Slavoj Zizek

LJUBLJANA – The standard interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine war is that it is a “clash of cultures” pitting Western liberalism against traditional Russian authoritarianism. But this is deeply misleading. Far from being a traditionalist, Vladimir Putin is merely the latest in a series of murderous modernizers stretching from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Catherine the Great and Stalin.

When Stalin was asked to define Bolshevism in the late 1920s, he described it as a combination of Russian dedication to a cause and American pragmatism. Once in power, he sought to imitate the American industrialist Henry Ford’s achievements throughout the Soviet Union, brutally erasing all traces of Russian tradition through, most prominently, the violent collectivization of agriculture.

Stalin was also a great admirer of Peter the Great, who built a new capital for Russia on the Baltic Sea (St. Petersburg) to establish a direct link with Western Europe. Peter’s reforms faced resistance from so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians whose liturgical and ritual practices predated the reforms carried out by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 1652-66. Many Old Believers ultimately chose death over compromising their faith. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, thousands died by self-immolation.

Things only really changed in Russia with the October Revolution; and even then, the first Soviet government included several prominent figures with Old Believer backgrounds. The Bolsheviks correctly saw such sectarians as representatives of a long-running social protest against the czarist regime. The Old Believers had always distrusted the unity of church and state (which........

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