| Publication |
2006.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a Russian Orthodox monk nominated Russia as the 'Third Rome', or successor to the Roman and Byzantine empires. Some analysts have seen Muscovite Third Romism (that allegedly persisted into the Bolshevik era of the Soviet Union) as the Russian equivalent of the USA's Manifest Destiny, and other concepts used to rationalise imperialism.
This paper attempts to broaden and deepen similar interpretations of the major geopolitical dictum coming from Russian Orthodoxy: questionably a direct justification for Russian imperialist messianism and far from being just a feature of the past, this metaphor is an essential element of post-imperial Russian geopolitical discourse as evident in its usage in writings of politically diverse authors. The paper focuses on resurrections of the metaphor in post-imperial Russia nowadays, and, ultimately, broadens our understanding of 'religion as geopolitics' nexus by presenting the too frequently overlooked field of Russian Orthodoxy-related geopolitics.
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