Patriarch Kirill’s new book turns Russia’s war into a sacred battle against evil. We read it so you don’t have to.

In late July, the Moscow Patriarchate’s publishing house released Patriarch Kirill’s new book, Za predelami vidimykh prichin i sledstviy (“War. Beyond Visible Causes and Effects”). Meduza asked Ilya Venyavkin, author of Khram voiny (“The Temple of War”) — a book about the ideas that made Russia’s invasion of Ukraine possible — to read it and explain the ideology Kirill lays out and how he justifies the war.

In the fifth year of the full-scale war, Russia’s political regime finds itself in a somewhat peculiar position. Nearly all the infrastructure for ideological control is already in place. The state bans and blocks independent media, and it hands down real prison sentences — sometimes enormous ones — for antiwar statements.

Meanwhile, a kind of contest has been underway for several years now over who can best articulate the ideology of the new militarized state. Vladimir Medinsky writes school history textbooks that cast the war with Ukraine as the latest chapter in Russia’s centuries-old confrontation with the West. The political bloc of Russia’s Presidential Administration has overseen the creation of a mandatory university course called “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood”, complete with its own concept of Russia as a distinct “civilization-state,” its own set of values, and a special chapter devoted to the “image of the future.” New exhibitions and monuments to “heroes of the SVO” keep appearing across the country.

But the state is still better at banning things than at making meaning. It has learned to explain what cannot be said and whom to treat as an enemy — but it struggles far more to explain exactly what society should live, fight, and die for.

Patriarch Kirill’s new book, Voyna. Za predelami vidimykh prichin i sledstviy “War: Beyond Visible Causes and Effects,” could be a contender for a prominent place in that contest. It contains nearly every ingredient of official ideology: Orthodoxy, Russia’s special path, traditional values, a soulless West. But making sense of it means wading through constant repetition, bureaucratic language, and an almost complete absence of narrative. The book is unlikely to find many readers, but it offers a clear window into how Russian state ideology gets made today.

How the book is put together

Patriarch Kirill did not, strictly speaking, write this book. Editors assembled the text from fragments of his sermons, reports, and public speeches.

One chapter shows how the method works. “The Religious Dimension of the Ukrainian Conflict” reads like a single, unified argument, but it is actually stitched together from five large fragments. It opens with part of Kirill’s report to the Moscow Diocesan Assembly on December 22, 2022, then jumps nearly two years ahead to a report he gave at the World Russian People’s Council on November 28, 2024. From there it goes back to a Bishops’ Council meeting on July 19, 2023, then forward again to that same November 2024 session of the World Russian People’s Council, before ending with an address to participants in the “Time of Heroes” program on November 3, 2024. The editor mechanically stitched the chunks together, trimming little more than a few introductory words.

This technique wasn’t invented for a book about the war. The publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate has long put out books credited to Kirill that are assembled the same way. In 2017, Vladimir Terebikhin, an expert with the Komi Republic regional branch of United Russia, compiled a 456-page Kirill book titled O smyslakh “On Meanings,” drawing on more than 250 sources. In an address to the reader, he laid out the method in the simplest terms: the patriarch’s statements had been grouped by topic. Terebikhin, who also assembled the material for War, specializes in this genre — using the same method, he once produced a compendium of presidential statements titled Vladimir Putin: glavnoye dlya nas — eto lyudi “Vladimir Putin: The Most Important Thing for Us Is People.”

This method has an obvious advantage: decades of public speeches can be turned into a “book” on almost any subject fairly quickly. It has an equally obvious drawback. A report addressed to bishops and a speech to participants in the “Time of Heroes” program each existed in their own context, aimed at their own audience. String large chunks of these speeches together, and the context disappears while the repetition remains. The argument doesn’t develop so much as it starts over again and again. Kirill keeps returning to the same words — sacrifice, heroism, evil, victory, homeland, faith — so the text unfolds less like an argument than a mantra.

That kind of editing strips the book of contemporary texture — no places, dates, living people, political decisions, or specific episodes of the war. The word “Ukraine” itself doesn’t appear until page 177. The war Russia is actually waging turns out to be less a subject in its own right than an occasion to talk about something bigger.

What war, then, is the book about?

First and foremost, about World War II — what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War. For Kirill, it isn’t simply the most important event of the twentieth century; it’s something closer to a key to all of Russian history. He asks readers to see it not as a military or political conflict, but as sacred history. In his telling, the war became the Soviet people’s atonement for the anti-religious campaigns of the early post-revolutionary decades, and the military turning point after the catastrophe of 1941 came because the Soviet people cast off atheist ideology and returned to true Christian faith.

Kirill doesn’t abandon the Soviet cult of Victory — he simply overlays it with a religious reading: “We can say with confidence that in a war that takes on sacred meaning, self-sacrifice becomes a co-crucifixion, an ascent to the Cross, and even for nonbelievers, military heroism became an act filled with religious meaning.”

In this framework, the religious meaning of a death is determined not by the dead person’s own faith, but by what he was fighting for. That’s why Kirill writes with particular irritation about “blasphemous” historians who argue that some Soviet soldiers went into battle out of fear or under compulsion.

