Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia 9781350280762, 9781350280793, 9781350280786

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Memory Makers

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Memory Makers The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia Jade McGlynn

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Jade McGlynn, 2023 Jade McGlynn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: Coat of Arms of Russia, 1898. (© duncan1890/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McGlynn, Jade, author. Title: Memory makers : the politics of the past in Putin’s Russia / Jade McGlynn. Description: London ; New York ; Oxford : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022048226 (print) | LCCN 2022048227 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350280762 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350280809 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350280779 (epub) | ISBN 9781350280786 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350280793 Subjects: LCSH: Russia (Federation)–Politics and government–1991– | Press and politics–Russia (Federation–History–21st century. | Mass media–Political aspects–Russia (Federation) | Collective memory–Political aspects–Russia (Federation) | Russia (Federation)-–Foreign relations–21st century. | Patriotism–Russia (Federation) | Russia (Federation)–Cultural policy. | Russia (Federation)–Social policy. | Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952–Influence. Classification: LCC DK510.762 .M425 2023 (print) | LCC DK510.762 (ebook) | DDC 327.47—dc23/eng/20221214 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048226 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048227 ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-8076-2 978-1-3502-8078-6 978-1-3502-8077-9

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Dedicated to my husband, without whom the adventures that sparked this book would never have taken place, and to our two children who will join us on new adventures.

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Contents Acknowledgements Note on Transliteration, Translation and Citation Style List of Abbreviations 1

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Taking Back Control of History Memory politics in Russia The route to the past Which history? Why history? Book outline The Kremlin’s Memory Policies Positive reinforcement of historical narratives The war on history Media censorship Past as Present: The Historical Framing of Ukraine, Sanctions and Syria The Ukraine Crisis as the Great Patriotic War Western imposition of sanctions as the (re)destruction of the USSR Russian intervention in Syria as a regaining of Soviet superpower status Amplifying the Call to History Memory wars and the war against historical falsification Russophobia Foreign agents Elites vs narod Heroism Messianism Memory diplomacy

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51 57 75 88 103 104

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Contents

Living Forms of Patriotism The Ministry of Culture and Vladimir Medinskii The Russian Military Historical Society Entertainment not education Securing the past for the future Taking over non-government movements: the Immortal Regiment

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Attaining Cultural Consciousness What is cultural consciousness? Templates of cultural consciousness From the vanguard of class to cultural consciousness Beyond post-truth: history as allegorical truth

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The Endlessness of History Where next for Russian history? The future of cultural consciousness

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References Index

128 135 142 148 152

158 166 170 175

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Acknowledgements I first knew that I wanted to write a book about Russian uses of history when I was living in Moscow in 2014. That it has taken so long to get to that point is testament to quite how much I had to learn in order to not only understand but also be able to explain what I could see happening before my eyes. Although I ceased to live permanently in Russia in 2015, I returned there frequently until the pandemic. After Russia’s brutal invasion and war on Ukraine, I do not know when I will return. Despite that, I still believe that perhaps the most important acknowledgement I have to make is to Russia itself, where I have spent my happiest years, and the culture, literature and history of which have inspired me to do more with my life than would ever have been conceivable for most children from my background. I hope that one day Russia will remind me of the country I fell in love with as a twelve-year-old. More tangibly, this book would make very little sense if it were not for my MA by Research supervisor at Birmingham, Natasha Rulyova, and, of course, my DPhil supervisor Polly Jones. Polly has continuously supported me in this and other endeavours and I will be forever grateful for her unending support – academic and moral – and for her incredibly detailed feedback on my work. I could not imagine a better academic mentor and it is difficult to put into words the range and amount of support she has given me. Besides my supervisors, I am also grateful to the following academics for their feedback on this book and related works, which helped me to refine my ideas: Andrei Zorin, Julie Curtis, Uilleam Blacker, Pany Xenophontos, Felix Krawatzek, Nina Friess, Karoline Thaidigsmann, Alexei Lokhmatov, Paul Goode, Ivo Walinga, Florian Toepfl, Jelena Đureinović and Travis Frederick. I am also grateful to Tomasz Hoskins, who, in his previous role as Commissioning Editor at IB Tauris, took an interest in my book pitch, and to the reviewers who approved my proposal. I would like to give special thanks to Nayiri Kendir for all her work on the manuscript and to Atifa Jiwa for her support and for ensuring this book was placed in the appropriate channels. ix

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My sincere thanks also go to the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies for providing me with the funding to pursue the DPhil research and related activities, from conferences to language courses, that informed this book. Financially, I am thankful to the AHRC, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Santander Fellowship, Marie Curie, New College and the University of Oxford Modern Languages Faculty. The generous funding of these organizations allowed me to conduct the required research, attend symposia and conferences to receive feedback on my work, and to undertake fieldwork research in Moscow and Voronezh. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Voronezh State University in providing me with a visa and other forms of support for fieldwork. More personally, I am grateful to my dad for paying for my first Russian conversation lessons, a necessary investment to correct my horrendous accent after teaching myself the language from a book, and to my nan for the moral support throughout difficult years. Finally, I express inestimable gratitude to my husband. First, I want to thank him for reading this book several times over and for his sensitive circumlocutionary phrasing of (most) criticisms. Second, I want to thank him for sharing, understanding and encouraging my academic endeavours and my complicated relationship with Russia. Third, I want to thank him for his love and for his patience in putting up with what could politely be called my ‘intensity’. Most husbands would grow tired of unwarranted discussions of Dostoevsky’s Demons or the Gulag over breakfast: that he has not, over ten years on, shows the generosity of spirit and good humour that immediately attracted me to him during the 2011 White Nights in Saint Petersburg. As a special mention, I would also like to thank my son and my daughter who have in no way helped me to complete this book but who have made my life complete.

Note on Transliteration, Translation and Citation Style I have used British Standard (BS 2979:1958, as modified in Oxford Slavonic Papers) throughout this book, except on occasions where there is already another popular or common way of transliterating the name of the person or thing (e.g., Komsomolskaya pravda, rather than Komsomol’skaya pravda; Yeltsin rather than El’tsyn). As a rule, I have included Russian words in transliteration rather than Cyrillic. All translations are my own except where indicated. For the translation of Ukrainian names and places, I have used the Ukrainian spelling throughout (e.g., Kyiv rather than Kiev), unless the speaker is deliberately using the Russian name, for example to make a political point. Given the large number of citations in a study of this kind, so heavily reliant on discourse analysis, I have opted to use Chicago Style (name–date). A full list of works cited is available in the References section towards the end of this book.

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Abbreviations BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation

DNR

Donetsk People’s Republic

FSB

Federal Security Service (of the Russian Federation)

GONGO

Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization

IMF

International Monetary Fund

INF Treaty Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty LNR

Luhansk People’s Republic

MFA

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (of the Russian Federation)

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NGO

Non-Governmental Organization

NSS

National Security Strategy

OUN/UPA Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists/Ukrainian Insurgent Army POW

prisoner of war

RHS

Russian Historical Society

RMHS

Russian Military Historical Society

RuNet

Russian (language) Internet

UN

United Nations

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

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Taking Back Control of History Historical memory is the most important component of our culture and history, our present [. . .] and our future will be made with reference to these historical experiences. Vladimir Putin (Seliger 2014)

Memory politics in Russia Teenage boys and hardened men march in winter uniform through Red Square, faces at jagged right angles directed towards Stalin’s podium. Crunching the snow underfoot, their faces are consumed by the formidable fate that lies imminently upon them: confronting the indefatigable Nazi invaders at the very gates of Moscow. Permitted not one step back, ghostlike, these men prepare to step forward into a battle for the Soviet capital and for their homeland. It was a battle from which many thousands would not return. Pop singers, children in colourful coats and the Minister of Defence watch on attentively as these faces of grim determination, flecked with simulcast age spots, beam into the present from 1941. The Soviet troops’ movements are shadowed and replicated by twenty-first-century soldiers of the Russian Federation, who now march annually beneath the broadcast footage of the 1941 October Revolution Soviet parade. The original parade was held hastily and defiantly by Stalin as the Nazis weighed down on Moscow. The modern-day parade is carefully curated, an invitation to all Russians to step back into a heroic past through a part-touching, part-inappropriately parodic, homage. Such tributes, characterized by a flurry of militaristic dress-up opportunities, are commonplace in Russia today. The blurring of fact with fiction, of real with 1

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reel, has long since become a normal part of Russian politics and its obsession with the past. Not just the soldiers described above but the entire Russian population has been recruited as understudies in this already completed play of historical fiction. It is a work of epic proportions centred on the Second World War but encompassing various storylines, (re)written and woven together by the country’s memory makers: the Kremlin, politicians, media, civil society and the many ordinary Russians who chose to sit down, stay watching and get involved. This book was written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, but the activities and rhetoric it describes will show that this war was perhaps the only possible outcome of Russia’s preoccupation with policing the past – even if, personally, I did not believe it would come so soon. Although it is not concerned with explaining the war, I hope the research and arguments contained in this book will provide some much needed context to explain why so many Russians support their government’s unjust war against Ukraine and see themselves as the heroes, denazifying Ukraine, rather than the perpetrators of atrocities not seen since the Yugoslav wars. I also hope it will explain why policymakers and analysts need to take ‘propaganda’ and historical obsessions much more seriously and acknowledge their considerable emotive power. Russia will never be at peace with its neighbours until it can be at peace with itself and its history. Russian official and societal obsession with sanitizing history, and moulding it into something usable to prove exclusive heroism and victimhood, is fuelled by an insecurity borne of changing ideological regimes and the senselessness of the historical traumas Russia experienced in the twentieth century. The power of these cultural memories is immense and the Kremlin has wielded this power to prepare its nation for war and repression. Ordinary people also took part in this immersive conflation of past with present. For many Russians, the road to shooting civilians in Bucha was paved with battle re-enactments and military dress-up. Participating in the official memory making has covered a vast, sometimes bizarre, range of activities. It could mean celebrating your child’s birthday party at a fairground Partisan Village located in Patriot Park on the outskirts of Moscow. Or taking the chance to clamber aboard the ‘Echelon of Victory’ Train-Museum that chugged across Russia and Belarus in 2018, laden with wartime exhibitions,

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propaganda posters and anti-aircraft guns. But as well as providing fodder for bemusing headlines, the politics of memory sits more solemnly at the very core of the Russian political system. In 2020, Vladimir Putin ushered in sweeping new legislative amendments that amounted to a new Russian constitution. Many observers focused on the fact it allowed Putin to stay in power until 2036 but at the heart of this constitution also lay a codification of the duty to ‘defend historical truth’ and ‘protect the memory’ of the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s term for the Soviet Union’s war against the Nazis from 1941 to 1945. In this memory – and law – there is no space for the Red Army’s mass rapes in Berlin, or the post-1945 Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Such restrictive legislation did not come out of the blue: the Russian government, media and – to some extent – public had carefully laid the groundwork for it far in advance, working as memory makers to push history into the heart of Russian political and popular culture. The efforts they undertook formed part of the Kremlin’s broader ‘call to history’, a term that denotes the government’s intensive use and propagation of selective interpretations of history to define what it means to be Russian, to justify its own rule and to project power at home and abroad.1 The call to history is partly a shift in political focus and partly a call to awareness and to action, requiring citizens to actively engage with and reproduce the Kremlin’s own ‘use[s] of history as an instrument of political argumentation’ (Kangaspuro 2011). This book is an attempt to describe both the content and delivery of these arguments, tracing how the Russian government, media and associated bodies have sought to assume power over cultural memory and to render historical narrative a matter of existential and everyday concern. It asks how and why the government have chosen to base identity and discussions of who belongs on the historical narrative they profess.2 Clarifying the how and the why are important not only for the Russian case, but increasingly for the global one, as we see history assume an ever more

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This term originates from the Russian ‘obrashchenie k istorii’. I came across its use in various interviews that I conducted, including with Konstantin Pakhalyuk, an academic working at the Russian Military Historical Society. All references to ‘government’ refer to the Russian government, unless otherwise stipulated.

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prominent and divisive role in political discourse, debate and discussions over identity, from Shanghai to San Francisco (Fukuyama 2019). My original interest in the Kremlin’s ‘retrospective reconstruction[s] to serve the needs of the present’ (Olick 2007: 9) emerged when I lived in Russia from 2011 to 2015. Following the 2013–14 EuroMaidan protests and revolution in Ukraine, with one eye on the BBC and one eye on its nominal equivalent, Rossiya-1, I was not shocked by the difference in interpretation so much as nonplussed by the intensity and selectivity of Russian politicians’ and the domestic media’s references to history. I watched as names and places I knew only from (Russian) history books – Stepan Bandera, Khatyn, SS Galichina3 – appeared on a loop in the news coverage, grafted onto present-day and seemingly unrelated events. I was fascinated by the way that this technique, which I would come to call ‘historical framing’, combined and demanded – but also distorted – knowledge of history, political culture, communications, nationalism and identity construction. Historical framing made history relevant to people watching right now by pretending that desperate traumas and euphoric triumphs from the past were being repeated in real-time. To understand this technique in a more academic sense, I first undertook an MA by Research and wrote a 40,000word thesis on the historical framing of events in Ukraine. But I soon realized this tactic was not unique to Russian media coverage of Ukraine and so progressed to a PhD, during which I analysed almost 11,000 historical analogies produced by the pro-Kremlin media and politicians, as well as more than 10,000 pages of government doctrines, strategies and interviews published between 2012 and 2021. The more I researched historical framing and its uses, the more apparent it became that the media’s hyperbolic invocation of history is clearly aimed not only at legitimizing government policy but also at constructing and imposing a revised understanding of patriotism, of the meaning of Russianness and even of truth itself.4

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Respectively, these are references to the far-right leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who were active during the Second World War; a Belarusian village massacred by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in 1943; and the 4th SS-Volunteer Division ‘Galicia’ (after 1944 called the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS [1st Galician], which was a military SS unit formed primarily of Ukrainian volunteers from the region of Galicia in what is now Western Ukraine). To avoid repetition, I use ‘media’ in this book to refer to the state-aligned pro-Kremlin Russian language media, unless qualified otherwise.

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Playing on the emotional gratification inherent within patriotic retellings of history, the media use historical framing to allow viewers to feel as though they were participating in, even reconstructing, heroic episodes from the past. In Russia, ‘affective belonging today is produced through the repetition and/or re-enactment of the past’ (Oushakine 2013b: 282), which means looking beyond the traditional political and media space to understand how these state-led efforts manifest themselves in society. I conducted interviews and fieldwork in Moscow and in the region of Voronezh to explore how the state encouraged the population to contribute to state-sponsored patriotic narratives of the past and to use these narratives to interpret the world around them. The more I examined the interplay of forces at work – trying to understand who was making the memory – the more it became clear that the discursive preoccupation with history was transmitted from elite circles but not solely derived from them. As the Russian scholar Vladimir Malakhov (2018) has argued, the government’s turn to history as a form of political legitimation came partly in response to what they saw as a general public appetite for a narrative that cast Russian identity and history as worthy of pride. This notion was also summarized by the political strategist Aleksandr Dugin: ‘you can’t say that Putin forced the war cult on people, but you also can’t say that the people independently demanded it’ (Walker 2017: 32). This common interest allows the Kremlin’s politicized historical narratives to transcend the traditional confines for discussing history (on days of commemoration, in history lessons, etc.), rendering it an everyday concern. It is important to differentiate between history (events as they happened and/or an evidence-based presentation of the historical events concerned with how they happened) and memory (the recollections and representations of lived experiences), especially because the Russian government and statealigned media5 deliberately blur this distinction, passing as ‘history’ what is in fact ‘memory’. Where possible, and where it is not too tiresome to the reader to do so, I have tried to underscore this distinction. The Kremlin’s ability to change and mould historical narratives to political needs (to employ its ‘uses of history’ as it does) stems in part from the shift from communicative to cultural

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State-aligned here means owned or working for the state, directly or indirectly.

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memory of the Second World War.6 Using veterans’ stories, historical reenactment and constant war analogies to bring the war back to life, the Kremlin and its supportive media imbue their top-down historical narratives with some of the authenticity of communicative memory. Given the overt prominence of memory politics in today’s Russia, this book is far from the first study of memory in post-Soviet Russia, and nor is it the first to identify the importance of history, especially the Great Patriotic War, to Russian national identity (re)construction (Walker 2017; Koposov 2018; Nelson 2019; Pearce 2020; Fedor et al. 2017). My work relies on key findings from these authors, such as Nikolai Koposov’s claim that memory is increasingly taking over the functions of ideology and Julie Fedor’s argument that memory and history are the most powerful structuring elements in Russian identity discourse. I am fortunate to be able to build on such excellent works, spanning the best of academia and journalism, but I hope to have added to this canon by shifting away from a concern with what history is promoted towards questions of how, that then inform my assessment of why.

The route to the past The Kremlin’s historical obsession did not appear overnight with Putin’s reelection in 2012. In part, it is an obsession common to national identity (Anderson 2016), where the peoples of a nation construct their identity with recourse to the past, using it to plot a tale of who and what they are and how they got here. In any nation, ‘memories of the past serve particular interests in the present’ (Ferrán 2007: 16), including political objectives, such as the formation of a cohesive culture and national identity. In secular societies in particular, history is frequently used to provide morality tales previously sourced from religion (MacMillan 2009). But the active discursive reconstruction of the past has played an especially emphatic role in the post-

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Jan Assman (2011) contrasts the two forms by describing ‘communicative’ memory as shared and conveyed within a social group, whereas ‘cultural’ memory is detached from personal experience of the event being remembered.

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communist space that emerged after 1989, as countries looked to create new futures but needed new pasts to justify them, disenchanted with the old teleological narratives of Marxism (Subotić 2020). Rather than the End of History, to look at Central and Eastern Europe today is instead to see the Return of History as a political topic, afforded an increasingly securitized and significant role in political and popular culture. You only have to look at the trials of academic historians and outsize role of the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland to understand the sensitivity at the heart of national politics of history in the region (Junes 2021). Memory is policed as if it were a fragile but highly valuable heirloom of the past, without which nationhood would shatter. While exaggerated, there is some logic to this sensitivity. Autobiographical narratives are constructed as continuous in time and space (Berenskoetter 2012); by challenging states’ collective memories, alternative narratives of a shared past can come to be seen as direct security threats to the nation’s sense of self and to its ‘mnemonical security’ (Malksoo 2015). Ultimately, the many discussions over ‘History’ are not about history at all, but about autobiographical narratives, or the mirror in which nations and people wish to see themselves. Although it took a different path to that of the other post-communist states who were able to successfully externalize their communist past, Russia has been enmeshed in many of the same processes described above. In (admittedly small) part, Russia’s historical preoccupation could even be viewed as a reaction to the nationalist-led revision of history in the Baltic States, Poland and other countries and their presentation of the Soviet occupation as a Russian one. In this strongly anti-communist historiography, many have actively subscribed to the ‘two totalitarianisms’ doctrine, equating twentieth-century communism with fascism. Given the scale of Soviet (and, within this, Russian) losses in the Second World War and its prominent role in Soviet memory in the late Soviet era, it is easy to see how this provoked a sharp reaction even without Russia’s own politicized autobiographical narrative choices. That said, the notion that the Kremlin’s ire is drawn primarily for reasons of historical justice, as opposed to political enmity, is hard to support given its willingness to engage with neoNazi organizations and those who openly celebrate Nazi collaborationist regimes. See, for example, the Kremlin’s support for People’s Party Our Slovakia, which glorifies the Nazi collaborationist government that ruled Slovakia from 1939 to 1945 (German Sirotnikova 2021).

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After the fall of the USSR, Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin denigrated the Soviet past, seeking to externalize the Soviet. He changed the focus of all the major Soviet holidays, creating new ones in their place. He promoted a narrative of the USSR as an inverted empire, where the peripheries had colonized Russia, rather than vice versa. This was an effort by Yeltsin’s team to disentangle Russian and Soviet identity and to undermine the idea that the USSR equated to great power status (velikoderzhavnost’). Yeltsin also introduced a new national anthem and tried to eliminate Soviet flags and communist overtones from Victory Day celebrations. However, these efforts faltered due to his lack of legitimacy following the 1993 shelling of parliament and the deeply corrupt 1996 elections, as well as his inability to construct a positive inspirational national narrative that disowned the Soviet past entirely (Smith 2002). Whereas Yeltsin tried – and failed –to impart a unifying anti-Soviet historical narrative, Putin successfully embraced several aspects of the USSR as a positive legacy, including reinstating the Soviet national anthem (with new words) early in his first presidential term. Although he did not, in the early years, introduce a coherent symbolic programme to replace that of the Soviet era (Gill 2013), Putin did restore the Victory Day parade to its former, militaristic glories. In 2005, he hosted one of the largest parades the world had ever seen and was joined on Red Square by the highest ranks of world leaders, including George W. Bush and Tony Blair, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazism. As discussed in Chapter 2, the rehabilitation of certain Soviet elements was accompanied by the return of less celebrated Soviet tendencies, including the government’s takeover of the information space, especially television channels, and a crackdown on opposition and political life. This autocratic turn fuelled and was fuelled by growing tensions between the West7 and Russia. In contrast to the early days of his rule, when Putin had held out a hand of friendship to the USA following the 11 September terrorist attacks, in 2007 the Russian president chose to introduce a more defensively aggressive foreign policy stance towards the West in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. In retrospect, this speech has served as the demarcation point for a shift in Russia’s relations with the rest of the world. At the time, its 7

While I acknowledge the inherent elasticity of the term ‘West’, I use it here and throughout in accordance with Aleksei Yurchak’s sense of Russia’s ‘imagined West’, applying it to refer to the USA and its allies (Yurchak 2005: 159).

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importance was overshadowed by baseless hopes that Dmitrii Medvedev’s time as president would usher in a more liberal climate. However, the cultivation of historical narratives, grievances and initiatives necessary for later illiberal turns had already begun to form by this point. For example, in 2007, there were riots in Tallinn, after the city authorities attempted to remove the affectionately nicknamed Alyosha statue that memorializes the Red Army soldiers who drove the Nazis out of Estonia. The Russian government and media exacerbated existing tensions, provoking riots among Tallinn’s Russophone population and even launching a massive and highly destabilizing cyber-attack against Estonia. Less dramatically, in 2009, the government set up the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History and the leading United Russia Party launched its Historical Memory (Istoricheskaya pamyat’) policy project. From that point on, the government began to increase its politicization of history and the administrative resources it spent on propagating its vision of the past. When Medvedev glibly stood aside to allow Putin to retake the presidency, many democratically minded Russians were disappointed. After the clearly falsified Duma elections of 2011 and presidential elections of 2012, they were outraged – and no more so than in the metropolises, until then seen as strongholds of support for the economic stability and development Putin had brought after the shocks of the 1990s. The 2011–12 protests were compounded by difficult economic prospects for Russia following the 2008 global financial crash, rendering the previous political arrangement untenable. Specifically, the protests reflected the failure of influential politician and advisor Vladislav Surkov’s notion of a managed or ‘sovereign democracy’ in which Russian citizens accepted the de facto dismantling of democratic institutions (e.g., a free media) in return for economic growth and stability (Teper 2016; Colton and Hale 2014). The conditions were such that the government needed to devise a new means of political legitimation to justify its arbitrary and authoritarian style of governing and reinforce Putin’s (more conservative) political base in the regions. Low on options, the politicians looked more and more to the past for inspiration. In his study of Soviet and post-Soviet historical narratives, the academic Thomas Sherlock demonstrates how the delegitimization of the Soviet past that took place under Mikhail Gorbachev had a deeply destabilizing effect on Soviet

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society, even contributing to the USSR’s downfall (Sherlock 2007: 93). In many ways, the Russian establishment under Putin has set about reversing this destabilization but this has not always equated to reinstating the old history. Instead, it has focused on reinstating old attitudes towards history, denigrating the critical approaches seen during the perestroika era, in a way that at times recalls debates in the USA and UK around critical theories and their application to historical narratives. This denigration of critical readings of history was part of a process in which the Russian government increasingly policed the limits of ‘acceptable’ memories, with certain topics (particularly the Great Patriotic War) sacralized beyond debate. Any attempt to disagree with these narratives was rendered a matter of existential security, summarized in Vladimir Medinskii’s (Minister of Culture, 2012 to 2020) quip that ‘If you don’t feed your own culture, you feed someone else’s army’ – a twist on the famous Russian saying that if you do not feed your own army then you feed someone else’s (Balueva 2015). The media and government’s intensive use of history to construct an often xenophobic and revanchist worldview accelerated accordingly, facilitating the so-called ‘conservative turn’ in Russian politics and political discourse (Makarychev 2018; Petro 2018; Byzov 2018). In the early years of Putin’s third term, there was sporadic and significant repression of historical investigation – including assigning a ‘foreign agent’ label to Memorial, a human rights organization dedicated to preserving the memory of those who suffered and died in the gulag. Yet, even within this conservative turn, at this time the Kremlin’s main tactics for inculcating their desired historical narratives relied on a genuine public appetite for a more patriotic history, in turn delivered via ‘informational autocracy’ (Guriev and Treisman 2019). To this end, those in power used their dominance over information channels to manipulate rather than coerce audiences wherever possible. However, as Putin’s third term became, inevitably, his fourth, these efforts at co-optation began to harden. When the emotive glories of the annexation of Crimea began to dim, falling living standards and economic stagnation meant that the Kremlin instead applied increasingly forceful coercive methods across the political space, including over political uses of history.8 If 2014 to 2015 saw

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This trajectory is traced in the first biography of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny (Dollbaum, Lallouet and Noble 2021).

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the media and politicians brandish historical analogies with gleeful abandon, the years 2016 to 2017 witnessed the mass creation and expansion of ways for the public to engage with (approved) history, while the period 2018–21 ushered in a more sinister constriction of historical inquiry alongside the targeting of alternative narratives. This trajectory reinforced the argument, implicit to pro-Kremlin politicians’ uses of history, that espousing the ‘correct’ memory was a – if not the – core attribute of Russian identity.9 In this interpretation, possessing the correct historical cribsheet provided the master key to decoding current events but also to ensuring Russia’s future. But what was on this cribsheet? And how to interpret it correctly?

Which history? In the weeks leading up to the 2020 constitutional referendum, Putin delivered an online lesson to mark the Day of Knowledge (1 September), when Russian pupils and students start or return to schools and universities. Putin appeared at the centre of the screen, joined digitally by teachers and students from several age groups, including some as young as six. As they settled in to listen attentively, their president condemned ‘wartime collaborators’, explaining why those who ‘distort’ history – understood here to mean ‘disagree with the pro-Kremlin version’ – are the modern-day equivalents of Nazi collaborators. Such an inappropriate and extreme statement would have been remarkable were it not so predictable. At this point, it was just another outré historical analogy in a long line of outré historical analogies. The sharpness of Putin’s – and others’ – language at times conceals the amorphousness of the Kremlin’s actual approach to history. Rather than dictatorial, the way that the Kremlin uses history is in many ways dialogic with societal needs and demands. It builds on popular narratives of history and then diverts these narratives to its own needs, rather than imposing certain views regardless of public perception. The Russian government and statealigned media also try to weave these popular, and sometimes mutually

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Sergei Lavrov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, expounded this argument during a 2014 speech at the Seliger youth forum (see RT na russkom 2014a).

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exclusive, narratives together to build as large a constituency as possible for their approved memories. The screen backdrop televising Putin’s Day of Knowledge speech displayed a range of images and people celebrating different historical periods: there were students from a Kadety school, set up in the imperial tsarist tradition; members of the Immortal Regiment, a new modernday procession to remember family who served in the Second World War; Victory flags with communist-era hammers and sickles. This mélange reflects the mosaic nature of the Kremlin’s approved cultural memory, underscoring the eclecticism and selectivity characteristic of the Kremlin’s ‘usable past’. The selective (ab)use of history also speaks to a political flexibility, borne of the need to construct a workable post-Soviet identity that in some way responds to the legacy of the USSR but eschews Marxist ideology and the excesses that contributed to the Soviet collapse. The Kremlin’s vague and adaptable historical narratives are aimed at creating a coherent Russian identity out of the past in order to derive political legitimacy from it in the present. For a nation to exist, it must connect its dead, living and yet unborn to an imaginary community (Anderson 2016). This requires a powerful story, or what the Israeli historian Yael Zerubavel calls a ‘master commemorative narrative’, where group leaders construct a basic storyline that provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past (Zerubavel 2005: 6). The actual events that constitute this narrative generally matter very little – new bits can be added – provided that these events are interpreted in such a way as to support the core cultural constructs needed to underpin, unify and legitimize the group or nation. Through its uses of history, the pro-Kremlin master commemorative narrative supports three broad arguments: that Russia needs a strong state; that Russia has a special path of development; and that Russia is a messianic great power with something unique to offer the world. Whether the celebration of the state in question relates to Stalin or Tsar Nicholas I is less important than that the state being celebrated is evidently strong. That said, Vladimir Putin and his senior ministers have generally avoided divisive issues. For example, I found very little evidence to support the consistent claims that the Kremlin and supportive media praise or idolize Stalin, despite analysing thousands of examples of media political discourse on the topic of history. This is not to say that the sources are or were condemnatory of Stalin (rather the opposite), but

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that they tend to avoid mentioning him (and other divisive historical topics) altogether, preferring – unsurprisingly – to promote those episodes behind which everyone can unite, such as Soviet courage against the Nazis. They also prefer to use recent history and, in my research, I encountered surprisingly few references to late imperial history on a sustained level. Instead, politicians and the media preferred to invoke a very specific and very Soviet-focused historical narrative, although it is at times expanded out, if only fleetingly, to cover events from across a 1,000-year spectrum. The triumphant events of this narrative include the Great Patriotic War (the backbone of the Kremlin’s call to history); the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’; the notion of Prince Volodymyr/Vladimir as the founder of all Rus’ (from which all three Eastern Slavic nations are supposedly descended); Aleksandr Nevsky’s military victories over German and Swedish armies; Peter the Great’s triumphs; imperial territorial expansion, as under Catherine the Great; victory in the first Great Patriotic War against Napoleon; the successes of the Cold War, like the Space Race; Soviet superpower status; and stability in the Brezhnev and Andropov eras. These are all events that showcase the benefits of a strong state, point to a special Russian development and demonstrate the country’s right to great power status. Tragic or traumatic events that are invoked as warnings include The Time of Troubles (a period of political crisis at the turn of the seventeenth century following the death of Fedor I, which led to anarchy and occupation by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth); the 1917 February and October Revolutions; Vladimir Lenin’s nationalities policy; Gorbachev’s reforms and the Soviet collapse; the anarchy of the transition to capitalism and wild 1990s. These events are cited as examples of the negative effects of a weak state or of Russia attempting to follow, or having imposed upon it, a foreign path of development. In Russian historical narratives, the tragedies and triumphs of 1941–5 are treated as if they were innate Russian characteristics. In this and so many other ways, Russian state-led memory politics recalls Bernhard Giesen’s (2004) theory that triumph and tragedy function as the two extremes against which national identity is discursively constructed. But these extremes are not static: while some traumatic or inconvenient events tend to be ignored, others are repurposed and re-evaluated so as to provide different, more convenient lessons. For example, some enterprising Russian politicians and cultural figures

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have peddled idiosyncratic interpretations of the Chernobyl’ nuclear disaster as something caused by US special forces and therefore evidence of the dangers of opening up to the West (BBC 2019b). As another example, Russian media were trying to depict the Soviet war in Afghanistan as a victory as early as 2018 (Rosenberg 2018). Following the disastrous failure of Western intervention and evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021, it was perhaps unsurprising that Russia would develop this bold retelling further, recasting the USSR’s failures as relative successes. The Putin-era tendency to recode vague memories of the USSR into Russian patriotism as part of a highly selective and ‘broadly conceived legacy’ of the past (Kalinin 2011: 156) also functions to create a sense of continuity. The Russian government has sought to impose this constructed constancy onto Russia’s unruly and discontinuous history, most famously in Putin’s repeated insistences that Russia is a state with 1,000 years of history. The use of history to provide a false sense of security relies on two components: the intertwining of mutually exclusive memories and the failure to closely examine the historical evidence for such memories. After all, this is not about accurately reproducing a historical era but about indulging nostalgia and creating a worldview that promotes qualities amenable to those in power: a strong state, Russia’s special path and great power messianism. In her work on nostalgia, which examines the (admittedly earlier) Russian context, Svetlana Boym differentiates between restorative and reflective nostalgia, classifying the former as efforts to reconstruct the past and the latter as a sentimental longing that ultimately accepts the impossibility of returning to the past (Boym 2007, 1994: 287). The type of nostalgia encouraged by the Russian government and media combines elements of both forms insofar as TV hosts and politicians have argued that history was not only repeatable but was literally repeating itself, while at the same time acknowledging that a complete return to the past is impossible and not necessarily desirable. The Russian media and politicians appear to want to cherry pick their restoration work on the past. Exemplified in government policies and media discourse, this (again) selective approach to nostalgia has developed from what the Russian academic Ilya Kalinin (2011) has described as a political discourse of ‘nostalgic modernization’. The government and media have started from the (not

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unreasonable) premise that if the Soviet collapse resulted in a grave worsening of conditions for many Russians, then a restoration of certain aspects of the late USSR would be desirable (Chigishov 2014k: 19.42).10 In essence, the future would be better if it could look more like the past, especially one informed by glorious episodes of Russian history, including the most celebrated event of all: the Soviet victory over Nazism in the Second World War. This nostalgic anticipation feeds off the destabilizing and traumatizing experience of the 1990s and the crime, chaos and corruption of the Soviet collapse, a genuine Time of Trouble – or smuta in Russian – a term used more generally to denote periods of chaos and state collapse. Beyond this unsettled hinterland lies another pillar of nostalgia, and the core of the official – and unofficial – commemorative narrative: the triumph of the Great Patriotic War. As opposed to the international conflict of the Second World War (1939–45, or Vtoraya mirovaya voina), the Great Patriotic War (1941–5, Velikaya otechestvennaya voina) is viewed as a war for and of the homeland against Nazi invaders. Much of today’s war myth is indebted to the Brezhnev era’s neo-Stalinist war cult, which saw the construction of gargantuan memorial complexes all around the country and the introduction of new rituals for remembering the sacrifices of the veterans (Tumarkin 1994). Sovietindebted narratives focus on the Great Victory and not on the 27 million lives lost, except insofar as those lives earned the Soviet Union a seat at the superpower table. Actors must ‘construct policies with public justifications that enact the identity and moral purpose of the state’ (Roselle 2006: 13); in Russia’s case this identity and moral purpose were borrowed directly from the Great Victory of 1945, exemplifying how memory politics belongs to a larger symbolic discourse on Russia’s place in the world and what it means to be Russian. As the successor state to the USSR, Russia’s great power status is partly dependent on the legacy of the Great Victory. Its sacrifice and moral triumph over Nazism constitute both a justification and a motivation for Russia to pursue its ambitions. Consequently, any challenges to Russia’s status as victor and liberator in the Second World War could potentially damage its geopolitical ambitions and

10

Please note that all the times provided in parentheses for Vesti nedeli and Voskresnoe vremya episodes refer to the programme’s running time. That is, they do not account for advert breaks.

