Authors

Evgenii Matveev¹;  ¹ Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

Discussion

The concept of “holy war” has a long history in world culture, appearing in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and has been applied to diverse conflicts. Its semantic scope remains contested. In general, a war is considered holy when collective violence is perceived as sanctioned by a divine or transcendent power. Scholars emphasize that the term “holy” is vague and difficult to define, and that it often functions rhetorically to create communal cohesion. This rhetorical strategy explains the prominent use of the concept in Russian propaganda after February 2022.
This paper investigates historical research on the concept of “holy war” in Russia and examines how this concept has evolved within Russian religious, cultural, and political contexts from the eighteenth century to the present. The research material consists of Russian-language texts containing the expression svi͡ashchennai͡a voĭna (“holy war”). During the analysis of the collected examples, the following parameters are addressed: referential relevance (which wars were called “holy” and the historical contexts of the term’s use), semantic structure, and the rhetorical and discursive structures of the collected examples.
The concept of “holy war” has been a part of military-propaganda discourse — a way of talking about war and of evaluating war. The observations suggest three broad categories of its usage: 1. Military conflicts involving Russia (Russian Empire / Soviet Union), distinguishing between cases where Russia is the subject (i.e., wages a “holy war”) and the object (a “holy war” is waged against Russia). 2. Military conflicts not related to Russia. 3. Non-military conflicts (here the metaphorical meaning of an ‘uncompromising struggle’ is realized). Texts in which Russia is the object of a “holy war” mainly describe Islamic jihad (the Caucasian wars of the nineteenth century, the Russo-Turkish wars, and the two Chechen wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). Russia was most often described as the subject of a “holy war”. Examples of precisely this use of the concept include major military conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The concept often served to create analogies connecting different events in Russian military history: for example, the war with Napoleon and the Crimean War could be labelled holy during the First World War; the capture of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible – at the end of the Second World War; the most famous song of the Great Patriotic War, Svi͡ashchennai͡a voĭna (“holy war”), was probably written during World War I. The use of the expression “holy war” by modern Russian propagandists, drawing both on its long history in Russian journalism as well as on literary dystopias of the early twenty-first century (V. Pelevin and V. Sorokin), fulfils the same function of analogy: to equate, in the eyes of Russians, the “Special Military Operation” with the Great Patriotic War and other wars of the past.