Political ideas and ideology work in society as cement does in the building. Ideas do not exist separately, they cement together the different floors of society, penetrating all its institutions—school, army, church, legislature, media—and helping each individual to fit into the existing order. This book examines how, in Putin’s Russia, this cement was used to build a temple of war—an ideological construct that allows to justify the invasion in Ukraine and propagate it as a sacred deed. 

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In “The Temple of War,” Venyavkin traces ideological trajectories of the most important institutions of Russian society. To make this analysis into an engaging narrative, each of the institutions is exemplified in one particular figure. Some of them are well known, like the chief Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan or Nikolai Patrushev, a longtime head of the FSB. Some are less famous, like an army general Sergey Surovikin or a militant priest Mikhail Vasiliev. Each chapter is devoted to one character and, by association, his industry or institution. With some figures, this is a story of how compromising leads to a moral failure. With others, this is a story of fringe ideas slowly infiltrating the ideology of the state. Taken together, they give us a complex picture of how the war became possible and even desirable.

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A few years ago, most experts believed that Putin’s Russia lacked a clearly articulated ideology, and that economic interests and personal ambitions played the main part in the Kremlin’s behavior. Today, it is evident that money and personal ambitions cannot explain a catastrophe of this scale. Ideas are needed to keep the war going. To counter them, we need, at the very least, to understand how they work.

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