The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars by KristinaStoeckl and DmitryUzlaner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. 298 pp. $105.00. ISBN 978‐1‐5315‐0213‐3

The rise of “traditional-values” rhetoric in post-Soviet Russia, especially since 2012, has generated a wave of academic publications. This book stands out for its meticulous fieldwork and nuanced account of Russia’s conservative turn and its deep entanglement with the “transnational dynamics of the global culture wars” (p. 10). While acknowledging indigenous roots of this post-Soviet development, particularly the upheavals of the late 1980s and 1990s, the authors argue that domestic factors alone cannot explain Russia’s emergence as a “norm entrepreneur for international conservatism in its own right” (p. 3). Instead, they show how Russian actors “first learned and adopted the language and codes of the global culture wars and then started to use them” (p. vii). The book’s first part reconstructs how Russia “learned the culture wars” in the late 1980s and 1990s along two main trajectories. The first was the influx of an American-style Christian Right “culture-war type of social conservatism” via Evangelical missionaries and Christian nongovernmental organizations who networked with state officials, educators, and academics (p. 12). Many post-Soviet citizens found this messaging appealing for its promise of stability and as a seeming antidote to the effects of Soviet atheism. A 1989 meeting between the Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and sociologist Mikhail Matskovsky (Soviet Academy of Sciences) led to Matskovsky’s translation of Dobson’s work, bringing Dobson’s understanding of “traditional family values” to a broad readership. Between 1992 and 1997, the Ministry of Education partnered with CoMission—some eighty Western Evangelical organizations—to train public school teachers in Christian moral education amid the post-Soviet “moral vacuum.” Meanwhile, concerned about demographic decline and the Soviet atheist legacy, Moscow sociologist Anatoly Antonov worked with Allan Carlson, then president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, to found the World Congress of Families. These encounters with American conservative Christian ideas on family, gender, sexuality, and bioethics left a lasting imprint. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the institutional Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was largely absent from these early networks. Viewing foreign Evangelical activity as a threat to Orthodoxy, church officials secured state restrictions on missionary organizations in 1997 and pursued their own learning path. Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner describe the ROC’s response to the “wild nineties” as a “conservative aggiornamento,” opposing an imagined “Western liberal ethos” while seeking theological and rhetorical resources to navigate the new landscape (p. 71). Central to this effort was the future Patriarch Kirill who, as head of the Church’s Department of External Relations, sought to balance global “liberal civilizational standards” with “national cultural and religious identities.” The authors credit the ROC with mainstreaming its traditional-values rhetoric and shaping the state’s conservative moral agenda; by Putin’s third term, they argue, he adopted this rhetoric, linking moral conservatism to state sovereignty and ontological security. The book’s second part examines how western-inspired traditional-values discourse circulated among Church leaders, independent civic actors, and the state after 2000. Although the ROC reframed morality in universal human-rights language and sought conservative alliances abroad, the authors argue it achieved little due to internal antiecumenical resistance and state restrictions on foreign-funded initiatives. More effective was a new generation of independent activists—drawing on relationships formed with Evangelical missionaries in the 1990s—who promoted Russia internationally as a “defender of traditional values.” This “Russian Christian Right,” though independent of the Church, enjoyed personal ties with influential conservative Orthodox clergy such as the priest Dmitry Smirnov (1951–2020); they helped channel American Christian Right rhetoric into ROC family and pro-life statements and, ultimately, state policy, receiving backing from “Orthodox oligarchs” including Konstantin Molofeev and Vladimir Yakunin (p. 109). The final chapter shows how both the ROC’s conservative aggiornamento and the “Russian Christian Right” influenced Russia’s position in the global culture wars. Case studies from the UN Human Rights Council and the Parliamentary Assembly of Europe (2009–13) reveal that Russia’s rise relied on both church-state cooperation, often initiated by Kirill, and these independent conservative entrepreneurs. Their efforts enabled Putin’s regime to forge alliances with the UN Human Rights Council with Muslim-majority and Global South states. In one of the book’s many striking insights, the authors observe that “if Patriarch Kirill…ever had the ambition to become the new spiritual leader of the global Christian Right, …this role has fallen to Vladimir Putin—perhaps a defeat for the Russian Orthodox Church” (p. 88). Drawing on extensive interviews (2017–18), The Moralist International is a bold, pioneering study, offering fresh insights into Russia’s evolving, increasingly militant—and, since 2022, deadly—traditional values discourse. Two contributions stand out. First, the book highlights the ROC’s growing communicative sophistication since the 1990s, enabling many American conservatives to imagine “Russia as a stronghold of Christian values rooted in a thousand-year history” (p. 153). It also traces the circuitous ways by which Christian Right rhetoric entered both church and state arenas. Second, it identifies a “new type of religious actor” in post-Soviet Russia—the “Russian Christian Right”—which “advocate[s] conservative religious positions…independently from the institutional Church” yet increasingly shaped its policies, generating internal divisions (p. 109). These findings challenge the assumption that the Moscow Patriarchate’s statements reflect views unanimously held within the Church. As with any ambitious study, the book raises further questions. One concerns how the ROC gained fluency in the “language and codes of the global culture wars” in the 1990s while it focused on institutional recovery (p. vii). A closer look at discussions in the annual World Russian People’s Council (est. 1993) might have clarified how ideas circulated among civic, ecclesiastical, and state spheres early on. Another issue is the book’s tendency to describe Russia’s “traditional values” as “Russian” (russkie) and specifically Orthodox, whereas official state rhetoric more often invokes “the traditional values of Russia” (rossiiskie traditsionnye tsennosti), a formulation that includes Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and other indigenous groups. Have non-Christian conservative actors with transnational links also contributed to Russia's “conservative turn”? As these trends evolve, The Moralist International will remain essential reading for anyone seeking to understand morally conservative rhetoric in post-Soviet Russia.