Powerful images like this don't need any explanation.

The rear of the two men crouching on the floor of a lavishly red-carpeted room, holding a dying man in his arms, is Vladimir Putin – even if the features of what was once an ascetic and an athlete have become doughy.

He stares insanely in front of him in this gruesome Pietà with bloodshot eyes.

The uniformed man in Putin's arms, who is probably dying from a severely bleeding temple wound, bears the features of his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the most loyal companion of the Russian President and executor of the Ukraine war.

A chair in the background has fallen over, probably due to a previous argument;

the space behind it sinks into darkness.

The bloody deed itself was apparently committed with the spear-pointed object

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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All this is obvious.

But what is hidden behind the historical ambience with the carpets and the addition “Vladimir the Terrible according to Repin”, which is unusual for the caricaturist duo Greser and Lenz, is perhaps not.

The template for the picture is the almost two by two and a half meter "life-size" historical painting by Ilya Repin from 1883, which hangs in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and is entitled "Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 16, 1581".

A painting as a target

On that day, according to contemporary reports, Ivan the Terrible had hit his own son with the scepter for a trifle in a dispute so much that he died after a few days.

In his description, Repin adhered to the description of the Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin, who was enormously respected around 1800.

Repin reconstructed the palace room in the Kremlin after an on-site autopsy, only the bloodshot, crazy eyes are an ingredient of his artistic imagination, but given the tsar's heavily fluctuating emotional states, which has been handed down to him, is probably not entirely out of thin air.

Repin's painting has repeatedly been the target of attack.

In 1913, the icon painter Abram Balashov stabbed the image.

And on May 25, 2018 in the Tretyakov Gallery, a drunk Igor Podporin smashed the barrier post in front of the picture on its protective glass, causing major damage to the canvas in three places.

What happened almost exactly four years ago could be dismissed as a contingent act of vandalism by a drunk who, in his condition, could have damaged any other painting in the gallery.

However, Podporin justified his actions by saying that Ivan the Terrible was a saint and that Putin had expressly defended him against the defamatory Western historiography, including in a speech to miners.

European historiography in association with the pope - Karamzin took the contemporary report of the papal legate Antonio Possevino as a basis - would have demonized the tsar because he opposed westernization and in particular the Roman Catholic missionary attempts in Russia.

Tsar Ivan was unjustly condemned, although he was cosmopolitan and downright humanistic had brought foreign master builders, including even Catholic Italians, to the Kremlin.

It is hardly surprising that the Russian Orthodox Church once again stood firmly behind Putin, even given this distorted view of history.

In truth, the young heir to the throne was poisoned by unknown perpetrators.

This rehabilitation follows Putin's long-standing pattern of dressing up the history of Russian power as a single succession of glamor and glory, while ignoring all the downsides.

The drunken iconoclast Podporin can therefore be regarded as a victim of this clumsy propaganda and constant assault by the Russian media loyal to the state.

Where's the Secretary of Defense?

History is currently repeating itself as a grisly farce.

As with Repin, the Russian President in the present picture no longer just assassinates dissidents in rows, but also judges his most loyal man and Defense Minister Shoigu, highly decorated "Hero of Russia" since 1999 and always at Putin's side, even during viril-propagandistic hunting and boating his own flesh and blood, so to speak.

A classic Shakespearean dilemma: As a loyal executor of the war, Shoigu died a public death for the world public.

If he turned against Putin, he probably wouldn't live long either.

The president, unpredictable in every respect, who wants to make Russia great again at any price according to the nationalist theses and writings of Alexander Dugin, whom he admires as a mastermind,

For days there has been speculation about the whereabouts of the Russian defense minister, who has not appeared in public for a long time.

There is already speculation that Shoigu may have fallen out of favor with his political "foster father" Putin after the unexpected military failures in the invasion of Ukraine.

The only hope left in this volte of history is that the tyrant's sons are forewarned - and survive.