To all the threats currently faced by democracy on a global scale, Dina Khapaeva adds a new menace: neomedievalism. Khapaeva—a Russian academic currently based in the US—sees neomedievalism as a worldwide phenomenon, reflected in the popularity of historical fantasy films and novels, but she maintains that it is more highly politicized in post-Soviet Russia than in the west. The first chapter of her book defines the three main concepts that she deploys in her argument. “Political neomedievalism” does not mean a return to the Middle Ages; rather, it is a form of memory politics which legitimizes a hierarchical society that embraces social inequality and thereby contributes to a crisis of democracy. The “memory of the perpetrators” offers a positive view of the agents of state terror at the expense of their victims; and “mobmemory” celebrates episodes of political violence in the past.

The Russian examples of political neomedievalism that Khapaeva identifies include the state-sponsored memorialization of the thirteenth-century prince Aleksandr Nevskii and far-right pamphlets that preached the virtues of an autocratic regime presiding over a patriarchal, organic society. The author’s prime exhibit, however, is Ivan IV, “the Terrible,” (r. 1533–84), the first Russian tsar, whom she describes—rather oddly—as a “medieval warlord” (38). (Khapaeva’s definition of the Russian Middle Ages includes the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period which is usually classified by historians as “early modern”). Khapaeva’s own image of Ivan, derived from what she identifies as the “liberal tradition” (81) in historiography, is of a monstrous tyrant; she views anyone who takes a more nuanced view as a potential apologist for political repression. Within Ivan’s long reign, her main focus is on the relatively short period of the oprichnina (1565–72), a complex episode that she depicts as a “regime of state terror” (38) perpetrated by the tsar’s bodyguard, the oprichniki. In her review of post-Soviet historiography, she is particularly critical of what she calls the “mystical turn” (82) of the 1990s, in which some historians suggested that Ivan had religious motives for the introduction of the oprichnina—an approach that Khapaeva rather unfairly regards as an attempt to justify political violence (88).

In the following chapter, Khapaeva discusses the concept of a “new oprichnina” (novaia oprichnina, neo-oprichnina) advanced by right-wing ideologists such as the neo-Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin and members of the Institute for Dynamic Conservatism think-tank in the 2000s. While their projects differed on details, they mostly advocated the creation of a supra-governmental elite corps to combat corruption and oligarchy, using dictatorial methods if necessary. Khapaeva goes on to examine the contrasting roles played by the oprichniks of the future in Mikhail Iurʹev’s utopian novel The Third Empire (2006) and Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian The Day of the Oprichnik (also 2006). She discusses the virtually simultaneous publication of these two novels from the perspective of a literary critic, as an example of intertextual dialogue; but she somewhat surprisingly fails to explore the possibility that such rival views of the oprichnina represent Aesopian critiques of Vladimir Putin’s regime from the right and the left respectively.

Khapaeva does however confront contemporary politics more overtly in her discussion of “re-Stalinization.” By re-Stalinization she does not mean a return to the Stalinist system (there is little enthusiasm for a planned economy in post-Soviet Russia) but rather the rehabilitation of Iosif Stalin. There is no doubt that Stalin is implicitly rehabilitated as a leader in the all-pervasive cult of the “Great Patriotic War,” but Khapaeva also finds evidence of justification of his repressions, for example in an officially approved school textbook published in 2008. The rehabilitation of Stalin under Putin goes hand-in-hand with the rehabilitation of Ivan IV, mirroring the way in which Stalin’s admiration for the Terrible Tsar was used against him in the de-Stalinization campaigns under Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. This connection leads Khapaeva to offer a disproportionately lengthy discussion of Vladimir Sharov’s novel The Kingdom of Agamemnon (2018), in which two of the protagonists express the view that the state terror implemented under both Ivan and Stalin represented a sacrificial ritual designed to save the souls of its victims. This mystical belief is said by the author to illustrate her concepts of the “memory of the perpetrators” and “mobmemory,” but she provides no evidence that it is widely shared in Putin’s Russia. More generally, while Khapaeva’s book provides an informative overview of the deployment of medieval imagery and metaphors in far-right post-Soviet political discourse, it fails to make a convincing case for the broader significance of this phenomenon.