Sacralisation, memory politics and a conclusion
The Orthodox Church's role, Victory Day memory politics, and why this is a political religion rather than a diagnosis of a people.
The sacralisation of military death
The Russian Orthodox Church adds an explicitly religious dimension. Kirill I of Moscow: Patriarch Kirill stated in a September 2022 sermon that a Russian soldier who dies "in the line of military duty" performs an act of sacrifice that "washes away all the sins that a person has committed." Confirmed via a Religion News Service mirror of the Associated Press wire report; apnews.com itself could not be fetched directly during this migration.claim:kirill-soldiers-sins-forgiven
Memory politics: from “Never again” to “We can do it again”
A broader scholarly literature — on Victory Day, the Immortal Regiment and Russian memory laws — describes how remembrance of the Second World War became a source of state legitimacy and permanent mobilisation. None of that literature was independently checked during this migration; it is noted here as a direction for a future chapter, not asserted as a sourced claim.
A political religion — not a diagnosis of an entire people
The most defensible conclusion across every source in this dossier is not that “Russians naturally love death.” Several of the scholars surveyed here explicitly argue the opposite: that compliance runs on money, fear, propaganda, resignation and apathy rather than belief. What the evidence supports is narrower and more precise: a regime that, lacking a persuasive vision of the future, has built political legitimacy on sacrifice, historical suffering and death. A death cult of this kind does not need everyone to believe it. It needs enough people to preach it, enough institutions to enforce it, and enough of society to stop objecting.