On 4 November 2016, the Day of National Unity, a statue dedicated to Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev, was unveiled in Moscow near the Kremlin, in the presence of political leaders as well as Patriarch Kirill and representatives of many other religious denominations. Three short speeches were given, each of which promoted a conservative agenda: the first by President Vladimir Putin, the second by Patriarch Kirill, and the third by Nataliia Solzhenitsyna, the widow of the Nobel laureate. Some months later, the Vladimir theme was echoed in director Andrei Kravchuk’s feature film The Viking, based on the life and deeds of the grand prince. Both the inauguration of the statue and the release of the film were belated events connected to the millennium of Vladimir’s death in the year 2015.

My task in this paper will be to study the dedication of this statue from the point of view of conservatism. I understand conservatism in the same broad sense as Elena Chebankova, who uses the following collective definition of Russian conservatism drawn from a number of different authors:

This thought is preoccupied with the ways of weaving the eternal concepts and morals into the fabric of the contemporary, future-focused world. In doing so, conservatives divorce the past from the eternal by selecting those transcendental values of previous ages that they wish to take to the future. In other words, Russian conservatism seeks to recreate tradition in a new form.1Conservatism has a moral function of preserving eternal values, but also carries the political implications of employing such values in society and governance.