanic way. Not only was the West embracing satanic beliefs in his view, but he also called the entire region “satanic” and condemned it for rejecting “moral norms” and “traditional” values.
This overt dig at the West fits into a greater appeal Russia’s government has to make to global audiences.
In a reversal of the Cold War era axiom of “Godless communism” facing down against a “pious West,” Russian messaging now portrays Russia as the home for all religious people against Godless, immoral neoliberalism.
One Russian military ad that has recently entered circulation in American social media channels shows Christians and Muslims working together, presumably against an unidentified Godless enemy. The ad opens with an Orthodox Christian praying in a trench before an icon of St. George.
The staging of the advertisement bears an eery resemblance to the numerous videos circulated online that showed Russian soldiers making the sign of the cross in trenches before being hit by Ukrainian drones.
Although there have been similar videos of Ukrainian soldiers, these videos of Russian soldiers are more frequently seen online. The attention the videos receive is often compounded by the negative reactions some viewers have to the callous comments posters will make about the slain Russians.
The advertisement then shows a Muslim making a similar prayer in a tank while a Russian flag waves behind him.
The minute-and-a-half-long video then appeals to a variety of religions and ethnicities, including Jews. It closes with the words, “We are Russians. God is with us.”
Religion is often an understated element when the legacy American press covers Russia’s view of the rest of the world. While Christianity declined in the West, it is thriving in the East. Nearly every data set and report indicates Russia is re-Christianizing, and the former Soviet state constructed the famous Cathedral of the Armed Forces in 2020.
Putin, who was baptized in secret because of his father’s communist party affiliations, still attends Orthodox religious services, and the Russian church has stood by him through a lot.
In 2019, Ukraine’s increasingly pro-Western tilt was co-occurring with a fissure within the Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian wing of the Orthodox Church broke off from the Russian Orthodox Church. Historically, like Ukraine’s longtime placement within Russia, the Ukrainian church was once an exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In a surprise to passive Western watchers, the head of the Orthodox Church, Bartholomew I of Constantinople, supported the move. Likewise, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko reportedly called it “a great victory for the devout Ukrainian nation over the Moscow demons, a victory of good over evil, light over darkness.”
Against this depiction of Russians as “demons,” the Russian Orthodox Church retaliated and broke off from the greater communion of Orthodox churches.
Just a year later, in 2020, the Hagia Sophia in Turkey, a former cathedral with a level of importance to Orthodox Christians that is similar to The Vatican for Catholics, fell back into Muslim hands and became a Mosque again after a period as a Museum. The chaos and anger this sowed in the Eastern Orthodox world has only been compounded by the strain other orthodox denominations, like those in the Baltic region, have felt about where their sympathies should lie as the Russia-Ukraine conflict spills into its 10th year of warfare since the Crimea invasion.
Western media outlets rarely give this context to reports about Russia’s new refugee program or the war in Ukraine. However, these endeavors are part of a response to a larger political, cultural, and religious sensibility in Moscow that frames Russia as the lone Christian nation fending off both the Godless neoliberal West, their confused Orthodox allies in Ukraine, whom the Russians view as having fallen into a Western trap, and those who seek to break up the essential elements of traditional Christianity.