Starting in September 2025, Russian center and highschool college students can be handed 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 Safety of the Household, claims that it’s going to educate college students “traditional moral values” that can enhance “the demographic situation in the country” as a part of a “Family Studies” course that was rolled out within the 2024-2025 faculty yr.
However a few of these classes for contemporary residing come from a less-than-modern supply. Among the many supplies borrowed from in “My Family” is the sixteenth century “Domostroi” – a group of guidelines for sustaining patriarchal home order. It was written, supposedly, by Sylvester, a monk-tutor of czar Ivan the Horrible.
Unsurprisingly, some teachings from “Domostroi” appear out-of-keeping with as we speak’s sensibilities. For instance, it states that it’s the proper of a father to coerce, if wanted by pressure, his family – on the time, this might consult with each family and slaves – in accordance with Orthodox dogmas.
“Husbands should teach their wives with love and exemplary instruction,” reads one of many 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 one other extract
Czar Ivan the Horrible and the priest Sylvester.
Wikimedia Commons
The usage of “Domostroi” within the textbook each references the previous whereas evoking the present authorities’s politics of decriminalizing household violence. A 2017 regulation, for instance, eliminated nonaggravated “battery of close persons” from the listing of felony offenses.
It additionally suits a wider sample. As a scholar of historic reminiscence, I’ve noticed that references to the Russian Center Ages are a part of the Kremlin’s broader politics of utilizing the medieval previous to justify present agendas, one thing I’ve termed “political neomedievalism.”
Certainly, President Vladimir Putin’s authorities is actively prioritizing initiatives that use medieval Russia as a mannequin for the nation’s future. In doing so, the Kremlin unites a long-nurtured dream of the Russian far proper with a broader quest for the achievement of Russian imperial ambitions.
Whitewashing Ivan the Horrible
In February 2025, only a month earlier than “My Family” was printed, the federal government of Russia’s Vologda area – residence to over 1 million individuals – established nongovernmental group known as “The Oprichnina.”
The group is tasked with “fostering Russian identity” and “developing the moral education of youth.”
However the group’s identify evokes the primary reign of brutal state terror in Russian historical past. The Oprichnina was a state coverage unleashed by Ivan the Horrible from 1565 to 1572 to determine his unrestrained energy over the nation. The oprichniks had been Ivan’s private guard, who hooked up a canine’s head and a brush to their saddles to indicate that they had been the czar’s “dogs” who swept treason away.
Chroniclers and international vacationers left accounts of the sadistic tortures and mass executions that had been performed with Ivan’s participation. The oprichniks raped and dismembered girls, flayed or boiled males alive and burned youngsters. On this frenzy of violence, they slaughtered many hundreds of harmless individuals.
Ivan’s reign led to a interval generally known as the “Time of Troubles,” marked by famine and navy defeat. Some students estimate that by its finish, Russia misplaced almost two-thirds of its inhabitants.
Ivan IV, czar of Russia from 1547 to 1584, generally known as Ivan the Horrible.
Rischgitz/Getty Pictures
All through Russian historical past, Ivan the Horrible – who amongst his different crimes murdered his eldest son and had the top of Russian Orthodox Church strangled for dissent – was remembered as a repulsive tyrant.
Nonetheless, because the mid-2000s, when the Russian authorities underneath Putin took an more and more authoritarian flip, Ivan and his terror have undergone a state-driven means of reevalution.
The Kremlin and its far-right proxies now paint Ivan as an awesome statesman and religious Russian Orthodox Christian who laid the foundations of the Russian Empire.
Previous to that alteration of Russian historic reminiscence, just one different Russian head of state had held Ivan in such excessive esteem: Josef Stalin.
Even so, no public monuments to Ivan existed till 2016, when Putin’s officers unveiled the primary of three bronze statues devoted to the horrible czar. But, the cinematic propaganda outmatched the commemorations of Ivan in stone. By my depend, from 2009 to 2022, 12 state-sponsored movies and TV collection paying tribute to Ivan the Horrible and his rule aired in prime time on Russian TV channels.
Russian revisionism
The post-Soviet rehabilitation of Ivan the Horrible goes again to the writings of Ivan Snychov, the metropolitan, or excessive rating bishop, of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga. His e book, “The Autocracy of the Spirit,” printed in 1994, gave rise to a fundamentalist sect generally known as “Tsarebozhie,” or neo-Oprichnina. Tsarebozhie requires a return to an autocratic monarchy, a society of orders and the canonization of all Russian czars. The idea that Russian state energy is “sacred” – a central dogma of the sect – was reaffirmed on April 18, 2025, by Alexander Kharichev, an official in Putin’s Presidential Administration, in an article that has been likened to an instruction handbook for the “builder of Putinism.”
The canonization of Ivan the Horrible particularly is a prime precedence for members of this sect. And whereas the Russian Orthodox Church has but to canonize Ivan, Tsarebozhie have garnered vital help from Russian clergymen, politicians and laypersons alike. Their efforts sit alongside Putin’s yearslong push to offer public help for Ivan. Not by probability, Putin’s minister of international affairs, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly named Ivan the Horrible amongst one among Putin’s three “most trusted advisers.”
In Snychov’s worldview, Russians are a messianic individuals, a part of an imperial nation that’s uniquely liable for stopping Devil’s domination of the world. In his explicitly antisemitic pseudo-history of Russia, the Oprichnina is described as a “saintly monastic order” led by a “pious tsar.”
An outline of Russian atrocities in Livonia in 1577, whereas Ivan was czar. From Johann Jakob Wick’s Sammlung von Nachrichten.
Fantastic Artwork Pictures/Heritage Pictures/Getty Pictures
For the reason that Nineteen Thirties, when Stalin used Ivan to justify his personal repressions, Ivan and Stalin – the Oprichnina and Stalinism – turned historic doubles. The whitewashing of Ivan by the Kremlin goes hand in hand with Putin’s rehabilitation of Stalin as commander in chief of the Soviet Union’s victory in World Warfare II.
Selling the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” – because the Second World Warfare has formally been known as because the Soviet interval – has been central to Putin’s militarization of Russian society and a part of the propaganda effort to foster help for the invasion of Ukraine. The regret for the lack of empire and need to revive it underlies Moscow’s discourse over the previous twenty years.
Medieval risk to democracy
The rhetoric of absolving Stalinism goes hand in hand with popularizing the state’s model of the Russian Center Ages by means of public media channels.
Putin’s neomedieval politics have adopted the Russian far-right perception that the nation ought to return to the traditions of medieval Rus, because it existed earlier than the Westernization reforms undertaken by Peter the Nice within the early 18th century.
Over the previous 15 years, Russian TV viewers have acquired a median of two state-funded motion pictures monthly, promoting the advantages 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 overseas and at residence and mobilize help for his suppression of the opposition. The key objective 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 regulation and democratic freedoms, as my analysis demonstrates, the Kremlin and its proxies have promoted the Russian Center Ages – with its theocratic monarchy, society of estates, slavery, serfdom and repression – as a state-sponsored various to democracy.
