Putin’s Dark Ages: Political Neomedievalism and Re-Stalinization in Russia. By Dina Khapaeva.

With recent global crises-including pandemics, the eruption of full-scale military conflicts, and the global authoritarian turn-presentist appropriations of the medieval past have become more and more popular in contemporary societies.Dina Khapaeva's book, Putin's Dark Ages, is among the latest successful attempts to critically understand this political "mobilisation" of the Middle Ages.Currently a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Khapaeva has devoted nearly two decades to the much-needed globalisation of medievalism studies by shifting the focus from Europe and the Americas to Russia.In her previous monographs, Goticheskoe obshchestvo [The Gothic Society] (2008) and The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (2017), she asserted that a growing interest in medieval history and aesthetics in Russian popular culture reflected deeper anti-humanist and anti-democratic trends.Putin's Dark Ages, published in the Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe series, represents a logical continuation of this research on Russia's cultural and political fascination with the period.The book's introduction, seven chapters, and conclusion, supplemented by a comprehensive bibliography and index, provide a compelling interdisciplinary analysis of how various actors have deployed medieval-themed references in Russian memory politics, public discourse, and popular culture for anti-democratic purposes from 2000 to 2023 (p.11).The book opens with an introduction that carefully sketches the development of pro-Western intellectual currents in Russia from the late seventeenth century to post-Soviet times.Khapaeva skilfully demonstrates that the continuous failures to implement Western-oriented political and cultural ideological projects in the Russian milieu have become a necessary historical condition that paved the way for the successful revision of historical memory, including that of the Middle Ages, under Vladimir Putin.The introduction thus provides the necessary contextualisation,