Source: PostPravda.info 13.08.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/russian-imperial-consciousness-necro-imperialism/
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/russian-imperial-consciousness-necro-imperialism/
Why do Russians believe in absurd things? What seems unlikely in the world-picture of a Westerner appears inevitable in the world-picture of Russians. The mistake made by Western analysts is that they look for a rational motivation behind the behavior of the Russian authorities. Russians, however, assess the significance of events differently and assign different probabilities to them, and this directly affects their imperial consciousness.
Why Did the West Misjudge the Military Threat from Russia?
To avoid getting lost in the flow of information, a person must establish priorities: what deserves primary attention and what should be ignored. This requires a system for assessing the probability of various events – a probability matrix. For example, before Russia attacked Ukraine, Western leaders considered it extremely unlikely that Putin would start a war. This belief was based on a world-picture in which people are assumed to be guided primarily by their own interests, whereas a major war was not in Putin’s self-interest. After all, he already had everything one could wish for: absolute power, stability within the country, international influence, and the opportunity to amass enormous wealth through the sale of natural resources. The war would put all of this at risk.
A world-picture is based on ideas or assumptions that affect the perceived probability of events. At the heart of Putin’s world-picture, as well as that of most Russians, is the belief that the West is inherently hostile to Russia and that the most important thing is to prevail in this civilizational confrontation with it. The advantage will go to whoever starts the war first, while economic interests are of secondary importance. The mistake made by Western leaders is that they arbitrarily project their own assumptions onto Russia.
However, what is impossible within one world-picture may be perceived as inevitable within another. In other words, the structure of a world-picture is itself a probability matrix according to which events are perceived and their meanings identified.
The Imperial Consciousness of Russians Is Based on a Different Probability Matrix
For ordinary Russians, the empire is Russia itself, and Russia is associated with a living space in which they feel secure. This has been the case for virtually the entire course of Russian history. Security within this vast living space can be guaranteed only by the central government; if it weakens or collapses, chaos will ensue: rampant crime, an influx of migrants, and civil war. This outlook is diametrically opposed to the one underlying European democracies, where people defend their autonomy, rights, and self-government because it is precise autonomy and self-determination that provide a sense of security.
Russian imperial consciousness shapes a world-picture based on the following assumptions:
Russia is a distinct civilization that includes Ukraine and Belarus;
Russia has never attacked anyone;
Russia has always won all its wars;
Russia expanded peacefully, with all peoples voluntarily becoming part of it;
the West is inherently hostile to Russia, and war with it is inevitable.
Why do Russians accept such absurd beliefs, including educated intellectuals who have access to information and know how to verify and critically analyze it? Moreover, they may believe any piece of propagandistic disinformation as long as it is consistent with the Russian imperial world-picture. For example, people in the Soviet Union were convinced that Soviet troops had entered Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government in order to forestall the Americans, who allegedly wanted to enter the country without an invitation.
Well, suppose they might not have known that Soviet troops killed Afghanistan’s leader, Hafizullah Amin, by storming his palace. Yet propaganda can be so absurd that no additional knowledge is required to recognize its absurdity. For example, Soviet people believed that Finland had attacked the Soviet Union in 1939. One only needs to look at a map to understand that this is about as implausible as the claim that our planet is ruled by reptilians. Yet human thinking is structured in such a way that even an outstanding scholar, a recognized expert in their field, may simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories or reptilians, or support an aggressive war while placing complete trust in the propaganda used to justify it. If the Soviet Union had succeeded in occupying Finland at that time, those same people would have been convinced that Finland had voluntarily joined the Soviet Union and would have regarded any talk of its independence as hostile activity.