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sense of identity (Torbakov 2011). This fragility has led to what Russian sociologist Elena Rozhdestvenskaya calls ‘the hyper-exploitation of the past Victory’ of 1945, which involves ‘the constant making present of the war experience’ (2015). While the Great Patriotic War plays the most prominent role in Russia’s state-led cultural memory, the ‘making present’ of historical episodes extends beyond the Great Victory. Depending on the political needs of the moment, politicians and the media also try to ‘make present’ periods from the Cold War, the Brezhnev era and the immediate post-war years. Indeed, the ‘making present’ of selected episodes of Russian and world history is an integral part of ensuring the government’s own political legitimacy and disseminating its approach to patriotism. Traumas, for example, are regurgitated to inform a fearful nation that they would do better to continue supporting Putin than risk a repeat of the chaos that came before, while the same politicians relive and re-enact triumphs to appropriate their splendour (Giesen and Eisenstadt 2004). Describing his attendance at a parade to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day, the pro-Kremlin conservative writer and Russian nationalist Aleksandr Prokhanov remarked: I felt happy that in celebrating the Victory of 1945, we are also celebrating the Victory over the dark and seemingly hopeless days of the 1990s. The Russian state has prevailed over the defeat [symbolized by] perestroika and the powerlessness of the 1990s. It has once more raised itself up to its full size and irrepressible height. Prokhanov 2015

In just a few lines, Prokhanov articulates the interconnection between triumphs and traumas in what is ultimately a narrative of national resurgence under Vladimir Putin. Tellingly, he also references the three core arguments contained within the media’s historical framing narratives explored later in this book:11 the legitimacy and importance of the victory over Nazism, the chaos caused by the lack of a strong state in the 1990s, and the resurgence of the Russian state as a great power. While the Kremlin does not present itself as responsible for

11

As a reminder, historical framing is a technique whereby speakers and news producers present present-day events in a detailed and intensive form of historical analogy, conflating a past event with a current one through hundreds, if not thousands, of references and comparisons.

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the ‘making present’ of traumatic events, the threat of this (re)occurring is central to their use of history for legitimation, which entails utilizing a deeply emotional, even traumatic, memory for political manipulation masquerading as redress.

Why history? The prominence and emotivity of the Kremlin’s uses of the Great Patriotic War render this tactic highly amenable to the government’s securitization of, and preoccupation with, memory and historical narrative more broadly. As a Briton, I am acutely aware that Russia is not the only country fixated on the Second World War; however, the intensity of Russian memory culture and politics provide a rich body of tactics, language and practices through which to explore not only Russian uses of history but also international points of inflection and comparison. Russia’s ostensible ‘special military operation’ to ‘denazify’ Ukraine is evidence enough of the extreme lengths to which Russians have collapsed the boundary between past and present. There is much to learn from the way in which Russia has progressed along a path that passes through cultural obsession and arrives at the total securitization of the memory of 1939/1941 to 1945 and other historical interpretations. In traversing this path, the government’s purpose has been to legitimize its own actions and its vision of who is Russian, at home and abroad. The slabs that pave this path must be considered within the socio-economic and political realities of Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term, when most of them were laid or at least polished. This term was mired in controversy from the beginning of the mandate, which saw the legitimacy of the election results contested. The 2011–12 protests against electoral falsification were the largest mass demonstrations ever seen against Putin and his United Russia ruling party and provoked the Russian government’s move towards increasingly conservative and illiberal values-based discourses of legitimacy, appealing to a more populist base of support (Sharafutdinova 2014). When ‘the structure of power itself is threatened, elites can either try to protect the status quo or they can accept change’ (Gagnon 2004: 8); one way to defend the status quo is to ‘reconceptualize political space, thereby fundamentally shifting the focus of

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political discourse away from issues around which challengers are mobilizing the populace’ (Gagnon 2004: 8). Since 2012, the Russian government has been increasingly active in using history to reconceptualize the political space and belonging. The government rendered its view of history and political events the only possible or legitimate opinion, effectively turning a person’s view on history into a security issue. This shift both contributed to and was exacerbated by increased tensions with the West relating to the latter’s (alleged and real) support for ‘colour revolutions’ in Europe, regime change tactics in the Middle East, Russia’s introduction of the so-called ‘gay propaganda law’, the increasingly active political role of the Church, various Magnitsky Acts and the tightening of regulations on foreign adoption of Russian orphans. It was against this backdrop that Ukraine’s EuroMaidan demonstrations took place in 2013 in protest at the corruption of then President Yanukovych and his failure to sign an association agreement with the EU. The Russian government reacted angrily to the protests, accusing the USA and EU of directing them and installing the interim government that assumed power after President Yanukovych fled the demonstrators. Insisting that the new authorities in Ukraine represented a mortal threat to Russian speakers, Putin ordered special forces into Crimea, annexing the region following a illegal referendum. Russia then facilitated the outbreak of full-scale war between Russian-backed rebels (including Russian soldiers and mercenaries) and the Ukrainian army, loyal to the new Kyiv authorities (Wilson 2014). With the downing of MH17 by Russians and Russian-backed irregulars in July 2014, and the imposition of sanctions and countersanctions between Russia and the West, relations continued to deteriorate. Domestically, Putin’s reputation was boosted by the wave of patriotism he had unleashed with the ‘return’ of Crimea, at least for 2014; yet, as the Russian economy faltered and the rouble plummeted, government popularity began to suffer as early as 2015 (Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2018). Throughout this period of extremes, the government used history alternately to distract from failings and to exaggerate successes. But why turn to history specifically? As the former Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinskii, has argued, this is about the ‘identity of Russian [rossiiskogo] society, in which respect for the heroic past [. . .] has played the part of a unifying force (Minkul’tury 2016: 155). In a country as diverse as

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Russia, the political elites could not rely on ethnic identity as a unifying element in the same way as in Poland, for example. Managing ethno-nationalism had been a political priority between 2006 and 2012 and continued to be a prominent concern at the beginning of Putin’s third term, when memories were still fresh of the 11 December 2010 Manezh Square riot by Russian nationalists (Popescu 2012; Horvath 2014). Although the government has flirted with ethnocentrism, notably during the Ukraine Crisis12 in early 2014 (Prezident Rossii 2014f), outright ethno-nationalism was limited in (major) media and government discourse during Putin’s third term. Beyond the Ukraine Crisis, Vladimir Putin and government figures promoted an ethnically inclusive image of Russianness (russkost’). The invocation of history as the basis for national identity has the advantage of not excluding ethnic minorities on the basis of their ethnicity while still celebrating a feature of the dominant ethnic Russian (russkii) culture.13 Similarly, Russia is too religiously diverse, despite the prominent role of, and political support given to, the Russian Orthodox Church. There are also three other official religions –Buddhism, Judaism and Islam – and Russia derives considerable soft power clout from its multiconfessionality, which it promotes as evidence of the nation’s inherent respect for religious belief, in contrast to the supposedly inorganic and ‘militantly secular’ multiculturalism promoted in the West (McGlynn 2021c). Civic identity would not work because it would require a developed understanding of civil society, which the Kremlin has destroyed rather than cultivated. Likewise, there is no coherent ideological set of principles to govern the way people live, as there was in the communist era. This leaves few options for a unifying national concept or an answer to the question of why Russians belong together as a nation. Most feasible among the remaining options is cultural memory and a sense of shared history. Arguably, the only truly unifying element for many Russians is the Great Patriotic War:

12

13

Andriy Zayarnyuk has criticized the use of the term ‘Ukraine Crisis’ for being a euphemistic description that minimizes the war. By using the term here, I wish to denote the inter-election period, chaotic political situation and beginning of the war but to differentiate this period from the ‘conflict’ in the East that began in spring 2014 and the full-scale war launched by Russia on 24 February 2022 (Zayarnyuk 2015). The Russian language has two words for ‘Russian’: russkii, which generally, but not always, denotes ethnic Russians; and rossiisskii, which encompasses all those belonging to the multinational Russian Federation.

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it is one of the few topics on which almost all Russians agree, with around 89 per cent feeling pride in the Great Victory according to a poll conducted in September 2020. This figure was an increase from 82 per cent in September 2012 (Levada Centre 2020). Capturing and encouraging that pride, the Russian government, supported by the state-aligned media, has used cultural memory to bring a battered, bruised and divided nation together. They have done so by promoting narratives that most people can support, adopting a mélange of the most popular historical narratives that appeal to as many ideologies and political persuasions as possible: imperialists, communist nostalgists, supporters of a strong state, and ethno-nationalists (Government.ru 2013). The Kremlin is not dictating the history, so much as appropriating it. This explains why, in 2017, Putin personally opened the Wall of Grief (Stena skorby), a memorial in honour of the victims of Stalinist-era political persecution. If the Kremlin intended to simply outlaw the memory of the camps and repressions then the appearance of the country’s political leadership at this unveiling would have been bizarre. Instead, it represented a certain level of recognition of the Great Terror and horror of those times but this recognition, like so much else in Russia, needed to be on the leadership’s own terms. Correspondingly, Putin’s opening ceremony speech focused on overcoming division and learning the correct lessons from history, core staples of his general uses of the past. In keeping with this speech, Russian officials and politicians have tried to remould the national narrative around the Gulag into a portrayal that supports their worldview, rather than detracting from it; for example, one of Russia’s few Gulag camp museums at Perm-36 was labelled a foreign agent in 2015 and taken over by local authorities, who have since curated new displays focused on how inmates contributed to the Great Patriotic War effort and non-condemnatory exhibitions on the KGB and camp guards (Coda Story 2020). The forced closure of Memorial in 2021 is further evidence of this obsession with controlling the narrative; it should not be read as an example of outlawing memory of the Gulag altogether, but rather of outlawing inconvenient or ‘unusable’ memory. As suggested in the case of the Perm-36 camp museum, while there is a natural tendency for Western media to focus on Putin, a preoccupation in itself spurred by the latter’s (self-)projection of a man in total control, the Russian president was far from the only – or most aggressive – ‘memory maker’.

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Instead, much like Russian politics more broadly, the call to history is better viewed as a complex web of practices and narratives promoted by the state and state-affiliated organs and taken up, to varying degrees, by Russian citizens. This organic take-up is then reappropriated by the state and manipulated so as to better represent the state’s desired projected image. In the chapters to come, I try to look at these uses of history and interactions with memory comprehensively, showing how the call to history simultaneously functions to legitimize Kremlin policies and rule, and delegitimize rivals, through its tactical and strategic application and advancement of those three core worldview messages: the need for a strong Russian state, Russia’s special path and Russia’s messianic great power status. The justification for this worldview stems from the argument that (proper, patriotic) Russians have access to an enriched understanding of the world, an awareness or consciousness of their own history and traditions that imbues them with a privileged knowledge of how the world works. The notion that Russians are especially informed and aware of their own history also distracts from cleavages within the Kremlin’s ‘usable’ historical narratives, shifting the focus from ‘what’ is known towards the ‘act’ of knowing. This then furthers the Kremlin’s ability to appeal to different ideologies because, bluntly, who does not want to belong to a group with a special awareness of historical truth? None of this is to say that the Kremlin is trying to create a genuine enhanced awareness of history among Russians. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, rather than viewing the use of history as an expression of clear or coherent ideology, I saw it more as a post-facto justification of the Kremlin’s power and vision of Russia. However, since 24 February 2022, it has become clear that Putin and those around him have started to believe their own lies. These are not the actions of cynics so much as of extremists, committing crimes in the name of the Great Patriotic War and of liberation. Having stared too long at the reflection of its own heroic past, the Kremlin has taken its army, its people and itself to live in a mirror world, where history is inverted. The idea that Russians are rediscovering a consciousness of their culture and history under Putin’s leadership is likewise a means for the media and politicians to justify policies but it also fulfils a symbolic function and offers a sense of purpose. If the unifying narrative of history answers the question of why Russians belong together then the argument that Russians possess a

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unique ‘cultural consciousness’ answers the questions of why Russia is special, what purpose it fulfils as a nation and why it has the right to dictate to, even control, other countries.14 The Kremlin’s efforts to design this image of cultural consciousness, to convince people it is real, and to encourage physical manifestations of it, often in the face of objective reality, have been a defining feature of domestic politics since (at least) 2012. But understanding this ideational function first requires detailed insight into how the Kremlin uses the past and invokes its call to history.

Book outline For the argument that Russians have access to a particular and peculiar consciousness to function, the government and supportive media must first define the limits of this consciousness: what is acceptable and what is not acceptable when it comes to discussions of history? Knowledge of ‘true’ history versus espousal of ‘false’ history forms the dividing line here, with the Kremlin as historical arbiter, enforcing its rulings via a discursive, legislative and policy framework that defines which history is patriotic and which is unspeakable. Chapter 2 examines these limits, looking first at reinforcement via policies like the creation of agencies dedicated to defending historical truth, the large-scale implementation of youth-oriented military history initiatives and the establishment of influential organizations to promote the Kremlin’s historical narratives. Yet, as well as promoting the ‘correct’ view of history, the government has intervened to police divergent interpretations of the past, introducing

14

The depiction of Russians as possessing a heightened awareness of their own culture and history (what I call ‘cultural consciousness’) correlates with Anthony Giddens’ paradigm (1984: 41–5), which equates discursive consciousness with the ability of actors to verbally express their actions, while practical consciousness, crucial for the maintenance of ontological security (that is, security of identity), is tacit knowledge about how to go on or act out this consciousness without it needing to be expressed discursively. Filip Ejdus (2020) uses the example of driving a car: the driver can explain it, but also does not need to be able to explain it to carry it out. By contrast, unconsciousness includes cognitions that are either ‘wholly repressed from consciousness or appear in consciousness only in distorted form’ (Giddens 1984: 5). If we continue this analogy, then Putin and his government functioned as the driving instructors, the promoters and purveyors of discursive consciousness, while the public were new drivers and learners, moving/being moved towards practical consciousness, achieved by mimicking the instructor and listening to their instructions. Against them, however, on the roads and driving towards them were those who had not learned to drive, those who were unconscious and therefore dangerous.

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legislation to prohibit the discussion of taboo historical topics, prevent proper historical inquiry and even imprison dissenters. By delegitimizing alternative views of history through memory laws, personal persecutions and silencing, the government and its supporters have tried to reduce the meaning of patriotism to a person’s view of history: ostensibly, genuine patriots believe in the Kremlin’s past and are ready to defend it. To create the conditions to convince people of this perspective, the Kremlin and state-aligned media have sought to inculcate a discourse, wherein people could recognize the relevance and importance of the historical symbols and references flooding their news cycles. There were two elements to this, and Chapter 3 considers how pro-Kremlin politicians and media made history a relevant topic of everyday discussion in the news cycle by ‘historically framing’ current affairs as continuations, even conflations, of the past. Historical framing denotes an intensive and developed form of historical analogy, comprising hundreds, even thousands, of individual comparisons between the current and the past event. Chapter 3 details how a pervasive sense of historical narrative accompanied media coverage of three pivotal events: 1. The first study examines the Russian media and government’s conflation of the Ukraine Crisis and the Great Patriotic War between February and May 2014. Citing analysis of 3,509 examples, it details how the Kremlin used the spectre of the Nazis and wartime Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera15 to undermine the Maidan protests and justify the annexation of Crimea to domestic audiences. As Russia incited war in the Donbas region of east Ukraine, the media framed the burgeoning conflict as a rerun of Soviet–Nazi battles in Ukraine, with Russian-backed combatants cast as Red Army soldiers valiantly fighting fascism like, and for the memory of, their grandfathers.

15

Stepan Bandera was the leader of one faction of the divided Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during the Second World War. His followers fought primarily against the Soviets and collaborated with the Nazis in order to declare Ukrainian independence in 1941, an initiative the Nazis did not entertain. After the declaration, Bandera was imprisoned by the Germans for the rest of the war. The OUN was a radical nationalist organization with a military partisan wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), formed in 1943. Members of the OUN/UPA collaborated with the Nazi police and Wehrmacht and have been implicated in war crimes against Jews and Poles. Although Stepan Bandera never actually led the UPA, the Soviet media often described all Ukrainian nationalists, including the UPA, as banderovtsy or Banderites. For more information, see RossolinskiLiebe (2014) and Berkhoff (2008).

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2. The second study is the largest examination of Russian coverage of Western sanctions to date. Citing analysis of 3,889 examples of historical framing employed between July and October 2014, it details how the sources exploited Soviet nostalgia and the trauma of the Soviet collapse to depict sanctions as a Western attempt to humiliate Russia, as in the 1990s, and even destroy it, as it ostensibly destroyed the USSR. Deflecting attention from the economic consequences of (Kremlin-imposed) countersanctions and Russia’s increasing international isolation, the state-aligned media lionized Putin’s policy responses as evidence that he was recreating the stability of the Brezhnev-era USSR, avenging and undoing the degradations of the late 1980s and 1990s. 3. The third example is a rare English-language study of how Russian media covered military intervention in Syria. Relying on analysis of 3,410 comparisons produced between September and December 2015, it shows how the sources depicted Russian intervention in Syria in largely geopolitical terms, as a just restoration of the post-Yalta order and Soviet great power status during the immediate post-war period. Russian media conflated Western criticism of Russian intervention in Syria with the US Cold War policy of containment, casting Syria as a proxy war. The historical framing of Syria within the early Cold War heralded a return to a more offensive and messianic depiction of Russia’s role in the world, a shift reflected in government promotion of Russian culture and history at home and abroad. These studies are important, not only as examples of historical framing but also because they explain the narratives through which many Russians would have interpreted era-defining events in Ukraine and Syria. While in no way wishing to present excuses for the Russian state’s falsehoods when depicting its actions in Ukraine and Syria, it is worth analysing state media coverage of such seismic episodes so as to understand the framework within which millions of Russians have had these events presented to them – particularly since they provide the context in which Russians understand their country’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine. Promoting a media and political discourse in which memory matters requires two elements: first, memory needs to be made relevant to the present;

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second, memory and history must be conflated to suggest that historical truth and objectivity are vulnerable. To achieve the latter, the Kremlin relied on securitizing historical interpretation, intertwining its uses of history with a pre-existing media and political discourse that supported the core elements of its worldview. Chapter 4 details how the uses of history depended on these varied adjacent and related narratives pertaining to foreign agents, Russophobia, historical falsification and elitism, exploring their relevance to supporting the core aims of the Kremlin’s uses of history. Chapter 4 argues that the call to history is dependent on being reinforced within this paranoid political framework and media discourse. Having traced the legislative and discursive framework within which the call to history was embedded, Chapter 5 looks at the performances and projects that brought these words and laws to life for ordinary citizens. By promoting activities and engagement with history, the government could ostensibly mobilize citizens into performing and reinforcing the Kremlin’s historical narratives. Relying on personal interviews with state and independent cultural practitioners, and access to unpublished promotional materials, the chapter begins by outlining the role of the Ministry of Culture in forcing its patriotic history into everyday life, with initiatives often personally overseen by Vladimir Medinskii, Minister of Culture from 2012 to 2020. It emphasizes Medinskii’s role as a driving force for the call to history. Displaying a fanaticism that aggrieved even Putin, this chapter charts how Medinskii acted more like a Minister of Memory than a Minister of Culture as he spearheaded the precipitous growth of the Russian Military Historical Society (RMHS), to which the government outsources a considerable amount of its memory initiatives. Although clearly controlled by the government, RMHS presents itself as a non-governmental organization, a tactic used to disguise state initiatives as independent or grassroots. Wary of independent memory initiatives, the government has also commandeered genuine civil society commemorations, as exemplified by the hostile takeover of the nationwide Immortal Regiment movement and which gives the lie to the notion that the Russian government wanted to develop a genuine cultural consciousness or historical awareness, rather than promote a politicized cultural memory. To support this argument, this chapter relies on interviews with the Immortal Regiment founder and

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with organizers of other commemorative initiatives. In this way, it brings together both the real efforts to make history an everyday matter of relevance but also the government’s tendency to appropriate citizen-led initiatives to connect with the past in a non-approved way, reflecting the hybridity and artificiality of the government’s approach. The Kremlin’s efforts to extend its (disguised) grip over cultural memory through history, academia, extra-curricular activities, tourism and popular culture were not aimed at creating historical awareness but at creating the evidence to support its assertion that Russians possessed a rare ‘cultural consciousness’. Chapter 6 examines this concept of cultural consciousness further, detailing how the Kremlin and supportive actors tried to turn the instrumentalization of history into a national idea. Relying on the information provided in previous chapters, this chapter demonstrates how the Kremlin took advantage of its own propagation of history to promote a vision of Russians as undergoing a sort of coming to ‘cultural consciousness’, whereby the nation rediscovered its sense of self by reconnecting with its ‘true’ history. Probing further into official and media depictions of cultural consciousness, this chapter examines how the Kremlin has utilized historical interpretation as a byword for patriotic awareness, to spin a narrative of Russian counterrevolutionary consciousness against Western cultural colonization, which is (allegedly) most egregious in the sphere of historical falsification. It also draws comparisons between cultural consciousness and (Soviet templates of) class consciousness, with the media and politicians adapting the latter to fulfil new functions of inculcating a peculiarly pro-Kremlin form of patriotism and cultural memory. To attain cultural consciousness is to be aware of history’s structural importance to everyday factors, it is to recognize and reject attempts to distort history as – by extension – attempts to distort reality. While cultural consciousness can take many forms – religious/illiberal values, antihomosexuality – memory and history are the most important among these for their unifying function. Cultural consciousness functions as a national idea, or raison d’être, for the Russian nation, but it follows afterwards not before. The government’s effort to encourage cultural consciousness is not best expressed as an ideology, especially given that ideology has been of little importance as a motivating factor behind the leading party’s actions under Putin (Gel’man

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2021). Instead, it is about creating the infrastructure to support a pre-existing worldview comprising the three core elements discussed above: Russia as a strong great power, with a special developmental path and a mission. The conclusion, Chapter 7, reflects on this messianism and sense of purpose, assembling the book’s key threads to ask what comes next for Russian political uses of history, including in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It predicts a continued reliance on – or recourse to – historical framing in the conflict and a desperate search to identify an event that might serve as a ‘Great Victory’. Chapter 7 also broadens the discussion of Russian political uses of history out to the rest of the world, tracing points of comparison and intersection. Refusing to pathologize Russia’s historical preoccupation, it challenges conceptualizations of Russian political culture as atypical or entirely divergent from European or Western patterns by citing examples of historical framing beyond Russia’s borders, including the tragic role of various historical framing narratives in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. With the intersection of memory and identity more intertwined than ever, fuelled by (partly real and partly imagined) culture wars, populism and grievances, the book ends by arguing that the intensive nature of the Kremlin’s political uses of history render Russia an extreme example of, rather than exception to, global populist trends in the sphere of memory, cultural and symbolic politics. Russia will also play a role in fuelling these trends as it seeks to inflame tensions via its well-documented memory wars with its East European neighbours and to promote its own narratives and commemorative traditions through memory diplomacy (McGlynn 2021a). These global outreach efforts all stem from the domestic uses of history outlined in this book, and from cultural consciousness in particular, which depicts Russians as endowed with a privileged understanding of history – their own and the world’s. This concept of consciousness, which ultimately is privileged as a higher form of truth, not only justifies Russian interference abroad, but is also a core idea that has appeal across the world, especially to those in power who can not only instrumentalize this but also define the very boundaries of what constitutes consciousness and truth. Which makes it all the more important to understand what the Russian government has been doing in this sphere for the last decade.

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2

The Kremlin’s Memory Policies Our country – where for many people the civil war still isn’t over and the past is extremely politicized – needs some careful cultural therapy. [It needs] a cultural policy that, on all levels from school materials to historical documentaries, would mould an understanding of the unity of our historical process. Vladimir Putin (2012) Vladimir Putin discussed these thoughts on Russia’s need for ‘cultural therapy’ – to be delivered via the teaching of historical unity – during a wide-ranging interview on the ‘national question’ and Russian identity in 2012. Although Putin had discussed these ideas before, this was the most detailed exposition to date. During this interview, he also outlined what would become familiar parameters around the importance of history to Russian identity, such as the propagation of a ‘single stream’ view of Russian history, stretching unbroken across 1,000 years from Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr) to Vladimir Putin. Later presidential speeches, from his 2014 ‘Crimea speech’ to celebrate the ‘return’ of the peninsula, to a 2019 Financial Times interview, in which he heralded the demise of liberalism, would build on and entrench these ideas, which gradually became more pronounced and quickly became more extreme, especially in relation to uses of history. By 2020, Vladimir Putin had even established himself as something of a historical op-ed columnist, writing an extended piece on the causes of the Second World War for National Interest that was a thinly veiled effort to spark memory wars with Russia’s neighbours, especially Poland, which he blamed for starting the conflict. In the article, the Russian president also accused the West of letting the Soviets ‘bleed out’ and generally used that war to make the case for Russian great power status (Putin 2020). Undeterred by criticisms over 29

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historical accuracy, in 2021 Putin published another historical op-ed on the close ties binding the Ukrainian and Russian nations, promoting a historiography that undermined Ukrainian statehood and was at great odds with that of many Ukrainians, who are unlikely to agree that there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian people or that their state is artificial or that its existence is purely due to Russian benevolence (Putin 2021a). In retrospect, this essay provided clear evidence of Putin’s complete isolation from the reality of Ukrainian national identity in the 2020s – an isolation for which Russian soldiers paid dearly when Ukrainians received them as invaders not liberators. Other leading Russian politicians have joined their president in appointing themselves guardians of history. Also closely involved in propagating the use of history are Vladimir Medinskii (Presidential Aide, Former Minister of Culture), Vyacheslav Volodin (Chairman of the Duma), Sergei Lavrov (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Sergei Naryshkin (Head of the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service), Sergei Shoigu (Minister of Defence), and Ol’ga Vasil’eva and Sergei Kravstov (past and present Ministers of Education). In a rather desperate effort not to be forgotten, one-time president Dmitrii Medvedev has also tried to join the ranks of these self-appointed historians. His efforts to join the growing circle of self-made historical experts show that examining Putin alone is of limited, albeit popular value. Instead, it is necessary to look beyond Putin to a wider political and media landscape obsessed with history, as detailed throughout this book. The best place to start understanding what the Russian government wants to say about history – or anything else – is by reading what the government says. As we have already seen from the 2020 constitutional amendments, history looms large in Russian legislation and the same is true of its major doctrines. Perhaps this is most evident within cultural policy, specifically within the Foundations of the Cultural Policy of the Russian Federation, but also as a reference point in the Foreign Policy Concept, the Information Security Doctrine, the Military Doctrine and all three National Security Strategies released since 2012. For example, the 2016 Foreign Policy Concept commits Russia to ‘strongly counteract any attempts to falsify history or use it to inflame confrontations and revanchism in world politics, and [to counteract] attempts to revise the results of World War Two, and facilitate the depoliticization of historical discussion’ (MID 2016). It argues that the historical specificities of

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any country must be considered when promoting the universal values, such as human rights or freedom of speech, that underpin the concept of multipolarity. The 2014 Military Doctrine contains similar claims, describing culture (including history) as an integral part of national security, even placing it on the same level as domestic threats from terrorism. It also calls on the Russian military to respond to disinformation campaigns that ostensibly try to destroy the historical, spiritual and cultural traditions of the Fatherland by targeting the young (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2014a). This clear emphasis on militarizing and securitizing historical interpretation also features in the Information Security Doctrine released at the end of December 2016. The doctrine explicitly connects supposed historical falsifications of Russian military history with current defence policy, describing as a central aim, ‘The neutralization of hostile activities in the information and psychological realms, including those aimed at tearing apart the historical foundations and patriotic traditions linked to defending the Fatherland’ (Lenta 2015a). The text implies that a disagreement over historical narratives constitutes an assault on the very foundations of the nation. This is used to justify the shrill and intensive invocation of history in political discourse, converting dissent from the official historical line into an existential threat and one against which Russians must defend themselves. In his 2015 address to the Federal Assembly, Vladimir Putin cited in one breath Russian citizens’ willingness to defend their ‘national interests, their history’, as if they were the same thing (Kremlin.ru 2015a). The Russian National Security Strategy to 2020, in both its 2009 and 2015 versions, also emphasized the assertion of Russian interpretations of history as a means of cohering society against perceived existential threats, listing the following as key beliefs: Confrontations in the global information space are caused by some countries trying to use information and communications technology to achieve their geopolitical aims, including the manipulation of social consciousness and the falsification of history. The basis of the general Russian identity of the nations of the Russian Federation is a system, established through history, of united spiritual, moral and cultural and historical values.

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These values are defined in terms that ground them very firmly in history, which is itself stressed as a source of national unity: ‘the historical unity of the nations of Russia is the continuity of the history of our Motherland’ (Prezident Rossii 2009, 2015a). Such notions of Russian multinational ‘historical unity’ and continuity are easily debunked: first, Russian territory had seen three state collapses in the century prior to this statement; second, many Russian national minorities, such as the Kalmyks and Chechens, would have very different interpretations of Russian history to ethnic Russians. Yet, these counterarguments disproving Russian ‘historical unity’ also indicate why the government promotes it so fervently: to fill the absence of a unifying national idea in a way that promotes political stability and the Kremlin’s power. The 2021 National Security Strategy (NSS) picks up where the 2015 version left off – on a crusade to politicize and polarize every aspect of Russian culture (Kremlin.ru 2021). Just like the call to history more broadly, this is not a strategy concerned with the country’s safety so much as with the government’s security: the document sets out to mobilize the Russian nation, even Russian identity itself, against Western bogeymen at home and abroad. The strategy reads as a paranoid diatribe against Russia’s oft-cited ‘internal and external enemies’. They loom large on nearly every page, lurking within discussions of national interest, societal cohesion, economics and strategic stability. But these threats are most prevalent in the frequent references to culture, historical truth and spiritual and moral values, all of which can in many ways be read as a manifesto for developing Russians’ awareness of Kremlin-approved history. The 2021 NSS cites the defence of historical memory as a strategic priority for the nation’s security and devotes a section to the defence of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, culture and historical memory. The same strategy also describes the people (narod) as the carrier of Russian sovereignty and places the cultural and historical values of the people at the foundation of its statehood (gosudarstvennosti). Support for, and belief in, a strong Russian state is arguably the overriding idea of the Putin era and one that history is instrumentalized to defend as well as instrumental to defending, with historical values described as ‘a basic element [fundament] for the future development of the country’. The 2021 NSS describes Russian historical values as under active attacks from the USA and its allies as well as transnational corporations and foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It claims

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there are increased efforts to falsify Russian and world history, pervert historical truth and destroy historical memory to weaken those who form the core of the state (i.e., ethnic Russians). The strategy sets as a goal the defence of historical truth and the preservation of memory and historically informed unity, acting against the falsification of history as well as in support of patriotic formation (vospitanie) on the basis of ‘historical examples’ and defending the population from the development of foreign ideas and values. However, while the doctrines and strategies above provide the context for how these policies fit into the government’s larger vision for the country, it is also worth examining how the government have set about promoting officially approved historical narratives.

