On September 30, 2022, at the same ceremony in which he illegally annexed four parts of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that those “Western elites” who defended transgender and same-sex rights were promoting “a religion in reverse—pure Satanism.” As Patrick Lally Michelson shows in this essay (in German), such criticisms of “the West” as being satanic have a long history in Russian Orthodox discourse, dating back at least to the early 19th century.
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