Kremlin Drawing on Sergianism and National Bolshevism to Promote ‘Russian World’ as Centerpiece of Its Ideology, Savvin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 14 – Putin has been drawing on Sergianism, an Orthodox doctrine articulated in the 1920s that the faithful should support even the Soviet state, and National Bolshevism, which held that Russians should support even the communists, to promote patriotism and his notion of “a Russian world,” Dimitry Savvin says.

            The conservative Russian writer who edits the Riga-based Harbin portal makes that argument in a detailed English-language article in the latest issue of the Warsaw Eastern Law Review (1(5)(2025): 101-141). He has now posted the Russian original on his website (harbin.lv/sergianstvo-natsional-bolshevizm-neosovetizm).

            Like the Russian state itself, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate did not undergo any lustration at the time of the fall of communism. It ceased to be loyal to Marxism-Leninism, which had ceased to be the state ideology; but it developed a new and equally close relationship with the state by drawing on Sergianism and National Bolshevism.

            By doing so, Savvin says, as early as 1992, the Moscow patriarchate and the Kremlin began “to form a neo-Soviet model of church-state relations, in the framework of which the ROC MP was to be in fact the only permitted Orthodox Church. That led to increased persecution of independent Orthodox inside Russia and its absorption of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.

            The absorption of the ROCA was especially important to the Putin regime because it represented “an attempt to win” the Russian Civil War which ended in most places in 1921. Hitherto independent and rejecting Sergianism, the ROC gave up on both thus destroying what had been the most important White Russian organization and hopes for rejecting the Soviet past.

            Savvin writes: “The path, which began in 1922, was completed by the Soviet-Neo-Soviet triumph in 2007; And if one evaluates these events from that perspective, the colossal activity which Putin personally and the entire state apparatus devoted to it becomes completely understandable.”

            By so doing, “the neo-Soviet system strengthened its victory in the Civil War which until then had continued in an ideological and spiritual sphere.” And that allowed Putin to promote both his single stream of Russian history and his ideas about a unified “Russian world” in which all were to be loyal to the Kremlin.

            According to Savvin, “the spiritual-ideological defeat of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 2007 became the start of a new stage of church-state relations in the Russian Federation. Before that, “the Russian Church Abroad remained an alternative to neo-Sergianism and neo-Soviet discourse” and thus acted as a “restraining factor” on the Kremlin and the MP.

            That allowed Putin to promote his idea of “a Russian world” without the serious competition that the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad had posed and even to include within that concept ideas drawn from the National Bolsheviks from the 1920s like Nikolay Ustryalov. That combination sparked a dramatic expansion in the Russian world idea well beyond the church.

            And that in turn means, Savvin suggests, that the defeat of independent Orthodox churches within the Russian Federation and the surrender of the ROCA to the Moscow Patriarchate marked a major step forward in Putin’s ideological campaign – and not a marginal development as many have thought up to now.