by Stefano Caprio

Doubts are growing in the country as to the real existence of the president, who is given up for dead or replaced so much so as to be nicknamed 'the refrigerator man'. The supreme leader is an almost anonymous and impersonal expression. Kirill embodies the celebratory role, but power is in the hands of the obscure Secretary of the Security Council who speaks of the 'tsar Putin' in the past tense.

In recent times, a most singular frosty atmosphere is condensing in Russia, not due to the winter cold which is slow to assert itself, given the unpredictable turns of climate change, but due to the uncertain perceptions regarding President Vladimir Putin.

Just as there are no absolute certainties in the minds of Russians regarding the sudden and spectacular disappearance of the "cook" Yevgeny Prigozhin, or the poor health of the Chechen "butcher" Ramzan Kadyrov, now there are added apprehensions about the real existence of Putin himself.

Given for dead by some and replaced by various lookalikes, by others "frozen" in his bunkers for health or simply safety reasons, so much so that he is now called "the refrigerator man".

It is not so decisive whether the next president, who will be proclaimed on March 18, 2024 with over 80% of the votes, will be the same one who has dominated the country for over twenty years, or one of his aliases from the times of drones and intelligence artificial, even more than masking and surgical operations.

Whoever sits on the Kremlin throne will have to fulfill a function defined by ideology and even religion; an idol to prostrate in the name of the greatness of Mother Russia, a true divinity venerated since before the Baptism of Kiev in 988, still in the uncertain inspirations of Scandinavian, Caucasian and Asian paganism of the people straddling East and West.

The "traditional values" personified by this semi-divine figure transcend even Orthodox Christianity, on several occasions interpreted only as an attribute of the authentic Russian soul, pre-existing any other form of morality or religion, projected onto the final solution of universal history.

For this reason, the supreme leader of Russia must remain an almost anonymous and impersonal expression, avoiding confusing and belittling the purity of the collective, the sobornost of the chosen people.

The monarchs in history who have tried to impose their own personality and vision have failed in their mission, like the first tsar Ivan the Terrible, who due to his hysterical paranoia caused sixteenth-century Russia of the "Third Rome" to plunge into the troubles of the conflict with Poland-Lithuania, of which Putin today tries to avoid the replication with the "defense" of Ukraine from the invasion of the immoral West.

On the contrary, the Westernist Peter the Great was unable to preserve the true Russian soul, spreading the dark spirit of the "cursed city" he created in imitation of European capitals, that of St. Petersburg in whose caves the grotesque and apocalyptic characters of the novels writhe of Gogol and Dostoevsky.

The perfect model, which today inspires Putin's Russia, was the gray Georgian secretary Joseph Stalin, whose cult of personality in the "overturned" Orthodoxy of Russian Communism indicated the way to total purification.

Stalinism is the true realization of sobornost, guaranteeing peace and security in the light of Victory over enemies, fueling the state of permanent war as the "Cold War" was, to be fought on the field and in the mind at all latitudes.

After the crash of the "Khrushchevite thaw", Soviet Russia regrouped in the twenty years of "stagnation", led by an impersonal being like Leonid Brezhnev precisely in the years of Putin and Patriarch Kirill's youthful education.

After the "Yeltsin troubles", following the disaster of the collapse of the system, caused by the imaginative excesses of Gorbachev's perestroika, Russia can now rest again on Putin's neo-Stalinism, guaranteed by an anonymous godfather whose permanence on the throne of the Kremlin is not not even questioned by the annoyance of physical death.

The supreme and metaphysical power is based on the two great prerogatives of Stalin's religion, conflict and security, which Putin is interpreting at the highest level. The war is now underway on a global level, finding in Ukraine and Israel the perfect supporting actors to project itself onto at least a century of fighting, sinking into the dams of Donbass and the tunnels of Gaza.

And Russia's internal security is so widespread that it has eliminated not only all political adversaries, locked up in concentration camps or scattered throughout the void of the West, but even the pacifist and liberal sentiments still remaining in the minds of Russians.

