Vladimir Putin’s beliefs and superstitions

Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is “not just a war of politics, it is a holy war”.

So argued ABC News' international affairs analyst, Stan Grant, as experts worldwide struggle to explain the Russian president’s motivation for invading Ukraine. Some believe Putin’s faith has played a key role in his decision-making, but not everyone is convinced.

Putin’s religion

Putin was born in Leningrad – a city that reverted its original saint’s name of St Petersburg in 1991 – to an atheist father and devout Christian mother, who baptised him in secret. He grew up under the Communist regime, which “frowned upon” open displays of religion, said Reuters.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In recent years, he has increasingly highlighted his apparent religious faith by “wearing a silver cross around his neck [and] kissing icons”, wrote Deborah Netburn in the Los Angeles Times. In a televised stunt in 2018, when he was campaigning for re-election, Putin immersed himself in the freezing waters of a lake – an Orthodox Christian ritual to mark the Feast of the Epiphany, commemorating the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan.

The Russian leader has cast himself as “the true defender of Christians throughout the world”, said journalist and rector Giles Fraser on UnHerd. Putin’s relentless bombing of Islamic State (IS), for example, “was cast as the defence of the historic homeland of Christianity”, Fraser wrote.

But whether Putin’s seeming orthodoxy represents a true spiritual awakening or just political theatre is “hard to say”, added the LA Times’ Netburn.

Significance of Kyiv

The Russian Orthodox church dates back to AD988, when the rule of Kievan Rus’, Vladimir I, summoned the whole city to the banks of the Dnieper River for a mass baptism. This founding of Russian Orthodox Christianity created a shared heritage among the people living in the countries now known as Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

A 2015 Pew survey found that 78% of Ukrainians identified as Orthodox Christian, and 71% of Russians. This religious link has been seized upon by Putin, whose much-repeated claim that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” has fed into his justification for actions including the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

However, while the older and larger Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, a new self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine was created in 2018 that celebrates its independence from Moscow.

Putin’s desire to maintain the strength of the Russian Orthodox Church explains why he is “not so much interested in a few Russian-leaning districts to the east of Ukraine”, argued Fraser on UnHerd. The president’s goal, “terrifyingly”, is the holy city of Kyiv, and his invasion of Ukraine is a “spiritual quest”.

Nationalist ideology

“In Russia, church and military go hand in hand,” said The Economist. Both Putin and the head of the Russian church, Patriarch Kirill, have promoted and developed a concept called “Russian World”.

This “soft power ideology” promotes “Russian civilisation, ties to Russian-speakers around the world, and greater Russian influence on Ukraine and Belarus”, explained Scott Kenworthy, a professor of comparative religion at Miami University, in an article on The Conversation.

Russia is presented as the spiritual, cultural and political centre of civilisation, in contrast with Western liberalism, secularism and consumerism.

And “as surely as Islamic State casts itself as the defender of Islamic cultural purity”, Putin views himself as the chief defender of Christian culture from the godless West, said former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in an article for New Statesman.

‘More Nato than New Testament’

Not everyone is convinced that faith guides Putin’s actions. “There’s a lot of nonsense being written at the moment about the religiosity of modern Russia, and the role of the Orthodox Church in President Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine,” said Anglican priest Michael Coren in Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.

The ongoing war, Coren argued, is “more about Nato than the New Testament”.

But Tim Costello, a fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, suggested that the opposite is true. Putin’s ranting about the threat to Russia from Nato encirclement, and the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, is just “propaganda and nonsense”, Costello wrote in The Guardian.

The Russian leader’s “power vision” is “threaded through with nationalistic Christian theology”, Costello continued, but for a leader to use religion “to justify in God’s name invasion, violence and annihilation” is simply “evil”.

Superstitious beliefs

Along with his apparent religious faith, the Russian president is also “very superstitious”, said the BBC’s Jonny Dymond on Radio 4's podcast series Putin.

To back up his claim, Dymond related an anecdote relating to a 2008 interview given by Putin to theatre surpremo Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was advised to cut a proposed question relating to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master of Margharita.

“[Putin] was reading the novel when he came back to St Petersburg in the early Nineties and there was a terrible fire, so from then on he refuses to have anything to do with The Master of Margharita or Bulgakov,” Putin’s press secretary is said to have told Lloyd Webber.

The president is also thought to have been unnerved by Alexander Gabyshev, a wandering shaman who made headlines in 2019 for embarking on a quest to “drive the evil spirit of Putin from the Kremlin”, before later being sentenced to enforced treatment in a Russian psychiatric institution.

“While a Western public may find the shaman’s exorcism quest funny,” The Washington Times reported at the time, “Mr. Putin does not.”