Meduza Publishing House is releasing a book by historian Ilya Venyavkin, The Temple of War. People and Ideas that Made the Russian Invasion Possible. In it, the author recounts the biographies and explores the thinking of nine Russians who, in one way or another, helped create the reality of the invasion – from philosopher Alexander Dugin and Methodologist Timofei Sergeytsev to satirist Mikhail Zadornov and LiveJournal user “Murz.” Olga Serebryanaya spoke with Venyavkin about the book’s protagonists and the influence their ideas continue to have on modern Russia.

You trace the intellectual biographies of nine Russian public figures and reconstruct their thinking. You use the term “ideas.” Why do you speak of ideas rather than ideology?

I faced the task of finding a way to describe ideas that were not purely intellectual. Dugin is an intellectual – he reads books, formulates special concepts or combines ideas he finds in others’ works to describe reality and convince his readers that they should live one way and not another. But my other characters are not intellectuals. General Surovikin hardly considers ideas to be his line of work.

In discussions of ideas and ideologies, this gap often appears: we tend to recognize as ideas only what is original and good. For example, when speaking of ideas in the Soviet Union, we refer to Marx or Lukács – but we do not discuss Stalin’s ideas and certainly not Yezhov’s. Yet ideas, in general, have a functional meaning. Most people do not live for the truth – they live to master the world and give it meaning. Accordingly, they use ideas as guides or maps to navigate life.

Every person uses ideas to justify their existence and give it meaning. What interested me was the repository of “raw materials” from which different Russian actors get remarkably similar frameworks. It is like the old joke: whatever you hand him, he’ll turn it into a Kalashnikov. It’s funny on the one hand but terrifying on the other. As a historian, I understand how difficult it is to make people do something they do not want to do. It’s much easier for them to reach conclusions on their own – conclusions that explain why thinking and acting in a certain way is good and right.

The debate over Russian ideology has recently intensified following the publication of Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin’s book about Vladimir Putin – what drives him: pragmatism or ideology?

I see no contradiction between personal interests, the desire for power, and ideas. Any rector of a Russian university wants to hold their post for life – yet at the same time, they wish to think of themselves as a progressive figure who has brought light and education to the people. When they are congratulated on their 75th birthday, the toasts are not about how the rector took over six buildings in central Moscow, but about how the rector has been a visionary.

So I do not believe there is a contradiction – that it must be either interests or ideas. But at the current stage, which began after 2011-12 and can be called the era of mature Putinism, radical ideas have become an important condition of loyalty – a way to determine “us” versus “them.”

At a primitive level, this is the main thing ideology does. In addition to showing where to go, it tells you with whom – and against whom – to go. Without this, it’s impossible to understand why, for example, Russia should denounce the Convention Against Torture. There are no books explaining how torture strengthens the Russian state, but there is a gut feeling that something about this convention is wrong. Basically, ideology helps that gut feeling spread.

Ideology can be viewed as a set of ideas or as a set of practices – when people develop stylistic, emotional and semantic synchronicity. How is it that Vladimir Solovyov and Sergei Kiriyenko dress the same when they lay flowers? Why does this stylistic uniformity emerge? Why are some songs considered “right” and others “wrong?” Why should one TV series be banned, but another made? For us, Cheburashka is dope, but for those who take the dope and benefit from it, Cheburashka is social glue. You can recognize likeminded people, and they reassure you: “you are doing a good job, you are doing everything right.”

Let’s turn to your protagonists. Broadly, they can be divided into two unequal groups: officials and people in power and, shall we say, private individuals. Let us start with General Sergei Surovikin – why him in particular?

My main idea was that General Surovikin embodies the Russian military culture whose motto is: “defending the Motherland is my career.” A good soldier is one who is unconditionally loyal to the state and supports hierarchical order. At the same time, Surovikin has his own pride and dignity – he would not say he is ready to carry out any order. There are things he would refuse to do – for instance, if he were told to sweep the street. Because sweeping the street is not a soldier’s business.

For Surovikin, the military man is the sovereign’s servant, who has voluntarily renounced himself in the sovereign’s favor. As a man who supported the putsch and then built a career under Putin – becoming one of the few public faces of the war in Ukraine – he struck me as an instructive figure.

