RUSSIAN WORLD The eternal kingdom of the victorious tsar

Putin had stated several times that he had no intention of remaining in power for life, but that issue has long been put behind him. And on the occasion of the inauguration of a new presidential term, Patriarch Kirill invoked upon him “the blessing of God until the end of your existence and until the end of time, as we usually say.”

Patriarch of Moscow Kirill (Gundjaev) greeted President Vladimir Putin on the occasion of the inauguration-crowning of a new presidential term and the anniversary of Victory over all enemies, wishing him to remain in power do skonchanija vekaan expression taken from the liturgy, similar to the Latin in saecula saeculorum. Perhaps the patriarch simply intended to refer to a “lifetime mandate” for the tsar-president, who had never exalted the solemnity of autocracy with the carpets and fanfares of the Kremlin like this year, but the excess of zeal was so evident that the meeting room Patriarchate press cut the sentence from the statement that reproduced the patriarch’s text.

The imperishable blessing resounded on the afternoon of May 7 in the Kremlin, in the Cathedral of the Annunciation, the private chapel of the tsars in front of whose altar is the splendid series of sacred images of the greatest iconographers of Russian history, Theophanes the Greek and Andrej Rublev, where the president attended the Moleben, the patriarch’s augural litany. Kirill’s prayer has invoked all the heavenly hosts and “may the blessing of God and the protection of the Queen of Heaven be with you until the end of your existence and until the end of time, as we often say. And I dare to say that, God willing, the end of the centuries also means the end of your permanence in power, because you have everything that is required to carry out your service to the country successfully and for a long time. In the text released by the press room, the phrase was reduced to the “end of existence” of the president, and the eschatological-presidential prophecy was also eliminated from the Moleben video on YouTube.

In any case, Kirill addressed the president with the title of vashe prevoskhoditelstvo, “your eminence”, as was customary with members of the royal family, and added that “by the great mercy of God, our time has been gratified because at the head of the Russian State there is a person of Orthodox faith who is not ashamed of their faith.” According to the patriarch, many Russians see Putin as “a very good, intelligent and kind-hearted person,” although he urged him to “not only be good, but also strict, because the head of state sometimes has to make fateful decisions and groznye” – which can be translated as “forceful” or rather “threatening”, reiterating the analogy between Putin and Ivan Groznyj, the “terrible”, or precisely the “threatening”. He later added that “if these dramatic decisions are not made, the consequences could be extremely dangerous for the people and for the State, and many times these are decisions that also involve victims.” In addition to the reference to the first tsar of the 16th century, the patriarchal speech recalled the heroic deeds of Prince Alexander Nevsky, who “was not afraid of his enemies and was glorified as a saint”, without making direct references to the war in Ukraine.

At this moment, according to new constitutional norms approved in a decidedly “unorthodox” manner in 2020, Putin could lead Russia until 2036 – when he will turn 84 – in case of a new re-election in 2030. Most sovereigns in Russian history , princes, tsars or party secretaries, remained in power until the end of their existence, with the exception of the last martyred emperor Nicholas II and the secretary Nikita Khrushchev, overthrown by Brezhnev and his companions to restore the Stalinist order. After the fall of the USSR, the unhappy governments of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991) and Boris Yeltsin (1992-1999) followed, not to mention the “transitional” presidency of Dmitrij Medvedev between 2008 and 2012, where he actually governed Putin as prime minister, also imitating Tsar Ivan the Terrible in this, who “appointed” other figures when he retired to his possessions around Moscow. In the past, Putin had stated several times that he had no intention of remaining in power for life, but that issue has long since been overcome.

On the other hand, the assumption of the eternal dimension has led the Russian president to feel completely master of history, to the point that the first ukaz that he signed after the coronation was precisely “On the correct understanding and transmission of history”, where all expression of historical science is reduced to pure propaganda. In all schools in the country, starting with kindergartens, or rather from the bedtime stories that parents read to young children, images of Orthodox saints, princes and tsars must be inculcated, without neglecting “Soviet heroism.” so often reviled by Western barbarians, who do not want to give Stalin and Marshal Zhukov all the credit for having freed the world from Hitler’s Nazism. This is, in fact, the great motivation for Victory Day on May 9, which remembers the armies that entered Berlin the day after the signing of the armistice between the Germans and the Allies without waiting for the triumph of the Russians; That is why in the rest of Europe May 8 is remembered, except for the Italian “liberation” of April 25.

In the rest of Europe and the world this is, without a doubt, not an occasion for military parades in the streets, but rather for lighting a candle in memory of the millions of fallen, as even the “most faithful” subjects of Asia did this year. central, whose presidents accompanied Putin and his generals in contemplating the tanks, while in their capitals the grotesque parades had been canceled. Very disturbing, in the box that hid Lenin’s mausoleum, next to or behind the Asians, were the faces of some of the most monstrous protagonists of the attacks in Ukraine, such as General Vladislav Volodin, who flanked Putin along with the young president-son of Turkmenistan, Serdar Berdymukhamedov, “guest of honor” on his first visit to Red Square. Volodin was the commander who attacked Mariupol in March 2022 and achieved the record for the highest number of civilian casualties; and behind him stood the triumphant Chechen commander Ramil Ibdatullin, who incited his soldiers to celebrate the victory by raping women and set an example by personally raping a pregnant young woman, who later lost her child.

The day after the parade of horrors, the supreme leader instead made a gesture that demonstrates Russia’s “democratic superiority” with respect to the entire world: he proposed to the Duma the candidacy of the prime minister, who is the same Mikhail Mishustin who already He has held office since January 2020, the year of the new eschatological Constitution that entrusted the approval of the government to the deputies. Before it was directly the presidency that made the decisions, today the sovereign addresses the “representatives of the people”, because this is precisely how “orthodox democracy” works: all for one and one for all, in a mystical communion that defends the people from the deviations of the minorities, which would drag Holy Russia into dependence on dark powers, as occurs in the degraded West.

The new-old government will have to first deal with the implementation of the majskye ukazi, the “May decrees” promulgated by the president, starting with the capillary diffusion of the correct version of history. According to tradition, these proclamations of the most solemn day indicate “the national goals for the development of the Russian Federation”, in this case “for the period up to 2030 and, in a broader perspective, up to 2036”. The godfather of the Kremlin promised Russians to increase the minimum wage, taking it from 20,000 rubles to 35,000 (about 350 euros), ensuring that in 2030 Russia will rise to at least fourth place in the world in terms of volume of gross domestic product. He also announced that Russians will not only get richer, but will live longer, raising life expectancy to 78 years in 2026 and 81 years in 2036. Therefore, young people should be grateful for the bright future ahead of them. wait and demonstrate it by “participating more and more actively in social and volunteer initiatives”, naturally seasoning everything with an increasingly thicker patriotic sauce distributed in the thousand initiatives to support the Motherland. After all, everyone will also be rewarded with more square meters of housing, 33 per person in 2030 and 38 square meters in 2036, a promise that Putin has repeated since 2007 without a single centimeter having been added.

The empty rhetoric of majskye ukazi echoes that of the grandiose five-year plans of Soviet memory, with 7 main objectives and 84 projects to be carried out, plus 6 major indicators entrusted to the new government, among them the inclusion of Russia “among the 25 most advanced countries in the world in the robotization and in the correct use of artificial intelligence”, praising its “technological leadership” and the definitive abolition of poverty. Ultimately, it is not even necessary to establish the dates for the realization of these providential plans, since they have now been entrusted to the kingdom of eternity.

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