The Retributive Inadequacy of Russian Leadership despite Legal Scholarship

To the uninitiated observer, the halls of modern statecraft present an intolerable moral paradox. A Russian diplomat exchanges pleasantries and formal protocols with Western envoys whose military industrial complexes supply the very weapons killing Russian soldiers on the battlefield. Simultaneously, Kremlin rhetoric rarely speaks the language of personal, eye-for-an-eye retribution (mshcheniye). Where the Western observer expects the raw, populist outrage of a blood feud, they encounter instead a calculated, almost eerie diplomatic decorum.

To mistake this decorum for disrespect toward the fallen is to misunderstand the deep, tripartite character of Russian statehood—its Orthodox, governmental, and civilizational heritage—and to miss the cold, sacrificial logic of state survival that René Girard so brilliantly unmasked.

                  THE DIALECTIC OF SACRED STATECRAFT

     ORTHODOX SPIRIT           GOVERNMENTAL REALPOLITIK         CIVILIZATIONAL TIME
   (Martyrdom / Podvig)    (State Monopoly on Meaning)      (Eurasian Endurance)
            │                           │                            │
            └───────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────┘
                                        │
                                        ▼
                           THE GIRARDIAN SACRIFICE
                Transmutes Private Loss into Sacred Authority
                & Deconstructs the "Romantic Lie" of Revenge

The Tripartite Architecture of Russian Sacrifice

The absence of emotional calls for personal revenge in state rhetoric is anchored in three distinct historical pillars that reject the individualism of modern Western ethics:

• The Orthodox Character: Death as Podvig: In Eastern Orthodox theology, the soldier’s death on the battlefield is framed not as a legalistic crime requiring a human vendetta, but as a podvig—a spiritual feat and heroic act of self-sacrificing love (“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”). Martyrdom cleanses; it does not demand a street fight. To reduce a holy sacrifice to a personal revenge story is to desecrate the spiritual elevation of the fallen. Redemption belongs to God; victory belongs to the collective.
• The Governmental Character: The Autocratic Monopoly: From Ivan the Terrible through the Soviet commissars to the modern Kremlin, the Russian autocratic apparatus has maintained an absolute monopoly over violence, grief, and meaning. Personal retribution belongs to the realm of peasant feuds; statecraft belongs to the Sovereign. The Tsar or General Secretary does not scream for revenge; he executes strategy. Diplomatic engagement with the enemy is not a sign of affection or forgiveness, but a cold, Machiavellian instrument of Realpolitik designed to preserve strategic flexibility, exchange prisoners, and signal power.
• The Civilizational Character: The Eurasian Fortress: Shaped by centuries of existential invasions—from the Mongols to Napoleon and Hitler—Russian civilizational memory measures conflict not in news cycles or election terms, but in centuries. Individual loss is subsumed into the eternal narrative of the “Third Rome” or the “Great Patriotic War.” The state views its soldiers not as atomic individuals whose deaths require private retribution, but as cells within an enduring, collective body politic that absorbs catastrophic loss to ensure civilizational continuity.

The Girardian Dialectic: Deconstructing the “Romantic Lie”

When viewed through René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, the dialectic between battlefield slaughter and diplomatic handshakes moves from an apparent paradox to a terrifyingly coherent engine of state power.

                      THE MIMETIC TRIANGLE OF STATECRAFT

                                  THE WEST
                             (The Model-Obstacle)
                                  ▲      ▲
                                 /        \
                    Mimetic     /          \ Diplomatic
                    Rivalry    /            \ Realpolitik
                              /              \
                             /                \
                     THE KREMLIN ──────────► THE SOLDIER
                      (Sovereign)  Sacrifice (Sacrificial Victim)
                                    (Podvig)

1. The Myth of “Unmediated Revenge” (The Romantic Lie)

Girard’s mensonge romantique (romantic lie) is the delusion that human action and desire are spontaneous, autonomous, and self-authored. The populist demand for “retribution” rests on this romantic lie: the fantasy that a nation can simply lash out in pure, unmediated rage to settle a moral score.

Girard exposes how states actually operate: violence is never autonomous; it is always mimetic. The West serves as Russia’s ultimate Model-Obstacle—the entity whose recognition is sought, whose power is mirrored, and whose opposition defines the state’s very identity. Shaking hands with the adversary is not an insult to the dead; it is the state’s recognition that it is locked in a structural, mimetic dance with its mirror image. To break diplomatic channels out of emotional rage would be to surrender the strategic control required to wage the mimetic contest itself.

2. The Scapegoat Mechanism and the Sacred

Girard demonstrated that human societies avoid internal self-destruction by channeling their chaotic, aggressive impulses onto a sacralized victim—the scapegoat mechanism.

In the calculus of the state, the fallen soldier is transmuted into the sacred victim whose blood unifies the community. If the state allowed private grief to turn into an unguided demand for personal revenge, that emotional energy could easily turn inward, questioning the competence or legitimacy of the sovereign who ordered the deployment.

Therefore, the state performs an ontological alchemy:

• The Private Victim is stripped of his individual grievance.
• The Death is sacralized through state-managed rituals (such as the Immortal Regiment or military funerals blessed by the Church).
• The Grief of the family is co-opted and redirected into absolute, unquestioning loyalty to the Fatherland.

By converting the soldier’s blood into sacred authority, the state neutralizes internal dissent. The victim is elevated to sainthood precisely so his death cannot be used as a political weapon against the regime.

The Cold Triumph of the Sovereign

The public expectation that leaders should display personal fury on behalf of slain soldiers is a projection of modern, bourgeois sentimentalism onto a traditional imperial structure.

Russian leadership does not speak of retribution in the emotional vocabulary of Western political soundbites because the state does not view its dead through the lens of individual victimhood. Through the combined heritage of Orthodox martyrdom, autocratic supremacy, and civilizational endurance—processed through the cold mechanics of Girard’s sacrificial engine—the state achieves its ultimate aim:

It transforms the tragic, messy reality of battlefield death into a clean, sacralized deposit toward historical destiny. The diplomat’s handshake with the enemy is not a betrayal of the soldier; it is the supreme assertion of sovereign privilege—the right to use the soldier’s ultimate sacrifice as currency in the uncompromising game of global power.