Positive reinforcement of historical narratives Outside Arbat metro station in central Moscow, there is a peculiarly ugly building known locally as the House of the Fool (Dom duraka). It looks like a bland Disney castle, with turrets covered in what appear to be neatly spaced barnacles. On 9 May 2012, the barnacles looked like they were shaking as the tanks rolled by and I observed my first Victory Day in Moscow. I gathered with thousands more to watch the military hardware make its way to Red Square, where it would parade alongside the latest missiles and troops carrying Soviet Victory flags to the rousing notes of some of the most epic music ever created. From outside, the militarism of Victory Day sets it apart from more traditional commemorative events and it really is more than a day of remembrance. Although full of rituals, new and old, Victory Day is also a popular holiday, a celebration for the people, in which everyone is involved. Like everyone else that day, I was wearing the St George Ribbon commemorative symbol, I gave flowers to veterans and I visited different song and dance troupes dressed in Second World War Red Army uniforms. Although Victory Day would reach new heights in the years to come, the city authorities had invested considerable effort into marking 9 May in style in 2012, which Vladimir Putin had declared to be the ‘year of history’. This year saw the founding of historical initiatives as well as the (re)establishment of the Russian Historical Society (RHS) and the Russian Military Historical Society

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(RMHS). While clearly new organizations, the former claims continuity with the Imperial Russian Historical Society, disbanded after the October Revolution, and so celebrated its 150th anniversary at just four years old. Likewise, the RMHS claims continuity with an organization begun by Nicholas I and so describes itself as 110 years old. In this, their claims reflect the government’s and president’s obsession with creating a sense of unbroken continuity between past and present. These organizations function to create museum exhibitions, conferences and other assorted events, although RMHS have assumed more of a popular culture function and certainly played a larger role, at least until Vladimir Medinskii’s dismissal from the post of Minister of Culture in January 2020. Following this, in July 2020, RMHS and RHS agreed to work more closely together, including sharing access to cultural grants. Since then, the two organizations have more harmoniously amplified each other’s work, as in December 2020, when Putin voiced his support for a joint initiative of the RMHS and the RHS to create a memorial for the Russian civilian population who became victims of ‘genocide’ perpetrated by the Germans (E. Novoselova 2020b). This idea itself stems from Vladimir Medinskii’s ongoing campaign to recognize the Soviet civilian casualties, estimated at 13 to 18 million, during the Second World War as victims of the ‘most brutal genocide in history’. This campaign began in March 2020 and was primarily directed against foreign countries’ differing views of history (Yakovleva 2021; E. Novoselova 2021), evidenced in the RMHS’s outraged response to the claims of Soviet occupation contained within the joint statement from the presidents of the Baltic States to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War (E. Novoselova 2020a). In earlier times it was hard to avoid the sense of competition between the two groups, which recalled elements of the Soviet practice of creating shadow organizations. This tension led to arguments, such as the fight over textbooks, with different parties wrestling to convince the government of the need to rewrite them and also to have control over how they should be rewritten. In the end, Medinskii emerged victorious.1 On 30 July 2021, the Interdepartmental

1

For a detailed study of Russian history textbooks and interviews with Russian history teachers, see James Pearce’s The Uses of History in Putin’s Russia (Pearce 2020).

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Commission for Historical Education was established and Vladimir Medinskii sat at its head. It is an ‘offensive’ enterprise with representatives from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the Security Council. It aims for the ‘defence of national interests’ and ‘preservation of historical memory’ against foreign-backed propaganda threats (Meduza 2021b). The new commission is in keeping with changes made to Russian history textbooks since 2012. In order to standardize history teaching, a ‘single textbook’ of Russian history was proposed in 2013, although this was an idea with which Russian politicians had long toyed. The then Minister of Education Dmitrii Livanov was involved along with his predecessor, Ol’ga Vasil’eva, seen as a Stalin apologist and close ally of the Orthodox Church (Hartog 2016). A proposal began to take shape on the content of this textbook: notably, there would be an emphasis on the Great Patriotic War and the importance of Russia in world history. In January 2014, details of this proposal were discussed with Putin and, subsequently, the list of then-approved history textbooks was inspected by the Association of Russian History. All textbooks had their approval revoked, with only three eventually recommended, including one published by Enlightenment (Prosveshchenie), then owned by close Putin ally Arkadii Rotenberg; Enlightenment’s share of the market rose from 1.23 per cent in 2013 to 93.2 per cent in 2015 (Moskwa 2018). The Enlightenment textbook mostly contains interpretable primary sources, but with a more open approach to disputed areas of history. For example, while it mentions Stalin’s repressions and the 1930s Holodomor famine in Ukraine, it places great emphasis on the importance of industrialization as a mitigating factor to these manmade tragedies. Medinskii’s Russian Military Historical Society has been heavily involved on an official level in the writing of these history textbooks, which provides some insight into what to expect from the new textbooks to be approved or written by the commission. In August 2021, the first of eleven new textbooks published by Prosveshchenie was released. It ends with an editorializing chapter by writer and journalist Arman Gasparian that represents a marked departure from the rest of the material, which is largely formed of raw historical sources. This final chapter – on Russia after the year 2000 – contains glaring omissions relating to the Putin administration. For example, the regeneration of Chechnya is described as a great feat achieved by Ramzan Kadyrov, the feared head of the republic, with no mention of the

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massive federal funds given to the region by the Kremlin, a contentious issue in Russian politics. However, while of some importance, history teaching in general should not be overstated, especially given the considerable variety in both the quality and types of school within Russia and, consequently, the variability of history teaching. The importance of external or para-educational engagement with history is worthy of at least equal consideration. After all, if asked to write about an historical event, today’s pupils are more likely to turn to online sources, such as Wikipedia. If they did, then they would encounter the Russian language article about the Second World War, which provides a skewed interpretation of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, does not mention the Soviet killing of Polish officers at Katyn and contains no mention of the Holocaust.2 Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it appears that students may be deprived even of this source, as lawmakers frequently discuss the desirability of blocking Wikipedia. Instead, pupils will have to turn to istoriya.rf, an RMHS initiative, which declares itself the most popular history portal on the Russian internet (known as the RuNet), and the Diary of Russian History project, which aims to popularize knowledge about historical events, especially in the regions, via the internet. The government has also launched various initiatives designed to make history entertaining for younger audiences. Such child-focused initiatives are aimed at propagating certain historical narratives and understandings of history, while closely intertwining them with a broader militarization of history and children as well. One of the most well-documented iterations of this comes in the form of the Youth Army (Yunarmiya), which exists to train children to become future soldiers and inculcate the values of patriotism, national service and respect for national and military history. A heavy emphasis is placed on remembering past military operations and campaigns and fallen soldiers. The Youth Army has its own host of military patriotic clubs, which often include historical education but are designed primarily to provide military training. The most prominent of these is the Country of Heroes (Strana Geroev) which is co-organized with the RMHS and offers students different pathways, from searching for soldiers’ remains to re-enacting battles 2

Information correct as of 25 October 2021.

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to conducting information campaigns about history, in various sites in Russia. There are also military history camps, clubs and tours – discussed in more detail in Chapter 5 – which are overseen by the Ministry of Culture (as opposed to the Ministry of Defence) and supposedly designed to teach only about history. The government has also established various youth-oriented organizations whose content is not explicitly focused on history but whose form is indebted to Soviet nostalgia and militarism. Such endeavours became more pronounced during the military intervention in Syria. One such example is the Russian Schoolchildren’s Movement (Rossiiskoe dvizhenie shkol’nikov), which was established shortly after the Russian aerial bombardment of Syria began. ProKremlin politicians and media sources depicted the Movement as prefiguring the restoration of the Soviet education system and children’s movements, namely the Soviet Pioneers, but also as a means of forming patriotic children ready and willing to serve their homeland militarily (Konyukhova 2015). Although there are no exact figures, the Russian Schoolchildren’s Movement website refers to the involvement of ‘millions of schoolchildren’ (Rossiiskoe dvizhenie shkol’nikov 2020). Unlike the Youth Army and the Ministry of Defence’s programmes and initiatives, this is more similar to the Ministry of Culture’s youth initiatives, given the emphasis on patriotic formation rather than military preparation (Rossiiskoe dvizhenie shkol’nikov 2020). Another example was the Ruspatriotcentre (Rospatriottsentr) activities which ran from 2016 to 2020 and sought to increase pride in the country and in its historical symbols, as well as a willingness to serve in the army. The growth in youth-focused initiatives was the result of a package of measures that named military patriotic education as a top priority. Putin’s 2012 May Decrees outlined areas for Russia’s future development and saw greater investments in, and media focus on, military patriotic and military history clubs and camps (Granina 2015). This was reflected in the allocation of financial resources: the federal budget for military patriotic education from 2016 to 2020 more than doubled (to 1.68 billion roubles) compared to the amount allocated in the earlier iteration, with additional spending even higher at the regional level (Alberts 2020). The Ministry of Education, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Culture and the Agency for Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh) all oversee this programme, which called on more than thirty federal agencies

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to establish internal coordinating bodies for work related to patriotic upbringing. While not all of these initiatives are specifically centred on history, they still focus on the past by privileging the teaching of military history and the emulation of earlier fighting heroes, as in the claim that ‘the Soviet education system’s main objective was to raise patriots, ready to defend their homeland. This was its entire purpose [. . .] it’s time we stopped following Western standards and returned to the best traditions of Russian and Soviet schooling’ (Lenta 2014e). The quotation reflects a common refrain in the statealigned media: that military patriotic training is required if Russia is to reassume Soviet greatness. Such commentary also reveals a preoccupation with youth and engaging the young with the Kremlin’s brand of historically rooted patriotism. An especially important umbrella for many government policies around the country is the United Russia Historical Memory project, which, like much of the call to history, has its roots as far back as 2007–8 but really came to fruition in Putin’s third term. In February 2017, the second iteration was launched, and it was only then that regular news of its activities became available. The stated objectives of Historical Memory include restoring monuments of historical significance at a federal and regional level and increasing efforts towards the patriotic education of young people using the country’s rich historical heritage as the foundation. The project is involved in shaping the history curriculum in local schools and updating local history museums. It also carries out other related activities, such as battle re-enactments from various periods of Russian history, and surveying battle sites of the Great Patriotic War to locate and rebury fallen soldiers. Nearly all the project’s activities have a military flavour, most often connected to the Great Patriotic War. This means that topics that fall outside this four-year period of the country’s history do not receive much attention. For example, a search for the word ‘Tsar’ on the project website yields no results relevant to Russia’s tsarist period, demonstrating how centuries of Russian history are sidelined. Sergei Naryshkin, the influential head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is closely connected to the project and is a well-known ‘memory maker’, displaying a near obsessive preoccupation with policing Russia’s history. Naryshkin was chairman of Medvedev’s Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History until 2012,

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when he became chair of the Russian Historical Society in addition to leading Historical Memory. As chairman of Historical Memory, Naryshkin is credited with devising a programme called Diktant Pobedy, essentially a knowledge test about the Great Patriotic War. It is a nationwide programme for all ages, aimed at promoting knowledge of the war. It draws approximately 150,000 participants per year and Naryshkin personally hands out certificates to those who achieve the highest marks (Diktant Pobedy n.d.). The competition is only one of numerous activities centred on Victory Day; there are too many to list here but other major initiatives include the Waltz of Victory (a dance competition), Songs of Victory (a concert that takes place across Europe for Russian expats) and the Immortal Regiment, a procession to display portraits of family members that took part in the war effort. Many of these initiatives are relatively new, with even the almost ubiquitous St George Ribbon (the orange-and-black symbol of respect for the Great Patriotic War) only assuming its current function after a promotional campaign in 2005 (Kolstø 2016). Since 2012, there has been a slew of further initiatives and campaigns, with the Russian government adding commemorative dates and activities to the national calendar. This includes the Day of Remembrance of Russian Soldiers Who Fell in World War I and the Day of Special Operations Forces, which commemorates the annexation of Crimea as well as the role of Special Operations Forces past and present in establishing Russian ‘military glory’. Other commemorative dates have been enhanced, as with the 7 November military parade, mentioned at the opening of this book, to mark the Battle of Moscow. In 1941, with the Nazis having pushed the Red Army all the way back to the capital, Stalin ordered a panicked evacuation before then changing his mind and calling for the defence of Moscow. The Soviet leader then held a parade to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution, intended as a sign to his people and the German Army that the Soviets were battle ready. Since 2015, this parade has been restaged with increasing pomp and ceremony, sending perhaps this same message to those countries whom Russia’s leaders see as figuratively rattling the gates of Moscow. Despite this, the actual events leading up to the Battle of Moscow are barely mentioned, reflecting as they do a litany of loss and devastating defeat caused by bungled state management of the war. The deaths and tragedies of 1941 were caused by Hitler’s armies but

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the number of deaths was exacerbated by the magnitude of the Stalinist state’s control (McGlynn 2021d). This not only causes problems for visions of the past, but also undermines the ‘strong state’ ethos. Consequently, these reflections and many more have largely been unwelcome in Russia. When the television station Dozhd’ tried to host a debate on the topic of what constituted an acceptable loss of life during the Leningrad blockade, they were effectively blacklisted by the government, who pressured advertisers to abandon the channel.3 This serves as a reminder that the Kremlin’s encouragement of certain memories was also accompanied by negative reinforcement; the Russian government has enacted a range of memory laws, which come from the alarming notion that Russian history is under threat, as discussed in the following section.

The war on history If you want to promote the argument that your country and/or people possess a rare consciousness of their own history, then you also need to define what that history is: in other words, what exactly are these people conscious of? Since 2012, the Russian government has introduced a raft of new laws and regulations policing what is acceptable to say about history. Their endeavours to inculcate a ‘correct’ interpretation of Russian history extend to outright prohibitions on speech, namely legislation relating to patriotism and the dangers of historical falsification, and legislation concerning media freedom, which curtails opposition voices. To justify these memory laws, the Russian media and politicians present disagreements over history as geopolitical struggles, much as they depict geopolitical struggles as the replaying of historical episodes. This exaggerated interpretation and the state-aligned media’s support for it means that, in fact, more initiatives are touted than actually occur. For example, towards the end of 2015, Russian media and politicians began talking about

3

Following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government ordered Dozhd’ and almost all remaining independent media to be blocked or shut down, including news site Meduza and radio station Ekho Moskvy. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were also banned and access to foreign news restricted. The government also introduced a law on ‘fake news’ that made it illegal to tell the truth about Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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the need – and intention – to create ‘brigades’ that would fight against alleged falsifiers of history: At the beginning of 2016, Russia will establish an academic brigade to uncover falsifications of military history. Above all it will study the history of the Second World War and issues related to the falsification of the victory of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War. Lenta 2015f

Although widely discussed, these brigades were never created. Nor were the brigades the only ‘anti-falsification initiative’ announced and then abandoned. Although it was initially realized, Medvedev’s 2009 Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History ultimately withered away, leaving no trace. This is not surprising as the Russian government has little reason to promote objective historical investigation; its aim rather is to create the impression that there are people intent on falsifying history – and thereby maligning Russia. Such announcements further the impression that there is a serious issue with the falsification of history that needs to be addressed militarily, as if it were a security concern, without actually ever being realized. This securitization of history contributes to an atmosphere that enhances the deleterious effects of Russian legislation, restricting different historical narratives, as well as condoning harassment of those voicing alternative views of history (Bassin et al. 2017; Ferretti 2017). This helps the government to unite most of the population around an ambiguous and presentist interpretation of the past that privileges stability, continuity and the maintenance of the political status quo because who wants to be outed as an enemy of the 1945 Victory? Russian academic Oleg Reut (2016) summarized the government’s intention here very neatly when he noted the current government’s ‘zeal’ for people identifying with their memory of the war but also for turning this identification into support for the government itself. In this way, the Kremlin’s memory laws are reflective of broader repressive measures taking place in Russia since 2012: the laws are so broad as to be applicable to almost anyone but, as we shall discover, they are almost exclusively applied to political opponents. The arbitrariness and vagueness of the laws puts everyone on edge, encouraging people to pay close attention to the government’s uses of history to make sure they do not fall foul of new laws.

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At first, the Kremlin’s bark seemed much worse than its bite: it was seemingly willing to threaten action but unlikely to impose it. But, over time, a number of laws relating to history were codified, including the 2020 constitutional changes. While disguised as amendments, these additions essentially amounted to a new constitution, one that now enshrined the need to ‘Perpetuate the Victory of the Soviet People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945’. There was also Article One of the Federal Law ‘On Countering Extremist Activities’ (regarding a ban on publishing images of people tried at Nuremberg). February 2021 saw the passing of a new amendment, unrelated to the constitution, banning the slandering of veterans. Already in prison for breaching his parole conditions by being transported to Germany for treatment for Novichok poisoning, opposition figure Aleksei Navalny was charged and found guilty under this same law after he criticized United Russia’s politicization of veterans in the lead-up to the 2020 constitutional referendum. These laws built on existing legislation introduced since 2012, such as Article 354, ostensibly there to outlaw the rehabilitation of Nazism. At first glance, this law does not appear especially controversial; however, in addition to making it illegal to justify or attempt to rehabilitate Nazism, it also prohibited showing disrespect to symbols of Russian military glory, spreading information disrespecting public holidays related to the country’s defence, or knowingly disseminating false information on the activities of the USSR during the Second World War (Kurilla 2014). The ‘false’ information includes acknowledging that the USSR annexed the Baltic states. Authorizing hefty fines for its violation, Article 354 reduces the space for discussing history, rendering illegitimate even minor deviations from the government’s official memory of the war. An illustrative example of those targeted by the law includes the case of a schoolboy in the west Siberian city of Perm who was convicted under this law in June 2016 for ‘falsifying history’. His crime was to write that the USSR shared some responsibility for the Second World War because it attacked Poland with Germany. The boy’s high marks in history lessons at school were cited as evidence that he knew what he was doing and had knowingly spread false information (HRW 2017). Most of the time, the federal and local authorities apply these memory laws selectively and in a targeted high-profile way, rather than en masse. For example, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Volgograd region opened a criminal case against Aleksei Volkov, coordinator of Navalny’s

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Volgograd headquarters, under Article 354.1, for publishing a photo of the enormous Motherland Calls war memorial statue in Volgograd with the face of the statue smeared in the green spray that was used to blind Aleksei Navalny in one eye. Aleksei Volkov was later released by the Supreme Court but the reputational damage was done (Novaya gazeta 2019). Less prominent, but no less perturbing, examples include Vladimir Luzgin, who was fined 200,000 roubles for ‘public denial of the decisions of the Nuremberg trials and the dissemination of false information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War’ (Chelishcheva 2016). Luzgin reposted on his VKontakte page the article ‘Fifteen facts about Banderites, or what the Kremlin is silent about’, which recalled the joint attack of the USSR and Germany on Poland in September 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War (Pravitel’stvo RF 2017; Pushkarskaya 2017). Nor does artistic license necessarily provide a getout clause: a case was filed (although later dropped) against blogger Nikolai Gorelov for a fictional literary piece about the Second World War, in which the prosecution alleged that the text contained information ‘expressing clear disrespect for society, about the days of military glory and memorable dates associated with the defence of the Fatherland’ (Novaya gazeta 2020). Applied haphazardly and unevenly – at least until February 2022 – these laws have had a chilling effect on historians, other academics and creative types in Russia and from abroad. Perhaps the most high-profile examples are the banning of historian Anthony Beevor’s books from Russian schools for containing ‘Nazi propaganda’ and the Ministry of Culture’s refusal to show for release Armando Iannucci’s black comedy The Death of Stalin because of its irreverence towards Soviet history. Of a much lower profile, prior to 2022, the research contained in this book occupied a grey zone in terms of the Russian laws under discussion, given that it could conceivably be interpreted as an effort to falsify or insult the memory of the Great Patriotic War. Since February 2022, it would undoubtedly be treated as a breach of one law, or several, relating to slandering veterans and disrespecting the Russian Army.4 4

For the avoidance of doubt, I would be deeply upset by such an interpretation, as my work consistently convinces me of the epic and incomparable bravery of the Soviet peoples in their battle against Nazism, a struggle I wish was better known and respected in the West, but which is, in my view, not served by denying instances when crimes did occur or by creating myths. The reality is impressive enough to stand on its own – it does not need to be garnished further – and it is morally reprehensible to see it used to justify the rape, slaughter and torture of innocent children, women and men.

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Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, numerous Western academics had to amend their research focus or risk being unable to publish their findings because they were worried about the impact of their work on their research subjects or being deemed nev”ezdnaya (not admissible to the country) and then being unable to return to Russia. Other academics, including more junior researchers who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, were unable to obtain approval from their (British) universities for trips to research historical memory because of security concerns for the researchers involved. However, even this unpleasant state of affairs pales in comparison with the limitations placed on some Russian historians. The situation in Russian historical studies and cognate disciplines under most of Putin’s rule has been one of increasing repression, albeit insidiously inferred much more than explicitly wielded: if you do not want to lose your job, you should avoid writing about certain topics. While there are many individual historians researching important and controversial areas of Soviet and Russian history, increasingly this is the exception rather than the norm, giving rise to an atmosphere of self-censorship and opportunism. For example, in 2016 there was an uproar among many academics when evidence emerged suggesting that Vladimir Medinskii plagiarized his PhD dissertation on ‘problems of objectivity’ in the coverage of Russian history from the second half of the fifteenth century to the seventeenth century. Pavel Uvarov, head of the historical expert commission in the Academy of Sciences, refused to comment, despite his position and despite the convincing evidence (Uvarov 2018). Much more rigorous academics have found themselves treated much less leniently than Medinskii. If you do choose to investigate a difficult topic and to prioritize research over one’s career, you face being penalized and persecuted by one of the various organizations ranged to ‘defend historical truth’. Some academics working on inconvenient topics have even been stripped of their doctorates; for example, the (then) Ministry of Education and Science rescinded the PhD of Kirill Aleksandrov who wrote his thesis on why some Soviets joined the collaborationist Vlasovite forces.5 His doctorate was

5

Andrei Vlasov was a Soviet Red Army general who was captured by the Nazis during an effort to break the Leningrad blockade. He later defected to the Nazis, heading up the Russian Liberation Army. Its members and those Russians who joined forces with them to fight against the Red Army are known as Vlasovites. After the war, Vlasov was tried for treason and executed by hanging.

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rescinded because the research did not serve the inculcation of patriotism (Gutiontov 2018). Moreover, numerous academics working on memory, culture or politics who have criticized the government’s use of history have been dismissed from their positions, including Nikolai Koposov, Kirill Martynov and Il’ya Kukulin. Nikolai Koposov’s troubles began as early as 2009, when the Russian government authorities attacked the Memorial archive, which houses testimonies from those imprisoned in the Gulag, something on which the academic Dina Khapaeva, who is also Koposov’s wife, has written extensively. This launched the first shots in an unequal war that is waged to this day on history. Koposov was forced to leave the country in 2012 following his open criticism of the memory politics being imposed upon the country and its academics. The introduction of memory laws has undoubtedly enhanced the Kremlin’s repressive toolbox for maligning inconvenient historical narratives but, even without these laws, the government can rely on older, tried and tested tactics to silence dissent. A case of note is that of Yurii Dmitriev, the head of the Karelian branch of Memorial, who is known for researching the crimes of the Stalinist regime and specifically in Sandarmokh, a site of Stalinist mass graves in Karelia, close to the border with Finland. Vladimir Medinskii and the local RMHS branch have tried to claim that among the over 9,000 dead were Soviet POWs shot by the Finns during the First and Second Soviet–Finnish Wars. There is no credible evidence for this, but it fits into a broader narrative – a sort of allegorical truth – about the suffering of the Soviet people during the Second World War. Consequently, those who deny the symbolism of this allegory have been vilified, persecuted and prosecuted, albeit not necessarily via the memory laws: Yurii Dmitriev was not prosecuted under any of the historical memoryrelated articles of the Criminal Code, instead being accused first of sexually abusing his foster daughter and using her to create child pornography (charges of which he was later acquitted), then of illegal firearms possession (of which he was also acquitted), and then of sexual assault against his daughter for which he is currently serving three and a half years in prison. Memorial and other human rights organizations believe that the cases against Dmitriev are political and related to his work on the history of Stalinist repression (Meduza 2021a). Another Karelian historian, Sergei Koltyrin, was sentenced to nine years on paedophilia charges and died in prison; there were allegations that

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this case was also politically motivated in connection with Koltyrin’s research into Sandarmokh (Zhukov 2020; Markelov 2020). While it is not possible to discern the exact nature of the above cases, the lack of due process and rule of law in Russia means that both convictions should be treated with suspicion and contextualized within the increasing clampdown on independent – and inconvenient – forms of enquiry in Russia.

Media censorship Since he first came to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has demonstrated a keen awareness of the media’s importance in constructing a sense of nationhood and defining who does – and does not – belong (Postill 2006). As president, Putin almost immediately began to limit media and press freedoms, launching takeovers (by the state or its allies) of unfriendly outlets (Gehlbach 2010). In so doing, he assured that virtually all television stations and almost all major newspapers were owned by the state or government-friendly businessmen. Although he did not change the market basis in which the outlets functioned, and which had made media sources highly dependent on advertising, Putin and his governments did curtail media freedoms drastically compared with the relative (if oligarch-controlled) liberties of the 1990s (Berlin 2002). Such efforts accelerated after Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. Clearly unnerved by the mass protests that preceded the 2011 and 2012 elections, Putin unleashed much tighter restrictions on protests and freedom of speech, including repressive blogging laws, restrictions on media ownership and legislation banning ‘extremist’ views and/or the rehabilitation of Nazism, as noted above. This included amending Article 19.1 of the Mass Media Law, which introduced a ban on any foreign government, international organization or foreign person – including a Russian citizen who also has foreign citizenship – from directly or indirectly controlling more than 20 per cent of any Russian mass media organization (Duma 2021). The Duma has since used this law as a Trojan Horse for introducing harsher measures against the media, by means of amendments to the original legislation. Most infamously, this has included the imposition of fines for distribution in the mass media of materials produced by an entity recognized and registered as a foreign agent in Russia if such

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publications do not already bear a special sign designating the publisher as a ‘foreign agent’. The restrictions apply to publications and messages distributed online or through social networks. In 2021, the Kremlin and the FSB greatly expanded the number of organizations and journalists designated as foreign agents, targeting anyone who had produced unfavourable coverage, as well as broadening the list of activities that should not be covered by media or journalists wishing to avoid such a designation. In an interview with me, a journalist working for state media at the time, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that events leading to the Ukraine situation proved a turning point with regard to state control and its influence over the news room (Journalist [anonymous] 2018). After the annexation of Crimea, the media and government used the popularity of the annexation to stress the unity of the Russian people behind the President, deeming those who diverged to be a ‘fifth column’ (Putin 2014). But they were able to do this thanks to changes in the media landscape implemented not only from the start of Putin’s mandate but also in the run-up to, and early days of, the EuroMaidan protests. During the latter period, the government abolished the news agency RIA Novosti and replaced it with Rossiya segodnya, headed by Dmitrii Kiselev, who was sanctioned in 2014 for his role as the Kremlin’s propagandist-in-chief. To give a taste of his hortatory style, in the early days of the 2014 war in Ukraine, Kiselev smirkingly threatened that Russia could turn the USA into radioactive dust. His editor-in-chief at Rossiya segodnya is the RT chief propagandist, Margarita Simonyan. For all its issues, RIA Novosti had previously provided a relatively uncensored atmosphere, with journalists given the freedom to explore almost all areas, and generally shielded from political fallout (Journalist formerly at RIA Novosti [anonymous] 2018). The takeover of RIA Novosti was followed shortly by the sacking of Galina Timchenko, the editor of the independently minded Lenta news portal. It was around the same time that the government attacked the opposition TV channel Dozhd’ for hosting the aforementioned debate about whether the USSR should have surrendered Leningrad to the Nazis during the Second World War to avoid unnecessary civilian suffering. Since February 2022, the state has become much more heavy-handed in its efforts to increase its control, but traditionally the Kremlin has used a wide array of methods to control the media and direct their coverage, including

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bribes, preferential treatment, indirect control through ownership, control over advertising and refusal to provide access to information (Vartanova and Lukina 2017). This political control has in turn been reinforced by welldocumented self-censorship among journalists working for state-aligned media outlets, who contributed to creating their own boundaries without the government having to spell it out (Benyumov 2013). This situation has then been compounded by the documented impact of state television on the RuNet (Cottiero et al. 2015) and the confluence of new social media and more traditional forms of media (Gaufman 2015). Moreover, a 2017 media law has forced online news aggregators to include only media registered with the federal agency Roskomnadzor (i.e., only state-approved media). Failure to do so can result in site access being blocked. Thus, the selection of sources being used by Yandex, Russia’s most popular search engine, has been depleted (Wijermars 2021). The Russian government has significantly expanded laws and regulations in the communications space, tightening control over internet infrastructure, online content and the privacy of communications. New laws and regulations have been adopted in recent years which have expanded the authorities’ already significant capacity to filter and block internet content automatically. This means that the Russian government no longer depends on, or requires, providers’ cooperation to implement the block. Moreover, it can also use other methods to change content, as with Yandex where, in addition to the aforementioned registration restrictions, the Kremlin has insisted on an algorithm that prioritizes state media content and makes it very hard for antiKremlin media to feature. Since the departure of its founder, Pavel Durov, in 2014, Russia’s largest social media site, VKontakte, has worked closely with the government. The Kremlin frequently threatens both domestic and foreign social media companies with fines or restricted market access, generally but not always leading to their compliance. Certainly companies like Google and Facebook have demonstrated a disarming meekness in the face of Kremlin demands – especially in contrast to their willingness to pay tax – as seen when both companies shut down content created by the Navalny team to encourage tactical voting (Smart Voting) under pressure from the authorities (Roth 2021). Such measures are part of a broader Kremlin project to extend its sovereignty to the internet, hoping to create a parallel web run entirely on

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Russian servers. In theory, although some way off realization, so-called Internet Sovereignty would see Russia develop the technology to restrict access selectively to banned content without the risk of collateral damage. Although concerned with the latest technology, these policies are little more than a digitalization of the Kremlin’s obsession with cultural sovereignty and control over the cultural space. As a result of this state control and its growth, there is a tendency among some outsiders to dismiss all Russian state-aligned media coverage as onedimensional propaganda, untethered from reality and not credible, akin to the late Soviet press. This is a mistaken assumption and flawed approach. First, any serious investigation into identity construction should take full account of the media debates and discourse in the country being studied. Moreover, in Russia, according to Levada Centre polling from 2013 to 2018, television was the main source of information for almost 90 per cent of respondents, with over 50 per cent voicing trust in the television channels’ portrayal of events, more than for any other source (Levada Centre 2018). Federal television news programmes (such as the weekly news roundup shows Vesti nedeli and Voskresnoe vremya) are very influential, as they broadcast across the country to the whole imagined political community (Burrett 2011). These programmes’ viewing figures also grew notably between 2012 and 2015 (Poluekhtova 2015). As such, the Russian media enjoys considerable popularity and should be taken seriously as a subject of research, as it takes seriously its job to convince people of pro-government narratives. The next chapter does exactly that, as it examines how the media sought to present pivotal moments in Russian domestic and foreign affairs as historical reruns of emotive, even traumatic, pasts.

