When the Russian annexation of the occupied Ukrainian territories was celebrated with a concert on Moscow's Red Square last weekend, the eccentric actor Ivan Ochlobystin, who was ordained an Orthodox priest, heated up the audience with a flaming war speech.

Sooner or later Russia will win, shouted the 56-year-old Ochlobystin, who had dressed up like a demon in a black leather jacket, blood-red shirt and black latex gloves, into the microphone and suggested declaring the Ukraine campaign a "holy war".

To raise fighting spirit, Ochlobystin uttered the Old Russian battle cry "Gojda", which he described as a Slavic interjection calling for immediate action.

Many Russians immediately thought of the dystopian novel “The Day of the Oprichnik” by Vladimir Sorokin, in which he already in 2006 envisioned the return of Ivan the Terrible’s terrorist guards, known as oprichniks, who also cheered themselves up by shouting “Goyda” before their murderous missions.

In his “History of the Russian State”, Ivan Karamzin also reported the “Gojda” reputation of these tsarist henchmen, who were organized like a monastic order.

Sorokin said of his oprichnik novel, which is prophetic from today's perspective, that he wanted to use the satirical description to create a kind of defensive magic against such a future scenario.

Admittedly, the writer received compliments from President Putin's apparatus from influential readers, who took his book more as a recommendation for action.

The video of Ochlobystin's incendiary speech that circulated online also seems to have had the opposite effect than he intended.

A number of users ridiculed his appearance as a surreal re-enactment of Sorokin's novel.

It was also recalled that loud "Gojda" shouting also accompanies the homosexual orgy that seals the intimate oprichnik community in Sorokin.

The fact that the thugs form a circle, in which each one penetrates the person in front, also illustrates the intertwining of raping and being raped by these law enforcement agencies.

One commenter tweeted that "Gojda" yells at anyone who has been humiliated and wants to make people forget it.

The young photographer Darya Pleshkova confessed that in view of the terrible general situation, she sometimes called her boyfriend "Gojda" to relieve tension and make him and herself laugh.

The film scenes from The Great Dictator, The Lord of the Rings, Mad Max and Star Wars that are circulating online are particularly amusing, in which Ochlobystin's hoarse tirade flows out of the mouths of caricature-like totalitarian mega-villains.

Instead of bolstering Russian fighting spirit, the war speech from Red Square seems to make them feel their hopelessness.