The next figure is Nikolai Patrushev. As I understand it, he represents the KGB’s Andropov-style ideology: we are surrounded by enemies, and any means are justified to defeat them.

When I tried to understand Patrushev’s modus operandi, I described it as the desire to correct the 1991 coup and restore everything to its proper place. There is a perpetual confrontation between Russia and the West, which has always sought to seize our resources. And the only people in the world who do not allow themselves to be brainwashed by fairy tales about humanistic values, human rights and democracy are the Chekists.

This is an ultra-statist ideology in which those who have learned “the whole truth” in KGB schools believe that no means are off limits to uphold it. Thus, enemies can be poisoned, blown up, deceived and subjected to disinformation, as was done in the Soviet Union.

The entire logic rests on the conviction that by speaking of humanistic values, one acts – knowingly or not – as an agent of the enemy. Liberal democratic and humanistic values are simply the West’s weapons in the global battle of the great powers. No sane person from the KGB doubts this.

Let us move on to the figure of Elvira Nabiullina.

The head of the Central Bank was perhaps the most difficult character for me. There was very little material about her – essentially, she gave two long interviews in her life. To understand what she meant and what her worldview was, I had to look at the figures around her – people who were influential spokesmen in the camp of liberal economists and technocrats: Chubais, Gref, Ulyukayev. Then there was Yevgeny Yasin, Nabiullina’s mentor. Overall, I can still only guess at her motivations based on her gestures rather than her words. I have come to the conclusion that this is a story of service. Chapters of such service include Speransky, Stolypin and Gaidar (based on what he wrote in his memoirs).

It is a worldview in which there are smart, competent professionals who want to help their country, but they constantly encounter the problem that this cannot be done democratically because no one understands the need for arduous structural reforms. Consequently, they must rely on an autocrat, a dictator. Gradually it comes to a point where it is no longer clear what stands on what, yet abandoning such an important task becomes unthinkable. If they leave the Central Bank, the Russian economy will collapse and millions of Russians will suffer.

Nabiullina has her own ideas, but her worldview is divided into two isolated parts. There is the Russian economy, where she is a professional economist, has a keen understanding of how to manage the Central Bank and takes pride in recognition from the international community. And there is Russian politics, where that same international community is publicly told to get lost, while the money she looks after is used to wage war. Neither she nor those in her circle appear to agree with the objectives of this war – but they are all professionals and bear their crosses. Judging by the signals she has sent, Nabiullina herself is discouraged and upset by the war. But it did not logically follow that she should resign and abandon her life’s work.

In the struggle between the professional and the citizen, the former won?

I think there is an ethical dimension to this for a professional, as well. Perhaps she is asking herself: how can she simply give up everything she has built? There has always been scaremongering that if Glazyev comes to the Central Bank, Russia will turn into a banana republic.

There is a professional code of ethics: one does not interfere in what is not one’s business but tries to do everything within one’s power. Do what you must and come what may. It is not this picture of the world itself that evokes strong feelings, but rather a person’s ability to depoliticize a part of their life.

The chapter about Nabiullina begins with what I consider an important dispute between Anatoly Chubais and Grigory Yavlinsky, in which, historically, both lost. Chubais called Yavlinsky a chatterbox who only complains and does nothing. The same logic that Chubais used in his time can be seen in Nabiullina’s actions today. Someone, they say, has to rebuild the country, someone has to pay pensions. If everyone puts on white coats and walks away, what will happen to the people? They could not manage without us. It is a mixture of megalomania and self-sacrifice, a sense of immense personal responsibility for everything that happens and learned helplessness. With such a combination, resignation is impossible.

Now, we move on to private individuals. It is rather surprising that among them is a man who died in 2017 and thus had no role in the media support for the full-scale invasion: satirist Mikhail Zadornov. Why did you include him, when there is no shortage of popular artists who supported the war?

