Putin is Russia’s ‘God-Given “Vozhd”’ Now, Patriarch Kirill Declares

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 21 – In his Epiphany message on January 19, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill declared that Vladimir Putin is now Russia’s vozhd or leader, using a loaded term Russians earlier employed for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and likely signaling that the Kremlin will now support its application to the Russian president. 

            “The head of our state is an Orthodox, genuinely not formally but by conviction, Orthodox leader [vozhd], ad that of course testifies to the fact that a miracle of God has occurred, Patriarch Kirill declared in his homily on the Feast of the Epiphany at Moscow’s Yelokhovo Cathedral (patriarchia.ru/article/119296).

            Commenting on this innovation and its meaning, Aleksandr Soldatov, a Russian journalist who writes frequently on religious issues, points out that in Kirill’s message, “there was not a word about the spiritual or theological content of this holiday” and violating Orthodox tradition about the use of the word vozhd (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/01/21/vozhd-dlia-patriarkha).

            “In the Orthodox tradition,” the journalist continues, it isn’t “customary to entitle the head of state as ‘the leader.” But there are exceptions and “the most famous precedent” for this use of the term was the ROC MP’s use of it regarding Stalin when after he restored the church referred to him as “a God-given leader.”

            It certainly appears that Kirill is “building a historical bridge” between the way in which the ROC MP referred to Stalin and the way the current patriarch suggests Russians should think about Putin, Soldatov suggests. Indeed, even after Stalin turned against the church in the late 1940s, church leaders continued to refer to him as the vozhd.

            Soldatov notes that there is one especially significant detail: Kirill made this suggestion about Putin as vozhd in exactly the same cathedral where his predecessor had done so on Stalin’s 70^th birthday.  Now that Kirill has done so, other Russians are likely to refer to Putin in this way, the same way they referred to Stalin before that dictator’s death.