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3

Past as Present: The Historical Framing of Ukraine, Sanctions and Syria On 24 August 2014, Russian and pro-Russian forces paraded dozens of dishevelled Ukrainian POWs through the streets of Donetsk. As the prisoners trundled past the crowds, enraged civilian onlookers screamed abuse at them, throwing objects and rotten food. The Kremlin-backed militiamen in charge of this highly stylized procession were bedecked in St George Ribbons, the commemorative symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazism. At first glance, the presence of such symbols might have appeared unusual, even random, but it was part of a deliberate attempt to infuse the parade with the semantic denotations of the Great Patriotic War. The parade of captured Ukrainian soldiers had been carefully designed to mirror the Red Army’s parade of Nazi POWs through the streets of Moscow in 1944. The Russian media covered it closely, historically framing not only the parade but the entire conflict in east Ukraine as a repeat of the Soviet Union’s epic battle against Nazi Germany. The 2014 spectacle represented a horrifying example of the constant making-present of the Great Patriotic War and other historical triumphs and tragedies in Russian political culture. Horrifying but far from rare: this type of conflation was only one of tens of thousands of historical references (re) produced by Russian media and political actors since 2012. Taken together, these references comprise a detailed narrative, in which current events are ‘historically framed’. Historical framing can be defined as the media’s framing of a contemporary event within an historical precedent: the media conflates a present-day and past episode. The basis of framing theory is that the media focuses attention on certain events and then places them within a field of meaning. In Russian media coverage of several important events during Putin’s third presidential term, that field of meaning was located within selective and 51

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emotive narratives of the past. To work, then, the parade of Ukrainian POWs had to rely on a historical frame that had already been lodged by the media in the audience’s and enactors’ minds. This particular framing is founded on the Russian state-aligned media’s comparison of the conflict in Ukraine with the Great Patriotic War – comparative content on which Russia’s current narrative about ‘denazifying’ Ukraine is built.1 But there have been others, and this chapter details three examples of historical framing as a key element in the government and media’s efforts to make history present. To elucidate how this works, I employed ‘framing analysis’, a form of discourse analysis, to Russian media and government coverage of three pivotal events that occurred in the era-defining years of 2014 and 2015: the Ukraine Crisis; the imposition of harsh Western sanctions on Russia following the downing of MH17; and Russian military intervention in Syria. Of the available methods for analysing media discourse, I decided that framing analysis was best suited to the analysis of process. A frame functions to define a problem (and its causes), assert the moral dimensions of the problem and then propose a solution (Kuypers 2006). In my approach, I adopted Michael Cacciatore, Dietram Scheufele and Shanto Iyengar’s (2016) refined approach to framing analysis, which emphasizes the need to explore ‘equivalence framing’, a growing media tendency to produce detailed comparisons and conflations between one event and another. In the same article, they also stress the importance of pre-existing, culturally dependent ‘schema’ (here: points of comparison) to successful media framing. This proved highly appropriate to my analysis of Russian media coverage given that a familiar, mythologized version of history functioned as the point of comparison. In terms of application, I adapted Mark Miller’s (1997) approach, in which he maps frames using keyword frequency, basing his method on the idea that frames are constructed through the strategic use or omission of certain words and phrases. In my framing analysis, I first established the presence of the historical frame and the sub-narratives that comprise it before then comparing different sources’ use of the frame. I managed to maintain the detail required

1

For a detailed academic analysis of the Russian government and media’s historical framing of the Ukraine Crisis within the Great Patriotic War, please see my article in Memory Studies (McGlynn 2018). For a detailed description of historical framing analysis as a methodology, please see McGlynn 2022.

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by analysing the texts individually, ensuring that infrequent frame-relevant words could be considered in my analysis. Once I had identified the presence of historical framing, I grouped keywords and phrases into thematic clusters, adapting the methodology used by Bruce Etling et al. in their analysis of the Russian blogosphere (Etling, Alexanyan and Kelly 2010). The Russian media and politicians use these detailed analogies to underscore the relevance of history, to make it matter to people’s everyday lives. Rather than employ history as a brief analogy, users of historical framing focus on demonstrating, in a detailed and intense way, both the repetition and repeatability of the historical event in the present. The first and most notable feature is the intensity of the level of repetition. Frequently repeated conflation of the past historical event with the present news event constitutes the main, and most basic, technique necessary to historical framing. In all studies mentioned in this chapter, a high level of repetition of historical comparison continued for at least two months, with all sources consistently detailing the supposed replaying of history. The media’s repetitive and restricted field of historical reference also built on trends identified by academics working on Russian media, where coverage of limited subjects with recurrent motifs has been described as a defining characteristic of the news agenda (Stent 2013: 112). The use of such techniques is particularly pronounced in government statements and in the government daily newspaper Rossiiskaya gazeta and the daily tabloid Komsomolskaya pravda. Such sources reiterated near-identical phrases, as in the examples taken from Russian state-aligned media coverage of the West’s imposition of sanctions in 2014: Having pronounced their victory in the ‘Cold War’ . . . Rossiiskaya gazeta 2014c The so-called ‘victors’ in the Cold War had decided to pressure events . . . Prezident Rossii 2013 The victors, in quotation marks, in the Cold War . . . Chigishov 2014j: 34.17

Such techniques recalled the late Soviet period in the use of repetition and set phrases, including the near-precise recitation of whole chunks of language or

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‘templates’ (Gorham 2016; Yurchak 2005: 63). Another technique, especially prominent in the tabloid press, saw the media contextualize new articles by including lengthy extracts from earlier pieces (Mazur 2014). In a similar vein, Rossiiskaya gazeta inserted whole sections of related earlier articles into their coverage (Zabrodina 2014a, 2014b; Domcheva 2014; Zubkov 2014; Vorob’ev 2014b, 2014a). Despite the penchant for repetition, to keep the comparison meaningful, the sources had to adapt their narratives to the development of events. The media and politicians’ references to historical points of comparison were often more frequent and more dramatic at those times when objective reality threatened to delegitimize the Russian version of events. By contrast, analysis of the media’s use of historical framing references, tracked by date, show that they reduced their use of historical framing when events were going the government’s way, reiterating the persuasive intentions behind the use of historical framing. The media and politicians often accompanied such shifts with a change in tone, so that any increase in the volume of references occurred alongside more heated and militaristic rhetoric. For example, in their coverage of the Ukraine Crisis during the week ending 23 March 2014, which followed the annexation of Crimea, most media significantly reduced the number of comparisons between the Ukraine Crisis and the Great Patriotic War, noticeably toning down their rhetoric (Chigishov 2014c: 03.54). Historical framing itself is not a new phenomenon and draws on a long tradition of top-down historical analogy in Russia: the war in Donbas was conflated with the Great Patriotic War, just as Soviet authorities framed 1941 to 1945 as a repeat of the 1812 war against Napoleon, which, in its turn, was depicted as a rerun of the 1612 Battle of Moscow. Arguably, the use of historical framing has its roots not only in conflict and division but also in the communist past, where the authorities would often retell history ‘in a presentist framework’ (Lampe 2003: 4), directly connecting it to the present day. Communist leaders frequently called upon the past to support the legitimacy of the new socialist states ‘by providing historical precedent’ (Lampe 2003: 4; see also Brandenberger 2002). Examining memory in the post-communist space, Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik (2014) describe a concept similar to historical framing: mnemonic layering. This term denotes how one commemoration is combined with another,

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assuming its overtones. However, while sharing structural similarities, historical framing is different because it involves the detailed conflation of current events with historical ones. Moreover, the historical events perform not only a comparative but also a causational function: because the present event is the same as the past event, we know how the present event will develop –exactly like the past event. Put another way, rather than layering the narratives, in historical framing they are amalgamated. This amalgamation also differentiates historical framing from Aleksandr Etkind’s notion of a ‘memory event’, since the latter creates a rupture with the accepted representation of a given historical event, whereas historical framing is an intensification of an already accepted representation (Etkind 2010). That said, there are some similarities of effect, namely that historical framing, like memory events, endow the past with new life, albeit perhaps not in the future so much as in the present. Djouaria Ghilani et al. came closest to an exposition of historical framing in their study of historical analogies and their effects (Ghilani et al. 2017). Some of the analogies they cite are examples of historical framing in that they are sustained and intensive conflations but, while there is an overlap, a historical analogy is frequently a one-off underdeveloped comparison, unlike historical framing. Moreover, as noted, historical framing requires, if not a causational link, then at least a structural similarity that (supposedly) produces similar outcomes: a present event is happening like this because, and/or just as, a past event happened like this. This applies whether the link is abstract and speculative, as between the Great Patriotic War and the 2014 Ukraine Crisis, or more concrete, as with the more proximate events of the 1990s and Putin era. Despite these divergences, many of the findings of Ghilani et al. are relevant: for example, they demonstrate that media narratives become much more impactful when using developed historical analogies. In applying discourse analysis to understand how historical framing narratives worked, my aim was to provide a detailed description, explanation and critique of the textual strategies used to ‘naturalize’ the historical obsession of the sources, making it appear to be a common-sense reaction (Riggins 1997: 2). The sources that I analysed are listed in alphabetical order below: Argumenty i fakty is a weekly Moscow-based newspaper, owned by the Government of Moscow as of 7 March 2014. It has a large circulation of

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1.2 million and has been very popular since Soviet times (Media Landscapes 2018). Relative to other state-affiliated media, it permits a wide range of voices in its coverage of events, although only within permissible limits. Komsomolskaya pravda is a pro-government tabloid newspaper founded in 1925 and available throughout Russia. In the Soviet Union, it was the official organ of the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, although now it is targeted at a mass readership. It is not owned directly by the state but by Media Partner, which in turn is owned by the ESN Group, an energy company led by Grigorii Berezkin, who enjoys close links to Gazprom and the government. TNS Gallup Media found that Komsomolskaya pravda was the most read newspaper in 2011 and its online version the most visited website in 2008, the last time such data was released before the start of Putin’s third term (von Feilitzen and Petrov 2011). Kremlin.ru is the official website of the Russian President and the Presidential Administration. It contains all official government statements, interviews and relevant documentation of the office of the presidency. Lenta is a popular Moscow-based online newspaper, with over 600,000 daily visitors in 2018 (Alexa Internet 2018). In 2014, the main editor, Galina Timchenko, and nearly half of the staff were sacked for displeasing the government with their coverage of events in Ukraine. The Kremlin installed a pro-government editor and the newspaper’s coverage of events in Ukraine – and much else besides – changed drastically. Mid.ru is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, which contains interviews, papers and statements released by the minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his officials and spokespeople. Rossiiskaya gazeta is the Russian government daily newspaper, which publishes official decrees and statements as well as articles written by their journalists. In terms of audience reach, according to the TNS Russia poll 2012, Rossiiskaya gazeta was in third place at the start of Putin’s third presidential term (Khvostunova 2013). Vesti nedeli is a Sunday evening flagship news round-up show for Rossiya-1, the state-owned television channel. In 2015, Vesti nedeli won Russia’s once-prestigious

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TEFI television industry award for best information analysis programme, and it averaged between 15 and 16 per cent of audience share for its prime time slot during 2014 and 2015. Vesti nedeli is presented by Dmitrii Kiselev, who was placed on the EU and USA sanctions list for producing anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian propaganda during the 2014 Ukraine Crisis and conflict. Voskresnoe vremya is Vesti nedeli’s competitor as the Sunday evening flagship news round-up show. It airs on Pervyi kanal (First Channel), Russia’s most watched federal channel. The channel’s CEO is Konstantin Ernst, a staunch and influential Kremlin loyalist, and it is owned by businesses that use opaque structures based in tax havens. Voskresnoe vremya was very popular during the research period, as the fifteenth most watched programme of all genres of 2014, with 8.1 million viewers on average for each episode, more even than Vesti nedeli (Poluekhtova 2015). I selected these sources because they represent a broad spectrum of popular state-aligned media, either directly or indirectly controlled by the government, amenable to its pressure and therefore representative of views the government would like to promote.2 Moreover, while they are all state-aligned, they cater for different target audiences and different forms of media, providing insight into the variety offered by state-affiliated media in their coverage of the events considered below, starting with the Ukraine Crisis.

The Ukraine Crisis as the Great Patriotic War The EuroMaidan protests (also known as the Revolution of Dignity) began in November 2013. They were sparked by then President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign a trade association agreement with the EU. This decision followed an offer by Vladimir Putin of major discounts on energy prices and 15 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine, with Yanukovych seemingly lured by these promises and frightened at the prospect of alienating Russia. To many

2

As noted above, Lenta was not state-aligned at the start of the Ukraine Crisis but the editor was sacked and replaced with a more pro-Kremlin voice during this period.

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Ukrainians, Yanukovych’s decision symbolized an unwelcome choice about Ukraine’s future, taking a Russian, as opposed to Western, path. People took to the streets, recreating the protests across the country. Over the winter of 2013– 14, the Ukrainian police responded violently to the protestors on several occasions, killing over 100 people. Despite this – and the bitter cold – the protests continued into February, when, the day after an EU-brokered agreement for early elections, President Yanukovych lost the confidence of the police and fled Kyiv. In the power vacuum that followed, opposition parties represented at the Maidan and in the Rada formed an interim government. Russia questioned the legitimacy of this action, characterizing the demonstrators and the interim government as far-right extremists in the vein of the Second World War Ukrainian nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera. Falsely claiming that Russian speakers in Crimea were facing impending genocide, Russia carried out a swift and immaculately executed annexation of the peninsula, later ‘legitimized’ by a sham referendum on 16 March 2014. Soon afterwards, Russia amassed troops on its border with Ukraine and sent both regular and irregular troops to initiate anti-Kyiv violence in east Ukraine. In Russian parlance this was dubbed ‘the Russian Spring’, but the uprising found less support than expected and faced a Ukrainian Army who were ready to fight back. What began as skirmishes between loyalists and ‘separatists’ had descended into armed conflict by April 2014. This conflict cost the lives of 14,000 people and evolved into the even more brutal 2022 war, which Russia launched against Ukraine under the pretence of defending the Donbas and ‘denazifying’ the rest of the country.3

What did the Russia media show? As detailed in Chapter 2, the Kremlin’s grip over the media grew ever tighter in the run up to and during EuroMaidan, with the abolition of RIA Novosti and the sacking of Galina Timchenko and her editorial board from Lenta, after they provided balanced coverage of the Ukraine Crisis, even interviewing a

3

For more information on the conflict in the Donbas, see Andrew Wilson’s (2014) or Serhy Yekelchyk’s (2015) books on the Ukraine conflict.

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far-right Ukrainian politician. Even in ‘normal times’, Putin’s administration ‘hosts weekly planning meetings for media bosses’, at which it disseminates key lines (Yaffa 2019). During the most tense days of the Ukraine Crisis, such meetings were held daily. Looking through Lenta’s website archive now, there are very few articles left relating to the Ukraine Crisis, with those that remain providing conflicting interpretations, reflecting the views of both outgoing and incoming journalists. The Kremlin’s enhanced level of control over not only Lenta but most mainstream media content led to a similarity of narrative and stance across state-aligned media, as the Russian government worked hard to ensure the Maidan protests did not cross the border. Those demonstrating on Kyiv’s Maidan shared common concerns with those protesting about electoral falsification in Russia just two years previously. The uproar of protest in neighbouring Ukraine would have been perceived by the government as a direct threat to the internal stability of the Russian Federation. This fear was reinforced by President Putin’s insistence that the EuroMaidan – just like the Bolotnaya protests – was organized and financed by the USA, an interpretation promoted across a wide variety of sources (Argumenty i fakty 2014d; Buzina 2014; Starikov 2014). This contributed to the idea that the USA and the West were continuously organizing ‘colour revolutions’4 to destabilize Russia, feeding into the long-standing trope of Russia as a besieged fortress. The Russian media’s depiction of events in Ukraine was very different from the reality: the EuroMaidan demonstrations were hastily (dis)organized protests, populated by all sections, good and bad, of Ukrainian society. Sparked originally by Yanukovych’s failure to sign a European Union trade agreement, the protests soon morphed into a powerful assertion of fairness, dignity and way of life. But the average viewer would have found little inspirational in the Russian media coverage of these same protests, which were depicted as an American-backed coup led by fascists against a legitimate president. According to this perspective, Russia was forced to intervene in the ensuing anarchy to defend Russian speakers in Crimea and east Ukraine (Delyagin 2014).

4

This term is used to describe a series of largely peaceful uprisings in the former Soviet Union, often supported by the USA and its allies.

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The overall narrative can be broken down into four components, each of which took prominence in the coverage at different stages and which centred on the following conflations: the new Ukrainian government as Banderites; the behaviour of the Ukrainian and Western governments as akin to Nazis; the war in the East as a rerun of the Great Patriotic War; and the Russian Spring and the return of Crimea as a new Great Victory. By telling the Ukraine Crisis as the Great Patriotic War, Russian media used a predictably Russified and selective interpretation of the 1941–5 period, with no discussion of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact or any nuanced description of Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom fought against the Nazis as well as the Soviets. Although the Russian media also used other narratives (e.g., Maidan as a colour revolution) to explain the political crisis in Ukraine, the depiction of the Ukraine Crisis as a rerun of the Great Patriotic War was a prominent interpretation in state-aligned media coverage. The practical purpose of the narrative was to delegitimize the Maidan protestors’ complaints, especially as these had much in common with the grievances aired during the 2011–12 mass protests in Russia – but the state also used this narrative to enhance the dominance of the Great Patriotic War in cultural memory, which could then fulfil a nationally unifying objective. The sheer number of repeated references to the Great Patriotic War in the coverage of the Ukraine Crisis was the most basic technique used by the media to persuade viewers of the legitimacy of the conflation. Looking at the sources’ news coverage between 22 February and 25 May 2014 – beginning with Yanukovych’s decision to flee Ukraine and ending with the election of a new president, Petro Poroshenko – I identified 3509 individual comparisons of the Ukraine Crisis with the Great Patriotic War. The use of this comparative narrative peaked in the run-up to major events, such as the annexation of Crimea and the referenda in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR, respectively).5 Not surprisingly, given the emotive nature of this narrative, the two most tabloid sources, Komsomolskaya pravda and Vesti nedeli, used this type of comparisons most frequently.

5

The DNR and LNR are Russian-backed (albeit not Russian-recognized until 2022) quasi-states located in the Donbas region of Ukraine. On 11 May 2014, both territories held sham referenda to legitimize their status, with overwhelming but unverified numbers of voters supporting the DNR and LNR’s self-proclaimed ‘self-rule’.

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Naturally, the media emphasized different historical elements depending on the topic under examination: for example, media sources would invoke Banderites (followers of Stepan Bandera) if Pravyi Sektor held a march, while they would cite Red Army heroism in coverage of Donbas’ armed ‘resistance’ to the Ukrainian Army. It was as if every group and actor had their historical double. Often these narratives drew on simultaneously produced discourses depicting oppositionists as traitors or Putin as a folk hero but cloaked these takes in historical garb. Of course, these doubles had existed previously, and had been used analogously previously – their familiarity was part of their power. As such, this was not a new technique, but it was an expansion of earlier uses of historical analogies and historical framing. To understand how this worked, it is necessary to consider how the media recounted each component of the narrative, starting with the story of Maidan and the build up to the 2014 war in east Ukraine.

The Ghost of Stepan Bandera The narrative’s earliest iteration centred on the controversial figure of Stepan Bandera and compared pro-Maidan Ukrainians’ actions and protests with the way internal enemies and collaborators weakened Soviet power and facilitated Nazi takeovers of territory during and prior to the Great Patriotic War. This view is prominent in Russian history textbooks (Zagladin 2017). Popular in the government daily and tabloid Komsomolskaya pravda, this argument was most dominant in the early weeks of the Ukraine Crisis (22 February to 23 March 2014). The media’s quick assumption of the frame can be linked to precedent. In 2004, the Russian media readily conflated the Orange Revolution with the Great Patriotic War, albeit on a lesser scale (Zhurzhenko 2015). Further back, Soviet politicians used references to Ukrainian nationalist crimes and collaboration during and after the Great Patriotic War to undermine Ukrainian claims for independence (Fedor et al. 2017; Marples 2007). The academic, Zenon Kohut even argued that in the pro-Soviet/pro-Russian Ukrainian media, ‘no historical theme received so much space in 1990 and 1991 as did the OUN-UPA’ (Kohut 1994: 136–7). Drawing on this history, the media set out to demonize large swathes of the Maidan protestors, presenting their criticisms of the political system in

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Ukraine as being driven by ethno-nationalism and fascist ideology.6 The main keyword in this sub-narrative was Bandera and words deriving from this root, such as Banderites and banderovshchina (the time of Bandera). Taken together, derivatives from the word Bandera formed over 72 per cent of all keyword references. During the Second World War, Bandera’s nationalists had fought both alongside and against the Nazis and committed atrocities against Jews, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians. Russian politicians frequently invoked these crimes, as when an MFA spokesman described those fighting in the Ukrainian militias as being motivated solely by admiration of ‘Bandera, Shukhevych and other facilitators of the German Nazis during World War II who fought together with them against their own nation, destroying the ethnic minorities who lived in Ukraine’ (MID 2014). This quotation exemplified many sources’ distinction between good and bad Ukrainians, a trope common in Russian narratives of the Second World War. The conflation of pro-Maidan Ukrainians with Banderites was not entirely a figment of Moscow’s imagination. Stepan Bandera remains a controversial and divisive figure in Ukraine, where (very broadly speaking) he is demonized in the east as a violent collaborator but honoured in west Ukraine as a man who fought for Ukrainian independence. There were supporters of Bandera on the Maidan in 2013–14 but to say that the majority of protestors professed Banderite views of Ukraine’s future would be absurd (Marples and Mills 2015). The Russian media promoted this view to overemphasize the role and prominence of far-right parties in post-Maidan politics and to delegitimize the protestors’ aims. They focused on members of the nationalist political party Svoboda ‘who glorify Stepan Bandera [. . . and] pulled down Soviet-era monuments and memorials to the heroes of the Great Patriotic War’ (Komsomolskaya pravda 2014). The conceit behind this narrative component was that 1940s Banderites were staging a comeback and had once more seized control in Ukraine during the EuroMaidan protests and ousting of Viktor Yanukovych. Represented by 6

Occasionally politicians and, very infrequently, the media, would suggest that some of the Maidan protestors’ views were legitimate, at least initially. Putin voiced similar opinions in his Crimea speech and in a meeting with journalists in that same month of March 2014 (Prezident Rossii 2014d, 2014b). This partial recognition often served the purpose of then contrasting such people with the Maidan protestors who were there at the end or who came into government (almost all, allegedly, Banderites) and to show that Russia was not condemning all Ukrainians.

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the new interim government in Kyiv, ostensibly these Banderites were proceeding to strip Russian speakers of their rights, pursuing their ideological hatred of Russians and all non-Ukrainian minorities in a bid to ethnically cleanse the territory of its Russian people and history. In many ways, this was a memory war turned into a real war, as armed gangs (or ‘self-defence battalions’) were formed, supported by Russian irregulars, to defend Lenin statues and war memorials from real and imagined threats against them by marauding Maidan supporters. The term Bandera has long been used in Russia as a byword for traitor and Ukrainian nationalist, but the media were also on hand to deliver timely historical exposés of crimes committed by Ukrainian collaborators. During this period, the government released a slew of wartime archives on the crimes of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine alongside reports on current crimes committed by (alleged) contemporary Banderites. The most prominent government report was a White Paper on Ukrainian crimes against humanity, released by the MFA. It contained images of Ukrainian nationalist atrocities during the 1940s and 1950s, alongside descriptions of (largely imagined) present-day crimes, used to strike fear into the Russophone reader by presenting Ukrainian state structures as utterly complicit with a reign of terror initiated by out-of-control Banderite youths. Other keywords included variations on the OUN/UPA (Ukrainian nationalist army)7 and SS Galichina,8 albeit with only twenty-seven and twenty-two references, respectively. The latter was a reference to the only Ukrainian SS volunteer division, which some Western Ukrainians have attempted to rehabilitate. The Kremlin-aligned media’s early emphasis on Bandera was deliberately designed to drive a wedge between two close peoples with extensive familial connections. But not all Russians fell for this narrative; some 30,000 people attended the Moscow March of Peace demonstration against the Kremlin’s

7

8

Although the Russian media often uses the two names interchangeably or sometimes even combines them, the OUN and UPA were separate organizations representing the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armia), respectively. The division is often referred to in English as the Waffen SS Galicia Division. The Division was formed exclusively to fight on the Eastern front against the Soviets, but its members were also allowed to remain in Western Europe after the war, with many then sent to Canada, despite Soviet demands to ‘repatriate’ them. See Olesya Khromeychuk’s (2013) book on this Division for more detail.

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aggression and ahead of the referendum in Crimea (Reuters 2014). The media freely dubbed these Russian demonstrators as Banderites (Grishin 2014b). In Rossiiskaya gazeta, Tamara Shkel’ described how there was an ‘open demonstration of the symbols of Banderites and of those Ukrainian nationalist divisions that acted on the side of the fascists as punishment battalions and took part in the mass annihilation of their fellow Soviet citizens and the citizens of other European nations’ (Shkel’ 2014b). It is rather ahistorical that the term Banderites should be used – here and elsewhere – to describe (primarily) ethnic Russians. While the media frequently and openly referenced the wartime collaboration of Ukrainians and other nationalities, such as Tatars and Chechens, there was only one reference, across all sources, to ethnic Russian wartime collaboration. Instead, as above, the Russian opposition was compared to Banderites as state media tried to externalize any negative aspect of the Second World War to other parts of the former Soviet Union (mainly Ukraine and the Baltic States). The remaining evidence for the comparisons was mainly intuited from the behaviour of the Banderites during the Great Patriotic War: they did this then, so their heirs will do this now. President Putin developed this line of reasoning in a Federal Address, widely known as his ‘Crimea Speech’, in March 2014 (Kremlin.ru 2014), when he depicted supporters of the interim Ukrainian government as collaborators whose behaviour should be judged according to the actions of Banderites in the Great Patriotic War: ‘Everyone can already tell exactly what they will do next, these Ukrainian heirs to the Bandera ideology, to a man who collaborated with Hitler during World War Two [. . .] they will try to create an ethnically pure Ukrainian state’ (Prezident Rossii 2014d). Putin’s superfluous use of ‘Ukrainian’ reiterated the divide between ‘good’ (Russophone) Ukrainians and ‘bad’ (nationalist/pro-Western) Ukrainians prevalent in Russian media retellings of the EuroMaidan and the Great Patriotic War. By describing Ukrainian nationalists as collaborators, Putin presented them as disloyal to Russia, implying that events in Ukraine were an internal affair for Russia. This view also emerged in various media sources: This isn’t just about destroying a state [Ukraine] that is centred in Moscow. Achieving this historical objective would never solve the problem once and

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for all. Instead, the issue is more about destroying the Russians as a people, of splitting up the Slavs [. . .] this is the programme that is currently being implemented in the Ukraine under the direction of the USA. Shablinskaya 2014b

As well as revealing an outdated and condescending Russian understanding of Ukraine that denied the latter’s nationhood, arguments similar to these had functioned to legitimize the Duma’s approval for sending Russian troops to Ukraine on 1 March 2014 (Klyuchkin and Dmitriev 2014). After all, if there was an existential attack on Russia and a genuine effort to historically unroot its peoples and culture, it made sense that Russians should fight back. This argument remains prominent in Russian political discourse: as referenced at the start of Chapter 2, both Putin and Medvedev penned historical essays about Russian–Ukrainian unity in 2021 that were littered with condescending and pseudohistorical reasoning as to why Ukraine is not a real state. The idea of Ukrainians as Banderites was also the predominant explanation as to why Ukrainians resisted the 2022 Russian invasion. Many sources also attempted to find convenient allies among peoples who shared Russia’s current or historical rivalries. This met with varying levels of success; for example, there were numerous unsuccessful attempts to set Poles against Ukrainians by reigniting historical grievances (Gamov 2014a; Chernykh 2014). The media also interviewed Jewish Ukrainians and Rabbis willing to draw parallels between the Nazis and the new Ukrainian government (Ivashkina 2014b). However, they frequently had to rely on disinformation and lies to back up their hysterical stories, with RT deliberately making up stories that cast Ukrainians as antisemitic (Sokol 2019) while Russian news channels left a widely-documented trail of fake witnesses and stories, including crucified toddlers (Demirjian 2015).

New Order: Nazis march on Kyiv As the 2014 crisis in Ukraine wore on, and Russia invaded the peninsula of Crimea in order to annex it, the coverage became ever more hysterical. Many of the arguments will be recognizable to anyone watching Russian propaganda about Ukraine in 2022. From early March 2014 in particular, there were

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increasing efforts to paint Ukrainians not only as collaborators but as out-andout Nazis. This argument compared the new Ukrainian authorities’ discussion of (never-passed) legislation on the status of the Russian language and the military’s efforts to restore order in east Ukraine with the development of Nazi ideology and its consequences for those living under Nazi rule and occupation. The purpose of this narrative was to cast the interim government’s attempts to restore sovereignty in Donbas as fuelled by ideological racial chauvinism. Its use epitomized a heightened intensity in the sources’ condemnation of the new Ukrainian authorities and the political reality in Ukraine. That said, this analogy was much less prominent than the Banderite comparison in Russian domestic coverage, with Russian media almost three times more likely to invoke Bandera than the Nazis. Comparisons with Nazis were, by contrast, much more prevalent in foreign-focused Russian media, such as RT, which could not rely on intra-cultural understanding of the term Banderites. The ‘Ukrainians-as-Nazis’ argument represented not a replacement of the Bandera narrative but rather an intensification of it, as the media tried to mobilize support for Russian interference – rather than just to vilify Ukraine. The most frequently used term was ‘Nazi’, with 240 mentions, followed by Hitler, with 175 mentions. Other reasonably prominent keywords included ‘Goebbels’ (often in relation to Ukrainian and Western media outlets), ‘swastika’ and ‘SS’, all with between thirty-five and forty mentions. Although clearly exaggerated, journalists used rhetorical flourishes to make their Nazi analogies appear factual, from citing dubious or selective historical documents (Shestakov 2014a) to using highly specific comparisons with events such as the Reichstag Fire (Grishin 2014a) or the Night of the Long Knives (Chigishov 2014a: 01.06.34). Many of the events cited were domestic German events occurring before or at the very beginning of the Second World War, as seen in Putin’s comments on the current and potential future political leadership in Ukraine: But in these conditions, anyone might emerge [as leader]. You will remember how [Ernst] Röhm’s units acted when Hitler charged to power. And then these [Brownshirt] units of Röhm were wiped out, liquidated, essentially. But they had played their role in Hitler’s rise to power. The most unexpected scenarios can happen. Prezident Rossii 2014b

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As in the example above, individual Nazis like Röhm and Goebbels (Rozova 2014; Grishin 2014a; Kholmogorov 2014) featured in order to symbolize the cutthroat and propagandistic nature of the new Ukrainian government. Russian state-aligned media coverage created the impression that the new Ukrainian authorities were imposing conditions similar to those of 1930s Nazi Germany. As in the words of the scurrilous tabloid reporter Ul’yana Skoibeda, ‘Fascists are winning in the Ukraine. Let’s call a spade a spade: after all people who proclaim the superiority of one nation over another, those people are fascists. Well, or Nazis, if we are going to be very exact about our terminology’ (Skoibeda 2014a). Skoibeda also referenced Hitler, the Abwehr, Kyiv streets ‘covered in swastikas’ and ‘destroyed Jewish shops’, painting a picture of a city overrun by Nazis. While there was, and is, a far-right presence in Ukraine, these were grotesque exaggerations. Rather than admit their exaggeration, journalists like Skoibeda and Argumenty i fakty’s Mikhail Delyagin, presented the horrifying content of their stories as proof that only Russia(ns) had the wherewithal to tell the truth, ugly as it may be: ‘Let’s look the truth in the face: a coup d’état, supported and largely directly organized by the West, has brought the most blatant Nazis to power in Kyiv’ (Delyagin 2014). In one crude if slightly absurd example, the weekly news show Voskresnoe vremya compared a Nazi propaganda sheet to Ukrainian safety instructions for frontline territories, going through each line to detail similarities and placing the two images next to each other to imply similitude (Korolev 2014c: 10.00). But in reality, the two documents had very little in common, as was patently obvious to any semi-observant viewer. The media also referenced archival documents, many of which were newly released by the government and concerned Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian collaborators and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine (Nikitin 2014). The government’s carefully timed releases of archival evidence merged historical fact with present propaganda. This type of evidence was much more popular in coverage of the Ukraine Crisis, and the media made very few such references in the other two events studied (sanctions and intervention in Syria). Senior members of the Russian government abstained from calling individual Western politicians Nazis, but their media did not (Filmoshkina 2014). The EU and USA were increasingly brought into the discussion following their imposition of the first round of sanctions on Russia on

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17 March 2014 for the annexation of Crimea. Unsurprisingly, Russian media allocated some of its starkest Nazi comparisons to NATO, characterizing them as a modern-day SS (Snegirev 2014). It was sadly ironic that claims that the West was supporting Nazis were accompanied by antisemitic comments: ‘And I am very surprised that despite this [history], the EU has decided on a confrontation with Russia [in Ukraine]. Does this mean then that they are supporting Nazis? There are heaps of super-rich Jews in there [in Europe]!’ (Shablinskaya 2014a). This type of comment implied that everyone else knew that Nazis had come to power in Ukraine, but only Russia was courageous enough to say it aloud, an implication that the Kremlin articulated very clearly in 2022. This builds on a broader argument that Russia is the only one able, willing and brave enough to defend historical truth.

