Mapping ‘Holy Russia’:
Ideology and Utopia in Contemporary Russian Orthodoxy
Mikhail D. Suslov
Institute for Cultural Research (Moscow)
The Russian Orthodox Church, headed by Patriarch Kirill, an ambitious intellectual and political figure, is emerging in today’s Russia not only as a political player of nation-wide importance, but also as a representative of probably the only agency which can lend ideological meaning, aim and the sense of purpose to the government’s policies. Dr. Suslov approaches the central concept and metaphor in Kirill’s discourses on ‘Holy Russia’, in the context of the Russian intellectual history. In this presentation Mikhail Suslov will discuss the political imagination of the highest church hierarchs through mapping ‘Holy Russia’ as a specific spatial and temporal construct. Refraining from normative analysis, Dr. Suslov assesses ‘Holy Russia’s’ ideological potential to renovate traditional political philosophy in Russia and to stimulate creative thinking.
Mikhail D. Suslov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Russian Institute for Cultural Research (Moscow) and a visiting researcher at the Uppsala Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. His PhD thesis, defended at the European University Institute in 2009, deals with geopolitical utopianism in Russian history and political culture. His publications in Kritika, Russian History, Ab Imperio, Revolutionary Russia, Acta Slavica Iaponica, Demokratizatsiya and other international journals analyze various ideological manifestations of Russian (geo)political imagination. Dr. Suslov discusses, the means by which ideological constellations ‘newness enters’ into the Russian intellectual history. Mikhail Suslov is on a 5-month CEU Research Fellowship awarded by CEU's Special and Extension Program.
Tuesday, 22 May, 17:30
Nádor 11. Hanák 001