Putin: I’m like Jesus on a divine mission against satanic West

The President quoted the Bible to explain his divine mission to school Russia’s youth in ‘traditional’ values.

Vladimir Putin has spoke in overtly religious terms about the need to shape the worldview of young people. Picture: AFP

President Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Jesus Christ as he quoted the Bible to explain his divine mission to school ­Russia’s youth in “traditional” values.

The Russian leader has often portrayed himself as a stalwart defender of Christianity against the “satanic” West. But in a ­revealing insight into how Putin sees his role, he spoke in overtly religious terms about the need to shape the worldview of young people.

Appearing via video link to celebrate the opening of children’s centres near Moscow, Putin began quoting from the Bible. He has ordered the establishment of youth centres across the country in a move redolent of the Soviet-era camps where children were indoctrinated in Communist Party values.

From the age of six, primary schoolchildren in the Soviet Union could join the Little Octobrists, before advancing to the Young Pioneers when aged nine and progressing to the Komsomol at 14.

Under Putin, the strict atheism of the Soviet Union has been replaced by a muscular form of Orthodox Christianity that is often used to spread state-­approved messages.

Putin compared his mission of protecting the Russian youth from the creeping influence of the West to Jesus Christ having recruited the fishermen Peter and Andrew to spread the word of God.

“Do you remember how Jesus came to Galilee and saw the fishermen beside the Sea of Galilee?” he asked a meeting of Russian officials. “One was catching fish, another was fixing his net. And He said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men, fishers of human souls.’ They became his evangelists, his students.

“This was very important at a time when world religions were developing … but it is no less current now, when we must defend our traditional values, our culture, our traditions and our history. This is very important for the future of the country.”

The return of religion to Russian politics and Putin’s apparently sacred role in upholding the country’s traditions mirrors the deification of the tsar before the February Revolution of 1917.

At the meeting last week Putin insisted he did not want to share a solely Christian message and referenced the four “traditional religions” of Russia: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism. But in a country where 70 per cent of Russians identify themselves as Orthodox, Christianity has enjoyed a privileged role and has been co-opted into justifying the war in Ukraine.

Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has said that Russian troops who die in Ukraine are absolved of sin, in effect anointing the war as a holy crusade.

In the run-up to Orthodox Easter on May 5, the Moscow patriarchate, which is closely aligned to Putin, has heaped further blessings on what it ­describes as a struggle for “national liberation in … southwestern Russia”. At a meeting in Moscow at the end of last month the patriarchate officially called the special military operation a “svyashchennaya voyna”, or holy war.

The patriarchate also identified the continuing decline of the Russian population as one of the gravest dangers facing the nation. Putin has declared 2024 the Year of the Family, encouraging Russians to have more children by offering subsidised mortgages and improved ­maternity leave, and telling women they must have at least two babies to “preserve our ethnic group”. At the same time LGBT groups were banned as extremist organisations.

Putin’s attempts to shape the values and worldviews of Russia’s youth appears to be working, polling suggests. A survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Levada Centre, a Russian independent polling ­organisation, of those aged 18 to 34 found that young Russians were overwhelmingly patriotic.

They were also found to be apathetic about engaging in democracy, with only 30 per cent having voted in an election in the past two years.

The Times