Tsar Vladimir

Speaking on the ‘Rossiia’ TV channel, Metropolitan Ilarion, chairman of the department of external relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, declared:

It is my opinion that a person who is anointed to reign by priests, a person who receives not merely a mandate from electors to rule for a defined period, but receives sanction for his rule from God through the Church, and remains such for life until he passes power to his successor, is, of course, a form of government which is positively recommended by history and has many advantages compared with any electoral form of government.

No surprise here. The Orthodox Church has long had a preference for monarchy, although its bishops don’t normally proclaim it quite so openly. But who is to be Tsar? Aleksandr Prokhanov has an answer. Responding to Metropolitan Ilarion, he noted that the huge crowds which lined up in the Moscow rain recently to greet the relics of St Nicholas showed that the monarchical spirit was reviving in Russia, and that the time was right to raise the issue of restoring the monarchy. Ideally, the new Tsar would be a descendant of the Rurik and of the Romanovs, but there was no such person in Russia. A new dynasty would therefore have to be created. Prokhanov has a candidate in mind to start it:

It must be a special person; some kind of sign, some sort of sacrament, must be upon him. Vladimir Putin is such a person. In one of his addresses to the Federal Assembly he said that the sacred centre of Russian statehood, of Russian power, returned to Russia along with the return of the Crimea. He had in mind Khersones, where the baptism of Rus took place. And this magical, miraculous, mystical act, when the light of Orthodoxy poured through Prince Vladimir into all the vast expanses of Russia, first from the Carpathians to the Urals, and then beyond the Urals to the Pacific Ocean, this mystical act brought the holiness of Christ into Russian statehood. And the Crimea, restored to Russia by Putin, has brought this holiness into the very centre of Putin’s power, Putin’s statehood. That is why by this act, in some undefinable and undogmatic way, Putin carried the icon lamp of mysterious, mystical light into Russia, into the Kremlin, into his office, into his own mansion. He was chosen for this. He confirmed this choice. And in a very conditional way he was anointed, not by the Patriarch, not in the Uspenskii Cathedral, his coronation was accomplished without the presence of the Bishops. It was accomplished in a mysterious, mystical manner, when the lamp of Crimean Khersones returned in his hands to Russia. And he stood with this lamp, having lit it up with a mysterious light. Thus, in circles close to the Patriarch, in circles dreaming of monarchy, recognizing all the difficulties of restoring monarchy in Russia, more and more often one hears the name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as a possible first monarch in the Putin dynasty.

Like a lot of Prokhanov’s stuff, this is all a bit OTT. And I’m sorry, Aleksandr, but I have news for you. It ain’t gonna happen. Putin has made it very clear that he has no interest in becoming Tsar, and besides the mass of the Russian population doesn’t seem too interested in the idea. Still, I think that I may use this quotation when I give a talk on the subject ‘Russia and Ukraine’ to the annual symposium of the Canadian Association of Security and Intelligence Studies in September. For it gives a sense of how much some Russians value Vladimir Putin and the annexation/reunification of Crimea. For sure, most of them don’t view these things in the same kind of mystical-religious fashion, but they value them pretty highly nonetheless. The lesson I will draw is clear: if anybody really imagines that there will be ‘regime change’ in Russia, or that Russia will someday return Crimea to Ukraine, they’re living in an even stranger fantasyland than Aleksandr Prokhanov.