The Little Patriotic War9 An increased focus on the fighting of 1941 to 1945 accompanied and fuelled the transformation of Russia’s memory war with Ukraine into a real conflict. Many future sites of conflict in east Ukraine grew out of the formation of socalled self-defence battalions – often supported, organized and manned by Russian volunteers – to defend statues of Soviet war heroes from bands of Banderites. These units then morphed into militias, once again led, armed and partly manned by Russian volunteers. It was not difficult to ascertain the sympathies of the Russian media and government, where the ‘separatists’ were characterized as plucky ‘partisans’ (Shestakov 2014b; Kagarlitskii 2014a; Varsegov 2014) or heroic defenders of the Great Victory, following in the dauntless footsteps of the Red Army (Argumenty i fakty 2014b). By contrast, Russian media compared the Ukrainian military’s (and militias’) actions to atrocities committed by the Nazi occupying forces during the Great Patriotic War (Dunaevskii 2014a). The fighting in Ukraine was confused with that of the Great Patriotic War by layering references to one within another or by using symbolic figures to associate the two conflicts in the audiences’ minds. This argument was especially prominent in televisual

9

This phrase is taken from an article written by the Ukrainian academic Roman Horbyk (2015).

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coverage, which liberally conflated the conflict in east Ukraine with the Great Patriotic War in their commentary on footage of fighting in Donbas. The purpose of the argument was to delegitimize the Ukrainian Army’s decision to fight back against Russian military interference in east Ukraine, including attempts by Russian-backed combatants (including Russian irregulars) to seize control of Ukrainian government buildings. Once again, we saw this same narrative used to delegitimize Ukrainian resistance in 2022. When presenting the ‘separatists’ as continuing the fight against fascism the media often used genealogical terminology, casting the pro-Russians as descendants of the Red Army simply by virtue of their (geo)political positioning. Where there was a clear biological heritage, this was underscored by the speaker and/or media, as in the following (sarcastic) quotation from Igor’ Strelkov, a key military commander in Donbas: ‘My grandfather was here in Krasnoarmeisk, fighting to get out of the encirclement for a week in February 1943, defending his country and his people [narod]. But, of course, I’m the aggressor here’ (Bas 2014). The familial and genealogical connotations heightened the ethno-nationalist undertones present in some of the media and government discussions during the Ukraine Crisis. While the call to history was largely an attempt to provide a unifying alternative to ethnonationalist patriotism, it was highly malleable and at times flirted heavily with ethno-nationalist tendencies – never more so than during the Ukraine conflict. This assuaged some of the more radical elements of the nationalist constituency in Russian society (Chaisty and Whitefield 2015). Arguably, it also exported them, given that up to 50,000 Russians did volunteer to fight, with nationalists – often of a more imperial bent – prominent among them. To appeal to the emotions of nationalists and non-nationalists alike, the media employed especially dramatic imagery suffused with death, killing and torture. On 4 April, Rossiiskaya gazeta issued a detailed description of Nazi killing methods in concentration and death camps, which it equated with Ukrainian Army tactics (Petin 2014). This fascination with gore and suffering was mirrored in the footage of fighting and the visual close-ups of dead people found on Voskresnoe vremya (Korolev 2014b: 16.23; 2014d: 15.11). In general, the more tabloid its tone (as with Vesti nedeli and Komsomolskaya pravda), the more likely the source was to focus on violence; however, extreme examples emerged across all sources, as with the following description from Rossiiskaya gazeta of

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one female veteran’s suffering during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv which she said was being repeated in 2014: ‘They [the Banderites] shot one of the sons right in front of her outside the house, another they took away and he disappeared without trace, while the third was cut up using a ramrod, his eyes gouged out. She dug him out of a half-buried well with her own hands’ (Latartsevii 2014). Through such gory detail and the emphatic focus on the atrocities of the Great Patriotic War and potential atrocities of the burgeoning war in Ukraine, the media created a sense of terror, fuelling hysteria at home and abroad. Many Russian speakers and former Soviet citizens living beyond the borders of the Russian Federation also consume Russian media sources, including in east Ukraine, where these comparisons were likely to have had a dramatic impact on audiences (Dougherty 2014: 4–7; Peisakhin and Rozenas 2018). Living in Moscow at the time, I found that people spoke of little else but events in Ukraine. There were frequent anti-Maidans10 on the street, billboards about the war, and kiosks everywhere – as well as churches – calling for donations and even volunteers to support the Donbas war effort. Moscow had the negative energy of a city at war – even though it was only inciting one. The dramatic sense of conflict polluting the Moscow atmosphere could be linked directly to the increasingly hysterical tenor of the Russian media coverage. This arguably hit fever pitch with the Odesa fire on 2 May 2014. The fire was caused by clashes between pro- and anti-government protestors, in which forty people died, mainly anti-Maidan protestors, after pro-government forces fought back including by throwing Molotov cocktails. Almost immediately, Russian media dubbed the fire ‘Odesa-Khatyn’ (Novikova 2014), juxtaposing it with the 1943 massacre in the Belarusian village of Khatyn committed by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and volunteers. For most Russians, this was a familiar story, with Khatyn an important part of the Soviet (especially Brezhnev-era) and now post-Soviet memorial complex of the Great Patriotic War (Oushakine 2013a). The popular television presenter (now MP) Evgenii Popov commented that an impromptu memorial to those who died in Odesa was ‘not only to the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War but also [. . .] to those

10

These were demonstrations held in Ukraine and Russia against the EuroMaidan protests and against the Ukrainian interim government that took over after Yanukovych fled to Russia.

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who died on 2 May’ (Chigishov 2014e: 20.17), illustrating the seamless blurring of two temporally non-contiguous events, as if the victims had died in the same conflict. This juxtaposition, alongside shocking images of dead bodies and burnt-out buildings, only stoked the fear that history was being repeated, adding further to the tension that stalked Ukraine and, increasingly, Russia.

Never-ending ‘Victory’ As Victory Day 2014 approached, tensions continued to grow but the Kremlin’s appetite for risk appeared to wane. By this point, there was considerable appetite throughout the country for an annexation of the Donbas, and the government, backed by its media, needed to distract from the (very loud) voices calling on Russia to annex Donbas. Support for further intervention in east Ukraine cut across the usual political divides; I remember a friend, a member of Russia’s beleaguered LGBTQ community, expressing outrage and astonishment that Putin was not defending ‘our people over there’. But annexing Donbas would not have recreated the Crimea ‘high’ and it would have entailed considerable financial burden. Besides, strategically, an occupied or frozen conflict gives the Kremlin far more leverage and does not risk further unnecessary disagreement with the West, which had applied underwhelming sanctions in response to the annexation of Crimea. As such, the Kremlin needed to calm the rhetoric, to prepare people for the fact that Donbas was not ‘coming home’. Correspondingly, in the run-up to the DNR and LNR status referenda in early May 2014, the media and politicians’ tone shifted from one of conflict to one of victory. Russian media tried to claim that the autonomy of Donbas and its allegiance to Russia and the ‘Russian World’ was akin to a desire for emancipation, recalling Soviet victory over the Nazis, liberation of occupied territories and the end of the Great Patriotic War. The main argument was that Russian involvement in Ukraine was somehow victorious because the hero separatists of east Ukraine were now free to remember the true history of their grandfathers in the Great Patriotic War (with whom they were also conflated). There was not much evidence to support the argument that Russia (and pro-Russian Ukrainians) had once again won this new version of the Great Patriotic War. Certainly, this triumphalism was difficult to marry with events

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on the ground. However, by invoking this argument, the media were able to focus on the idea of Russia as victor to complement the Victory Day celebrations, also held in May, and to re-establish the triumphalism of the post-annexation slogan ‘Crimea is Ours’ (Hopf 2016). The sources’ increased use of the Victory sub-narrative meant there was something to celebrate when Victory Day came around, namely the protection of a space now free from the abuse alleged in the example below: The most egregious example was the attempt to remove the symbol of victory in the Great Patriotic War from this courageous man [. . .] SBU officers started demanding that Pavel [the veteran] remove the symbol of the Great Victory. In response he announced the following: ‘I will not give you my St George Ribbon! Even if you kill me. For me, it is holy.’ Vasilev 2014

Of course, there is no way of knowing whether the incident above took place, although it is worth noting that the Ukrainian authorities did ban the St George Ribbon, which has its origins in the Imperial Order of St George but had gained widespread significance as a commemorative symbol for the Great Patriotic War since 2005 (Kolstø 2016). Belarus also banned the ribbon albeit with much less backlash from Russia, perhaps because it chose to embrace its own partisan red and green ribbon rather than adopting Western traditions, or more likely because Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s decision was not part of a broader geopolitical shift. The presence of symbols like the St George Ribbon and rituals (attending 9 May parades and, indirectly, anti-Maidan protests) functioned as examples of how to remember actively and correctly (Khrebtan-Hörhager 2016). The prominence of the St George Ribbon as a symbol and key image in the media coverage at this point invited the audience to participate in affirming their awareness of their own history, embellishing its normal significance as a Great Patriotic War symbol worn on Victory Day.11 The ribbon even adorned the 2014 LNR and DNR referendum ballot papers. Its association with Victory Day imbued the symbol with positive meanings relating not only to the past but also to the present (Goode 2017). As noted in Rossiya-1’s introduction to 11

Please see the following for an examination of the semantic indeterminacy of the ribbons: Subotić 2020: 247; Kolstø 2016.

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an episode of the political talk show Pryamoi Efir, ‘The St George Ribbon was a symbol of victory over fascism. Today it is a symbol of resistance’ (Pryamoi efir 2014). By depicting people wearing the St George Ribbon or partaking in commemorations as performing exemplary practices, the media demonstrated to domestic Russian audiences how they could and should affirm their Russian cultural identity and solidarity with the east Ukrainians. This was an invitation to participate metaphorically in the Great Patriotic War through its 2014 representation: the Ukraine Crisis. Thus, if wearing the St George Ribbon simultaneously indicated respect for the cultural legacy of the Great Patriotic War and resistance to the aims of the Maidan (Argumenty i fakty 2014b), it was also a way to emphasize an especially active form of heroism. However, if it was a way of mobilizing people into affirming identity it was also a way of cajoling audiences into less dramatic, but no less emotive, gestures. Anti-Maidans fulfilled a similar function. As the media and Kremlin sought to move the narrative on, they provided unsubtle reminders of Russia’s position as judge and juror after the Great Patriotic War, including references to the Nuremberg Trials and what Russian media falsely claim was the sentencing of Banderites there at the Soviet Union’s insistence (Akhmetzhanova 2014).12 Such references evinced a sense of nostalgic anticipation, whereby the authors looked forward to the future (justice being meted out to the Ukrainian nationalists) for its similarities to the past (the justice of the Nuremberg Trials). It epitomized how national pride in the Great Patriotic War had allowed shared remembrance of this event to become a focal point for affirming one’s Russian identity and Russian moral leadership over others. The media depicted the right to remember the Soviet Victory (in the Great Patriotic War) as its own form of victory in contemporary Ukraine, or the ‘Little Patriotic War’ (Horbyk 2015). By increasing references to victory and cultural affirmation, the media created a semblance of resolution and closure, showing that awareness and celebration of Russian culture and history had prevailed despite the Banderites and Nazis trying to destroy it. This Victory narrative partly functioned, therefore, to distract audiences from the lack of a

12

Russian claims that the Nuremberg Trials judges condemned or even sentenced Banderites are completely unfounded and have been debunked in the Ukrainian media (Odyntsova 2017).

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natural ending for the Ukraine Crisis, which evolved into an eight-year conflict (and then, in 2022, a genocidal war). As such, in 2014, this argument only became more prominent – and convenient – as the Ukrainian presidential elections approached in May. It was patently obvious that the election results would undermine the claim that the Banderites enjoyed mass support in Ukraine and were implementing Nazism. Indeed, to disguise the inevitably poor polling of fascist parties, the pro-Russian group CyberBerkut hacked into Ukraine’s electoral system in an effort to discredit the process and make the fascist and nationalist parties appear more popular (Clayton 2014). These falsified election results were covered by Voskresnoe vremya (which never apologized or admitted their error afterwards) and showed Pravyi Sektor’s Dmytro Yarosh as winner of the Ukrainian presidential elections with 37.13 per cent of the vote, as opposed to the 0.7 per cent he actually received (Korolev 2014a: 1.35.00). After Petro Poroshenko’s election victory, there was a marked decrease in media and politicians’ comparisons of the Ukraine Crisis with the Great Patriotic War. The continued intensive use of the historical frame beyond 25 May would have risked the comparison’s delegitimization, when the Ukrainian election results would prove that the country was not in the grip of Nazis or Banderites. In its place, the Russian media moved towards a new, more identity-focused narrative according to which it was defending compatriots in Ukraine.13 This narrative was less hyperbolic, had already existed alongside the Great Patriotic War comparison and was particularly popular in newspapers such as Zavtra and Vzglyad, which propagate anti-Western and neo-imperialist narratives (Laruelle 2016b). The narrative evolution confirmed the media presentation of east Ukrainians as culturally-reawakened Russian patriots worthy of emulation (Kots and Steshin 2014; Tkanchuk 2014; Chigishov 2014b: 17.33). There were still references to the Great Patriotic War after 25 May, but they did not approach the frequency or sophistication observed during the research period, except for brief periods during particularly tense moments or anniversaries of events like the annexation of Crimea. Having fully developed the frame over the initial

13

Tomila Lankina and Kohei Watanbe’s research into Russian media framing of the Euromaidan also noted a shift in the types of narrative applied around the end of April 2014, as the violence in Donbas began to escalate. I support their argument that, at the time, this shift gave ‘credence to arguments about Putin’s strategic, interests-driven foreign policy’ (Lankina and Watanabe 2017: 1526).

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stages of the Ukraine Crisis, the government and media could then invoke it for emotional impact without having to prepare audiences – Russian viewers already recognized the story. By 2022, they had watched it for eight years: in this context, Putin’s objective of denazifying Ukraine did not sound obscene – it sounded overdue.

Western imposition of sanctions as the (re)destruction of the USSR Despite Russian claims of victory in May 2014, the fighting continued in east Ukraine, deteriorating into brutal violence between Russian-backed fighters and the Ukrainian Army (plus volunteer militias) over Donbas territories like Sloviansk, Donetsk airport, Ilovaisk and Mariupol. While the USA and EU initially fired a volley of statements of deep and serious concern in Russia’s direction, their reaction was comparatively muted until 17 July 2014. This was the day when Russian-backed irregulars shot down Malaysia Airlines passenger jet MH17 over east Ukraine, killing 298 people. The downing of the jet was accompanied by a truly horrific disinformation campaign and inhumanely gruesome incompetence as passengers’ bodies were left to decompose in cornfields while some Russian media claimed there were no bodies there.14 The following day, 18 July 2014, Putin appeared on television to deny Russian involvement. He appeared genuinely shaken and shocked, but his protestations did little to convince anyone except the least intellectually promising of useful idiots. So outrageous was the tragedy that it spurred the USA and EU to take action, as they imposed so-called third-wave sanctions, including banning state-owned banks from raising capital and Russian oil firms from cooperating with Western companies (BBC 2016). These thirdwave sanctions accumulated over a period of nearly three months, during which time Russia imposed counter-sanctions on Western agricultural products, a process also known as import substitution. However, while the

14

The investigative journalism organization Bellingcat produced a series of podcasts on their investigation into MH17, which provides a thorough and engaging explanation of what happened, including the disinformation campaign.

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sanctions grew out of the conflict in Donbas, it is important to differentiate the imposition of the post-MH17 sanctions from the first- and second-round sanctions which were linked to Russian aggression in Ukraine and were limited in scope, targeting only a small number of individuals and businesses. Russian media coverage of these third-wave sanctions was distinct from its rhetoric on Ukraine, treating the sanctions disputes as a war with the West and separate from events in Ukraine, perhaps reflecting a disinclination to remind audiences of the connection between the economic measures and the downing of MH17. The USA, EU and other allies’ imposition of sanctions was followed by efforts to isolate Russia internationally, including during the 2014 G20 summit. At the same time, the Kremlin-imposed counter-sanctions began to bite. Life was increasingly unstable: from September 2014, the rouble was devalued, food prices rose and growth forecasts and credit ratings were significantly downgraded. To distract audiences from the unpleasant consequences of sanctions and tensions with the West, the media presented government policies as facilitating a return to a bygone era of stability. The Kremlin also attempted to present Western imposition of sanctions in 2022 through a similar lens to the one detailed below.

What did the Russian media show? Although the Russian government was not in control of (the initial) sanctions being imposed, they could attempt to control the coverage. In their longerterm coverage, the government and media framed events within a selectively interpreted mythologized history with the apparent aim of consolidating audiences against Western sanctions and inuring them to outside criticism of the Russian government. In order to elucidate the historical frame, I collected and analysed 3,889 references to the period from 1975 to 1999 made by the media and politicians in their discussions of sanctions and international relations between 17 July and 27 October 2014. By framing current events within alleged historical precedents, the sources characterized Russian intransigence as intrepid resistance to Western attempts to wreak financial havoc on Russia and to replay the economic crises of the 1990s, following the Soviet collapse. According to these sources, Russia’s defiance was facilitating a metaphorical return to the stability of the Brezhnev

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era. Journalists and politicians sought to underscore the similarities between alleged Western aggression against Russia and against the USSR, while explaining Russia’s countermeasures through analogy with the imagined selfsufficiency and stability of the Brezhnev and Andropov eras, both of which have been idealized in the post-Soviet period (Dubin 2003; Tseplyaev 2014). This framing rhetorically maximized the threat to Russian sovereignty by conflating Western behaviour with that of the late 1980s/1990s, while restoring national pride and trust in the state by contrasting Russian actions to those of the late 1980s–1990s. In practice, this meant that the media focused on the humiliations of the 1990s immediately after the imposition of sanctions in July 2014 and then, as Western criticism increased, they moved backwards through history to recall the trauma of the Soviet collapse and disintegration under Gorbachev. Later, in September/October 2014, the media argued that Russia had successfully defended its sovereignty and was re-entering an imagined era of stability and prestige similar to that (allegedly) enjoyed under Brezhnev and Andropov. As with the first narrative, there was an element of distraction when the Russian government and media tried to reframe the sanctions not as the result of Russia’s support for ragtag militiamen, who had shot down 298 people from the sky, but of an enduring Western Russophobia that had destroyed the USSR. The historical framing narrative was developed fully in several government interviews (RT na russkom 2014a, 2014b; Prezident Rossii 2013; Vpered Novorossiya! 2014), but most notably by Vladimir Putin at the Valdai discussion club conference in a speech entitled ‘The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules’. Prior to 2022, Russian elites saw Valdai as a way to shape opinion in the West (Satter 2016: xii–xiii). As such, domestic media also provided extensive coverage of the proceedings, honing in on moments or speakers that could serve as evidence of Western affection and respect for Putin. The speech contained a number of historical interpretations that featured in the President’s 2022 eve-of-war speech and began with the Russian President underscoring the relevance of history to understanding present-day events: ‘In analysing today’s situation, let’s not forget history’s lessons’ (Prezident Rossii 2014e) – a reference to how the USA had imperilled global governance by their behaviour after the Cold War. Putin also alluded to the USA’s assumption of unearned powers by declaring itself victor in the Cold War. Russia’s defeat in

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the Cold War was implied within this self-promulgated victory. The President entrenched the 1990s connection by describing the USA as nouveaux riches (Prezident Rossii 2014e ). Putin then proceeded to discuss the post-Cold War history of American military involvement overseas, after depicting the Soviet collapse as the culmination of Western assaults on Soviet sovereignty. This emphasized not only US global dominance since the USSR’s collapse but also American involvement in its downfall through its ‘sponsoring’ of ‘Islamic extremist movements to fight the Soviet Union. Those groups gained battle experience in Afghanistan and later gave birth to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.’ Putin even alluded to Western complicity in the Chechen conflicts,15 which he said Russia had not forgotten. He continued his discursive retrogression by claiming the world was witnessing a return to the Cold War itself, something for which he held the USA responsible. Russia was depicted as a victim of Cold War-era demonization, feeding into a narrative of Russophobia prevalent in official coverage since 2012 (Darczewska and Żochowski 2015). He also drew attention to Russia’s nuclear superpower status, mirroring Cold War rhetoric and undermining his argument that the West bore sole responsibility for reviving tensions. Putin also stressed Russian self-sufficiency, contrasting it to the time when Russia was ‘begging at anyone’s door’, a veiled reference to the conditions attached to 1990s IMF loans (BBC 1999). In invoking an image of Russian collective resistance in the face of external pressure, Putin alluded to the besieged fortress myth, using (semi-)positive myths to counter negative historical analogies (isolation, collapse and societal degradation) that could potentially be seen as consequences of sanctions from, and poor relations with, the West. In closing, Putin cited some post-1945 and Brezhnev-era agreements, rhetorically elevating Russia to the international position it enjoyed previously, as opposed to its reduced prestige in the 1990s. His employment of history thus performed a redemptive function, allowing Russia to come full circle, avenging the losses of the 1990s and Soviet collapse in order to return to a golden age of prestige and stability:

15

Putin had previously made similar accusations, including during his 2003 ‘Direct Line’ conference: Prezident Rossii 2003. See also Stent 2013: 267.

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Building a more stable world order is difficult. We’re talking about long and hard work. We were able to develop rules for interaction after the Second World War and reach agreement in Helsinki in the 1970s. Our common duty is to resolve this fundamental challenge at this new stage of development. Prezident Rossii 2014e

Prior to Valdai, Putin had delivered a speech at Seliger youth conference that covered near-identical ground: in it he condemned NATO adventurism of the 1990s and Western responsibility for socio-economic chaos in Russia, expressed nostalgia for the Soviet Union and positioned Russia as the world’s most powerful nuclear power then (in the 1970s) and now (RT na russkom 2014b). Both speeches were microcosms of the broader historical comparison narrative used by the media to present sanctions to the Russian public. However, in practice, the media and politicians generally tended to apply different components of the narrative at different points and to different ends.

Taming the wild 1990s In Russia, the term ‘wild 1990s’ (likhie devyanostie) refers to the period following the Soviet collapse, when the country was beset by organized crime, economic disarray and political chaos. This traumatic period is viewed negatively by the overwhelming majority of those who lived through it, and a strong majority of those who did not (Levada Centre 2020). This is unsurprising given that, for many, perceived national humiliation was often combined with the personal humiliation of not being paid for months, not being able to afford groceries and seeing gangsters and criminals take over society.16 The traumatic memories of the 1990s were almost immediately weaponized after the downing of MH17 as a way to discredit the West and to reiterate Russian victimhood at a time when it stood accused of atrocity.17 16

17

The academic and former BBC journalist James Rodgers covers this period tactfully but honestly in the chapter ‘ “Free for All”: The Yeltsin Era’ in his book Assignment Moscow. Rodgers reflects on the failure of Western journalists to live up to their own democratic ideals when covering the corrupt election campaign of 1996 and on the humiliation of both the Russian factory workers being paid in gherkins and the Russian state, greatly reduced from the status of a superpower (Rodgers 2020). The Russian opposition also made use of the 1990s and end of the USSR themes, arguing that the impact of counter-sanctions in 2014 reminded one, respectively, of the price rises and empty shelves that typified these times. This speaks to the overwhelmingly negative cultural memories of that period.

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According to the official argument, the West of 2014 was trying to recreate the conditions of the 1990s when Russia’s weakness meant the USA and EU could disregard Russian interests and sovereignty. In comparing Western behaviour then and now, the sources characterized the 1990s as a period of brutal economic hardship and political – and geopolitical – humiliation, caused by Western exploitation of Russia. Pro-Kremlin media invoked the bombing of Yugoslavia as an example of the USA’s first fomentation of a ‘colour’ revolution (Lenta 2014g). Given the prevailing Russian view of its historically close relationship with Serbia (Popović 1994; Nikoforov 2014; Bechev 2017), the NATO bombing also served to illustrate Western disregard for global stability, beginning in the 1990s (Lenta 2014b; Smirnov 2014; Shestakov 2014c). The media reinforced its argument that the West presented an existential threat to Russia, with descriptions of financial hardship suffered by Russians following the Soviet collapse. Oligarchs, pyramid schemes and the Yukos scandal were repeatedly cited to remind readers of the economic and political chaos of the 1990s. An article in Rossiiskaya gazeta was typical of this argument: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which took place in 1991 not without US participation, Washington ensured all investments in the Russian economy were confirmed by the IMF. The IMF is controlled by the US Treasury. This allowed American multinationals and Wall Street to steal Russia’s wealth under Yeltsin. Engdale 2014

The moral of stories such as those related above was that the West was and is treacherous and manipulative. Collapsing the past into the present, government officials and media sources argued that the West was trying to humiliate Russia, just as it had in the 1990s. They burnished their arguments by blaming the West for current relations and for the degradation of Russian society in the 1990s. In so doing, the media built on existing coverage within Russian politics that had sought to legitimize Putin’s reign as an antidote to the chaos and difficulties of the 1990s (Malinova 2020), despite Putin’s well-documented role in the notorious banditskii (gangster) Petersburg of that period and Boris Yeltsin’s direct involvement in Putin’s accession to the presidency (Dawisha 2014; Navalny 2021). Regardless of this, Yeltsin and his followers, in fact, were depicted by the media – albeit not by government figures – as Western stooges and denied

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agency (Baranets 2014a). This treatment applied to past and contemporary political figures: just as the West was conflated with the alleged destructive behaviour of its leaders in the 1990s, so people who disagreed with the government in 2014 were depicted as ’90s politicians. In the words of Sergei Mironov, leader of Russia’s (then) third largest party, A Just Russia: Today’s ‘fifth column’, working inside Russia in the interests of the USA and other Western countries [. . .] is a loose conglomeration, comprising different parts. First, from those same bankrupt politicians of the 1990s who made their career precisely in the period of Russia’s decline and dream of returning to the earlier status quo. Mironov 2014

By projecting responsibility for the traumatic post-Soviet transition period onto others, Russian media and politicians could reassert discursive control over the country’s fate, using it to argue that Russia could now act against Western attempts to recreate the 1990s and regain its lost status. Some journalists took this view even further, with Artem Sidorchik arguing in Argumenty i fakty that the West would now have a taste of its own medicine: ‘Having simply launched a boomerang at the end of 1980s–1990s against the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the USA and Western Europe forgot that it is bound to return’ (Sidorchik 2014). The motif of the boomerang reiterated the idea that Russia was remedying injustices allegedly visited upon it by the West in the 1990s. The self-pitying tone was exemplified by Evgenii Arsyukhin’s articles in Komsomolskaya pravda, as when he claimed that promises offered by the West had turned sour: I remember the cruel ’90s. A wonderful new world in which, it seemed, there was a place for everyone. The kolkhoz worker would become a farmer, the engineer – a high-flying businessman, the journalist – an owner of his own free media organization. As it turned out somewhat later, in fact the number of places in the wonderful new world was limited. Arsyukhin 2014a

The author concluded the article by updating the reader on his imagined characters’ progress, emphasizing that the achievements of the late USSR were considerably better than those of the 1990s:

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What did we end up with? Parents grew stupid in dachas. Engineers worked with unique technology from the days of the late Soviet Union. Journalists have long since become PR execs, where they have also grown stupid and been pushed out. The peasant is cursing either the weather or the Belarussians. Wherever you look, they’re everywhere hawking products, their land either grown over or sold for dachas. Arsyukhin 2014a

While Arsyukhin was outrageously melodramatic, the content and moral of his message was broadly characteristic of the state-aligned media’s description of everyday life and politics in the 1990s. Such depressing depictions may well have been realistic, given what we know of how the transition to capitalism failed many ordinary Russians, but the sources employed it to underscore the threat posed by Western behaviour towards Russia. Even the starkness of these images proved insufficient during the most heated periods of the sanctions coverage, when media sources instead invoked the memory of the destruction of the Soviet state as a suitable analogy for Western intentions.

The reverse Gorbachev As sanctions began to hurt, and Russia introduced counter-sanctions – also far from painless – international relations became increasingly strained. Russian media and politicians framed the dissolution of perestroika-era agreements, Russian counter-sanctions, and any American criticism of Russia, within the years from 1985 to 1991. This six-year period covered the Gorbachev era from perestroika to the Soviet collapse, including Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the ‘loss’ of the Eastern Bloc. The media and politicians invoked episodes from this period to advance the argument that the West was trying to literally destroy Russia – just as it had ostensibly destroyed the USSR. This reinforced the notion that Russia faced an existential threat, further stigmatizing (pro-) Western positions and increasing the rally-round-the-flag effect incurred by the sanctions. However, any hint of danger was offset by the media presenting Russian counter-sanctions as evidence that the contemporary state could withstand Western assaults on its sovereignty.18 According to such reasoning, if 18

Further details and a more balanced account of the multifaceted reasons for the collapse of the USSR can be found in the following: Marples 2004; Bisley 2004.

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Gorbachev had compromised and reduced Soviet influence, then the present Russian government had reasserted national sovereignty. To illustrate their arguments, sources accentuated different attributes of the Gorbachev era and Soviet collapse: from the INF Treaty19 and Soviet war in Afghanistan, to Western duplicity in their dealings with Gorbachev. Government sources in particular used the latter to discredit any notion of compromise with the West (Dunaevskii 2014b). Most sources coalesced around ideas of loss and breakdown, instrumentalizing the trauma of the Soviet collapse to foster enmity towards the USA and EU. Broadcasters and journalists often invoked the years 1989 and 1991, dating negative societal trends back to the Soviet disintegration, typified by the following lament in Rossiiskaya gazeta: Since when has world leadership been the USA’s official policy? Probably since 1991, since the fall of Communism. But now the mask has been torn off. As citizens of the world, and not only the USA, we have to come to terms with a new reality: the USA wants world domination and, in pursuit of this, it will not stop in its attempts to destroy Russia. Vorob’ev 2014a

In this narrative, the USA’s push for world domination was made possible by the USSR’s demise, with grave consequences for Russia and the rest of the world. In the 2014 sanctions coverage, the media emphasized standing up to American tyranny, although in later years, particularly from 2018 onwards, the Kremlin and its supporters would supplement this argument with the claim that America’s waning unipolarity was causing it to lash out unpredictably (see the 2021 National Security Strategy, for example). The 2014 media focus on the USA reflected how the sources, just as in their treatment of the 1990s, attributed almost no blame for the Soviet collapse to Russia (the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic) or the communist system. This continued a Putinist tendency to de-ideologize the communist era. By painting it in purely geopolitical terms, the media and politicians could obscure the total economic collapse that was a direct result of the ideological

19

The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was an arms control agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union banning nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometres.

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mismanagement of the country’s resources. The media and government thereby constructed a line of reasoning in which pressures on Russia and/or the USSR were almost exclusively external in origin. According to this logic, any compromise with the West signalled a clear and present danger to the very foundations of the Russian state. Sources were, however, careful to confirm that the USSR’s weakness in the face of Western pressure would not be repeated now and the media invited prominent pro-Putin figures to share their confidence with their readers. For example, pro-government filmmaker and General Director of Mosfilm, Karen Shakhnazarov, said in an interview with Argumenty i fakty, ‘In this information war our media has learnt how to hold fire and answer back properly. In the Soviet Union they couldn’t do that’ (Grachev 2014). Elsewhere, politicians called for Russians to resist Western attempts to ‘disturb the socio-political situation’, presenting Russian countersanctions and criticisms of the West as defensive measures (Prezident Rossii 2014c). The media was kinder to Gorbachev than to Yeltsin, in line with public attitudes, which hold the former in disregard and the latter in disrepute (Levada Centre 2017). Although politicians and journalists attributed some ‘mistakes’ of the perestroika era to Gorbachev, on the whole the media tended to infantilize him, depicting him as naïve in his dealings with the West: if Yeltsin was a stooge, then Gorbachev was merely a fool. The media also cited increased US aggression under Reagan as a contributing factor to Gorbachev’s concessions to the West, portraying the last Soviet leader’s readiness to accommodate the USSR’s erstwhile enemies as a sign of weakness (Chigishov 2014i: 1.20.01). All sources presented Gorbachev as manipulated by cynical Western(-influenced) policymakers (Zubov 2009), with the innocence and naivety of Soviet policymakers frequently underscored – another way of reiterating Russian victimhood. This characterization belonged to a wider establishment effort to delegitimize the post-Soviet world order and to rewrite the post-1991 consensus. The INF Treaty recurred as an especially egregious symbol of the loss of strategic balance and parity after 1985. Signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987, the sources depicted the treaty as benefitting the West at Russia’s expense. Although the media generally blamed Americans for the present-day unravelling of the treaty, sources that covered this topic (Lenta, Argumenty i fakty, Rossiiskaya gazeta, the

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government, Vesti nedeli) also underscored the treaty’s iniquity (see, for example, Rossiiskaya gazeta 2014b). Many other agreements signed during the perestroika era were also presented as unjust restrictions on contemporary Russian sovereignty and characterized as harbingers then – and relics now – of the humiliations and ignominy decried in the ‘Wild 1990s’ narrative (Lenta 2014c, 2014d; Diveeva 2014). The media employed such treaties as metonyms for the post-Soviet international order, simultaneously justifying their dissolution and using them to contextualize worsening relations with the West. Media comparisons with the Gorbachev era also outlined a specific Russian ‘post-revisionist’ interpretation of the Cold War, in which the conflict was allegedly driven by long-extant Russophobia, as opposed to ideological anticommunism. In the words of one journalist, ‘The USA continues to realize its geopolitical doctrine for Russia, which is known by the name “Anaconda”. The first snake loop tightened when they destroyed the Warsaw Pact. The second when they destroyed the Soviet Union’ (Boiko 2014). Although this historiography dates to the disappointments of the 1990s (Pechatnov 2017), within the media coverage it emerged as the uncontested view of the Cold War. To support this argument, journalists interviewed external contributors with privileged insight into this period, such as former dissidents and US advisors like Alexander Zinoviev (Chigishov 2014h: 1.38.00) and Dmitrii Mikheev (Pankin 2014), with the latter claiming that the only difference between then and 2014 was that now Russia would not surrender. Such intransigence, repeated across numerous sources, would supposedly facilitate a symbolic return to the great power status and stability of the late USSR, an argument that became increasingly dominant as the coverage (and economic crisis) developed.

