A joke has been making the rounds recently in Kiev about the new monument to Saint Vladimir the Great that stands in Borovitskaia Square, just outside the walls of the Kremlin, in the heart of Moscow. The city’s residents, upon seeing the towering sixty-foot figure for the first time, ask in befuddlement, ‘Who the heck is that?’ Looking down from his lofty perch, the saint responds, ‘Where the heck am I?’ The crux of the joke, of course, is that the historical Prince Vladimir would be utterly unable to recognize modern-day Moscow, for the simple reason that he died centuries before the city was founded. For patriotic Ukrainians, the statue is therefore a symbol of post-Soviet Russian aggression. It represents a political strategy—carefully crafted by Putin’s political technologists in the Kremlin— designed to deny Ukraine its own history, identity, and national sovereignty.

Sean Griffin is a historian, philologist, and religious theorist, specializing in the most ancient and most recent periods of Russian civilization. His research is interdisciplinary and brings together fields as diverse as medieval religion and new media theory, Byzantine liturgy and Russian Alaska, the history of propaganda and post-Soviet digital culture.

His first book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, is currently in press with Cambridge University Press. In the work, Griffin uncovers the liturgical origins of Slavic historiography and shows that the myth of origins for Rus, a myth promulgated even today by the Russian Orthodox church, originated in the religious services of the Byzantine Empire.

Griffin is currently at work on two new projects. The first is a book on post-Soviet political propaganda and religion, provisionally entitled Putin’s Holy Trinity: Orthodoxy, Media, and the Military in Post-Soviet Russia. His other work-in-progress is a multimedia collaboration with Randall Balmer. Together, they are currently filming a documentary about the Russian colonization of America and the ongoing role of Russian Orthodoxy in the lives of modern-day Alaskan natives, such as the Aleutian and Yupik peoples. The film is a companion piece to their co-authored book on the subject, Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska: Old World Faith in the New World.

Griffin earned his Ph.D. from UCLA. Prior to joining the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College, he was a VolkswagenStiftung fellow at Westfälische Wilhems-Universität in Münster, Germany, and before that he spent time as a visiting professor at Stanford University.

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