How Putin uses history as a weapon: ‘It’s a Soviet tradition’

Russian children will receive new history manuals when they return to school next month. It was important to explain why the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was “inevitable”, Vladimir Medinsky, the head of the update project, who served for eight years as Putin’s minister of culture, told Radio France.

Referring to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Medinsky said: “The Kyiv regime unilaterally aggressed parts of its territory who asserted their right to independence under international law.”

Younger children will not yet be taught about the Ukraine war, but their manuals have been amended to note that the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 was also “inevitable” because Finland “threatened” Russia.

Vladimir Putin demonstrated his obsession with history in an article foreshadowing the full-scale invasion, entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians and posted on the Kremlin website on July 12th, 2021.

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“It is as if he decided to take his country back to the past,” says Laure Mandeville, a journalist at Le Figaro whose book The Russian Reconquest (2008) foresaw Putin’s attempts to reconstruct the Russian empire.

“Putin uses history as a weapon,” Mandeville continues. “Permanently rewriting history is a Soviet tradition, for example erasing figures like Trotsky from school manuals, paintings and photographs when they fall out of favour.”

Three periods feature prominently in Putin’s historical rants about the Ukraine war: the 9th to 13th century Kyivan Rus empire, the 17th and 18th century reigns of Peter I and Catherine II, and the second World War, known to Russians as The Great Patriotic War.

The Kyivan Rus empire is mythologised as the cradle of Russian civilisation. But the name of the enemy capital has become toxic so the label for the medieval dynasty will henceforward be shortened to Rus empire.

Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s first tsar, took the name Russia from the Kyivan Rus, who were Swedish Scandinavians, not Slavs. Ivan was fraudulently portrayed as a descendant of the 10th century ruler Volodymyr.

The chief protagonists in today’s war, Zelenskiy and Putin, are named after St Volodymyr/Vladimir. Both consider him the founder of their nation.

“It would be disastrous for Putin to be deprived of the myth that Russia sprang from the Kyivan Rus empire,” says Mandeville. “Because if Russia did not originate with the Kyivan Rus it means their origins are farther east, in Muscovy, which was a vassal state to the Mongol Golden Horde.”

The territory Putin has seized along the Azov and Black Sea coast of Ukraine was colonised by Empress Catherine II and her lover, Prince Grigory Potemkin, in the late 18th century and called Novorossiya (New Russia). At the outset of the present war in 2014, separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk named their confederation Novorossiya.

When they retreated from Kherson last November, Russian forces disinterred Potemkin’s remains and took them to Crimea for reburial. On July 23rd, Russia fired missiles at the historic centre of Odesa, which was founded by decree of Catherine II in 1794. It was not the first time Russia has attacked vestiges of Russia’s presence in Ukraine. Putin’s message was clear: If I cannot have it no one else can either.

Russia’s victory in the second World War is the most tenacious of Putin’s historical obsessions. On May 9th, 2012, he said that Russia “gave freedom to the peoples of the entire world” by single-handedly defeating Nazi Germany, a version of history which conveniently forgets the 1939-1941 Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact and billions of dollars’ worth of US weapons supplied to the USSR under the Lend-Lease Act.

The USSR eventually accepted Soviet culpability for the massacre of 22,000 Poles at Katyn in 1940. Putin’s entourage now question that.

Putin’s glorification of Russia’s role in the second World War is sometimes called a “memocracy”, or rule on the basis of memory.

“It’s about the only thing he has left to hang on to, the founding myth, if you erase the Germano-Soviet pact so as not to stain the Great Patriotic War,” says Mandeville. “Putin constantly says, ‘we are going to repeat our victory. We are confronting Nazis’.”

Putin also exploits memories of the second World War in the hope of sowing division. At a St Petersburg economic forum in June he showed archive footage of wartime massacres of Jews and Poles by Ukrainians.

In his speech to the Russian security council on July 21st, Putin accused Poland of harbouring territorial designs on former Soviet republics, including Belarus and western Ukraine.

Putin also claimed that the western part of Poland was a gift from Joseph Stalin. The Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted in response that “Stalin was a war criminal, guilty of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles. Historical truth is not debatable.”

In yet another grotesque distortion Putin compared the fate of Mariupol, the Ukrainian city on the Azov Sea coast which Russia flattened last year, to that of Leningrad during the German siege. Inaugurating a new tramway line in Mariupol from afar, the Russian dictator said Mariupol showed “what these people are capable of, then and now”.

There was not the slightest indication from Putin that it was Russian forces who had destroyed Mariupol.