For me, his story is somewhat Dostoevskian. I believe Zadornov taught his listeners to take pride in their own humiliation. In the early 1990s, he spoke to people who hoped that society would now be able to overcome the absurdities of Soviet life – bureaucracy, officialdom, hypocrisy. There was an expectation that, partly through cathartic self-laughter, society would cleanse itself of its flaws. But when it became clear that those expectations were not materializing, Zadornov helped his audience embrace the idea that we suffer because we are the chosen ones.

The enemy, he suggested, was not Soviet bureaucrats but the “world hegemon,” primarily the US. Zadornov argued that we suffer because we do not fit into their matrix and that our suffering is proof of our greatness.

Next comes priest Mikhail Vasiliev, who spent his entire life promoting the idea of reviving the institution of military priests.

He shared the belief in a Christ-loving army that is common among conservative church hierarchs. From their perspective, there is no contradiction between preaching Christ and fighting. They believe that some of Russia’s problems in the 1980s and 1990s stemmed precisely from the fact that the army – which, as they see it, is Russia’s only true ally – lost its spiritual and moral core.

Until his death in November 2022 in Kherson Region during the Ukrainian army’s counteroffensive, Vasiliev lived as a “paratrooper priest,” showing by his example that this is a new kind of spirituality and that war can be a holy endeavor.

Another of your protagonists who died in the war is Andrei Morozov, a LiveJournal user known as “Murz.”

By the way, Vasiliev, despite his devotion to the war, never said that dying in battle is good or that one should seek it. If you watch his interviews and sermons, they are quite dovish: he said we must show mercy to prisoners and to the enemy. A Christian must do his duty to defend his values with arms in hand.

But Murz had a much more radical and romantic outlook. From an early age, he dreamed of dying for a just cause and becoming an ideological martyr. In this sense, Vasiliev, who tried to build a new institution, seems to me a creator in the social sense, while Murz was a kamikaze.

He grew up on the myth of heroes who fight decisive battles against evil, sacrificing themselves. He had a deep connection with Soviet techno-optimism of the 1960s and 1970s; his mother’s experience, working at Baikonur and supporting the Buran flights, was deeply formative. His worldview was influenced by adventure literature and Soviet science fiction, especially the Strugatsky brothers. People, he believed, must be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the sake of progress – and when they are not, the world begins to come apart at the seams.

In a sense, your other heroine, Margarita Simonyan, stands at the opposite pole. She is not only unwilling to sacrifice herself for an idea but openly says that there is simply no truth.

Yes, indeed, Simonyan says there is no objectivity and no truth. But this is not the position of postmodernist philosophers, who say there is no truth and now we do not know what to do. Simonyan’s position is different: there is no truth – so we can do whatever we want. What we really want is success.

For her, the media is not about truth, which does not exist, but about power. And she seems to enjoy it. At the very least, she certainly does not look like someone who lies awake at night wondering if she is doing something wrong.

Simonyan is not a philosopher, but you also have philosophers in your book – first and foremost, Alexander Dugin, as well as the Methodologist Timofei Sergeytsev. In the sociopolitical media, you were, I believe, among the first to write about the Methodologists of Georgy Shchedrovitsky’s school.

Yes, the text about Sergeytsev was the first thing I wrote; in a sense, the whole book grew out of it. I am very grateful to Alexander Gorbachev, who was my editor at Kholod. It was through Sergeytsev’s example that I saw that my method was producing results.
There is a large community of people who went through the organizational activity games devised by Shchedrovitsky, through his circle and the broader Methodological movement. I would not claim that Sergeytsev best embodies their spirit or represents them all.

For me, the most important element here is their belief that reality is socially constructed. But this does not mean that some society consciously constructs it – not in the sense that we say gender is a social construct and thus we can abandon binary oppositions. Rather, the idea is that if you are truly intelligent and understand everything correctly, you can control reality with your brain.

This, too, looks like progress: there are these social technologies, and the smartest people can shape reality into whatever form they wish. This logic led Sergeytsev to write his notorious column “What Russia Should Do with Ukraine.” For him, the “denazification” of Ukraine is a technological task: give me the order, and I will figure out how to denazify Ukraine.

The first thing people usually ask when they hear about Shchedrovitsky’s teaching is: methodology of what? But there is no “of what” – it is a methodology of everything.

