Apparently, it happened without emotion: the workers came and slowly began to demolish. The work went on for two whole years (1924–1926) and, in the end, not one stone was left of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw [Fig. 7] At the beginning of the twentieth century, Poland was a bastion of Catholicism, so the destruction of a church in the capital city may have seemed out of step with popular sentiment, but to destroy a church that had only been completed twelve years earlier at that time smacked of sensationalism. The emotions behind such a decision must have been very strong. As a precaution against inciting an impassioned response, the demolition took a civil form, that is, it was a systematic and respectful demolition. This was certainly intended to calm the sensitive atmosphere in which this sacrilegious action took place, but it did nothing to diminish the power of the gesture. Such a gesture can only be understood in the context of violent nineteenth-century Russian imperialism, which turned art and saints into instruments of propaganda and identity. The destruction of the temple was, indeed, one way to oppose Russia's expansionist policies.

Dreaming Byzantium

The story of Russian imperialism has deep historical roots. Its origins can be traced back to the time when Ivan IV, known as the Terrible (1547–1584) was crowned “Tsar of All Russia” in 1547. Although the tendency of rulers to expand their territories was the practice of all major European powers in the sixteenth century (think, for example, of the brutal colonial policies of the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal), a glance at the history of the Russian Empire reveals that expansionist endeavours characterized Russian statehood from the reign of Ivan iv onwards. However, every imperial power requires rhetorical weapons to defend its ambitions—or to speak bluntly, it needs “excuses” for the inevitable imperial atrocities. This has often been done through the smoke screen of defending religious issues, protecting the oppressed or, and this is crucial for our reflection, through historical law, i.e. in the defence of policies in the light of (real or entirely imagined) historical claims. Russian power made abundant use of these tools, and at least since the early nineteenth century it can be said that “historical law” gained more and more space and power, especially in the context of an increasingly clearly declared relationship with the Byzantine Empire.

In the last two centuries or more, the Middle Ages, whether Russian or Byzantine, have become a powerful tool of propaganda and identity discourse for Russia. At crucial moments of crisis, medieval heritage has been used both visually and intellectually to affirm the country's imperial rights and to fight the external enemy. During the reign of the last Romanovs this situation seemed in some ways logical, and Russian rhetoric was essentially no different from that of other contemporary empires, but it was even more surprising (and complex) to uncover the (mis)use of the past in the Soviet years, when Stalin created a unique synthesis between the two seemingly contradictory trends of communism and clericalism. In the last two decades, then, it is possible to see a seeming return to the patterns that developed during the nineteenth century.

I hope I have been able to show that in each of the stages examined it is not so much the past itself that is interesting, but rather its use for the needs of the present. In this framework we can now return to the very beginning of this text, to Moscow's Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ. All of the visual and material tools mentioned above and used therein tell a story of Russian identity. The building refers to the medieval past, but also to its reuse in the mid-twentieth century. This is evident not only in the architectural design but also in the iconography of the decoration. It is a celebration of medieval and modern warlords, with a strong reference to the decoration of the Stalinist underground, and to an idealized image of the national past. In light of the current situation, the 2020 construction can be seen as one of the crucial preparatory steps in the expansionist, imperial ambitions of the Russian Federation, which culminated in the military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Visually and conceptually, the regime is following the rhetoric conveyed to the public by the mass media: that Moscow is the Third Rome, the last standard-bearer of Orthodoxy, and under its leader, it has a moral obligation to intervene, even with military force, against the evil that is rampant in the “fascist” West. It is clear, however, that something else is the goal of this huge propaganda effort.

When I first visited Moscow in 2000, I saw a vibrant city bursting with life and incredible opportunities. It was a city where you could get married on the spot at three in the morning and then go to a sushi restaurant to celebrate (there were very few of them in Central and Western Europe then), or go to a rock club where books that had been banned for seventy years were sold and read. Even the university I visited then was a lively institution full of enthusiastic people. But, at the same time, Moscow was in many ways a wild and dangerous city. It was not advisable to cross the road if a car was in plain sight. Such situations could end in death, as happened to the husband of one of my acquaintances: he was hit by an official's black car in a pedestrian crossing. His widow lost the subsequent court case and Russia lost a poet. But it wasn't just about cars. Especially in the evening, the streets were not safe at all. Violent criminal activity was the norm in Moscow life. The wild 1990s were dawning, a time when the world of ordinary Russians literally collapsed after the fall of the Bolshevik regime and during the five hundred days of transition from socialism to capitalism. Some prominent members of the former regime, and some from organized crime, came to power. For everyone else, times were indeed hard. They faced runaway inflation, the disintegration of the welfare state, and violence on daily basis. Moscow was a city of contradictions. Despite all this, I must confess that for me it was an absolutely enchanting encounter (although, this was perhaps due to my age) that changed the course of my whole life. If it had not been for this trip, I might never have learned Russian, or begun to work on the history of Russian scholarship and imperialism, and, therefore, I would never have written the book you are now holding in your hands.

