“Ready for the End of Time”
Neo-Byzantism in Post-Soviet Russia
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
In Russia, “historiosophy” periodically experiences a boom. The attempt to determine the aim and purpose of history usually leads to Manichean patterns of interpretation. World events are interpreted as a struggle between good and evil, Russia and Orthodoxy as redeemer. Most recently, political circles close to the government and high-ranking clergy have been working together on the forced updating of a mystical “Byzantium”, which is to serve as a bastion against the secular West. Historical sources and facts are being falsified and distorted. Even the Soviet period is being declared a “mystical return to Byzantism”, the Third Rome and the Third International dissolve into one. Society is to be mobilized for a supposedly “final battle” of civilisations.
(Osteuropa 11-12/2016, pp. 15–37)