Dissidents do not worry the Kremlin leadership, what matters more is the perception of impotence and submission among the masses, to be fueled with propaganda and surveillance. The real structures of power take care of this, the only Stalinist legacies left alive after the end of the USSR: the patriarchate of Moscow and the Security Council.

Patriarch Kirill perfectly embodied the celebratory role for which he had been preparing since he was a young Brezhnevian bishop, the "altar boy of power" according to Pope Francis' definition. In recent days he has given a signal of the opening of the next electoral campaign, calling for the repression of "intentions in favor" of abortion, in the country in the world where the practice of abortion is easier and more widespread: it is not the facts that count, but the “intentions”.

The head of the Church, in the Stalinist variant, must provide the justifications for the war, and the union between priests and soldiers was exalted in the war in Ukraine, after being prophesied in the "Victory Cathedral" erected in 2020. The year of the celebration of the 75 years since the entry into Berlin of the saviors of the world, true children of Christ with the sword and the Virgin with the machine gun.

If the patriarchal function takes on public and liturgically emphatic contours, the contribution of the security men, the legendary ghosts of the KGB-FSB services, from which the "refrigerator czar" himself comes, is less evident.

In the unrest that hovers over the physical person of the president, the obscure secretary of the Security Council of Moscow, Nikolai Patrushev, who many call the "patron of Russia", the one who monitors and guarantees the order of things, takes on ever more importance.

According to the rules, in the sudden absence (or disguised death) of the head of state, it is he who carries out the functions of regent, or team leader of aliases and lookalikes.

In some recent speeches Patrushev has fueled the suspicion that he is in control of the situation, authoritatively exposing Russia's programs in view of Putin's re-election and dictating the political line in the acute phase of the world conflict.

On September 16, he denounced the "collapse of the Western parasite empire" in a long report published in the intelligence magazine Razvedčik ("The Investigator"). On November 4, on the occasion of the celebration of the Unity of the People, he assured that "the Russian people are able to overcome all internal and external threats, thanks to their unity".

The speech was delivered during the “marathon” of the Znanie (“Knowledge”) society, one of the structures surviving from Soviet times, having been founded in 1947 on the wings of Stalin's enthusiasm for Victory, with the aim of “spreading knowledge political and scientific", especially with anti-religious propaganda, atheist "catechesis".

It seemed like it should have been dissolved, but in recent years Patrushev has inspired its refoundation, using it as a privileged place to expose the new visions of anti-Western Russia.

The "patron" therefore turns out to be the guarantor of the "godfather", perfecting a system of "anonymous paternity" with respect to the people, who see no alternatives to Putin and Putinism as the state religion has canceled the very concept of "alternative" , and with it also the principle of succession: only Putin can succeed Putin, the continuity of power becomes the reincarnation of power, thanks to all-encompassing surveillance.

Patrushev controls the FSB, which in turn controls the judiciary, courts and National Guard. The Federal Protective Service (FSO) maintains formal independence, being assigned to look after the "refrigerator", but in reality everything works perfectly in unison and no Prigožin-style head-banging is expected. Always assuming that it was a real revolt, in the secret rooms of the cold Kremlin bunker.

Patrushev's speech at Znanie has also been called "Putin's obituary", because taking stock of his 23 years of government, the "patron" only spoke about it in the past tense in a sad tone.

According to him, the Tsar "saved the country from the Yeltsin drift because he knew every detail of the situation and had a clear program to implement, a purpose for which he knew he had to take responsibility for the salvation of the whole society".

Remembering the merits of the godfather of the Fatherland, Patrushev continued to return to the actions of the past, of the nineties and the beginning of the 2000s, without mentioning the current Putin, except with a brief reference to the new Constitution of 2020.

Not a word about the special military operation, logical consequence of the entire "salvation plan". The Tsar does not live in the present, but takes on an eternal and ethereal dimension, because the true Russia is only in the heavens, where every suffering and every tragedy is overcome, and everything on earth now sinks into the abyss.

RUSSIAN WORLD IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA. WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE IT EVERY SATURDAY IN YOUR E-MAIL? TO SUBSCRIBE, CLICK HERE.

• Russian
• World