Still, some of these ideas are applied quite successfully in management – at least in Russia. The Soviet Union was very poorly positioned to absorb management theory. What is taught in Western business schools was taught in a rather obscure way in the USSR, yet management tasks always existed. Large corporations, cities and other complex systems have to be managed.

The problem, as so often in Russian culture, is the scale and the desire to universalize everything. Perhaps this is partly a legacy of Soviet Marxism. Our Marxists believed they had discovered universal laws and therefore the method they had mastered was the highest form of knowledge. If you have mastered dialectics, it no longer matters whether you study physics or build a factory – the key thing is that you possess this super method.

The Methodologists likewise believed they had a super method with which they could solve any problem. And indeed, they solved some problems quite well: one of them was, at one time, a successful political strategist, because in a world with no technologies, people who can organize the work of promoting a candidate can achieve real success. It is not complete nonsense.

The Methodologists and their emergence on the Russian political scene are, at least, explainable. What is harder to understand is the influence of philosopher Alexander Dugin. How do you explain it?

In interviews, Dugin says quite openly that he is a man who read René Guénon and Julius Evola, believed in their ideas and then directed all his considerable intellectual energy toward maximally refining that construct and tying everything else into it. He is like a hoarder, someone who can never throw anything out.

There is a liberal humanist idea he cannot stand, and he discards it. Everything else possible he links to traditionalism. He likes new audiences: in the 1990s, he was involved with the National Bolsheviks, and now he has found resonance among Trump supporters worldwide.

I recently saw his banner on Facebook – it featured Charlie Kirk and Daria Dugina, two “martyrs for the faith” in this terrible modern world. It seems to me that Dugin stands firmly on these foundations and dreams of a world truly imbued with the spirit. He considers himself one of the initiates who has experienced revelation.

There is no external point from which one could declare him wrong, because he exists within a very consistent, complicated system. Whichever way you turn within it, you end up in the same place – at the final apocalyptic struggle between true spirituality and soulless materialism, a struggle that must be waged to the end.

An inevitable question: what influence have the ideas you describe had on the country’s history? When Soviet historians discuss Marxist ideology, it is understandable – the Soviet government itself declared it was guided by that ideology. But the ideas of your protagonists are not formalized into a single system, and most of those who articulate them cannot directly implement them – they do not have the right rank. Of your nine heroes, only Patrushev has had the opportunity to convey his views personally to Putin. How did the worldviews your protagonists represent shape events and become reality?

As Oxxxymiron sang, everything is connected. I am not much of a fan of Kremlinology and do not think Putin is a Methodologist who controls reality. I believe reality is cocreated by many people.

When Murz goes to fight in the Donbas, he influences reality: he takes up arms or helps those who have taken up arms to kill others. Similarly, Nabiullina influences what happens in the Russian economy through her key rate decisions. Mikhail Vasiliev, with his preaching, influences what soldiers do, feel and think. And so on.

I do not claim that my protagonists are the most influential people in Russia. Rather, I imagine a large corporation, called Russia, in which my protagonists are shareholders. Their stakes vary – some are very small, others larger. They may not be majority owners, but each of my protagonists has taken actions in pursuit of their vision of the future. They did not stand aside.

As a historian of Stalinism, I have always been more concerned not with why Stalin decided to execute so many people, but with why some NKVD officer, on his own, would brutally torture people he arrested. All these ideas and practices – they come from somewhere.

It is a mistake to think that if Putin were to change his mind now, everything would go back to how it should be. It would not, because the ideas and practices I write about live much longer and spread in different ways. The experience of life under Putinism will not disappear. It cannot be erased by a decision from above.

How would you define the status of your research? Is it history, intellectual history or the history of ideologies?

That is a hard question. I suppose this book is a mixture of intellectual history, a love letter to my wife and an autobiography. I am very grateful to my wife, Vera, whose support and love made this book frightening but not hopeless. At least, I do not think it is hopeless.

I am used to thinking that there are historians who write history books in which their personal biographies – and especially their love for their wives – play no part. But that is not my case.