World War II is the main example, but not the only one. The book applies the same logic to other wars from Russian history — the Russo-Turkish wars, World War I, the conflict in Yugoslavia — turning all of them into episodes of one larger story in which Russia again and again sacrifices itself to defend Christianity and justice.

If Russia has been fighting the same war for centuries, then its enemies become embodiments of the same evil wearing different masks. Eras, states, and armies change, but the structure of the conflict stays constant: on one side stands the “Christ-loving army,” and on the other, forces threatening the Christian faith and Russia’s very existence.

That’s why Kirill has no need to explain the current war in Ukraine through its immediate causes. “Our present struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against […] the rulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 6:12). I say this boldly, with full confidence that Russia is on the side of light.”

Numerous illustrations reinforce this whole construction. The text is constantly interspersed with icons and religious paintings, works by Russian and Soviet battle painters, images from World War II, and contemporary artists’ depictions of the “war.” Saint George the Victorious, Minin and Pozharsky, the defenders of the Brest Fortress, Givi, and Motorola all appear together in the same visual sequence.

The illustrations do to the images what the editing does to the text: they erase the distance between eras, so different armies, regimes, and wars come to look like episodes of the same sacred story.

What does Kirill offer the reader of the book?

Like many ideologues convinced that only their own worldview reveals genuine reality, Kirill invites readers to adopt a new way of seeing — to view what’s happening not through the lens of politics, economics, or military strategy, but through the lens of salvation.

In this framework, the causes and effects that make sense to ordinary common sense become secondary. Command errors, “meat-grinder assaults,” and the burning warehouses of Wildberries belong to a lower order of reality. They can be discussed, but they say nothing about the spiritual meaning of what’s happening.

The “Paschal dimension,” as Kirill calls it, lets the whole of Russian history be seen differently. Stalin’s crimes nearly dissolve against the backdrop of the church’s partial rehabilitation in 1943, while the only head of state to draw contempt in the book is Nikita Khrushchev, whom Kirill calls a “deranged ruler” for promising to build communism by 1980. What matters isn’t the scale of mass violence, but its significance for the history of salvation — whether a ruler brought the people closer to faith or tried once again to pull them away from it.

If history is judged through the lens of salvation, then the individual is judged by his readiness for self-sacrifice. The book admiringly describes the Soviet soldier’s ability to walk toward certain death, to stand before a wall of fire, and to sacrifice himself for others. Kirill writes:

The distinction between a martyr who dies for the faith and a soldier who dies on his commanders’ orders disappears.

In Kirill’s telling, readiness for self-sacrifice is what separates the Russian warrior — and the Russian person generally — from his Western counterpart. The former can give up his own life for the homeland and for higher values; the latter is absorbed in individualism, comfort, and consumption, and treats human life as an unconditional value.

A political conclusion follows: if Russia, by its very nature, cannot wage an unjust war, and its adversaries are always manifestations of the same metaphysical evil, then the absence of victory can’t be explained by the war itself being a mistake. That leaves only one other explanation: society hasn’t yet been mobilized enough.

Kirill says as much directly: “Russia faces the task of emerging victorious from the struggle that the forces of evil have unleashed against us. […] Mobilization is needed of everyone: the army, the political forces, and, of course, first and foremost the Church must be mobilized.”

That’s how the book’s whole construction comes together: readers are invited first to stop judging the war by its visible causes and consequences, then to accept sacrifice as the highest expression of human dignity, and finally to agree that the only answer to the absence of victory is even greater mobilization.

In this system, freedom stops meaning the ability to choose one’s own life and one’s own beliefs. True freedom becomes the ability to submit voluntarily to the common struggle and, if necessary, to sacrifice oneself to it.

Will this book become required ideological reading?

Probably not. In its current form, the text is too poorly crafted to become genuinely popular reading — it’s tautological and has no plot. It’s hard to imagine anyone finishing it out of curiosity or passing it along to a friend as a revelation.

But that may not be a problem for the political regime. The experience of the Stalinist 1930s shows that producing ideology can matter for the process itself, not just the final result. Back then, writers, historians, party theorists, and cultural institutions competed with one another to propose the correct way to describe the past, present, and future. Out of that competition, a shared repertoire of acceptable narratives and rhetorical formulas gradually emerged — even though no single text ever became canonical.

In today’s Russia, that incompleteness may be especially functional. As long as the ideology stays fluid, Vladimir Putin keeps for himself the role of final interpreter. Only he can say, definitively, what history demands of Russia today: whether the fight must continue until complete victory, or whether the time has come to talk about a ceasefire.

Patriarch Kirill’s book doesn’t need to become popular. It already serves another purpose: giving the Russian Orthodox Church a ready-made language for explaining the war to parishioners. In this picture of the world, Russia stands on the side of light, the war has sacred meaning, dying for the Motherland is indistinguishable from Christian sacrifice, and the absence of victory demands further mobilization.

That’s why the book deserves to be taken seriously — not because Kirill has created a convincing ideology of war, but because a doctrine has already taken shape inside one of the country’s largest and most influential institutions, one that lets death in war be presented as a path to the highest virtue. A dangerous book doesn’t need to be good literature.