An icon glorifies Putin and his fighters | EUROtoday

An exhibition of lacquer work from the icon portray villages of Palekh, Mstjora, Cholui and Fedoskino could be seen within the artwork museum within the city of New Jerusalem west of Moscow till March twenty fourth. A brand new icon of the Last Judgment stands out among the many works, which its writer, the painter and restorer Andrei Grachev from Mstyora, describes as a panel with the title “God is our only judge”.

The multi-figured picture combines parts of Orthodox iconography with placing portraits. Grachev defined that he had tried to unite all of the nation’s patriotic forces within the face of the widespread enemy. An essential supply of inspiration for the artist might have been Putin’s assertion on the Valdai Forum in 2018 that Russian nuclear doctrine consists of letting the aggressor know that retaliation is inevitable and that he might be destroyed. And that the Russians, as victims of aggression, would go to paradise as martyrs, whereas their opponents would chew the mud as a result of they would not even have time to repent.

The artist transports Russians to heaven in droves. On the a part of the icon on the left for the viewer (on the proper for the enthroned Christ) there are very completely different Russian leaders and their supporters subsequent to one another, from Tsar Ivan the Terrible to Lenin, Stalin, even Trotsky, but additionally the final Tsar Nikolai II and his spouse’s favourite, Grigori Rasputin, are there, leaders of the White Army in addition to the Soviet basic secretaries Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The heart of the composition, in a martyr pose, is Nikolai II’s son Alexei, the final inheritor to the Romanov throne, who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

At the toes of the Transfigured One, Putin sits at a desk with writers similar to Pushkin, Fjoor Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy (whom the Orthodox Church excommunicated) and Gorky. But warlords within the Ukrainian conflict, the chief of the Wagner troupe Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ringleaders within the Donbass Alexander Zakharchenko, Motorola and Giwi, additionally made it to the Russian paradise after being eradicated by secret companies – as a result of they strengthened the Russian state.

On the other facet of the image, behind Putin’s again, hell takes sinners. Interestingly, amongst them are Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ivan Ilyin, who’re valued by the president as a result of one criticized the Soviet state in his Gulag archipelago and the opposite sympathized with Hitler. Less surprisingly, the final Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev, the murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, and the yarmulke-wearing oligarchs Roman Abramovich and Oleg Deripaska are languishing within the underworld. But former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, central financial institution chief Elvira Nabiulina, whom many blame for the failures within the Ukraine marketing campaign, and Putin’s press spokesman, whose daughter lives in France, additionally ended up there.

In the upper echelons of the underworld there are Western politicians from Churchill to Trump, who’s sandwiched between Clinton and Zelensky. Adolf Hitler is only a shadowy determine. George Soros seems as a real Satan, who guidelines over the damned as a fantastic manipulator. The pious picture propagates a radically nationalistic view of Russia’s salvation historical past and preaches conflict till the ultimate victory over the satanic West. The indisputable fact that it’s being proven right this moment in a good regional museum may appear ridiculous if it weren’t so threatening.