Getting back to Brezhnev To support the argument that Russia was recouping prestige by resisting Western pressure, the media and politicians argued that the country was returning to an idealized and imagined era of self-stability under Brezhnev. This ‘return’ was supposedly facilitated by the Kremlin’s willingness and ability to defend itself from Western attack. These arguments were most prominent in the coverage following the introduction of the government’s counter-sanctions

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in August 2014 and then again in September and October 2014 when the effects of the counter-sanctions began to be felt and widely discussed. Correspondingly, this particular argument functioned not only as a distraction but almost as a remedy and resolution of the trauma experienced following the collapse of the USSR – a means of escaping to people’s nostalgia for their (lateSoviet) youth. While a full description of the Brezhnev-era USSR lies beyond the purposes of this chapter, the absence of references to the post-1973 economic slowdown, failure of agriculture to feed the cities, political repression and antisemitism created an unrealistic image, to put it mildly. The government and media’s presentation of the Brezhnev era in almost exclusively positive terms was once more facilitated by their refusal to mention communist ideology, which might have reminded audiences of certain negative aspects from that time, including restrictions on freedom of speech and movement. Instead, the media emphasized the USSR’s alleged stability, high living standards and international esteem. The media presented Russia’s current disengagement from the West as a process of normalization, a return to the way things ought to be, summarized in Lenta as, ‘Nothing bad will happen if we take all the good things from the USSR because there were a lot of good things, more good than bad’ (Lenta 2014e). To take advantage of Soviet nostalgia, the media used highly personalized rhetoric and images of food, promoting the concept of patriotic (non-) consumption (Skvirskaja 2017), where eating or not consuming a certain product becomes a symbol of patriotism. There was a class element here too: the vast majority of Russians cannot frequently afford genuine French Brie or Italian Parmesan and so were likely not particularly affected when both were banned under ‘import substitution’. This correlation between wealth and European produce allowed the media to launch accusations of epicureanism at those who criticized counter-sanctions, turning pro- and anti-countersanction positions into a signifier of a simpler, more meaningful way of living in the past and the consumerist values of the present opposition, respectively. Perhaps the most vivid example of this line of attack came from Ul’yana Skoibeda who fulminated sarcastically in Komsomolskaya pravda: I don’t actually know how far sanctions will go. But the main thing is that standards of living are not actually equivalent to standards of happiness. My parents, the generation who were young in the 1980s, lived a much more

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spiritual life than me. They read all the latest literary releases, subscribed to the most fashionable periodicals, gathered in kitchens, discussing it all. I feel very sorry for people who consider the availability of a wide range of sausages a victory for democracy. What a pity we can’t divide society: on the right, those who want the return of the USSR with all its pluses and minuses; on the left, those who want sausages. The only thing to do with that type of democrat is tell them to leave: it’s a big world, there are lots of countries with sausages. Skoibeda 2014c

The derisive tone of such coverage minimized the well-founded concerns of many about price rises of over 13 per cent. It also built on Soviet tropes that pro-Western sympathies were rooted in greed and consumerism. The media’s contrasting of the empty West with meaningful Russian culture was played out via food, such an integral part of any culture, but also through more geopolitical metrics, such as the re-establishment of Soviet-era alliances. The rekindling of alliances with countries like Cuba and Zimbabwe supposedly refuted the notion of Russia’s isolation from the international community while also contributing to the idea of restoration. As one Lenta article phrased it, in politically incorrect language, ‘Russia is returning to the Black Continent [Africa] after a more than twenty-year absence [. . .] The head of the MID has successfully renewed and developed political and economic ties that were de facto lost after the Soviet Union’s collapse’ (Lenta 2014f). The rebuilding of Soviet global standing, as expressed in the ‘Back to Brezhnev’ narrative, was inextricably linked to Western criticism of Russia. Through its resistance to Western pressure, the media depicted the Russian government and nation as metaphorically revisiting its past, avenging injustices inflicted by others to (re) access a bygone era of Soviet might. The gradual progression of the historical narrative from a period of national humiliation (the 1990s) through to a period of alleged international admiration (the Brezhnev era) endowed the structure of the storytelling with its own meaning – one that built on widespread nostalgia for the late Soviet era. Sources employed personal reminiscences to create a more engaging depiction of past glories and then juxtaposed these experiences with ideas of statehood. After first individualizing the loss of the USSR, reducing it to the personal level in the ‘wild 1990s’ narrative, this narrative development in turn enabled the

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media and politicians to transcribe this nostalgia for a lost Soviet homeland into support for the current government’s policies. Nostalgia is an unpredictable but not necessarily unwieldy force: in many cases public approval of this or that Soviet figure or event is rather unimportant. What matters is not the historical figure or moment but what they or it symbolizes, both in terms of the nation and in terms of one’s own, inevitable, nostalgia for one’s youth (McGlynn 2021b). Skilfully blending these two elements, the progression provided in this historical framing of sanctions implied a journey of redemption and return to a better, more innocent time, coinciding with youth and perhaps symbolizing the final stages of the metaphorical journey on which Putin had led the Russian nation. The break with the West, symbolized by sanctions and counter-sanctions, was the necessary sacrifice to reach the lost promise land and to heal the traumas – real and imagined – of the 1990s. This break would be one of several threads in Russia’s efforts to discursively (re)acquire great power status. Persuading others of this process also involved invoking the military, as epitomized by Vladimir Putin’s comment that other nations respected the USSR because it possessed the world’s largest nuclear arsenal; he then added that these nations should remember that Russia had once again become the world’s largest nuclear superpower (RT na russkom 2014b: 1.43.31). The redemption of lost status through conflict and weaponry was also an important paradigm through which Russia interpreted its 2015 military intervention in Syria.

Russian intervention in Syria as a regaining of Soviet superpower status The year 2015 began inauspiciously for the Kremlin. If public support for Putin had dropped from its post-Crimea highs, then other politicians’ ratings were languishing in the doldrums. The impact of counter-sanctions and sanctions was beginning to take its toll,20 the shine had worn off Crimea, and Russia

20

According to the Pew Research Center, 73 per cent of Russians described the Russian economy as ‘bad’ in spring 2015 (Simmons, Stokes and Poushter 2015).

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appeared isolated on the world stage following its invasion of Ukraine and the shooting down of MH17. Within this context, Russia’s decision to intervene militarily in Syria took many by surprise – perhaps more than it ought to have done. Most analysts have conceded the importance of boosting Russian geopolitical heft as a reason for the intervention (Katz and Casula 2015; Pierini 2015; Babayan 2017). Stephen Kotkin and Dmitri Trenin also emphasized (separately) the importance of Russian messianic thinking to Russian interpretations of the war and the need to intervene (Kotkin 2016; Dmitri Trenin 2016). I examined coverage of intervention in Syria from 16 September 2015, two weeks before military airstrikes officially started. In mid-September, the Russian government became more explicit about their intentions for Syria, as symbolized by Putin’s call to the West to unite with Russia and fight ISIS during a Collective Security Treaty Organization summit in Dushanbe on 15 September, covered in the news the following day (Prezident Rossii 2015b). I finished my analysis on 24 December 2015, which marked one week after then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting with Lavrov and Putin in Moscow, where he publicly stated that the USA had no policy to isolate Russia. Justifiably or not, the Russian media heralded this statement as a recognition of American defeat and Russian success in terms of the latter’s struggle to (re)assert its position as a global power. Russian military engagement began after an official request by President Assad of Syria to help fight jihadists. Russian military activities inside Syria were depicted as a war against ISIS, rather than for Assad (Notte 2016). During the early stages, military action was not the Russian media’s main focus, however, and most news relating to Syria concerned Russian geopolitical might. As such, while the media did cover Russian military successes at first, this soon all but disappeared from coverage. Public support for intervention was low: before Russian airstrikes in Syria began, Levada Centre polling showed a majority of Russians were opposed to military intervention (Rainsford 2015). This perhaps influenced the nature of the media’s coverage of Syria, including the emphasis on Russia’s ability to dictate events on the world stage (Dmitri Trenin 2016; Katz and Casula 2015; Luk’yanov 2016). The media presented Russian diplomacy as breathing new life into the ideals and norms of international law and also as restoring the great power status of the

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Soviet Union (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2015a), using a historically-based narrative to sell this story.

What did the Russian media show? The Russian media used historical framing to conflate Russian intervention in Syria in 2015 – and its geopolitical consequences – with the end of the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War. Media and politicians explained Russian involvement in Syria as facilitating a return to the international order decided at the 1945 post-war Yalta conference. Relations with the West were therefore an important part of the narrative, with the media depicting any evidence of the West’s acceptance of Russia’s renewed political strength as a resumption of Cold War-era ‘strategic balance’ and depicting any resistance to it as Western Cold War-style aggression and containment of Russia. To bolster approval, the Russian media presented the intervention as evidence of Russia regaining status and breaking the alleged containment and isolation policy announced by the West after 2014 (Babayan 2017). Within this context, public support for the conflict in Syria inevitably grew. Russian media were more interested in the geopolitical angle than events on the ground. Put succinctly, they cared more about how Syria made them look than how Syria itself looked. This line of thought was encapsulated in the Komsomolskaya pravda headline ‘If we are successful in Syria, then we will improve our position – whether in Ukraine or Zanzibar’ (Gamov 2015b). The media’s historical framing of events in Syria also entered into dialogue with several aspects of the two previous studies (Ukraine and sanctions). Most explicitly, the Syria coverage included the notion that Russian victory in the Second World War gave Russia a moral right to geopolitical influence (a theme shared with the Ukraine coverage) and also featured the idea that Russia was restoring elements of Soviet greatness (a theme shared with the sanctions coverage). However, the media and politicians expanded upon (and altered) these themes in their coverage of intervention in Syria: now Russia was independently projecting its (geo)political and military might outside the former borders of the USSR for the first time since Afghanistan. In this sense, Russian intervention in the Syrian conflict finally gave ‘a tangible reality to Moscow’s concept of a

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new international order’ (Pierini 2015). Unlike the coverage of Ukraine and sanctions, the media and politicians used historical analogies in such a way as to present Russia as assertive and on the offensive, rather than purely defensive. The balance of victimhood and heroism was shifting. Vladimir Putin’s 2015 speech at the Valdai discussion club conference – the title of which was officially translated as ‘War and Peace in the 21st century: international stability and balance of the new type’ – provides a good overview of the Syria narrative. As Rossiiskaya gazeta journalist Igor’ Ivanov (2015a) summarized, Putin used the speech to clarify his vision for restoring order to a world fraught with conflict, establishing Yalta as the ideal for maintaining peace and stability. Putin then invoked positive aspects of the Cold War, which he emphasized by employing terminology associated with the era. This was accompanied by threats in the guise of references to Russian nuclear strength, a popular refrain of Russian politicians and media ever since tensions with the West heightened in 2014 (BBC 2015). In the same speech, the President turned his attention to the relevance of the lessons of the Cold War for the present and the need to re-establish a strategic balance (Prezident Rossii 2015d). In support of his argument, Putin referenced concepts familiar from his 2014 Valdai speech, such as the unfair global dominance of the USA following the Soviet collapse (‘the disequilibrium of the system’). Elaborating, Putin described a world riven by blocs and returning to the more dangerous aspects of the Cold War, including an arms race that could only be solved by re-establishing the Yalta settlement. It is hard to discern the logic here – since Yalta established these same blocs – but by emphasizing how Russia was working to restore the post-war system, Putin conflated Russia with the Soviet Union, ambitiously placing the Eurasian Union in the context of the USSR and casting Syria in the mould of a twentieth-century proxy war. Putin ended his speech by focusing on Russian intervention in Syria, which he presented as the means for re-establishing multipolarity. As in his 2014 Valdai speech, detailed in the previous section, Putin drew his listeners’ attention to the need to learn from history in order to move forward. By the middle of December 2015, historical comparisons along these lines had begun to diminish as the media and politicians could point to the realization of the goals outlined in the narrative: by intervening in Syria, Russia

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did indeed greatly increase its geopolitical standing and influence to a level far from equal but more comparable to that of the USSR. From the Kremlin’s point of view, operations in Syria had been a success on almost every level. Consequently, by the end of December, the media shifted its emphasis to the present and the respect being afforded Moscow as well as the new (old) world order that it had reinforced. This shift functioned as a conclusion, ostensibly providing evidence of the arguments inherent within the historical frame: Russia, just like the USSR (because it almost was the USSR), had the right to decide world events, ensure strategic balance and be treated as an equal partner with the USA. As 2015 drew to a close, and historical comparisons diminished, the media decided to end the narrative by focusing on returning to a future full of conflict and Russian influence rather than emphasizing resolution. The entire narrative comprised 3,410 historical analogies, which could be separated into three detailed comparisons:

Restoring Yalta and the anti-Hitler coalition Especially popular among politicians and the government daily Rossiiskaya gazeta, this prominent narrative in coverage of Syria outlined Russia’s claim to great power status through reference to the world-defining events and decisions taken by the victorious Allied powers following their defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. This narrative was most dominant in September 2015, when the Kremlin was justifying the intervention to a sceptical public by calling on the familiar greatness of the Second World War. It cast Russia as trying to form an international coalition against terrorism and to restore international legality and respect for the UN. To achieve the desired effect, speakers and writers drew on cultural memories of the Great Victory in 1945, the anti-Hitler coalition, the Yalta conference and the founding of the United Nations. By invoking the Allies, Russian politicians were ostensibly trying to encourage the West to join an anti-ISIS coalition to defeat terrorism in Syria. Given Western hostility towards Bashar Al-Assad, the Russian government must have understood that this was unlikely to succeed, but it was a useful way to reiterate to domestic audiences that Russia had inherited a right to sit at the table of the major world powers due to the USSR’s victory in 1945 and that it had every intention of claiming that right. Putin actively propagated this

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message in a speech at the UN to mark the organization’s seventy-fifth anniversary as well as in press interviews beforehand. During one interview with American journalist Charlie Rose (Prezident Rossii 2015c), he even linguistically confused Russia and the Soviet Union Russian state-aligned media and politicians dismissed the idea that the system agreed at the Yalta conference in 1945 was no longer relevant: ‘The Yalta-Potsdam system, founded on the acceptance of international law, is not yet a thing of the past’ (Ermolaeva 2015). This belief in Yalta’s significance built on a recurring argument (beyond 2015) about the need to return to the world order decided there, another way of stressing the continuity between the USSR and Russia, with the aim of asserting Russia’s right to world power status and to decide major global governance issues. Visually, this was reinforced by the new statue erected to the ‘Big Three’ (Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin) in Yalta in February 2015. At the opening of the monument, Sergei Naryshkin, then Chairman of the State Duma and Russian Historical Society, declared the statue a warning to those who ‘distort history’ (BBC Russian 2015). In his UN speech, Putin underscored the need for countries to work together: ‘similar to the anti-Hitler coalition, it could unite a broad range of parties willing to stand firm against those who, just like the Nazis, sow evil and hatred of humankind’ (Latukhina 2015c). Such statements reinforced the importance of protecting the UN as ‘a fruit of the great Victory’ (MID 2015a). In this way, politicians and the media sacralized the UN and the Yalta system, describing (alleged) attempts to undermine them as part of wider efforts to pervert the memory of the Second World War, as if the former were abstract manifestations of the desecrated Soviet war memorials so frequently referenced in MFA spokeswoman Mariya Zakharova’s briefings (MID 2015e, 2015g, 2015k). The UN and the Yalta system were also used to confer legitimacy on Russian involvement in Syria, with Putin describing Russia as ‘working from the Charter of the United Nations, that is, on the founding principles of modern international law’ (Latukhina 2015a). This UN speech was referred to in domestic Russian media as ‘Putin’s doctrine’ (Ivanov 2015b). Its significance would anyway have been hard to miss due to the blanket media coverage, which included a five-hour ‘tele-marathon’ of the twenty-five-minute speech, hosted by the bellicose Vladimir Solovev on Rossiya-1.

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Many publications and speakers elaborated on Putin’s theme that the West must overcome its dislike of Russia in order to save the world from ISIS, who were described as ‘Nazis’ and ‘the dead head SS brigade’ (Georgii Zotov 2015): In essence, he [Putin] drew a parallel with the period when the anti-Hitler coalition was created. From the West’s point of view, the USSR was evil but once fascism and Hitler, with his new order, had emerged, then ideological differences between communism and capitalism no longer mattered. MID 2015c

Even though no coalition emerged in 2015, there was de facto coordination between Russia and the Western powers fighting in Syria, in the interests of avoiding accidental conflagration. This breathed new life into the concept that joint action against ISIS constituted an anti-Hitler coalition, with Grigorii Bovt writing in Komsomolskaya pravda, ‘Confronted with ISIS, the USA and Europe’s only hope, just like during WWII, is an alliance with the Russians’ (Bovt 2015). However, it also led to the reliving of less positive myths from the wartime alliance, including (Russian) accusations that the Western Allies deliberately delayed opening a second front in the Second World War (MID 2015i). The rancour of history rendered it ever-present, contributing to conflationary statements like ‘in recent times, since WWII, the world has begun to change dramatically’ (Naranovich 2015). This phrasing was typical of the media’s and politicians’ efforts to behave as if the Second World War had just ended, collapsing the seventy years that had passed since then. While the media may at first appear to invoke the same historical event (what in the West is called the Second World War) as for the Ukraine Crisis, the content was actually quite different. The terminology presented the most obvious difference, with the term ‘Second World War’ used three times more frequently in the Syria coverage than the more usual Great Patriotic War. Reinforced by other keywords such as Yalta, the creation of the UN, the seventieth anniversary (referring to Yalta and/or UN) and anti-Hitler (coalition), this was part of the media’s presentation of Russia as an international player, restoring order to a chaotic world. In the media coverage of Syria, overcoming chaos denoted the restoration of the UN and the Yalta system. To fail to do so would, ostensibly, result in anarchy, thereby adding a messianic bent to the Russian presentation of their position (a thread that emerged

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throughout): ‘if we do not now understand that there are general rules of existence designed seventy years ago, then in a few years it shouldn’t be any surprise if the world is plunged into chaos’ (Smirnov 2015). Any problems resulting (even tenuously) from the conflict, or Russian intervention, in Syria could henceforth be blamed on the West’s unwillingness to form an alliance similar to the anti-Hitler coalition; for example, Dmitrii Kiselev, presenter of Vesti nedeli, blamed terror attacks in Paris on the USA supposedly vetoing the EU joining Russia’s ‘anti-Hitler’ coalition (Chigishov 2015g: 16.04). Such messaging underscored not only the positive aspects of following the example of Yalta but presented the post-1945 system as the only tenable world order. Pro-Kremlin media stressed that to achieve its restoration, there would need to be a rejection of the outcome of the Cold War (specifically the demise of Russian influence). This argument set the scene for the succeeding narrative, which explored Soviet superpower status during the Cold War.

Refighting the Cold War This was the most popular narrative element used in the media’s historical framing of events in Syria. It was most dominant in October and November 2015, when the media needed to distract and detract from the West’s criticism of Russian intervention and from Russia’s (then) continued isolation on the world stage. To do so, the media contextualized Russia’s failure to influence the West’s sanctions policy within memories of US aggression during the Cold War. Newspaper editors, television hosts and veteran politicians alike explained Western and Russian engagement in Syria and their divergent aims there through reference to the international situation during the 1950s and 1960s, with a focus on Soviet–American crises, including the arms race, nuclear weapons, espionage and containment. The purpose was to depict Western disagreement with Russia over Syria as part of a continued Cold War plan to contain and isolate the Soviet Union. The media and politicians focused on the earlier period of the Cold War (from 1948 to 1962). See, for example, the comments of one 2015 Valdai contributor: ‘As a result [of Syria] the fundamental nature of relations between the USA and Russia now can be compared with the first years of the Cold War

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– not the later period, but the beginning’ (Prezident Rossii 2015e). Given this focus, the arms race and atom bomb played a prominent role in the political and media rhetoric. Threats of nuclear war were thrown around with gay abandon, foreshadowing the looseness of Russia’s rhetoric on nuclear weapons during the 2022 war on Ukraine. Refusing to take responsibility for the heightened risk, journalists and diplomats vilified the USA for reprising the conflicts of the Cold War, with constant reminders about the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Mel’nikova and Kupriyanov 2015; Grishin 2015; MID 2015f). Flitting between the two eras, television and print media used American aggression in the Cold War as a backdrop against which to interpret more recent US decisions to place nuclear weapons in Europe. The terminology reinforced this conflation, as seen in the use of Cold War rhetoric about ‘disturbing the strategic balance’ (I. Petrov 2015) or the USA’s efforts being ‘directed at the so-called containment of Russia’ with ‘US nuclear rockets and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers [. . .] situated in Europe’ (MID 2015d). Russian media cited as specific causes of concern the placement of NATO weapons in (member state countries) Romania and Germany. One Lenta article describing the stationing of US atomic weapons in Germany and other European countries noted that the ‘the non-peaceful American atom appeared in Europe fifteen years after the end of World War Two’, making an explicit link between then and now (Mel’nikova and Kupriyanov 2015). To heighten consciousness of the threat, there were at least twenty-four articles and broadcasts about occasions when the USA had been on the brink of launching a nuclear attack on the USSR or about its protocol for doing so. Curiously, Russian vilification of the USA took on many characteristics that may, to Western audiences at least, appear more applicable to the USSR. The attribution of characteristics of the Cold War-era USSR to the USA was exemplified in the Russian Ministry of Defence’s accusation that the West was engaging in Bolshevik-style propaganda, namely creating agitki,21 to spread disinformation about Russian planes targeting – or rather, not targeting – ISIS (MID 2015e). This led to a bizarre role reversal in which it was claimed that

21

Agitki refers to the early propaganda films made by the Bolsheviks to explain and support the October Revolution.

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Russia had become the West and the West had become the ‘baddies’.22 In a Vesti Nedeli segment entitled ‘We are changing places with the West’, Dmitrii Kiselev offered perhaps the most flagrant example of this approach, stating that Russia was now much freer than the West, which had become like the USSR, again referring to a Western image of the USSR as oppressive (Chigishov 2015e: 01.08.47). Clearly, certain elements were tongue-in-cheek and there was a humorous tone, as with the following excerpt that follows on just seconds after the excerpt above: ‘It recalls the Soviet slogans “if you enjoy jazz, you’ll sell your country out” [. . .] soon the West will be trying to secretly listen in to Russian pop songs’. In the Soviet Union’s defence, this sounds catchier in the original Russian. Regardless, the message was clear: now Russia was the country with something to offer the world, burnished with hard and soft power, while the USA was imposing its will on others. To manufacture evidence of the coercive nature of the USA’s relations with its ‘allies’, Russian media (and the television stations with special gusto) presented the USA as still occupying Germany and Japan in 2015 (Chigishov 2015b: 1.47.30). This argument contributed to the impression that countries were only allied to the USA – and by extension against Russia – because they were under threat of invasion by them. Again, this turned a narrative used against the Soviet Union onto the USA. For example, Dmitrii Kiselev accused the USA of destroying German and Japanese awareness of their own culture and heritage (Chigishov 2015d: 01.18.33), linking the war with the broader narrative about cultural colonization versus cultural consciousness that Russia was seeking to promote,23 and which formed an important part of the following component of media coverage of Syria.

The glory days of the Cold War Media figures and politicians invoked positive memories of the Cold War as well as the negative ones described in the previous section. News sources used the ‘good old days’ and ‘bad old days’ narratives during the same time period 22

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This trend was noted as early as 2005 by Julie Elkner: ‘the use of the Cold War “totalitarian” label in order to justify what amount to totalitarian policies is one of the paradoxes of the post-Soviet scene’ (Elkner 2005). For more detail on this opposition and on cultural consciousness, see Chapter 6.

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(October and November 2015), but to frame – and justify – different aspects of Russia’s military campaign in Syria. If the notion that the USA had (re) morphed into a Cold War-era villain was used to explain why the Western world was criticizing Russia’s actions in Syria, then the notion that Russia was reasserting its Cold-War-era importance accompanied the successes of Russian military engagement. This narrative was also prominent in December 2015, as the media tried to show how Russia’s intervention in Syria had led the USA to halt its policy of isolating or containing Russia. According to this view, Russian engagement in Syria, Russian support from its allies and/or Western countries and the popularity of Russian actions among ‘ordinary people’ (narod) in the West and worldwide were akin to the achievements of the USSR in space, education and soft power. It also represented a continuation of the Soviet ability to maintain strategic balance from the 1950s to the 1970s. While the media referred to Cold War enmities to distract from other countries’ criticisms of Russia, they cited Soviet superpower status and achievements during the same period to enhance and exaggerate Russian military or diplomatic successes. The chiaroscuro representations were intended to depict Russia in 2015 as capable of exerting a Soviet-style level of soft power, now redefined as the global appeal of Russian culture. In this modern-day retelling of Soviet public diplomacy, there was no mention of communist ideology or even anti-imperialism. The latter was especially important to the USSR’s construction of international alliances with the global south; hence, it did feature more in Russian diplomacy after 2015, especially during the first six months of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. Russia’s understanding of soft power often had quite hard connotations; for example, the media invoked the ‘peaceful’ Soviet atom bomb, developed ostensibly to prevent nuclear war by creating nuclear parity, as an example of Soviet soft power (Mel’nikova and Kupriyanov 2015). Although the emphasis on atom bombs may seem incongruous with the soft power focus, the media’s confusion between aggression and soft power (albeit only in relation to Russia/the USSR’s actions) is not unusual in Russian conceptions of public diplomacy and influence building, which, especially prior to 2016, could often bleed into types of political warfare and were too often contextualized within discussions of geopolitical gain and influence (Makarychev 2018; Nye 2013).

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The media liked to quote the people of Syria to support claims of Russian and Soviet soft power reach, defined here as the ability to attract, influence and build networks with foreign populations through cultural and other nonmilitary attributes (Gavrilov 2015). For example, columnists often saw the Soviet legacy as a potential way to improve Russia’s global standing: I will mention yet another effective weapon that we have in our arsenal. That’s ‘the Russian [russkii] potential’. The USSR in its day prepared almost 600,000 international specialists, very many of whom were from Syria, Iraq [. . .] therefore we have quite a few supporters. Korotchenko 2015

The notion that those trained in the USSR would enjoy a special bond with its successor state, Russia, is a perfectly tenable argument but it also relies on a more inclusive idea of Russianness. This conception of Russian identity and affiliation as available to those with a shared experience of Soviet culture and education (even if the study actually took place in Ukraine, as in the example cited above), or the Russian language, was essential to the Kremlin’s (re) positioning of itself as a messianic power. Academics and commentators also cited long-standing international alliances to justify Russian military intervention; for example, in an Argumenty i fakty editorial entitled ‘Why is Russia in Syria?’, the political scientist Sergei Grinyaev explained ‘this country has been our ally since the times of the USSR’ (Argumenty i fakty 2015b). The pro-Russian alliances emphasized by the media were almost always remnants of Soviet alliances and ideological sympathies, eclectically spanning Jeremy Corbyn, Jordanian royals and Vietnamese communists (Lenta 2015c; Zamakhina 2015; Zubkov 2015). The core message was that Russia could enjoy the benefits of historic alliances constructed through Soviet soft power. It was as if, having reasserted its Soviet-indebted great power status, Russia had unlocked the alliance treasure trove. Suddenly, well-known allies of the USSR, such as Cuba, were described as ‘once more by our side’ (Borisov 2015). Naturally, the main focus was on the longevity and durability of the Russian alliance with Syria (Lenta 2015d), with Russia reprising the USSR’s role as its protector (Alekhina 2015). From October 2015, Russia intensified and expanded its military presence in Syria. In reaction, television shows and media outlets began to focus on new

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Russian weapons in considerable detail, fuelling a frenzy of militarism. The obsession with glitzy weapons and war porn was exemplified by the newly created ‘Russkoe oruzhie’ (Russian Weaponry) section on Rossiiskaya gazeta’s website. Here and elsewhere, readers could learn about the latest arms and about their history; for example, the media stressed the Soviet legacy of the TU160 (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2015b) and Kalibr missiles (Kolesnichenko 2015), contributing to a sense of continuity between Soviet and Russian weapons and soldiers. The Russian media were also happy to emphasize non-military continuities and achievements, such as space exploration. Dmitrii Medvedev provided one such example in an interview with Rossiiskaya gazeta, when he compared Western shock at Russia’s demonstration of strength in Syria and on the world stage with their surprise following the launch of the Sputnik satellite: The Americans are experiencing a trauma that has only one precedent: the launch of the first man-made satellite (Sputnik) from Earth in October 1957. Then America thought that it was wrong about everything. But this selfrecrimination resulted in the first man on the moon. Now we’re not talking about the moon but about diplomats and intelligence services taking decisions in a situation where a military machine, never before seen in action, has emerged with new types of weapons, whose creation Vladimir Putin insisted upon despite the destructive [economic] crisis from the fall of oil prices. Kuz’min 2015

The final line of the above quotation betrayed a concern with domestic policy in what was otherwise very outward-focused coverage. Even this, however, was merely an attempt to pin culpability for Russia’s economic woes on external forces, rather than Vladimir Putin’s policies. The argument that Russia was restoring Cold War greatness inevitably fuelled increasingly messianic depictions of Russia’s global role. In this, the theme continued the logic of the sanctions coverage, according to which many of the bad things that had happened since 1991 had occurred precisely because the USSR collapsed, although this coverage stressed the end of the Cold War more than the end of the USSR. More erudite Russian media argued that Russia’s return to the world stage and resumption of Soviet rights would rebalance the world order; for example, Anna Fedyakina of Rossiiskaya gazeta

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claimed that Russian intervention in Syria ‘recalls what happened in the Cold War when a balance existed between the USSR and USA that made it possible to act’ (Fedyakina 2015). While the demonization of Western leaders was a consistent feature of all these examples – and there was a significant exclusionist element to politicians’ speeches and addresses – the government tried to avoid creating too many enemies. Instead, political leaders preferred to employ a big-tent (albeit not all-inclusive) approach to patriotic history by finding room for a range of voices within its vague retellings of Russian history. Ultimately, the purpose of historical framing was to make history relevant to many people, to use it to ‘sell’ government policies and to inculcate a sanitized view of history that provided a convenient context for the present: one that reinforced core Kremlin beliefs about Russia as a great power with a mission and a need for a strong state and a special path. While the coverage and historicized explanations of the Ukraine crisis, 2014 sanctions and Syria reinforced this vision of Russian identity, they also contributed to a wider media discourse that obsessed over and securitized history with clear political and policy implications.

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Amplifying the Call to History During research stays in the central Russian city of Voronezh, I lived in a Brezhnev-era apartment building on Voroshilov Street, named after Stalin’s People’s Commissar (or Minister) of Defence. To reach Lenin Square, in the centre, I had to walk along Kirov Street and Friedrich Engels Avenue. As the city was largely destroyed during the Second World War, there was little to remind inhabitants of a pre-Soviet existence, and the infrastructure and street names alike recalled the communist era. The types of temporal blurring discussed in the previous chapter would only have been reinforced by the lingering Soviet urban presence in many, if not most, Russian cities. Soviet remnants provide a supportive infrastructure for the Kremlin’s uses of history, while also revealing that many sections of the country do not see any real need to move on in any case. Appreciating the emotive and political power of this uneasy nostalgia, Russian politicians, in statements and interviews, continuously emphasize the importance of remembering the past. In this way, they create the discursive environment required for the call to history – and their uses of history – to flourish. Feeding on core topics spanning the Great Patriotic War, Soviet nostalgia (merited and imagined), imperial grandeur, medieval knights, encircled fortresses, victimized Russians and overindulged peripheries, political figures deftly adapt the story of the past according to the needs of the present. At times, Russian political news coverage can appear little more than a question of arranging historical motifs, like parts of a jigsaw, to create a narrative that justifies the present or at least provides a nice analogy that sort of makes sense on an emotional, if not intellectual, level. The government’s obsessive use of historical analogies was a way to stress the relevance of historical episodes to people’s everyday, modern lives, while accusations (and 103

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evidence) that enemies abroad wanted to rewrite and denigrate Russian history was a way to securitize the collective and cultural memory. Much of the time, the media and politicians’ narratives hinge on arguments about the present-day interpretation – or forgetting – of history. This is history for politics’ sake, not history for history’s sake, which is why it is important to look beyond what is being remembered (or ignored) and to focus on why and how the remembering is taking place. The Kremlin’s ‘call to history’ is reliant on, and intersects with, a range of different popular narratives that contribute to, facilitate and are also bolstered by this same obsession with history. The discussion below is far from exhaustive in its coverage of tropes and narratives dominant in Russian media and political discourse but it should provide useful insights into the discursive context – and supporting pillars – within which the Kremlin has been able to make history an issue of everyday importance and existential security.

