In his newest book, Putin’s Holy War: Sacred Memory and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Griffin reconstructs the career arc of Patriarch Kirill (Gundiaev), the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, and documents his controversial role in the invasion of Ukraine. The project is not simply a journalistic chronicle of events, however, and neither is it primarily an intervention in the study of ideology, conservatism, or nationalism. Rather, what emerges in the book is a still deeper and more ancient form of political group-making. Today it is often called fake news or disinformation, but in previous eras it was described as myth, memory, and ritual. The project focuses on the sacred stories that human beings repeatedly tell themselves to create imagined political communities—on the stories that form the deepest paradigms of personal, national, and imperial identity. Griffin suggests that these archaic paradigms have not vanished from the contemporary world but continue to play a visible role in global politics. By indoctrinating imperial paradigms in the hearts and minds of the Russian people, the Kremlin has been able to manufacture an alternate information universe—an ideological space in which western liberal perspectives are challenged and inverted. A place where black becomes white, up becomes down, and where Russian bombs can rip through the bodies of Ukrainian civilians in the name of “liberation”, “brotherhood”, and “traditional values”. Ultimately, therefore, Putin’s Holy War is about the myths that governments generate to justify their own violence and sacralize the mass murder of other human beings. It is a book about how political elites take the figures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and make from them the gods of war.

An article based on a chapter of the book—entitled ‘Revolution, Raskol, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The 1020th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’—was awarded the Eve Levin Prize for the best article published in The Russian Review in 2021. Meanwhile, a second article, ‘Putin’s Holy War of the Fatherland: Sacred Memory and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine’ was recently published in a special edition of The Russian Review.

Funding for the project has been awarded by the ACLS/Luce Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. The book will be published with Cornell University Press.