Tolkien’s Orcs, and the Identification of Russians with Them, Key to Understanding Putin’s Country, Savvin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 12—References to Orcs, the evil characters of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, have increased in frequency in Russian society since the start of Vladimir Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, although the words is typically dismissed as nothing more than a term of abuse, Dimitry Savvin says.

            But in fact, they provide extraordinarily valuable keys to the understanding of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society, given that many Russians now view Orcs as something positive, according to the editor of the conservative Russian Harbin portal based in Riga (harbin.lv/obraz-orka-v-tvorchestve-tolkina-i-sovetskaya-identichnost).

            Tolkien’s positive heroes are representatives of what he recognized as the passing of peasant societies, with all their myths, Savvin says. Indeed, he saw as something fundamentally evil the rise of industrial society and the kind of people who became “the servants of darkness,” the Orcs.

            Soviet ideology celebrated “the so-called working class” as the “most progressive and most creative” political force, although those who knew it best could see how its members, who were after all yesterday’s peasants who had passed through urbanization and industrialization were in fact anything but the positive role models the CPSU claimed to see.

            According to Savvin, orcs, whether in Tolkien’s novels or among Russians who identify as such, “are incapable of creating anything beautiful and have no need to do so; but they are skilled in the manufacture of machines and especially of weapons.” Moreover, the two groups share a common morality.

            On the one hand, he says, hey “value discipline and slavishly obey ‘the Master,’ even though deep down they hate their superiors and dream of escaping from them so that they can live freely and “kill ‘for pleasure’” while “making easy money from ‘suckers’” who give in to them.

            What is striking, the conservative Russian wrier says, is that in the 1990s, an ever larger number of Russian writers began to present the Orcs as something “positive,” the victims of aggression by others; and such identification and the attitudes on which it is based have only intensified in the Putin years.

            “Classical Sovietism,” Savvin writes, “attempted to conceal its dark side, to hide and hush up its crimes; but in the 2000s, a major, systemic shift occurred” fir from below and then with the support of the bosses who saw the self-identification of Russians as Orcs as benefitting their rulers.

            “Neo-Sovietism ceased to be assumed of its immorality, its crimes and its sadism,” the Russian conservative says. “Instead of denigrating ‘warrior liberators, they began to display a demonstrative drive ‘to Berlin for the German women.’ Instead of ‘we are for peace,’ they shouted ‘we can do it again.’”

            In short, the surviving Soviet people “no longer want to pretend” they are anything but Orcs; and as a result, “being an Orc is no longer an insult: it is now a source of pride” and a recognition of just how alike the Russian people of the Putin era are to Tolkien’s Orcs.