As of September 2025, Russian high school and high school students will receive a new textbook entitled “My family.”
Published in March 2025, the co-author of the textbook, Nina Ostanina, president of the State Duma Committee for Family Protection, states that she will teach students “traditional moral values” that will improve “the demographic situation in the country” as part of a “family studies” course that was implemented in the 2024-2025 school year.
But some of those lessons for modern life come from a less than modern source. Among the materials taken from “My family” is the “Domostroi” of the 16th century, a collection of rules to maintain the patriarchal domestic order. It was supposedly written by Silvestre, a monk-tutor of the Tsar Iván the Terrible.
As expected, some teachings of “Domostroi” seem to be out of line with current sensibilities. For example, it establishes that it is the right of a father to coerce, if necessary by force, to his home – at that moment, this referred to both relatives and slaves – according to orthodox dogmas.
“Husbands should teach their wives with love and exemplary instruction,” says one of the domostroi appointments repeated in the textbook.
“The wives ask their husbands about the strict order, how to save their souls, please God already their husbands, fix their home well and undergo their husbands in all matters; and what the husband orders, must agree with love and fulfill him according to his commandments,” reads another extract
The use of “Domostroi” in the textbook refers to the past and evokes the current government policy of decriminalizing family violence. A 2017 law, for example, eliminated the “aggression to nearby people” of the list of criminal crimes.
It also adjusts to a wider pattern. As a student of Historical Memory, I have observed that the references to the Russian Middle Ages are part of the broader policy of the Kremlin to use the medieval past to justify the current agendas, something that I have called “political neomedievalism.”
In fact, the government of President Vladimir Putin is actively giving priority to the initiatives that use medieval Russia as a model for the country’s future. In doing so, the Kremlin joins a dream long fed from the extreme Russian right with a broader search for the satisfaction of Russian imperial ambitions.
Blankeo of Iván the Terrible
In February 2025, just one month before “My family” was published, the Government of the Russian region of Vologda, home of more than 1 million people, established a non -governmental organization called “La Oprichnina.”
The organization has the task of “promoting Russian identity” and “developing the moral education of young people.”
But the name of the group evokes the first reign of brutal terror of state in the history of Russia. Oprichnina was a state policy unleashed by Iván the terrible between 1565 and 1572 to establish its unlimited power over the country. The Oprichniks were Ivan’s personal guard, which tied a dog’s head and a broom to their mounts to show that they were the “dogs” of the Tsar that swept the betrayal.
Foreign chroniclers and travelers left stories of sadistic torture and mass executions that were carried out with the participation of Iván. The Opríchniks raped and dismembered women, broke or boiled live men and burned children. In this frenzy of violence, they massacred thousands of innocent people.
Iván’s reign led to a period known as the “Time of Problems”, marked by famine and military defeat. Some scholars estimate that, at the end of that year, Russia lost almost two thirds of its population.
Throughout the history of Russia, Iván the Terrible, who among other crimes murdered his eldest son and made strangle the head of the Russian Orthodox Church for Disidence, was remembered as a repulsive tyrant.
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However, since the mid -2000s, when the Russian government of Putin took an increasingly authoritarian turn, Iván and its terror have undergone a reassessment process promoted by the State.
The Kremlin and its representatives of the extreme right now paint Ivan as a great statesman and a devout Russian Orthodox Christian who laid the foundations of the Russian empire.
Before that alteration of Russian historical memory, only another Russian head of state had had Iván in such a high esteem: Josef Stalin.
Even so, there were no public monuments to Iván until 2016, when Putin officials revealed the first of the three bronze statues dedicated to terrible tsar. However, the film propaganda exceeded Iván’s commemoration in stone. According to my calculations, from 2009 to 2022, 12 films and television series sponsored by the State that paid tribute to Iván the Terrible and his government were broadcast during the maximum audience hours in the Russian television channels.
Russian revisionism
Iván’s post -Ssovietic rehabilitation dates back to the writings of Iván Snychov, the high -ranking metropolitan bishop of St. Petersburg and Aparoga. His book, “The Autocracy of the Spirit”, published in 1994, gave rise to a fundamentalist sect known as “Tsarebezhie” or neo-oprichnina. Tsarebozhie asks for the return to an autocratic monarchy, an orders society and the canonization of all Russian tsars. The belief that the Russian state power is “sacred” – a central dogma of the sect – was reaffirmed on April 18, 2025 by Alexander Kharichev, an official of the Putin presidential administration, in an article that has been compared to an instruction manual for the “Putinism builder”.
The Canonization of Iván The Terrible in particular is a priority for the members of this sect. And although the Russian Orthodox Church has not yet canonized Iván, Tsarebozhie has obtained a significant support from Russian priests, politicians and laity equally. His efforts are located next to Putin’s pressure to give Iván public support. Not by chance, Putin Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appointed Iván the Terrible among one of the three “most confidence advisors” of Putin.
In Snychov’s world vision, Russians are a messianic people, part of an imperial nation that is solely responsible for avoiding the domination of the world by Satan. In its explicitly anti-Semitic pseudo-historical, oprichnina is described as a “holy monastic order” directed by a “pious zar”.
Since the 1930s, when Stalin used Iván to justify his own repressions, Iván and Stalin – Oprichnina and Stalinism – became historical doubles. Ivan’s cover -up by Kremlin goes hand in hand with Stalin’s rehabilitation as commander in chief of the Soviet Union in World War II by Putin.
Promoting the cult of the “Great Patria War” – as World War II has been officially called since the Soviet period – has been fundamental for the militarization of Russian society by Putin and part of the propaganda effort to promote support for the invasion of Ukraine. The remorse for the loss of the empire and the desire to restore it underlies Moscow’s speech during the last two decades.
Medieval threat to democracy
The rhetoric of the acquittal of Stalinism goes hand in hand with the popularization of the state version of the Russian Middle Ages through the public media channels.
Putin’s Neomedieval policy has adopted the belief of the Russian extreme right that the country must return to the traditions of the medieval Rus, as existed before the westernization reforms undertaken by Pedro el Grande in the early 18th century.
In the last 15 years, Russian viewers have received an average of two films financed by the State per month, in which the benefits of Russian medieval society are announced and the lords of the Russian medieval war are praised.
This use of Russian historical memory has allowed Putin to normalize its use of state violence abroad and in the country and mobilize support for opposition repression. The main objective of political neomedievalism is to legitimize the enormous social and economic inequalities in postsovietic society as part of Russia’s national heritage.
To serve the purpose of undermining the rule of law and democratic freedoms, as demonstrated by my research, the Kremlin and its representatives have promoted the Russian Middle Ages – with its theocratic monarchy, society of estates, slavery, servitude and repression – as an alternative sponsored by the State to democracy.
*Dina Khapaeva is a professor of cultural studies at the Technological Institute of Georgia
This article was originally published in The Conversation/Reuters.
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