Thread by @irgarner

🧵 If you want to understand what Russia believes it's doing in invading Ukraine, crying wolf about "NATO" and the West, and risking much bigger wars, you have to understand the history of Russian messianism.

The idea that Russia has a peculiar "messianic" destiny - it and its people are fated to play a leading and often martyring role in world history - goes back hundreds of years.

Russia found itself the sole defender of Orthodox Christianity when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in the 15th Century. Russia anointed itself the "Third Rome," the defender of the faith after Rome and Constantinople.

A jumble of often contradictory notions have been attached to the core of the "messianism" narrative, but broadly speaking, the idea is that Russia is always under threat, that threats are often abstract, and that there is something uniquely spiritual in the people and state.

In times of crisis the ideas seems to have flared up: when Peter the Great tried to modernize Russia, the Church split into the state church and "Old Believers"; the turn of the 19th-20th centuries; and, of course, in 1917.

The "messianism" idea fuelled a lot of Bolshevik and Soviet thinking, which is essentially eschatological and apocalyptic: it's formed around great turning points - 1905, 1917, the Second World War - that would herald new utopias. Each time, shady enemies opposed the faithful.

Of course, within the USSR, the Russian nation played the leading role. Part of the justification for that was spiritual, not logical: the Russian nation simply *was* the chosen nation, the nation with the messianic destiny.

Even in the apparently atheistic late Soviet Union, messianism grew with the rebirth of Russian nationalism (Peter Duncan has a great book that discusses this). When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russians interpreted history even more apocalyptically.

You all know by now that Putin promised stability and new wealth when he came to power. Since Crimea & the ensuing economic decline, it's been obvious that's not happening. So the government's propaganda is whipping up ever more messianic visions of Russia's role in the world.

We're seeing it in Putin's speeches, in school lessons, and in the ever more obviously militarized role of the Orthodox Church and the patriarch.

Russians are told that, just as was the case however many times in the past, their destiny is to "save the world" from forces that are as incomprehensible as they are evil. If you're "saving the world," you can do anything you like: use murder, illegal weapons, etc.

This is of course abhorrent. It doesn't make sense from the outside, just as any religion can't be explained if you're a non-believer. But when the propaganda and the cultural life of the country have been infused with this heady stuff for years, it must be influencing things.

Where we see Russians ranting about a crazy "World War III," they hear themselves summoning visions of post-apocalyptic, religious utopias. Young soldiers who know nothing else will genuinely believe that they're on the side of right. It's bananas, but that's the history.

I probably explained all of that terribly, but there you have it.