The World-picture of a Paranoid Personality
The word “paranoid” is used not only in reference to a mental disorder but also to describe a particular type of personality that, from the standpoint of society, may be considered perfectly healthy. A paranoid personality is characterized by such qualities as heightened suspiciousness, a tendency to hold grudges, heightened sensitivity to threats, a search for hidden motives, a tendency to systematize and provide logical justifications based on arbitrary premises, a logically consistent but one-sided interpretation of events, a lack of empathy, an inability to understand another point of view, and an inability to critically examine one’s own beliefs. All these qualities result from the breakdown of the probability matrix in paranoid consciousness. A person ceases to distinguish between the most and least probable explanations of what is happening. An unlikely explanation becomes certain to them if it corresponds to their suspicions.
The breakdown of the probability matrix can lead to paranoid delusions, in which a person extracts hidden messages from completely random coincidences. For example, they may see a candy wrapper lying on the ground near their home bearing the image of a “Little Rooster – Golden Comb” and begin to suspect that someone deliberately planted it there as a hint that they intend to “send the red rooster” – that is, set the house on fire. Such an explanation is internally logical, but it rests on assumptions so highly improbable that a mentally healthy person would simply disregard them.
According to the same logic, there are all kinds of conspiracy theories and a widespread belief among Russians that the West has always sought to destroy Russia. Does this mean that all of them are paranoid? Of course not. Most are perfectly normal, healthy people. It is necessary to distinguish between those who construct a paranoid world-picture and the majority of people who agree to live within it, even though they themselves are quite ordinary rather than paranoid personalities. They should also be distinguished from indifferent people who merely pay lip service to propaganda but take no real interest in it or engage with it. Among those who construct a paranoid world-picture, there are both genuinely paranoid personalities and cynical ideologues who promote propaganda merely for the sake of their careers.
Why Do Healthy People Believe Absurd Fabrications?
The most common motivation for believing fabrications is the desire for social adaptation. If a person wants to conform to the expectations of the majority, they will, by default, accept everything that everyone else believes. It is therefore easier for them to deceive themselves than to argue with or come into conflict with those around them. Alongside this, two other dominant motivations for self-deception can be identified: fear and hope associated with a particular vision of the future.
Fear may be caused by insecurity, by the fear of losing one’s sense of security, familiar way of life, job, social status, or self-respect. It may also be connected with a perceived threat to one’s identity, culture, or hopes for the future.
Hope, by contrast, is connected with a vision of the future. Any information that calls this vision into question causes anxiety and other negative feelings, while anything that reinforces hope generates enthusiasm. A person begins to trust not the sources that are most reliable, but those that reduce anxiety and confirm their expectations. As a result, they gradually surround themselves with like-minded people who are on the same emotional wavelength. This is how an information bubble is formed, within which only information consistent with an already established world-picture is perceived.
The Mechanism of Becoming Enmeshed in a Paranoid World-picture
Any fabrication can be perceived as unquestionable reality if it fits into a person’s world-picture. Most Russians live within a world-picture characteristic of a paranoid personality and therefore believe that Russia did not attack Ukraine but is merely defending itself, while the West has allegedly installed a Nazi regime in Ukraine and is using Ukraine as a means of destroying Russia.
An ordinary person does not become trapped in a paranoid world-picture immediately. First, they must enter a common social and communicative environment with paranoid personalities. At this stage, they are still capable of recognizing that the fabrications everyone accepts as obvious truths contradict common sense. However, the seed of doubt has already been planted, and they unconsciously begin to adjust their assessment of the probability of events, treating the improbable as possible and the possible as necessary. Gradually, the probability matrix through which they perceive events begins to change.
Other motives contribute to this process: material gain, fear, the desire to keep one’s job, reach retirement safely, and avoid conflicts. In present-day Russia, this is compounded by the fear of losing one’s freedom, since an accurate assessment of reality is treated as a crime, and many people have received lengthy prison sentences for expressing such views. The desire to suppress feelings of guilt over Russia’s crimes in Ukraine may lead people to try even harder to convince themselves that it was Ukraine that started the war.
After the collapse of the communist system, a new transformation of imperial consciousness began under the influence of two factors: the desire to simplify the world and the loss of a vision of the future. With Putin’s rise to power, a new form of imperialism in Russia – necro-imperialism – became the basis of state policy, and with the beginning of the war against Ukraine, it became entrenched in Russian mass consciousness.
