ABSTRACT
Why was the glorification of the Russian Middle Ages dismissed as a marginal occurrence in post-Soviet politics before the war against Ukraine? The Introduction considers how the discourse on Putin as a rational politician who advances Russian national interests underestimated the impact of far-right neomedievalism on the Kremlin’s politics. Positing that an understanding of Russian history, memory, and culture is impossible outside of the global context, the Introduction retraces the intercultural dialogue between Russia and the West and the pro- and anti-Western controversy within Russia from the eighteenth century to the present day. Recurring disillusionment with the West and social progress have fostered the Russian fascination with medieval Rus. The admiration of the Russian Middle Ages harbored by the nineteenth-century Slavophiles and the early-twentieth-century Eurasian thinkers provides a background against which to assess the novelty of the Kremlin’s neomedieval memory politics. The crisis of the pro-Western ideology that struck in the late 1990s further prepared the ground for the rise of political neomedievalism in Putin’s Russia.
