Since Vladimir Putin denounced the West as “satanic” in 2022, Satanism has become a defining metaphor in Russia’s public and national security discourses. Political and religious leaders have described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “de-Satanization,” a holy war, and a jihad against Satan, and they have branded Satanism as a “threat to statehood.” Public figures have applied the label “satanic” to an ever-widening catalog of perceived foreign evils—from hormone replacement therapy to the Olympic opening ceremony and Peppa Pig.
This rhetoric laid the groundwork for legal prosecution. In 2024, the Russian government designated the US-based Satanic Temple as an “undesirable organization” and added Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible to the federal list of extremist materials. In 2025, the Russian Supreme Court banned the nonexistent “International Satanism Movement” as extremist.
By May 2026, Russian authorities had opened at least 66 cases investigating alleged satanic “extremist symbols”—the number 666, a pentagram, an inverted cross, the word Satan, and an image of Baphomet. The state has found signs of an international extremist threat in underwear, candles, tattoos, Tarot cards, car stickers, old social media posts, and memes. Citing suspected “manifestations of Satanism,” authorities raided a black metal band’s concert, disrupted a horror convention, and arrested a cosplayer carrying a pentagram-branded goblet. Lawmakers demanded a ban on Halloween, describing it as satanic propaganda.
Demonizing diversity
These absurd cases reveal the power of a new legal instrument for prosecuting nonconformity: the state-invented “international extremist movement.”
The template for the Satanism ban was the 2023 decision, issued by the same judge, declaring the “international LGBT movement” extremist. It led to more than one hundred convictions and separate bans on nine actual LGBT organizations. At a State Duma roundtable, speakers called this decision a precedent and listed alleged similarities between Satanism and the LGBT “movement,” including “subculturality,” “popularization of hedonism,” and “discreditation of traditional moral values.”
Earlier, Russia had banned LGBT “propaganda” aimed at minors, which the European Court of Human Rights found to be incompatible with freedom of expression and nondiscrimination. Why did the authorities not simply prohibit “satanic propaganda”?
One explanation is that information laws regulate communication to specific audiences and do not formally criminalize private communities, adults-only gatherings, and personal possessions. Anti-extremism law is far more convenient for repression because it effectively penalizes multiple forms of nonconformity, requires no identifiable victim, and carries penalties so severe that people are afraid of mere association with forbidden beliefs.
But anti-extremism law is designed to address threats of organized violence. The fiction of an “international extremist movement” supplies that missing danger by constructing a prosecutable, existentially threatening collective actor with a political agenda supposedly concealed behind lawful civic behavior.
These “movements” serve as ideal state-defined objects of repression. Unlike an abstract ideology, a movement can be supported, represented through symbols, and financed, giving prosecutors forms of conduct to punish. Unlike an organization, however, it needs no office, official membership, or representative to contest the state’s allegations.
The vagueness of the law allows authorities to assign hidden political meanings to daily life choices, symbols, gatherings, and aesthetics and to treat these as signs of extremist affiliation—all without proof of any real organization, harm, or danger. As a result, private birthday parties have been raided by police in search of an alleged LGBT extremist conspiracy, people wearing rainbow earrings have been prosecuted for the “public display of extremist symbols,” and the managers of a nightclub hosting drag shows have been imprisoned for running an “extremist organization.”
This model of prosecution recalls Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “objective enemy.” A totalitarian regime persecutes a person not for what they have done or intended but as a “carrier of tendencies,” like a carrier of disease.
The familiar enemy
Satanism is a family of philosophical traditions using Satanic symbolism to affirm bodily and intellectual autonomy, self-development, and resistance to unjust authority. Under international law, these beliefs are protected by the rights to freedom of thought, expression, and association. Satanist groups express these values by litigating for reproductive rights, campaigning against corporal punishment in schools, offering free abortion care and menstrual products, and supporting LGBTQ+ communities and animal rescues.
In contrast to this peaceful reality, Russian authorities manufactured a moral panic that portrays Satanism as a threat to children and national security. Patriarch Kirill announced that internationally coordinated satanic sects “freely conduct their rituals in our country, recruit young people, and register their communities on social media.” Proponents of the ban have falsely conflated Satanism with Nazism, the Columbine shootings, and terrorism and have called it a “funnel” for drawing Russian youth into “LGBT.”
Portraying human rights as a foreign project threatening national survival is a central theme in many recent repressive developments in Russia. The Supreme Court described the “international LGBT movement” as a “destructive ideological mechanism” originating from the United States as part of a birth-control policy. The prohibition of gender transition was framed as resistance to a Western “transgender industry” spreading into the country. The ban on “childfree propaganda” was presented as protection from a “hybrid war” aimed at population reduction. Regional bans on “inducement to abortion” were packaged as a defense against “selfishness, freedom from all restraint, immorality, [and] the denial of the natural continuation of life.” Similar arguments have appeared in emerging restrictions on queer expression in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
The same horror story is told again and again—a foreign network infiltrates the country through hidden domestic agents, targets young people with a “radical ideology,” and turns them away from “national values.” This menace is then used to justify abolishing the freedoms to think, believe, speak, gather, and make decisions about one’s own body. By portraying nonconformity as loyalty to a transnational threat, the authorities can sell any act of repression to the public as self-defense against an all-powerful antagonist—if necessary, the Antichrist himself. In this sense, the Kremlin’s “Satanic West” is just another name for an old political bogeyman used to legitimize discriminatory abuses of power.
First, they came for the Devil
The main danger of this concept of “extremism” is that it opens the door to a legal future in which routine criminal prosecution is no longer restrained by legality or factual reality. Once the Kremlin can criminalize entire identities based on ideological disagreement rather than harm, its grimoire can expand without limit.
Besides the supposed Satanist and LGBT “movements,” Russia has already applied the label of extremism to the “International ‘Memorial’ Movement” and the state-invented “Anti-Russian Separatist Movement.” However, the political appetite of the Kremlin’s exorcists extends much further. Despite an explicit constitutional guarantee of ideological pluralism, Russian public figures have proposed introducing legal restrictions on feminism, vegetarianism, furries, femboys, occult services, emigration support, Black Lives Matter, and “propaganda” of polyamory, single life, and nonhuman self-identification.
Yet declaring each imagined movement extremist still requires a manufactured body of evidence and a separate judgment. The next step is to remove that inconvenience through broader idea-based formulas, such as “spreading destructive ideologies,” “discrediting traditional values,” and “promoting non-traditional values.” This would allow authorities to handcuff people for the “display” of atheism, transhumanism, or environmentalism, or any other belief outside the state’s moral script.
The ultimate target of this crusade is not any specific belief or identity but human agency—the very idea that people may belong to themselves.