I returned to Moscow regularly. The more time I spent there, the more I realized the incredible cultural and human potential that lies there. The community of people I befriended were publishing books and working at the institution MEMORIAL (banned just before the military invasion of Ukraine began in 2022).

On October 5, 1931, Moscow residents heard two powerful explosions that shook the gloomy city. It was the beginning of the 1930s, a time of great terror, when millions more innocents were about to fall victim to a new regime, and no one probably wanted to ask what was going on. When the smoke disappeared, however, everything was crystal clear: the Soviets had blown up the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, one of the prides of the Romanov Empire [Fig. 20]. This was no surprise; anti-clericalism was built into the DNA of the Bolshevik Soviet Union. But the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was intended to demonstrate something else: the USSR wanted to distance itself from the tsarist imperialist policies that the cathedral embodied. A year earlier, the same fate had befallen the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Tbilisi. The new regime had begun to rewrite history by dynamite and by stone. But had change really come?

Utopia in Power and the End of an Empire?

After the so-called October Socialist Revolution in 1917, all the subtle (and sometimes overt) signs pointed to this rewriting of history. The rhetoric of tsarist Russia's successor, the Soviet Union, changed dramatically. The new socialist state certainly did not want to build on its imperialist past and swiftly ended the First World War by drawing on the rhetoric of the spirit of Marxist doctrine to rewrite the historical motivation for going to war, which was now revised as a clash between bourgeoisie interests and those of the innocent and exploited proletarians. At the official level, therefore, imperialism was considered an instrument of the exploitation of the working class and was strictly rejected. It would, of course, be interesting to reflect on whether this was in fact the case, and to what extent Lenin's version of the doctrine of “world revolution,” which was so popular in the early years of the emerging USSR, was really opposed to the previous tsarist imperialism. But that is a subject too broad to address here. However, the idea of systematically rejecting imperialism on a rhetorical level, even at times when the USSR had long since emerged as an empire, was maintained. This is exampled in the texts of the art historian Mikhail Babenchikov (1890–1957).

When I asked a friend from Moscow, now an expatriate in Georgia, to explain how Russia could have fallen so quickly into Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime after the fall of the USSR sometime in the early 2000s, his response was unequivocal: “It was the 1990s, it was a jungle!” The stories he told me afterwards helped me to understand at least a little why the demand for a “firm hand” was so great after 2000.

In the 1990s, household savings were almost completely wiped out and inflation had led to elderly people—“senior citizens” who had given so much to their society and country— begging on the streets and starving to death. I cannot forget the begging grandmothers I used to meet on every corner during my first visits to Moscow. All rules had, it seemed, disappeared from the country [Fig. 30]. The practice of borrowing a sum of money from an acquaintance, a fraction of which could be used to pay a hired assassin who then murdered the acquaintance of the person in question and relieved them of the obligation to repay the loan, was, at the least, said to be commonly practiced. The market for the profession of assassin for hire was reportedly so saturated after the breakup of the elite military units that an assassination for hire cost about $2,000. In the resulting chaos, society became radicalized, allowing nostalgia for the previous regime, neo-Nazis, Stalinists, and religious fanatics to coexist [Fig. 31]. The trauma of this period, duly fed by the resulting Putin propaganda, can be seen as one of the key reasons for Russia's current imperialism.

To better understand the roots of the current situation, in this chapter I would like to address the most recent period—that which corresponds to the last thirty years of Russian history, and not only the artistic aspects. I will, first of all, summarize the salient facts of politics with a special focus on economics in the 1990s. Secondly, I will present the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour from its much-discussed rebuilding in the nineties to the times when it was included in the celebrated performance of the punk feminist rock band Pussy Riot in 2012.