Putin Opening the Way to ‘Creeping Islamization’ of Russian Traditional Values, Furman Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 21 – At his recent open line press conference, Vladimir Putin declared that “all the peoples of the Russian Federation have common traditional values” and that God “doesn’t know that people on earth are divided into various churches” because it doesn’t matter what faith one has, “when people together are being shot at.”

            Such an approach appears to lie behind efforts in the Duma to impose fines on those who discredit whatever the Kremlin believes are “traditional values” and work in the Kremlin itself to create an ideology embracing both Orthodox Christianity and Islam, commentator Lera Furman says (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/12/21/krestom-i-polumesiatsem-po-traditsionnym-tsennostiam).

            That the Kremlin is moving in this direction, she says, is suggested by a telegram channel post by Kirill Kabanov, the head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, who says that “technologists in the Kremlin are seriously working on the integration of Islamic components in ‘the national spiritual-moral values” of Russia (t.me/kabanovkv/6450).

            According to Kabanov, “it has become clear why the state still cannot give a firm rebuff to the radical Islamism spreading throughout the country” and that “at the very top” of the Russian political system, it has been recognized that “the main vector of the new traditionalism’ is the East, Eurasianism, and the Golden Horde” because of “decadence” in Christianity.

            Furman says that her sources “believe that the Kabanov leak may have originated with Sergey Karaganov, a veteran of Putin’s geopolitical thinking, a professor at the Higher School of Economics and the long-time chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy” who has written about the need to make a radical turn to the east.

            “Among other things,” Furmanov says, “’creeping Islamization,’ not at the level of non-religious practices but in the format of the ideology of ‘common traditional values’ is now considered by the authorities as an antidote to the inevitably anti-immigrant sentiments that may flare up in the event of a mass return” of veterans from the war in Ukraine.

            Many Orthodox Christians and even more Russian nationalists will be appalled and infuriated by such a development, Furman suggests; but the official hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate has shown that it is willing to “accept anything” that the Kremlin asks for – and so it will likely go along.

            After all, Patriarch Kirill once declared that Putin himself had once said that “we are closer to Islam,” adding that he thinks that too. (On the complicated relationship of Islam and Orthodoxy in Kremlin thinking and its potential to backfire among Russians, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/02/moscow-patriarchate-said-opening-way.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/05/russian-orthodox-patriarchs-words.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/06/rise-of-orthodox-russian-nationalism.html.)