Making Russia medieval again

Dina Khapaeva

Beginning in September 2025, Russian middle and high school students will be handed a new textbook titled 'My Family'.

Published in March 2025, the textbook’s co-author Nina Ostanina, chair of the State Duma Committee for the Protection of the Family, claims that it will teach students “traditional moral values” that will improve “the demographic situation in the country” as part of a “Family Studies” course that was rolled out in the 2024-2025 school year.

But some of those lessons for modern living come from a less-than-modern source. Among the materials borrowed from 'My Family' is the 16th-century “Domostroi” – a collection of rules for maintaining patriarchal domestic order. It was written, supposedly, by Sylvester, a monk-tutor of czar Ivan the Terrible.

Unsurprisingly, some teachings from “Domostroi” seem out-of-keeping with today’s sensibilities. For example, it states that it is the right of a father to coerce, if needed by force, his household – at the time, this would refer to both relatives and slaves – in accordance with Orthodox dogmas.

“Husbands should teach their wives with love and exemplary instruction,” reads one of the Domostroi quotations repeated in 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 another extract.

The use of “Domostroi” in the textbook both references the past while evoking the current government’s politics of decriminalizing family violence. A 2017 law, for example, removed nonaggravated “battery of close persons” from the list of criminal offences.

Indeed, President Vladimir Putin’s government is actively prioritizing initiatives that use medieval Russia as a model for the country’s future. In doing so, the Kremlin unites a long-nurtured dream of the Russian far right with a broader quest for the fulfillment of Russian imperial ambitions.

Whitewashing Ivan the Terrible

In February 2025, just a month before 'My Family' was published, the government of Russia’s Vologda region – home to over 1 million people – established a nongovernmental organisation called 'The Oprichnina'.

The organisation is tasked with “fostering Russian identity” and “developing the moral education of youth.”

But the group’s name evokes the first reign of brutal state terror in Russian history. The Oprichnina was a state policy unleashed by Ivan the Terrible from 1565 to 1572 to establish his unrestrained power over the country. The oprichniks were Ivan’s personal guard, who attached a dog’s head and a broom to their saddles to show that they were the czar’s “dogs” who swept treason away.

Chroniclers and foreign travellers left accounts of the sadistic tortures and mass executions that were conducted with Ivan’s participation. The oprichniks raped and dismembered women, flayed or boiled men alive and burned children. Ivan’s reign led to a period known as the “Time of Troubles,” marked by famine and military defeat. Some scholars estimate that by its end, Russia lost nearly two-thirds of its population.

Throughout Russian history, Ivan the Terrible – who among his other crimes murdered his eldest son and had the head of Russian Orthodox Church strangled for dissent – was remembered as a repulsive tyrant.

However, since the mid-2000s, when the Russian government under Putin took an increasingly authoritarian turn, Ivan and his terror have undergone a state-driven process of reevaluation.

The Kremlin and its far-right proxies now paint Ivan as a great statesman and devout Russian Orthodox Christian who laid the foundations of the Russian Empire.

Russian revisionism

The post-Soviet rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible goes back to the writings of Ivan Snychov, the metropolitan, or high-ranking bishop, of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga. His book, “The Autocracy of the Spirit,” published in 1994, gave rise to a fundamentalist sect known as “Tsarebozhie,” or neo-Oprichnina. Tsarebozhie calls for a return to an autocratic monarchy, a society of orders and the canonisation of all Russian czars. The belief that Russian state power 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 manual for the “builder of Putinism.”

The canonisation of Ivan the Terrible specifically is a top priority for members of this sect. And while the Russian Orthodox Church has yet to canonise Ivan, Tsarebozhie has garnered significant support from Russian priests, politicians and laypersons alike. Their efforts sit alongside Putin’s years-long push to give public support for Ivan. Not by chance, Putin’s minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly named Ivan the Terrible among one of Putin’s three “most trusted advisers.” 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 War II.

This use of Russian historical memory has allowed Putin to normalise his use of state violence abroad and at home and mobilise support for his suppression of the opposition. The major goal of political neomedievalism is to legitimise huge social and economic inequalities in post-Soviet society as a part of Russia’s national heritage.