Mythological Consciousness and the Vision of the Future
In archaic societies, mythological consciousness structured both life and the perception of the world. Myth is a non-rational way of making sense of reality, through which everything is endowed with new mythological meaning, allowing people to overcome the fear of the unknown and come to terms with the horrors of the world. Suffering is unbearable when it is meaningless. If it becomes comprehensible within a mythological world-picture, it can be endured. However, myth offered no vision of the future, which is why archaic societies could remain in a static state for centuries without developing.
Modern society is structured differently. Today, the fear of suffering and uncertainty about the future are overcome not through myth but through a vision of the future. People hope that life can be changed, and this hope becomes a source of activity, contributing to the rapid development of modern Western civilization.
In contemporary Ukraine, various visions of the future coexist, engaging in political and societal competition. Which of these models will become dominant largely depends on the younger generation, as it is young people who are most forward-looking. In Russia, however, instead of a vision for the future, a mythologization of the past is offered, which substitutes actual history and thus encourages individuals to reconcile with a tragic reality.
But how can one come to terms with war, suffering, death, and violence? There is only one way: by imbuing them with new mythological meaning. When death, suffering, and violence perpetrated by the authorities receive sacred justification, necro-imperialism emerges.
In reality, the Russian authorities attempted to present a reconstruction of the past as a vision of the future – one in which Russia is a great military power constantly expanding its borders. During the occupation of Crimea, many Russians were galvanized by this image, leading to unprecedented support for the regime. However, as the war dragged on, this vision faded and is now sustained only by projecting mythological notions of history onto it.
Consequently, individuals are left with a choice: either accept this mythology – in which death acquires intrinsic value, making the killing of people in a neighboring country seem justified under the belief that this is simply how the world works, with war and death being natural and self-justifying – or reject it. Yet rejecting it shatters one’s entire world-picture, dissolving any vision of the future and, with it, the capacity to overcome fear of the present. It is precisely in this psychological trap, in my view, that Russian mass consciousness finds itself today.
Necro-Imperialism and the Simplification of the World-picture
Russian necro-imperialism is oriented toward the archaic, and this is connected with the desire to return to the simplest possible world-picture. The most primitive manifestation of the fear of the complexity of the world is the destructive instinct characteristic of lumpenized personalities (chavs/gopniks). People like this can be found in all spheres of society. They do not seek to create anything new or preserve what already exists. Their basic impulse is to destroy everything that seems incomprehensible or alien. Why? So that the world will become simpler. All the complexity of assigning probabilities to events is reduced to a binary scheme: yes/no, with all intermediate possibilities excluded from the probability matrix.
This impulse toward simplification is directly connected with the suppression of empathy. Gradually, the circle of people toward whom a person is capable of feeling compassion becomes narrower and narrower; everyone else is perceived as an abstraction. At that point, it is no longer difficult to accept ideological doctrines that justify their destruction. This attitude becomes an element of state ideology and permeates every sphere of Russian society. Essentially, Putin’s political style is the style of a gopnik who sees everyone who differs from him as an enemy.
If a person becomes an enemy simply by virtue of their existence, then the simplest solution would be to ensure that they no longer exist at all. And when death is perceived as a universal way of simplifying the world, a necrophilic instinct is awakened. The simplest way to simplify the world is through war. According to this logic, not only the deaths of enemies in war but also the deaths of one’s own compatriots are perceived as a simplification of the world, which helps explain the indifference of many Russians to unjustified casualties in the war against Ukraine. Thus, over the years of war, this necrophilic attitude has come to dominate Russian mass consciousness.
It is difficult to say what will happen next. However, the extreme simplification of any social system inevitably leads to a point where, sooner or later, it ceases to sustain itself and begins to collapse under its own weight. In any case, I do not believe that a social system based on necrophilia can remain viable for an extended period of time.