Memory wars and the war against historical falsification Ever since his 2007 Munich speech, the Russian President has demonstrated an increasing proclivity towards conspiratorial rhetoric that deliberately invites comparisons with the Soviet language of wreckers, saboteurs and, of course, ‘foreign agents’. As early as 2008, this approach began to merge with an elite-driven fixation on historical falsification. This obsession was encapsulated by then-President Medvedev’s establishment of a Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History and deliverance of increased funding in 2009 for historical organizations and commissions to defend ‘historical truth’ (Rodgers 2009). Pro-Kremlin media has mirrored and facilitated this tendency by amplifying the supposed threat posed by foreigners attacking (the one true Russian) historical memory. As noted earlier, these actions took place within an Eastern European context that was increasingly concerned with asserting nationalist histories and criminalizing alternative memories. Countries perceived as long since integrated into European Union or ‘Western’ structures, including Poland, Croatia, the Baltic States and Hungary, have implemented memory laws and/ or created political atmospheres that stifle academic and historical debate. The

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Kremlin makes use of, even exaggerates, the scope of such restrictions but they exist regardless and provide fodder for the Russian government’s intensive focus on (alleged and real) historical falsifications. In particular, the media accuses various state actors and cultural figures in Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine of the deliberate destruction of monuments to Soviet war heroes and of trying to ‘roll back history’ (Poslednie novosti 2015: 14.05; Shkel’ 2014a; Yur’ev 2015). In so doing, Russian politicians and media legitimize their own obsessive invocation of historical parallels by creating the impression that Russian cultural memory (or ‘historical truth’) – and by extension Russian national identity – is in imminent danger.. The narrative of historical falsification as a plot to undermine Russia has occupied considerable space in official political debate since at least 2014. With near-weekly fulminations against other countries’ alleged mistreatment of the memory of Soviet soldiers (MID 2015k, 2015g, 2015b, 2015e), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, Mariya Zakharova, has played a starring role in this charade. Combining outlandish accusations and outrageous language, she has used her diplomatic lectern to argue that ‘nobody has the right to manipulate the memory of the soldiers of the Red Army, taking advantage of the fact that most of them are no longer about to give the speaker a slap round the chops’ and that ‘historically there isn’t much we haven’t had to put up with from our “partners” but they haven’t been able to destroy us however they try – not through a world war, not through the collapse of the USSR, not through sanctions . . .’ (Argumenty i fakty 2020). Despite their criticism of other countries’ historical ignorance or even revisionism, Russian media and politicians are exceptionally prone to historical falsification. Distorting historical fact is frequently a means for Russian media or politicians to achieve the conflationary objective of historical framing, as seen in the coverage of the Ukraine Crisis, sanctions and Syria. As well as the well-documented false or unfair accusations that Poland started the Second World War or that the UK and USA deliberately did not open a second front in 1943, especially bemusing historical distortions or falsifications have included the following claims: ●

The ingrate Baltic States greatly benefitted from the USSR at Russia’s expense (Polupanov 2014).

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The USSR’s ‘radically anti-war’ stance and pacifism had a nefarious effect on the Soviet military (Lenta 2014h). Yeltsin and the USA expelled Ukraine from the USSR against its wishes (Gamov 2014b). The USA calls the Second World War ‘the American–Romanian victory over fascism’ (Chigishov 2015h: 1.18.13). Poland did not care about their soldiers or civilians who were killed by the Nazis; they only cared about the officers shot at Katyn (Starikov 2015). Ukraine banned cookbooks because they were obsessed with keeping borshch recipes ethnically pure (Quinn 2022).

This is just a small selection of the scores of seemingly minor historical falsifications and exaggerations that come together to form not only a false impression of history but also a narrative of a kindly Russia/USSR being continuously manipulated, exploited and undervalued. By using the past failures and crimes of others to minimize difficult areas of Russia’s past, pro-Kremlin figures whitewash Russian history to afford their nation a sense of moral authority. The eternal spring of Russia’s moral authority is the Soviet war victory as well as Russia’s defence of the memory of the Great Patriotic War. At all times, and in all retellings, the ethnic Russian – russkii – nation, is afforded a privileged position. Nothing is allowed to besmirch the historical memory of Russians in the Great Patriotic War. This privilege has been further underscored by the media using the crimes of others to justify and contextualize Russian or Soviet crimes. By way of example, in an article purportedly describing the situation in Ukraine, journalist Petr Likhomanov wrote in Rossiiskaya gazeta that the Great Terror was justified by the need to fight against internal enemies, such as Banderites, who would have undermined the Soviet war effort. He even described the Soviet state’s mass repressions, incarcerations and murders during this time as the ‘preventative arrests of 1937’ (Likhomanov 2014). In this way – as is so often the case with political uses of history – the references to history not only flavoured the interpretation of the present event but also reached into the past, using events in the present to justify what had happened in history. Russian state-aligned media, politicians and diplomats also launched outlandish accusations of historical crimes and revisionism to maintain

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memory as a constant talking point, using geopolitics as a way to heighten its relevance and potential to agitate, in both senses of the word. In particular, aggressive rhetoric has helped to spur on the ‘memory wars’ between Russia and various neighbouring states, in which political actors engage in undignified contestations over their countries’ historical – especially wartime – roles (Lebow et al. 2006). See, for example, Russian politicians’ – and the public’s – anger at the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States over the removal of Soviet war memorials or the renaming of Soviet-era streets (Miller 2020). Quite often, these memory wars are sparked by memory laws in the origin country that require, as in Poland’s case, the removal of communist insignia (except on graves). Memory wars – as with so many conflicts – are typified by a symbiotic enmity, in which the most vociferous on the opposing sides depend on the other’s memory warriors to reap domestic gains, leading to a spiral of extremism. As each side responds with ever harsher and more defensive rhetoric, the public is distracted from real politics by the politics of symbolism. In Russia’s case, officials and politicians could deflect the difficulties in Russia’s relations with its European and post-Soviet neighbours onto the latter’s alleged lack of historical knowledge and disrespect for its memory, thus creating an entirely different frame of reference for their audience. It also supports the argument that Russians have a special historical insight or knowledge (‘cultural consciousness’), an argument explored in Chapter 6 of this book and important for discerning the ultimate purpose of the Kremlin’s uses of history. This purpose, and the uses themselves, cannot be viewed in isolation from each other or from the tenor of political discourse that surrounds them, contributes to them and is in turn fed by them.

Russophobia The conceit that Russia is being targeted in a campaign of historical falsification is difficult to maintain without the assertion that the world, especially the West, is awash with Russophobia. President Putin and others have even gone so far as to equate Russophobia with antisemitism, describing hatred of Russians as the ‘new’ hatred of Jews (Prezident Rossii 2017b). This narrative has become

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especially intense since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has predictably and regrettably sparked many more genuine instances of Russophobic attacks, covered by Russian media with gleeful abandon. Ostensibly, this same crazed Russophobia is driving Western revision of historical narratives and pursuit of historical falsification. It is not enough for the Kremlin to have a diplomatic or political dispute with someone; the opponent must also be characterized as a Russophobic heir to Russia’s historical enemies, seeking to rewrite history to justify their ancestors’ past crimes (Prezident Rossii 2014a; Mironov 2014). While politicians are quite free with their accusations of Russophobia, these assertions are usually fairly broad and the accusers rarely give specific examples. Moreover, the accusations often relate to memory wars; for example, at a meeting of the Victory Organizing Committee in 2019, Putin fulminated over alleged attempts by foreign states to ‘revise the role played by the Red Army in the routing of Nazism and the liberation of European nations from the Nazi plague’, as well as to ‘attack Russian history’ as fuelled by and part of ‘anti-Russian propaganda’. Similar sentiments were echoed by Sergei Shoigu, Minister of Defence, at this same committee (Prezident Rossii 2019). By dismissing historical disagreements as bad-faith conspiracies fuelled by Russophobia, Russian politicians paint any disagreements over memory as the result of blind ethnic hatred rather than a genuine, perhaps even well-founded, divergence of opinion. In her aforementioned briefings, Mariya Zakharova has over the years worked hard to thread a narrative of Poland and the Baltics as Russophobic ingrates with little more to do with their time than target and destroy Soviet war memorials (Smirnov 2015; MID 2015e, 2015j). During these tirades, this contender for the world’s most impolitic diplomat has at no point provided any background as to why some Poles may view the arrival of Soviet troops not as a liberation from the Nazis but as a takeover, from one occupation to another, or as to why many in the Baltic States perceive 1940–91 as an occupation. Instead, Zakharova and the media sources that loyally amplify her arguments depict citizens of these countries as zombified by nationalist propaganda that is constantly spewing anti-Russian hatred. In this way, Russophobia becomes both a cause and a result of historical falsification, reflecting the tautological nature of an accusatory narrative that relies on rallying emotion rather than appealing to logic.

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Foreign agents Official depictions of Russophobia as a widespread phenomenon both facilitate and are facilitated by a xenophobic suspicion of the ‘Other’. The purpose of the Kremlin’s call to history is not to ‘simply remember but to actually repeat the victory [which] led to the quick formation of not only practices of solidarity and identification with those who fought but also with a symbolic aggression’ against those who do not engage in these practices (Arkhipova et al. 2017). By invoking historical events like the Great Patriotic War, the media’s and politicians’ efforts to cohere Russian audiences rely not only on a sense of shared suffering but also on an exclusionary element, one that mobilizes audiences against enemies abroad and ‘collaborators’ at home. Russia’s failure to come to terms with the Stalinist past and the continued efforts to justify or mitigate the horrors of the Great Terror often betray a belief that internal enemies really did exist and needed to be thwarted. The language around ‘foreign agents’, combined with accusations of ‘fifth columns’ and ‘collaborators’, has revivified these narratives. In 2012, the Russian President signed into law the first rendition of the socalled ‘foreign agents’ law, requiring non-profit organizations involved in politics to declare themselves ‘foreign agents’ if they received money from abroad. Since then, the legislation has been strengthened and reinforced on several occasions. This constant tightening fed a paranoia that Western governments were undermining Russians from within, especially as the rules expanded so widely that they could theoretically include most organizations in Russia. In practice, the law is targeted against those who disagree with the Kremlin and, as noted in Chapter 2, those organizations working on sensitive periods of history were some of the first to be attacked, as with the targeted campaign against Memorial, which culminated in its forced closure in November 2021. The ‘foreign agents’ designation, which carries connotations of Cold War espionage, has reinforced a wider discourse that presents anyone opposed to the Russian government as not only an enemy but an ‘enemy in history’. These supposed adversaries remember in a different way to real, patriotic Russians because they are on the side of the historical enemy (the West/Ukraine/fascists, etc). Politicians frequently castigate oppositionists for being too negative about

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Russian history. One of the most memorable such critiques was Vladimir Medinskii’s 2015 diatribe on the importance of history, and historical consciousness, to the Russian people, in which he argued that this consciousness ‘is why “oppositionists” who criticize our History, statehood or spirituality and so on will never have WIDESPREAD success’ (Radzikhovsky 2015). Medinskii’s capitalization of the word ‘history’ suggested there is only one true version thereof. He uses the opposition’s (supposed) failure to recognize ‘History’, to borrow Medinskii’s style, as evidence against them. In this way, the wrong interpretation of history is identified with foreignness, especially Western-ness. The juxtaposition of ‘Western’ and ‘opposition’ is also reinforced by the presence of Soviet-era terminology in Russian public and political discourse, with politicians and officials from the Duma to the Russian Army describing opposition voices as provokatory, fifth columns and speculators (Baranets 2014b; Mironov 2014), as well as ‘foreign agents’. In these depictions, Russia is a nation plagued by internal enemies and besieged by external ones, harking back to long-standing myths of encirclement, sabotage and Russia as a ‘besieged fortress’. These tropes were invoked by the media in relation to a wide range of topics, from LGBT rights to NATO military exercises (Skvirskaja 2017; Tseplyaev 2015; Riabov and Riabova 2014a; Darczewska 2014). Russian media and politicians are hardly unique in using enemy images to delegitimize a certain group for a political purpose: it is a long-standing and global practice to conflate perceived ‘enemy’ groups with characteristics of untrustworthiness and otherness, using this as a distinction to generalize and stereotype people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Merskin 2004; Keen 1988). But studies suggest that mobilizing one group against the other requires the media to present the enemy as a direct threat to their security or existence (Lasswell 1971; Mandelzis 2003: 2; Jervis 1976). Russian media and politicians reached the necessary level of intense securitization by deploying history; they recast the oppositionists’ supposed revision of Russian history as an existential attack on Russian identity itself. As such, while xenophobic and anti-Western narratives exist independently of the political uses of history detailed in this book, the combination of the two is important for realizing the mobilizational possibilities of emotive historical narratives. This helps to explain the increasingly intense language used to ‘other’ the Kremlin’s perceived internal enemies, a process that accelerated between 2014

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and the end of 2015, or, roughly, the start of the Ukraine Crisis and Russian intervention in Syria. Although Russian media coverage of Ukraine was far more emotive, journalists covering Syria frequently employed technical, even pathologizing, language to describe those who disagreed with the Kremlin intervention: ‘There exists a sort of moral-intellectual “condition”. I would call it “Party-phobia” or, if you prefer, “devouring the nation” [otchiznoedstvo]’ (Grachev 2015). The reference to the ‘party’ draws deliberate echoes of the Soviet Union, while feeding into the broader narrative in which it is not only unpatriotic to criticize the government, it is outright foreign. For example, Vladimir Putin blamed ‘foreign agents’ for spreading fake news about civilian deaths in Syria ‘as soon as Russian planes had taken off ’ (Kremlin.ru 2015b). Across Russian political media coverage, the vilification of internal enemies as foreign and corrosive is an integral part of securitizing the political and historical space. With echoes of the 1930s, internal enemies are depicted as posing more of a threat to the Russian state than external enemies (Petersson 2017: 242). This presentation relies on an image of internal enemies as a negative, exclusionary force against which ‘patriots’ and ‘heroes’ could and should define themselves, creating a frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This was exemplified in Vladimir Putin’s 2014 address to the Federal Assembly, which questioned if Western politicians were about to provoke ‘action by a fifth column, that disparate bunch of national traitors’ (Kremlin.ru 2014). By 2020, such sentiment had become even more explicitly linked to history, as when Putin labelled historical dissenters the ‘modern-day equivalents of [Nazi] collaborators’ in his Day of Knowledge speech, referenced above. This intense securitization equates historiographical debate with the basest of treachery, leaving no scope for moderation or compromise.

Elites vs narod The state-aligned media and politicians’ emphasis on enmity divides people into distinct and antagonistic binaries. Separating out potential critics, and redesignating them as traitors, is a useful tactic for directing populist tendencies. Discontentment with elites is channelled towards the government’s critics instead (Tipaldou and Casula 2019). In other words, rather than the

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United Russia officials who maintained flats and second families in Western capital cities, it was apparently those who persisted in disagreeing with government policy, be it on present-day reality or on issues of memory, who were the out-of-touch elites. Supposedly, such people were hostile to ordinary Russians because their sympathies lay with the West, as reflected by their suspect historiographical tendencies. Maligned as rootlessly cosmopolitan, liberal elites, the genuine opposition are depicted as out-of-touch by a president who owns a golden toilet brush. This is undoubtedly shocking but many of the accusations lobbed into the faces of oppositionists will no doubt be familiar to perusers of populist discourses beyond Russia. Of course, the words ‘liberal’ and ‘elite’ have a meaning dependent on the speaker’s own interpretation: many more things were ‘liberal’ to Komsomolskaya pravda than to the more urbane Lenta, reflecting a certain amount of diversity within the pro-government media. As a rule, however, they incorporated the following characteristics and attitudes: ●

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financially comfortable, middle-class and well-off people (Kagarlitskii 2014b); well-travelled cosmopolitans (Steshin 2014); those who profited financially or whose status improved during the 1990s (Mironov 2014); and those who do not feel nostalgia for the USSR (Skoibeda 2014c).

Such people were perceived as revelling in Russia’s troubles, even manufacturing them. During the food shortages of 2014 that followed Russia’s restrictions of EU imports, one fiery journalist wrote sneeringly in Komsomolskaya pravda that ‘representatives of the middle class are rushing to publish images of empty shelves from the time of the late USSR’ (Arsyukhin 2014c). The government’s targeting of liberal and metropolitan sections of society was fairly predictable; that constituency’s apparent abandonment of – and threat to – Putin during the 2011–12 protests had poisoned the president against these urbane audiences.1 The Kremlin could also rely on antagonisms

1

It is interesting to note that while those protests were more populated by liberal middle-class types, over later years a different type of demographic would come to support Aleksei Navalny and his movement, one that is ‘clearly not middle-class: they are poorer, younger and more socially liberal’ (Dollbaum 2021).

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embedded within Russian culture, mirroring yet updating the age-old Russian opposition between the intelligentsia and the people (Rutten 2010: 104). The target of Russian media and politicians’ ire was not necessarily only educated metropolitans but supposedly also so-called new Russians, those who became rich following the fall of the USSR. Popular derision towards the tastelessness and materialism of the latter draws on the association of Westernizing traditions with poshlost’, or being gauche (Boym 1994: 42). Interestingly, tasteless or crass people have traditionally been contrasted with the intelligentsia, but, from 2014 (perhaps earlier), certain parts of the tabloid media began to (admittedly imperfectly and inconsistently) amalgamate the intelligentsia with ‘new Russians’ to create a novel hybrid form of othering in Russian historical and political narratives (Arsyukhin 2014a, 2014b). What united the depictions of these two types was not just a shallow love of all things Western but also their disconnect from the (ostensible) mainstream, which the media tried to create and mould through a variety of tactics. Throughout coverage of seismic or contentious events, the media relies on a heady if inauthentic stream of external contributors to provide a diversity of voices that camouflages the lack of a diversity of views in such a controlled media environment as Russia. Instead of providing both a for and against, the media offered a range of different voices presenting the same argument, creating an illusion of the polyphony of democratic discussion, one without disagreement. A variant on this can be seen in the Russian media’s confected use of ‘voices from the street’ (Darczewska 2014). Anyone featured in these news report vox populi who is well dressed or conventional expresses progovernment views while the few dissenting voices belong to unkempt and unusual people. In this way, the extensive use of external contributors can be seen as a tactic for masking and enabling the further tightening of authoritarianism from the ‘managed pluralism’ more typical of Putin’s earlier presidential terms (Balzer 2003) towards the informational autocracy seen in Putin’s third term. Informational autocracy was itself eventually supplanted by a more traditional authoritarian style shortly after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. To conceal the extent to which the space for alternative views has been constricted, the media market their news and discussion programmes using highly deceptive language. Programme creators claim to provide debates

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covering a range of views but any real distinction is superficial at best. To blur the line between fact and fiction, the television producers and news presenters turn traditional media devices on their head: for example, in their use of ‘distance markers’. Traditionally used in discourse analysis to describe the act of distancing oneself from the claims to truth advanced by others, distance markers comprise quotation marks and phrases such as ‘allegedly’, ‘according to’ and so on, which underscore the difference between the newsreader’s view and the view they quote (Fairclough 1995: 42). In Russian media, distance markers are used for people who are expressing highly similar if not identical views to the newsreader or journalist. In this way, they apply a technique from Western media (where, ironically, it is often used to discredit those with alternative views) and invert it to give the impression of difference and variety of opinion, when in fact there was no such diversity (Riggins 1997: 11). Intended to suggest a plurality of support for the government position, this technique also distracts from the media’s use of external contributors and contributions to outsource the deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. Russian television programmes do sometimes invite a ‘token’ masochistic Western or Ukrainian speaker, who is then harangued and mocked for their refusal to see what is really going on. The tone of these television programmes, and of Russian politics more widely, is exceptionally conspiratorial. The media indulges fantasies of internal enemies’ involvement in outlandish conspiracies against Russia and for the US-dominated world order (Lenta 2015e). Such conspiratorial language is part of the media’s and politicians’ broader attempt to depict Russia and Putin as victims of an unfair global order, where Russians are not the only victims. In many ways, Russia’s victimhood is purely symbolic, at least in the present, when Putin ostensibly protects Russia(ns) from any suffering. Instead, Russians symbolize victimhood insofar as they represent ordinary people around the world, interested in justice and what is right as opposed to the ‘elite’ interests of Western governments. This feeds into a populist narrative in which Putin represents the people (narod) of his own country and, in doing so, appeals to the people of other nations; hence, foreign governments feel the need to fight against him. In this way, Putin becomes not only a leader of his own people but also a hero for ordinary people in other countries, who are prevented by their elites from connecting with their true histories and espousing their traditional values.

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To support this angle, the media frequently sources foreign voices and not always in the most convincing of ways. One long-standing practice is to include comments from random social media accounts to suggest support in foreign countries for the Russian president or for Russian government policy, citing, for example, the social media of Canadian students (Azaeva 2014). One of my favourite examples was the inclusion of a random Facebook post from a beautician living in the Oxfordshire town where I resided during my PhD. In it, the beauty specialist criticized Angela Merkel’s policy to welcome asylum seekers from Syria, with Russian media citing her as evidence of ordinary people rising up against elite-imposed multiculturalism. More familiar ‘antielites’ included the tax-refugee Gerard Depardieu, always happy to criticize US foreign and security policy (Pleshakova 2015). The name recognition of Western commentators was much higher during the Syria coverage than for the 2014 events, when the media would often exaggerate the significance and status of Western supporters. By contrast, figures as well known as Frederick Forsyth, Roger Stone, Oliver Stone and political figures such as Congressman Brad Sherman were happy to speak to Russian media about Syria. One element remained constant whatever the story: Westerners (famous or not) interviewed or approvingly cited by Russian media are almost always undermining their own country’s opposition to Russia. In this, they help the pro-Kremlin press create a skewed impression of common views and sympathies among Western populations (Chigishov 2014d: 24.55). Unsurprisingly, Russian media especially like quoting foreigners who openly express their admiration for Vladimir Putin’s or Russians’ knowledge of history. One figure who emerges from time to time is Ivan Bleu, a French political scientist, who has argued that ‘Vladimir Putin knows history well, something, alas, that few state actors in the West can boast’ (Prokof ’ev 2015). Such statements are part of a broader effort to present Putin and Russia as objects of admiration and envy for their awareness of historical truth, an awareness that supposedly affords Russia(ns) greater insight into current affairs. Russian media also likes to interview, or feature, ‘ordinary’ people who profess a strong cultural affinity with Russia and/or the USSR; for example, Syrian military men who studied in the Soviet Union or local inhabitants of occupied areas in east Ukraine. Local inhabitants such as these are frequently anonymized, especially in cases where they appear to belong to east ‘Ukrainian’

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‘separatist’ militias (Ivashkina 2014a). The (alleged) locals’ interpretations of events were often more dramatic and conspiratorial than those of the general Russian media, perhaps as part of a deliberate effort to make the latter seem comparatively calm and objective. For example, a few days after the Odesa fire, a Vesti nedeli clip featured (people claiming to be) Odesans who avowed that Maidan supporters had pre-planned the blaze and were now using violent means to cover up their crimes, including gassing survivors (Chigishov 2014f: 57.00). This highly dramatic version of events would seem outlandish to many viewers but would also make the Russian media’s own exaggerations seem more credible, even representative of the ‘common-sense majority’.

Heroism In their populist depictions of Vladimir Putin’s narodnost’ (being of the people) and masculinity, the media are offering up the Russian president as an exemplar of heroism (Moss 2017; Sperling 2014). In 2014 and 2015 in particular, the media and government sought to encourage people to demonstrate their allegiance to officialdom by performing ritualized acts of support that were described as heroic (Chigishov 2014b: 17.33; Tkanchuk 2014). For example, television programmes would run features on sample ‘heroes’ who professed the right historical narrative and responded patriotically to external threats to this narrative (Chigishov 2014e: 56.06, 2014c: 01.06.56). The media characterize such ‘heroes’ as ordinary, everyday people called upon to defend their home from attack, thus reinforcing the sense of existential crisis that underpins so much of Russian political discourse. As well as emphasizing threats to history, state-aligned media and politicians try to render these cultural and ‘memory-based’ threats into issues of personal consequence. One of the most blatant tactics used by Russian media to underscore the relevance of historical narrative to national and individual identity is to adopt a highly personalized tone when covering historical topics and themes. When discussing significant events such as the Great Patriotic War, journalists’ deliberate personalization of language (‘we’, ‘our’) frequently extends into the familial (‘our fathers’, ‘our grandfathers’) and the primordial. In coverage of the Ukraine Crisis, the latter even included

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graveyard visits and talk of ‘our ancestors’, ‘heirs’ (to villains or heroes as appropriate) and the ‘offspring of veterans’ (Filmoshkina 2014; Mironov 2014; Korolev 2014d: 22.54). Through these rhetorical devices, the media has sought to foster a sense of national cohesion against EuroMaidan, the West, the opposition and numerous other opponents. The emphasis on the familial renders the past, and politics, personal: ‘our memory has been given to us by our parents, grandmothers and grandfathers. So, we know what really happened in the Great Patriotic War [whatever the Ukrainians say]’ (Grishin 2014c). As this quotation indicates, journalists could achieve a sense of national cohesion with particular effect in coverage of events in Ukraine, where the media presented the EuroMaidan protests as an assault on the truth of – and people’s personal connection to – the Great Patriotic War. To achieve this, the media frequently cited the families of Second World War veterans. Given the time that had passed since 1945, there was a scarcity of veterans from that conflict; instead, the children and grandchildren of veterans were used to express outrage at the dismantling and rewriting of the victory won by their ‘fathers’, ‘grandfathers’ or ‘greatgrandfathers’ (Chinkova 2014). In 2022, Russian media was using the same tactics to justify their bombardment of Ukrainian cities. The personalization of history encourages audiences to take sides between two clear binary opposites: the villains of today (merged with past incarnations) and heroic contemporaries merged with one’s own forefathers and past legends. It also reflects the government’s and media’s sensitivity to, and ability to channel, the emotive power of memory. In their articles on sanctions and faltering relations with the West, journalists offered exceptionally private insights into their troubled experiences of the 1990s, with food assuming an emotive role. Prominent journalist Dmitrii Steshin, normally known for his bombast, recalled with apparent desperation ‘how for weeks I ate pearl barley fried in the crackling of old yellow lard, hard like a paraffin candle’ during his impoverished youth following the Soviet collapse (Steshin 2014). As well as bringing the author and/or publication closer to the reader by emphasizing (presumed) shared experiences, highly personalized stories delineated the divide between those who suffered and those who profited during the 1990s (Arsyukhin 2014a). All types of media analysed coveyed the same message: namely that the West and its backers were the undeserving

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winners from, and causes of, this painful time: ‘We remembered with sadness 1990 and the hamburger as a mark of achieving western civilization [. . .] finally, that same Soviet ice cream – made to state standards – was killed’ (Skoibeda 2014b). Invoking memories of Soviet food privatized following the collapse gave a political spin to a very common form of food nostalgia, found across the world, where recipe or even branding changes are decried as symbols of decline. Only in the Russian case, the country that had created the products and state that had regulated their quality had entirely disappeared. Exploiting this nostalgia for financial gain, the luxury restaurant group Novikov opened a very expensive new restaurant at the end of 2014. Called ‘The Country that Doesn’t Exist’ (Strana kotoroi net), it offered a wide range of food from former Soviet republics in an overpriced and judgmental atmosphere typical of a certain type of Moscow establishment. It reflected the elite-driven commodification of widespread nostalgia for the Soviet era, demonstrating that, in reality, this is a phenomenon far too complex to be summarized as ‘poor Soviet-nostalgic Russians’ versus ‘greedy (pro-)Westerners’. This binary had even run its course in Russian political discourse, which typified Russia as a victim in the 1990s but not in the mid-2010s. In their coverage of worsening relations with the USA and EU, media sources instead carried historical connotations, such as the boycotting, or patriotic non-consumption (Skvirskaja 2017; Rann 2017), of Western food, particularly McDonald’s, with its connotations of the transition to capitalism (Lenta 2014a; Zubkov 2014). Other prominent examples include the media celebrating those who holiday in Russia, especially Artek, a refurbished Soviet-era children’s holiday camp (Kostenko-Popova 2014). The media depict such people not as ordinary holidaymakers but as patriots at the vanguard of the Kremlin’s crusade to defend cultural memory. They are supposedly partaking in a heroic cycle of activity, contributing to Russia’s steadfast defence of itself and others (Chigishov 2014g: 17.57). The action of rejecting Western brands, or embracing Soviet ones, assumes a temporal as well as geopolitical dimension, in which ‘heroes’ perform their shared ‘correct’ remembering of past heroes and of past victims through actions in the present. These actions may or may not be commemorative in nature. For example, throughout the coverage of the Ukraine Crisis, Russian proxies were presented as spontaneously and heroically reacting to events by affirming their cultural and historical legacy in the face of

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the Ukrainian government’s attempts to rewrite history (Ul’yanova 2014; Argumenty i fakty 2014a; Tseplyaev 2014). They did this by wearing St George Ribbons and defending Soviet memorials but also by renaming streets and rejecting Western car brands.2 This type of ‘active remembering’ is another way to make history tangible, leading to further ‘re-enchantment’ of the Kremlin’s usable historical myths, all of which are already of considerable emotive and symbolic significance (Nesbitt-Larking and McAuley 2017; Khrebtan-Hörhager 2016). Furthermore, such ‘heroes’ are there for emulation and the media encourages audiences to copy their actions, supporting the government in a way that carries historical overtones, simultaneously affirming a sense of shared remembering and political positioning. These ritualized methods of resistance repeated across the media are presented as emphatically grassroots phenomena, organized by individual citizens. Yet, in many cases these examples are clearly staged. Moreover, despite the praise for the actions of the individual ‘resisters’, it is the state that assumes the role of the real hero (Grachev 2014), given that the role of the resisters is essentially to demonstrate allegiance to the Russian government as it restores historical justice and consciousness.

Messianism The media defines those resisting the onslaught of enemies, whether at home or abroad, as actively mobilized against identity-based threats.3 From 2012 to 2014, the ‘counter-rhetoric of hysteria’, or the hysterical justifications of any Russian aggression as pre-emptive, was one way politicians sought to depict their country as the victim of the international order – unfairly lampooned by resurrected Nazis and the cruel West (Pasitselska 2017). However, by 2015 a new approach was needed – one that characterized Russia as an assertive actor

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For more on these types of template activities, see Chapter 6 and in particular the section on ‘Templates of cultural consciousness’. It is difficult and beyond the scope of this book to assess to what extent these reactions or mobilizations were real but it is pertinent to note that even highly educated Russian metropolitans cited greater emotional engagement with the state during this period (Robertson and Greene 2017; Greene and Robertson 2017).

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and channelled its obsession with history into a clearer sense of purpose. Consequently, following Russia’s intervention in Syria, the media and politicians replaced the highly defensive tone, typical of coverage of Ukraine and third-wave sanctions, with self-congratulatory gloating as they moulded an image of Russia asserting rather than defending itself (Kazun 2016). The discursive transformation from defensiveness in 2014 to bombast and messianism in 2015 mirrored a change in how the media positioned the government’s actions as well as the evolution of Russia’s role on the world stage. The media’s increasingly messianic depiction of Russian identity was a clear link between historical framing and the government’s strategy to intensify the significance of history to national identity, a strategy explored further in Chapter 6. The media and government built the argument, which emerged steadily from 2012 and had crystallized by 2015, that Russia must not only forge its own path but also act as a beacon, helping others to find their own paths. This neatly folds back into the worldview that sits at the base of the historical lessons being promoted: Russia as a strong state, with a special path of development and a great power mission. Russian elite political rhetoric and selfunderstanding has long embraced elements of messianism, from the promulgation of Moscow as the Third Rome to the Soviet Union’s universalist identity as the first international workers’ state (Duncan 2002; Kukulin 2018; Berdyaev 1922, 1990; Rabow-Edling 2006). Moreover, messianic thinking is particularly complementary to the Kremlin’s presentist uses of history, especially if we employ Walter Benjamin’s definition of messianism as a ‘simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’ (Benjamin 1968: 265). Certainly, a strong sense of messianism has become increasingly apparent as the klaxon of the call to history has grown ever louder, heralding Russia’s bloodthirsty ‘liberation’ of Ukraine in 2022. Although it can take different forms, this messianic tone has relied on a selfassurance, buoyed by a chauvinistic understanding of history that depicts Russia as saviour of, if not the world, then at least the Eurasian landmass. The example from the MFA below is rather typical in this sense: It has turned out on many occasions that Russia, which civilized Europe sees as something alien and dangerous, has saved Europe from existential threat. Both those that have emerged from European soil and external ones [. . .]

