Dina Khapaeva/The Conversation
Beginning in September 2025, Russian middle and high school students will be handed a new textbook titled “My Family.”
Published in March 2025, the textbook’s co-author Nina Ostanina, chair of the State Duma Committee for the Protection of the Family, claims that it will teach students “traditional moral values” that will improve “the demographic situation in the country” as part of a “Family Studies” course that was rolled out in the 2024-2025 school year.
But some of those lessons for modern living come from a less-than-modern source. Among the materials borrowed from in “My Family” is the 16th century “Domostroi” – a collection of rules for maintaining patriarchal domestic order. It was written, supposedly, by Sylvester, a monk-tutor of czar Ivan the Terrible.
Unsurprisingly, some teachings from “Domostroi” seem out-of-keeping with today’s sensibilities. For example, it states that it is the right of a father to coerce, if needed by force, his household – at the time, this would refer to both relatives and slaves – in accordance with Orthodox dogmas.
“Husbands should teach their wives with love and exemplary instruction,” reads one of the Domostroi quotations repeated in the textbook.
“Wives ask their husbands about strict order, how to save their souls, please God and their husbands, arrange their home well, and submit to their husbands in all matters; and what the husband orders, they should agree with love and carry out according to his commands,” reads another extract.
Oil painting of Ivan and Sylvester, 1856. (Public Domain).
The use of “Domostroi” in the textbook fits a wider pattern. As a scholar of historical memory, I have observed that references to the Russian Middle Ages are part of the Kremlin’s broader politics of using the medieval past to justify current agendas, something I have termed “political neomedievalism.”
Indeed, President Vladimir Putin’s government is actively prioritizing initiatives that use medieval Russia as a model for the country’s future. In doing so, the Kremlin unites a long-nurtured dream of the Russian far right with a broader quest for the fulfillment of Russian imperial ambitions.
Whitewashing Ivan the Terrible
In February 2025, just a month before “My Family” was published, the government of Russia’s Vologda region – home to over one million people – established a nongovernmental organization called “The Oprichnina.” The organization is tasked with “fostering Russian identity” and “developing the moral education of youth.”
The Oprichniki by Nikolai Nevrev (1888). The painting shows the last minutes of boyarin Feodorov, who was arrested for treason and executed wearing tsar's regalia, in mockery. (Public Domain).
But the group’s name evokes the first reign of brutal state terror in Russian history. The Oprichnina was a state policy unleashed by Ivan the Terrible from 1565 to 1572 to establish his unrestrained power over the country. The oprichniks were Ivan’s personal guard, who attached a dog’s head and a broom to their saddles to show that they were the czar’s “dogs” who swept treason away. Chroniclers and foreign travelers left accounts of the sadistic tortures and mass executions that were conducted with Ivan’s participation. The oprichniks raped and dismembered women, flayed or boiled men alive and burned children. In this frenzy of violence, they slaughtered many thousands of innocent people.
Ivan’s reign led to a period known as the “Time of Troubles,” marked by famine and military defeat. Some scholars estimate that by its end, Russia lost nearly two-thirds of its population.
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Throughout Russian history, Ivan the Terrible – who among his other crimes murdered his eldest son and had the head of Russian Orthodox Church strangled for dissent – was remembered as a repulsive tyrant. However, since the mid-2000s, when the Russian government under Putin took an increasingly authoritarian turn, Ivan and his terror have undergone a state-driven process of reevalution. The Kremlin and its far-right proxies now paint Ivan as a great statesman and devout Russian Orthodox Christian who laid the foundations of the Russian Empire. Prior to that alteration of Russian historical memory, only one other Russian head of state had held Ivan in such high esteem: Josef Stalin.
Even so, no public monuments to Ivan existed until 2016, when Putin’s officials unveiled the first of three bronze statues dedicated to the terrible czar. Yet, the cinematic propaganda outmatched the commemorations of Ivan in stone. By my count, from 2009 to 2022, 12 state-sponsored films and TV series paying tribute to Ivan the Terrible and his rule aired in prime time on Russian TV channels.
First of three bronze statues put up by Putin’s government to honor Ivan the Terrible, in the city of Oryol. (Sergey Sebelev/CC BY-SA 3.0).
Russian Revisionism
The post-Soviet rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible goes back to the writings of Ivan Snychov, the metropolitan, or high ranking bishop, of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga. His book, “The Autocracy of the Spirit,” published in 1994, gave rise to a fundamentalist sect known as “Tsarebozhie,” or neo-Oprichnina. Tsarebozhie calls for a return to an autocratic monarchy, a society of orders and the canonization of all Russian czars. The belief that Russian state power is “sacred” – a central dogma of the sect – was reaffirmed on April 18, 2025, by Alexander Kharichev, an official in Putin’s Presidential Administration.
The canonization of Ivan the Terrible specifically is a top priority for members of this sect. And while the Russian Orthodox Church has yet to canonize Ivan, Tsarebozhie have garnered significant support from Russian priests, politicians and laypersons alike. Their efforts sit alongside Putin’s yearslong push to give public support for Ivan. Not by chance, Putin’s minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly named Ivan the Terrible among one of Putin’s three “most trusted advisers.”
In Snychov’s worldview, Russians are a messianic people, part of an imperial nation that is uniquely responsible for preventing Satan’s domination of the world. In his revisionist history of Russia, the Oprichnina is described as a “saintly monastic order” led by a “pious tsar.”
Portrait of Ivan IV by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1897 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). (Public Domain).
Since the 1930s, when Stalin used Ivan to justify his own repressions, Ivan and Stalin – the Oprichnina and Stalinism – became historical doubles. The whitewashing of Ivan by the Kremlin goes hand in hand with Putin’s rehabilitation of Stalin as commander in chief of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. Promoting the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” – as the Second World War has officially been called since the Soviet period – has been central to Putin’s militarization of Russian society. The remorse for the loss of empire and desire to restore it underlies Moscow’s discourse over the past two decades.
Medieval Threat to Democracy
The rhetoric of absolving Stalinism goes hand in hand with popularizing the state’s version of the Russian Middle Ages through public media channels. Putin’s neomedieval politics have adopted the Russian far-right belief that the country should return to the traditions of medieval Rus, as it existed before the Westernization reforms undertaken by Peter the Great in the early 18th century. Over the past 15 years, Russian TV viewers have received an average of two state-funded movies per month, advertising the benefits of Russian medieval society and praising Russian medieval warlords.
New bust of Joseph Stalin erected in Russian-occupied Melitopol, Ukraine, on May 9, 2025. (X/Nexta TV).
The major goal of political neomedievalism is to legitimize huge social and economic inequalities in post-Soviet society as a part of Russia’s national heritage. The Kremlin and its proxies have promoted the Russian Middle Ages – with its theocratic monarchy, society of estates, slavery, serfdom and repression – as a state-sponsored alternative to democracy.
Top image: Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. 1885 painting by Ilya Repin, showing the murder of the younger Ivan by his father.
Source: Public Domain.
This article was originally published under the title ‘Make Russia Medieval Again! How Putin is seeking to remold society, with a little help from Ivan the Terrible‘ by Dina Khapaeva on The Conversation, and has been republished under a Creative Commons License.
