While most countries in the world are dismantling monuments to tyrants, Russia is erecting statues with its famous medieval despots. Understanding the causes of this medieval "revival" allows shedding light on the current direction of Russian politics, writes Professor Lingua Professor of Russian Language and Literature at the College of Modern Languages ??of the Georgia Institute of Technology Dean Khapaev.

In October 2016, with the approval of the Minister of Culture of Russia, Vladimir Medinsky, the first in the history of the country, a monument to Ivan the Terrible. A month later, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the ultranationalist Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, called for the renaming of Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow on the highway of Ivan the Terrible. And in July this year, President Vladimir Putin himself honored this tyrant by making a (false) statement, as if "it is not yet known whether he killed his son or not. Many researchers believe that he did not kill anyone at all ".

Most historians agree that Ivan the Fourth was quite consistent with the nickname given to him; that he not only killed his son and other relatives, but also created oprichnina - the state repressive system that terrorized Russia from 1565 to 1572. He also led Russia to defeat in the Livonian War; his poor rule contributed to the onset of the Time of Troubles and the colossal desolation of the country.

The modern cult of Ivan the Terrible began to be created by Joseph Stalin. And in the mid-2000s, the Russian "Eurasia" party, a political movement led by pro-fascist mystic Alexander Dugin, began to position Ivan the Terrible as the best embodiment of the "authentic" Russian tradition - an autocratic monarchy.

Dugin's "Eurasianism" calls for a "new Middle Ages" in which all little that remains of Russian democracy will be replaced by a society of estates. In the ideal future of Dugin, the medieval social order will return to the country, the empire will be restored, and the Orthodox Church will gain control over culture and education.

The movement of Eurasians was marginal in the 1990s, but it gained considerable popularity in recent years, contributing to the formation of the so-called Izborsk Club, which unites the far-right forces of Russia. Several times Putin mentioned Eurasianism as an important part of Russian ideology; he even called it a fundamental principle of the "Eurasian Economic Union," a fast-growing trade zone that includes several former Soviet republics.

Eurasianism became a platform on which ultranationalist groupings could unite. And it attracted new legions of support for the symbols of terror - Ivan the Terrible and Stalin.

The main among them were the members of the Eurasia party, which regards political terror as the most effective instrument of state administration and calls for a "new oprichnina" - the anti-Western, Eurasian conservative revolution. According to Mikhail Yuryev, a member of the political council of Eurasia and the author of the utopian novel The Third Empire, oprichniks should be the only political class, and they must rule, relying on fear.

Ivan the Terrible is not the only medieval rudiment to be revived now in Russia. Returns and the cultural dictionary. For example, in everyday speech the word "servant" returned meaning "slave, serf" - this linguistic regression is accompanied by the alarming growth of modern slavery in Russia. According to the Global Slavery Index, more than a million Russians are now in actual slavery in the construction industry, in the army, in agriculture, and in sexual slavery. Moreover, there are those who gladly identify themselves with future bars.

Even Russian officials say approvingly of serfdom. Valery Zorkin, chairman of the Constitutional Court, wrote in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official government body, that serfdom was Russia's "main staple". Another medieval term - "the people of the sovereign", which translates as "servants of His Majesty" - became popular among high-ranking bureaucrats.

Nostalgia for serfdom is supplemented by the desire to restore autocracy. Prominent Russian intellectuals, including film director Nikita Mikhalkov, journalist Maxim Sokolov and priest of the Russian Orthodox Church Vsevolod Chaplin, call for the coronation of Putin, and petitions in support of this idea are typing on the Internet. It is significant that the protests against Putin's regime in 2012 were interpreted not only as protests against Putin, but also as protests against the public order, which the Eurasians dream of.

Putin's silent support for the Eurasian concept of neo-medieval Russia appeals to historical recollections of Stalinism.

According to Dugin, Stalin created the Soviet empire, and like Ivan the Terrible, he "expresses the spirit of the Soviet people, Soviet society". Not surprisingly, Stalin's monuments also began to appear in Russian cities.

The origins of the new Middle Ages are rooted in nostalgia for a social order based on inequality, castes, clans and terror. The glorification of historical despots is the consequence of supporting these radically anti-democratic, unjust values. For contemporary admirers of Ivan the Terrible, it is precisely such a past that is the key to their vision of the future.