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Today history provides us with yet another chance to put to one side our disagreements and unite for a decisive struggle against a common threat – the threat of terrorism. MID 2015h

This statement conveys the recurring argument that Russian greatness stems from its historical achievements, especially its actions to defend or liberate Europe over past centuries. This way of thinking raises the notion of a ‘genuine versus fake’ Europe, which intersects with other discourses, especially conservative ones setting liberalism against traditional values (Riabov and Riabova 2014a, 2014b; Stroude 2013; Sapozhnikova 2015; Verkhovskii and Pain 2012; Tolz 2017). It also contains borrowed elements of Soviet and imperialist thinking, as reflected in the quotation below, which carries deliberate echoes of Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain speech and frequent mentions of religion: Russia has a real chance of becoming the Christian leader of Eurasia. There will be a new evangelization of Europe – from the Adriatic to the Baltic. Western Europe will be finished, it has no spiritual might [. . .] Russia now is the most important country in the world. Everything depends on what happens in Syria. Aslamova 2015

According to this logic, it follows that Russia’s return to great-power status is – and must be – steeped in references to history and presented as a repetition of these same historical achievements. In this view, knowledge of, and respect for, history is central to realizing Russia’s potential: this is what gives the call to history a purpose rather than simply legitimation.

Memory diplomacy Such narratives are not solely for domestic consumption. The Russian government is also prone to promoting abroad its flattering depictions of Russia as a country with a rare connection to its historical and cultural traditions. While I do not wish to contribute to the exaggerated accusations of Russia’s ability to destroy Western liberal democracy by stealth (ultimately if

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those democracies cannot defend themselves against a few tweets and a lot of money, they are unlikely to survive anyway), there are numerous examples of Russia trying to promote its versions of history abroad and to encourage memory wars in and with other states. This has included the Russian MFA and other state bodies actively using what I call ‘memory diplomacy’ to bolster Russian influence and propagate a selective view of the Soviet past. These efforts assume renewed importance when skewed interpretations of history and historical justice play such a prominent role in Russia’s justification of its war against Ukraine. Memory diplomacy is a form of public diplomacy in which states or political groups try to improve relations and reputations by exporting commemorative practices and historical narratives and by allying their own historical narratives with those of another country (McGlynn and Đureinović 2022). Unlike memory wars, which focus on criticizing alternative views of history, memory diplomacy is more about promoting Russia’s view, about creating memory allies rather than enemies. Of course, memory diplomacy is not a Russian invention, but it is a tool the Kremlin has made its own. The sheer breadth of tactics the Russian state has deployed as part of this exercise is worth examining. State actors have developed a wide array of commemorative symbols, activities and core historical narratives for international use – spanning military history tours across Europe, commemorative dance competitions and museum exhibitions (McGlynn 2021a). The Russian MFA, embassies, cultural centres and government-organized groups working on memory, such as the RMHS, organize and energetically export these activities around the world. Prior to 2015, Russian memory diplomacy efforts largely focused on the Russian diaspora and the former Soviet Union, but in an effort to develop Russian soft power, attention has since been shifted to foreign citizens without common historical or cultural links to Russia. Perhaps Russia’s most famous memory export is the St George Ribbon: since 2009, Russian embassies around the world have organized so-called Volunteers of Victory, largely comprising the Russian diaspora, to hand out St George Ribbons and historical marketing materials to passers-by. In 2019, Volunteers of Victory were active in more than ninety countries, including the USA, where they distributed some 15,000 ribbons alongside brochures telling the (selective) history of both this symbol and the Soviet role in the Second World War. Embassy staff have, at times,

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targeted groups perceived to be sympathetic; in 2019, members of the leftwing Momentum group within the British Labour Party were photographed wearing the ribbons and even shared images on their social media pages depicting the ribbons draped around a gun (Humphries 2019). But the Volunteers of Victory fail to mention the St George Ribbon’s other connotations, particularly those linked to the conflict in Ukraine, showing how Russian state actors use the memory of the Second World War, abroad as at home, as a Trojan horse to smuggle in other, more contentious, geopolitical stances. This means that those countries that accept and implement Russian commemorative traditions not only adapt to the Russian way of remembering, but also incorporate aspects of the Russian official narrative of the war – a narrative that abounds with geopolitical symbolism, as documented. By promoting its view of the Second World War – one in which the Soviet Union only liberated Eastern Europe but did not occupy it, one in which the West left the Russians to bleed dry, one in which only non-Russian people collaborated with the Nazis – the Kremlin also promotes its vision of how the world ought to look. When Putin praises the post-Yalta conference settlement, he is extolling a world that stands in contrast to the unipolar US-led system that came after 1991. As at home, the history the Kremlin promotes abroad is so selective as to be untrue and even disrespectful to the memory of those who fought in the Second World War. In any case, the Russian state is not trying to promote historical investigations but to promote a flawed view of the world. To fail to recognize these distortions and conflations is to risk accepting not only a biased history but also a view of the world that is inherently unfair to those countries and people (Russians included) who have suffered under the Soviet and Russian states. To distract from this, the Kremlin has become increasingly sophisticated at adapting its narratives to local tastes, making them easier to swallow: if in France, the Russian Foreign Ministry promotes its historical truth by emphasizing the Normandie-Niémen fighter pilots (MID 2017), then in the United Kingdom, it celebrates the Arctic Convoy veterans who brought supplies to the blockaded Soviet port of Murmansk. In 2015, the Russian Foreign Ministry organized a trip for Arctic Convoy veterans to occupied Crimea, in which the convoymen praised Russia’s hospitality, comparing it negatively with the UK’s treatment of its veterans (Rozin 2015). Although the trip was covered in the UK and Russian press, this Potemkin visit did not

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mention conditions for veterans in Russia, many of whom live in poverty even as the memory of their exploits is used for political gain. Memory diplomacy is not reserved for Western nations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made a point of raising Soviet contributions to China’s wartime efforts against Japan – and with some success. In 2020, the Chinese and Russian ambassadors to the United States wrote a joint article for the US-based security site Defense One, titled ‘Honor World War II with a Better, Shared Future’ (Antonov and Tiankai 2020). In it, they argue that the strength of China and Russia’s current alliance is grounded in their shared feats in the Second World War, but that this victory is at risk from historical revisionists. Engaging in some revisionism themselves, the authors do not mention the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or former Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. Although it would not win any scholarly awards, the article does serve the purpose of showing that China is a memory ally of Russia and perhaps encouraging at least some Americans to also see Russia as a memory ally. Of course, while it is a powerful cultural memory in some parts of the world, Russian actors’ political uses of the Second World War are not appropriate in all countries. In Germany, for example, where the war is obviously not a source of pride, Russian state-funded, German-language media, including RT and Sputnik, sought to strike up memory alliances by appealing to a sense of Ostalgie, promoting a revisionist narrative that depicted the East German state in rosy hues (McGlynn 2020a). Russian media played on the disappointments and trials following German reunification and fuelled a sense of nostalgia for a lost way of life and a time of close relations with the Soviet Union and Russian people. As demonstrated by the German example, in promoting pro-Russian historical narratives in certain countries, Russian-aligned actors can add to existing divisions or undermine rivals. Although memory diplomacy often includes positive acts of public diplomacy, it exists in a symbiotic relationship with Russia’s more sinister uses of history, including Russian state actors’ encouragement of marginalized interpretations of history in order to build political alliances with other nations or sections thereof. In the most obvious example, Russia frequently uses its media presence and cultural organizations in Serbia to recall the NATO bombings and Russian support for Serbia in the

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Kosovo conflict (Sputnjik Srbija 2020; Ruski dom 2019). This more divisive element of memory diplomacy is often focused on exploiting memories that do not fit with the EU’s efforts to create a common ‘Europeanized’ memory (Kucia 2016). This approach reflects both the failures of the EU’s attempts to synchronize member states’ memories and Russia’s goal of undermining EU influence in Eastern European accession states and EU popularity in existing member states. In so doing, these same Russian organizations and media depict themselves as supporting the target population in its quest to reconnect with its historical roots. By manufacturing – or even creating – the impression that Russian historical narratives are popular in scores of countries, Russian officials can show domestic audiences that Russia is restoring historical truth worldwide. The conception of historical truth relates to a more comprehensive Russian vision of the world, where the USA, EU and their East European allies are waging a war on memory, on history and on truth itself. They are seeking to undo the results of the Second World War in order to undermine Russia and enforce a unilateral American-led system on the world. Russia presents itself as the last bastion against this onslaught. Russia is leading the defence of historical truth and values of sovereignty, authenticity and tradition around the world. It is difficult to assess exactly how successful Russian memory diplomacy has been at converting its targets but the domestic utility of these narratives is plain for all to see and, in turn, provides justification for promoting these same narratives abroad. While memory diplomacy covers narratives propagated abroad, as opposed to the types of narratives delivered by state-aligned media at home, both types divide countries into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in accordance with whether they are in touch with their memory and traditions or whether they are subjugated to supposed American cultural colonization. The Russian government and media situate their nation at the vanguard of this fight against cultural colonization and for memory and historical insight. But for this to be in any way credible, the media and politicians need to provide evidence that Russians are truly engaging with history. The Kremlin, with the help of various bodies, set up the conditions for this evidence – and sometimes just manufactured the evidence – at the same time as spreading and inculcating their key messages. The following chapter examines what these initiatives looked like in practice.

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Living Forms of Patriotism At a meeting with representatives of patriotic youth education in 2012, Vladimir Putin called on civil society to generate ‘genuinely living forms of patriotism’ through initiatives that promote a positive, Kremlin-loyal history of Russia (Prezident Rossii 2012b). So far, we have seen how, through historical framing and their securitization of historical narrative, the Russian government could make their vision of the past a topic of almost daily conversation that required urgent and consistent attention. But this vision belongs within a wider mission, one that exists beyond language and can be felt in the physical realm. To ensure its messages had the desired effect, the government needed to create the conditions and physical infrastructure for ordinary Russians to not only recognize the call to history but to actively engage with, and reproduce, these historical narratives as much as possible. Emphasizing the need for these initiatives, Vladimir Putin argued that such events are ‘important because they make our country stronger [. . .] and our success both economically and in the humanitarian sphere, and elsewhere, depends to a considerable degree on them’.1 These more active formulations of the call to history developed from a performative political culture that had grown markedly under Putin’s rule, particularly in the sphere of memory. Building on the preceding chapters, which detailed the legislative and discursive framework within which the call to history was embedded, this chapter looks at the performances and projects that brought these words and laws to life in the cultural sphere and beyond. It starts from the top, looking at the role of the Ministry of Culture in forcing its patriotic history into everyday life, with initiatives often personally overseen by Vladimir Medinskii, Minister 1

Taken from promotional materials for the ‘Forgotten Feat’ history festival, provided to the author by the organizer of the festival, Pavel Zheltov, following an interview in September 2018 (Zheltov 2018a, 2018b) .

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of Culture from 2012 to 2020. A committed mythomaniac, Medinskii also spearheaded the precipitous growth of the RMHS, to which the government outsourced a considerable amount of its memory politics. The RMHS placed a particular emphasis on youth projects, such as military history tours and military history camps and festivals. To do so, it largely used government money and followed strict government instruction but presented itself as a non-governmental organization. This chapter examines how the RMHS created an impression of a groundswell of memory-focused activity and details how, as well as disguising state structures as independent bodies, the Kremlin took over genuine civil society initiatives, including the now global Immortal Regiment movement (May 9 n.d.). When there was genuine and grassroots public engagement, state actors worked hard to appropriate it and then redirect or channel such energies into a format amenable to the Kremlin. In this way, almost all post-2012 major historical initiatives can be directly or indirectly traced or linked to the government, with the Ministry of Culture playing a prominent role under Vladimir Medinskii’s stewardship.

The Ministry of Culture and Vladimir Medinskii Between 2012 and 2018, the Ministry of Culture was instrumental in translating the call to history into physical activities, assuming increasing control over areas traditionally the concern of the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Culture’s expansive remit already covered traditional cultural spheres, such as art, music, film, and literature, but it then further expanded to cover tourism, archives, copyright, censorship and heritage. From 2012, the area of historical and cultural heritage played a dominant role in the ministry’s activities, as documented in the many hundreds of pages of reports they released between 2012 and 2020 (Minkul’tury 2019). These reports show that the Ministry of Culture organized around one million educational events a year, a majority of which focused on preserving history and (an eclectically defined) historical truth. This emphasis was also reflected in Vladimir Medinskii’s numerous sharp-tongued speeches as Minister of Culture in which he repeatedly stressed the need to preserve and defend Russian history from attack. While the scale of the events demonstrates

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how the ministry provided ample opportunity for citizen engagement with the ‘right’ type of memory, Medinskii’s own rationalization and production of these historical narratives leaves little doubt as to the political, rather than purely educational, emphasis inherent to them. Appointed in 2012, at the start of Putin’s third term and the beginning of the call to history, Vladimir Medinskii’s ministership heralded a significant increase in the influence of the Ministry of Culture thanks to his strongly worded statements and provocative interviews. Despite his apparent obsession with defending Russia from cultural infection by the West, Medinskii’s backstory reveals a more complicated trajectory. Educated at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), he completed his first PhD in political science before returning to academia in 2011, shortly before assuming the post of Minister of Culture, to defend a second dissertation. In his new thesis, Medinskii argued tendentiously that there was a lack of objectivity in Western coverage of Russian history from the second half of the fifteenth century through to the seventeenth century (and presumably after that too). Certainly, the notion of subjective misinterpretation of Russian history was a topic he cared about, but seemingly not enough to write his own thesis, parts of which appear to be plagiarized (Meduza 2016). A further question mark is raised by Medinskii’s own career path between these two theses, including running the major PR firm that represented the notorious MMM pyramid scheme (Meduza 2016), in which millions of Russians lost their savings (BBC 2003). It is more than a little ironic that the man infamous for censoring and battling Western cultural influence sold to the Russian people one of its very worst iterations at a time when they were most vulnerable. Despite these black marks, Medinskii revels in his status as a patriot and as an academic, frequently delivering lectures on an extraordinary range of historical topics, during which he comes across as knowledgeable and erudite, if colourful in his interpretations. He is a prolific writer, having composed seventeen non-fiction works, all of which explore the topic of Russian history and memory. The works all touch upon similar themes, with content often copied or paraphrased from book to book; for example, much of the 2015 book On Russia as a Prison of Nations is taken from a 2009 work titled On Russian Slavery, Dirt, and the Prison of Nations (V. Medinskii 2015a). Several

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of the books were published as part of a series on outsiders’ (negative) myths about Russia. The books’ overriding message is that Russia’s enemies have slandered its history and national character out of pure malevolence. They have even managed to deceive people, luring Russians into ignorance of their almost uniformly positive history. The books advance some very original arguments: for example, that ethnic minorities within the Russian Empire were incredibly grateful to live there, were very happy with their treatment (or ought to have been), and peoples living outside its borders streamed into the Russian Empire because it treated minorities so fairly. Medinskii graciously concedes that the Jews were, at times, an exception to this rule. No evidence for any of these points is forthcoming, despite the confident tone of the author’s assertions. As suggested by Medinskii’s oeuvre, while there is a tendency to characterize Vladimir Putin as the driving force behind the call to history, it is Medinskii who is the true believer. Indeed, Putin even discouraged or reprimanded Medinskii for some of his more outré ideas for fighting Western cultural influences. Perhaps the most significant example of this discord came with the publication of the Foundations of the State Cultural Policy of the Russian Federation (2014), which set out forthcoming Russian cultural policy: broadly, what to promote, why and how (Pravitel’stvo RF 2014). Originally, the Ministry of Culture, with personal input from Medinskii, wrote the first drafts of the Foundations (Gudima 2014), the text boldly declaring that ‘Russia is not Europe’ and asserting that only cultural products that were politically useful should and would be supported. It abounded in historicism, arguing that the purpose of promoting cultural education was, first and foremost, to create a common worldview among the Russian people. Its second aim was to create a spiritual cultural matrix for the nation (a ‘cultural consciousness’ if you will). Despite liberally sprinkling the text with quotations from Putin, the President’s team blocked and disowned the draft. A Presidential Administration working group eventually rewrote the Foundations from scratch, producing a more sober and less politicized view of Russian cultural policy. These hiccoughs did not deter Medinskii from his accelerated transformation of the Ministry of Culture into the ‘Ministry of Memory’ (Us’kova 2020). From 2014, the Ministry of Culture engaged heavily in historical outreach across a wide variety of formats, from university historical discussion clubs to children’s

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war tourism. A particularly popular form of outreach included the creation of military history clubs and camps, where children aged between twelve and seventeen could learn exclusively positive views of Russia’s past and re-enact battles, reliving the epic and often mythologized wars of the past that proved, according to Medinskii, that Russians possessed an extra chromosome (BBC Russian 2013). A 280-page report on the ministry’s activities in 2015 listed hundreds of such groups and similar initiatives that they established and/or financially supported in that year alone (Minkul’tury 2016). The Ministry of Culture justified the establishment of military history camps and youth initiatives by presenting them as a solution to the ‘problem’ of historical falsification, and attempts by the West to denigrate Russian history: these camps would inculcate a patriotic vision of history and thus instil resilient patriotism in young people (Bashkova 2017: 82–3; Prezident Rossii 2012b; Pravitel’stvo RF 2015; Prezident Rossii 2016b). In his numerous statements on the need to teach young people the ‘correct’ history, Medinskii has argued that Russian youth are at particular cultural risk from the West. Moreover, they represent the country’s future and, as such, (what amounts to) historical indoctrination is a way of securing the ‘correct’ memory for years to come, ensuring Russia’s ‘spiritual’ (dukhovnoe) development (V. Medinskii 2015b; Uskov 2013; Zabelina 2017). Medinskii frequently uses sententious language to argue the case for ‘educating’ children in officially approved historical narratives. On one occasion, when asked what a father should do if their son has read a version of history that contradicts the accepted Russian cultural memory, Medinskii replied that ‘you need to explain to him that there is good, and there is evil, ideally through your own example’ (V. Medinskii 2015b) . Like the father from his analogy, Medinskii took a personal role in explaining the ‘good’ history to his figurative children. This has involved promoting and funding content that fits his narrative, including a film called Panfilov’s TwentyEight, which recounts a long-since disproven Soviet war myth about twentyeight soldiers who all (supposedly) died heroically defending Moscow from the Nazis. The creator was struggling to crowdfund production of the film until Medinskii stepped in and provided Ministry of Culture money and his own advice. Ever muscular in his mnemonic interventions, Medinskii also wrote his own films and television series, including a documentary series,

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Myths about Russia, which aired on Russia’s Pervyi kanal and was based on his books Myths about Russia and Myths about the USSR. He declared himself the creator – but not screenwriter – of Sobibor, a film about a prisoner-led uprising in a Nazi death camp (TASS 2018). The Russian government and embassies abroad widely promoted the film as evidence of the heroism of the Soviet people, ignoring the Jewish identity of most prisoners (Rossotrudnichestvo 2017). Even the ministry’s more traditional remit was infected with this historical preoccupation, including the key cultural policy of kinofikatsiya, which entailed the building of cinemas in Russian towns, as well as providing funding to promote and support domestic cinema, cartoons and television. Reporting to Putin on the success of these measures, Medinskii explained that ‘together with the television channels, we decided to support those series which it is not profitable for the television channels to make [. . .] expensive historical series’ (Prezident Rossii 2016c). He made it clear that the constant invocation of history was a deliberate part of the Ministry of Culture’s approach to ensuring the prominence of history (as a topic) in everyday life. For Medinskii, the importance of this task was to be contextualized against the Western corruption of history, as when he railed against Russian cinema and television privileging American war films or even news: The surname Ryan is known to everyone but hardly anyone knows the surname Gazdanovy2 [. . .] That is how they brainwashed us, and the PR ideological organs of the state machine were broken then. They should have answered all these ‘voices’ (Voice of America, BBC and other stations broadcasting on the territory of the USSR – note by Lenta) rather than block them. It should never have been permitted that Seva Novgorodtsev (BBC Russia correspondent) beat the Red Army. Lenta 2015a

The former minister’s hyperbolic language contributed to the persistent characterization of historical discussion or disagreement as a battle over truth, even between right and wrong.

2

This is a reference to the seven Gazdanovy brothers who all died in various battles of the Great Patriotic War. Their mother died after burying her third son, while the father lived until the end of the war but died after burying his last son.

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This battle began to subsume ever greater areas of traditional culture, including those not inherently related to memory. For example, the Ministry of Culture organized three sequential special cultural years dedicated to the ‘humanities’ between 2014 and 2016: The Year of Culture, the Year of Literature and the Year of Cinema, respectively. Although the focus of each year appeared different, in fact they were united by a strong emphasis on historical themes, especially (the official memory of) the Great Patriotic War. The Ministry of Culture even released special metro carriages in honour of the Year of Cinema that were plastered with stills and scripts from Second World War films, illustrating the way that such initiatives are often subordinated to historical concerns, especially the Great Patriotic War. The train carriages, still in use today, are part of numerous efforts to engage people with history not only in traditional cultural spaces, such as museums or lecture halls, but also in the everyday sphere, such as on transport or in the park. Local and city authorities frequently use public parks to host history festivals; for example, Europe’s largest history festival, Times and Epochs (Vremena i epokhi), launched during Putin’s third presidential term, and takes place in summer across Moscow’s central boulevards and parks. The Ministry of Culture also assumed responsibility for restoring, protecting and building historical monuments, including the erection of dozens of new statues, most of which commemorated the Great Patriotic War. This included a project led by Medinskii’s father, Rostislav Medinskii, to increase the number of statues to Soviet POWs. Naturally, monument-building literally increased the visibility of the war, but from 2016 there was a definite shift in focus from monuments to movements, reflected in the doubling of the new budget for the State Programme for Patriotic Education between 2011 and 2016, reaching 1.67 billion roubles. Whereas earlier budgets had privileged commemorations and monuments, the 2016 plan allocated more than a third of its budget for ‘youth military preparation’, reflecting a broader shift towards mobilizational activities in which the state’s role was less prominent (Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2018). Government spending allocated for events that required public engagement, such as ‘mobilization’ and ‘competitions’, more than tripled compared to the previous plan (Goode 2018). Interestingly, the budget for the Ministry of Culture itself did not increase significantly, rising from 90 billion roubles in 2012 to just over 94.3 billion

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roubles in 2016, after a drop to 89.3 billion roubles in the economically challenging year of 2015. Instead, activities were increasingly outsourced to the RMHS, which undertook many of the Ministry of Culture’s main initiatives and was funded by them, but also by private (Kremlin-friendly) donors (Minkul’tury 2020). Such behaviour is part of a pattern whereby, despite their muscular approach to independent forms of commemoration, the government masks its involvement so that state-directed organizations appear to be led by ordinary people or civil society. The lack of transparency is a recurring theme; for example, the All-Russian National Front and the Community (Soobshchestvo) GONGOs3 are concerned with building patriotic activities, with Vladimir Putin attending events for both organizations where they were presented as non-state actors (Kremlin.ru 2016a). Over this period, the state preferred to ‘outsource’ the implementation of its approved cultural memory initiatives and historical narratives to organizations, GONGOs and assorted funds, such as the Fund for Developing Civil Society (Vinokurovaya 2014), while reducing its direct funding for official programmes related to state symbols and state history. Somewhat abruptly, Putin removed Medinskii from his post in January 2020, replacing him with Ol’ga Lyubimova, who had previously declared that she was ‘not bloody cultured at all’ and hated exhibitions, museums, opera, ballet and classical music (BBC 2020). Given the ministry’s focus on inculcating politicized narratives of history, these preferences may not prove an insurmountable impediment to satisfactory job performance. Either way, the ‘purity’ of Russian history appears to remain very much in the hands of Medinskii, who was immediately appointed as presidential aide on questions relating to history. He also led the initial rounds of Russia’s negotiations with Ukraine in 2022, despite, or perhaps because of, calling Ukraine a historical phantom shortly before the war began. After being decried as too lenient, Medinskii was removed from this role and put in charge of developing patriotic indoctrination programmes for university students. He maintains his role as a presidential aide alongside his continued position as President of the RMHS, the organization to which we now turn in more depth. 3

The term GONGO (government-organized non-governmental organization) is used in Russia to describe organizations that present as, even pretend to be NGOs but are in fact funded and closely managed by government figures.

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The Russian Military Historical Society The RMHS was established in 2012 by Presidential decree No 1710 (Prezident Rossii 2012c), but it makes bold claims to a more established lineage, that of the Imperial Russian Military Historical Society. A glossy promotional book released in 2017 to celebrate the (‘new’) RMHS’s achievements states that the original imperial society was set up as a bulwark against the revolutionary stirrings of the age: it was believed that ‘studying martial traditions and the glorious history of the Russian Army would provide moral succour to society and strengthen’ the government (Bashkova 2017: 4). By posing as the inheritor, or continuation, of this Imperial RMHS, today’s RMHS arrogates to itself a similar role, that of using history for moral and state-defending purposes. These objectives were made clear by President Putin, who argued that the RMHS’s mission pertains to ‘consolidating the efforts of the government and society in studying the military history of Russia’s past [. . .] and patriotic upbringing’ (Bashkova 2017: 9). Across its marketing literature, the RMHS states that exclusively positive versions of Russian history should be taught (RVIO 2016). The RMHS is best described as a GONGO, whose proximity and subordination to the government is underscored by the number of senior ministers made honourable members of the society alongside Medinskii, such as the Deputy Prime Minister Dmitrii Rogozin, Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu and Minister of Transport Maksim Sokolov. Shoigu is also a member of the cabinet council overseeing the RMHS’s work. As President of the RMHS, Medinskii plays a particularly active role in the society’s initiatives. In an interview with me that took place in August 2018 at the RMHS’s headquarters, Konstantin Pakhalyuk, an RMHS employee, confirmed that Medinskii was frequently present at the headquarters, at least once a week.4 Indeed, on my visit to the RMHS, in the chic Chistye prudy region of Moscow, I encountered the then-minister emerging from his blacked-out official car in the courtyard. Such is Medinskii’s personal interest in, perhaps ownership of, the society, that even after being dismissed as Minister for Culture in 2020, he still retained the

4

To clarify, Konstantin Pakhalyuk was talking in a personal capacity, albeit at RMHS headquarters, and his views represent his opinions and are not the official views of the RMHS.

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presidency of RMHS. It has even been argued that he has turned the RMHS into a personal fiefdom, given the important roles he has secured for his father, Rostislav Medinskii, in the design and erection of POW memorials (Reiter and Golunov 2015; Amos 2022). Other members of the council overseeing the work of the RMHS include Kremlin-friendly oligarchs who have donated generously to the organization, such as Sistema’s Vladimir Yevtushenkov, Transneft’s Nikolai Tokarev and onetime Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin, who was placed under US sanctions for his role in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Between them – and others – these pro-government oligarchs have donated tens of millions of roubles at least, although efforts to find out the sources of other private donations have proved fruitless (Us’kova 2020). The main source of funding comes from the government in the form of substantial subsidies from the Ministry of Culture. From 2018 to 2020, the Minister of Culture signed off two billion roubles’ worth of funding for the RMHS (Us’kova 2020). Given that Medinskii would have been responsible for signing this off in 2018 and 2019, as Minister of Culture, even though he was also the president of the organization, there was an obvious and irresolvable conflict of interest. This was far from the only hint of corruption. Like a suspicious number of Russian government ministers, Medinskii boasts an inner circle who are supernaturally talented at acquiring wealth and property with values beyond the wildest dreams of your average Russian (or British) citizen. Well-regarded liberal Russian newspapers have hinted that this wealth may come directly from misuse or nepotism in the allocation of Ministry of Culture funds, although there is no hard evidence (Reiter and Golunov 2015; Us’kova 2020). There are certainly questions to answer, however, including in relation to the RMHS Endowment Fund, where the society actively gathered donations for years, but which then went dormant in 2019, leaving it unclear what has happened to these donations. The Fund’s website has not been updated since 2016 (RVIO Fond n.d.). Much less predictable than the story of the missing funds is the story of the missing statues, investigated by the liberal Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta (Gutiontov 2019). In June 2015, Medinskii, accompanied by prominent politician Leonid Slutsky and the Oscar-winning director Nikita Mikhalkov, hosted the opening ceremony for Military Commanders’ Square in Moscow.

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The square had a large statue of St George slaying the dragon, surrounded by busts of famous military commanders. However, after 2015, there were strange goings-on in the square: certain busts started disappearing (e.g., of General Bagration, Marshal Rokossovskii and the Tsarist naval officer von Bellingshausen), while others appeared from nowhere, apparently all produced by an extortionately expensive statue-maker partnered exclusively with the RMHS. When Novaya gazeta asked the RMHS what was happening, the latter denied all knowledge or involvement, saying the square was now owned by a different organization, who also pleaded ignorance. By 2019, the statues had all been replaced by busts of famous fighter pilots. Even the hitherto steadfast St George had been removed, just his plinth remaining. There are stories of the same thing happening across hundreds of RMHS-project squares (Gutiontov 2019). Such episodes further undermine the notion that Medinskii and his ilk are primarily concerned with leading a historical renaissance rather than with lining their own pockets and power nest, but not all the money has disappeared without trace. Figures spanning the period 2013 to 2020 show that RMHS intruded into a dizzying array of cultural spheres, both low- and highbrow. In just seven years, it was responsible for producing the following: 3,000 memorial plaques; 650 open lectures; (expert commentary and input into) 600 documentaries and films; 300 monuments; 251 military history tours; 213 military history festivals; 155 military history camps; 108 search expeditions; seventy conferences; forty-five films and series; forty exhibitions; nine themed trains; seven historical commissions; six historical web portals; four museums; and a stationery range. Since 2017, the RMHS has continued to go from strength to strength. Breaking out of its Moscow base, the RMHS now delivers its projects across the country, establishing regional affiliates in every region of Russia (plus Crimea). Most of these affiliates cooperate closely with the local authorities, local United Russia politicians and the central RMHS office in Moscow, from which their narrative focus is delivered, as suggested by the forms and formats of cultural memory promoted by the RMHS offices even in areas where such narratives cannot resonate. For example, in the Republic of Kalmykia, the RMHS produces initiatives and materials that ignore the Soviet authorities’ deportations of the entire Kalmyk nation, preferring to force that region’s own

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special memory into the top-down centralized official memory (McGlynn 2020b). As well as expanding its geographical reach, the RMHS has increased the physical visibility of its approved cultural memory in everyday life – at least in Moscow. The main tourist and shopping street of Old Arbat now hosts an enormous mural to Marshal Zhukov. Guests to the city will see similar murals as they drive from the airport. In this way, a war that ended almost eighty years ago is becoming a growing fixture in the physical and visual infrastructure of Russia’s capital city. Likewise, it is difficult to find a wellfunded historical show or exhibition that has happened without the RMHS’s involvement in the last few years. The RMHS is easily the most prominent actor inculcating the Kremlin’s approved cultural memory in popular society, propagating politically convenient versions of history across a wide range of popular media and various interfaces, thereby ensuring the government’s successful deployment of a ‘unifying’ narrative. In his interview with me, RMHS employee Konstantin Pakhalyuk contextualized the RMHS’s role in, and importance to, the ‘call to history’, which he argues began ‘in 2012, with the foundation of RMHS’ (RVIO Employee 2018). Explaining the need for the government to provide and then feed a sense of historical unity, Pakhalyuk argued that: . . . even if you wanted to use religion and ethnicity to bring Russians together, they wouldn’t really work [but history] is something that people accept as a natural point of unity, whatever the criticism [. . . so] for the last few years there has been a process whereby history is the thing that is transformed into the foundation of Russian society. It is no easy thing to create an ephemeral identity, one that goes beyond saying ‘we are not x or y’ but rather why we are gathered here together, why Russia should exist. That is, that which is normally answered by referring to values, to the general good and so on, there in the values should be located the very idea of the nation. RVIO Employee 2018

As is clear from Pakhalyuk’s comments, he sees the government’s call to history as a major and deliberate endeavour, but one concerned also with morality and imbued with a clear purpose. Like Vladimir Putin, who frequently cites the 1990s as the antithesis of the national, cultural and historical unity he desires for Russia, Pakhalyuk blames

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the government’s and country’s need for a hegemonic unifying historical narrative on the chaos of the Yeltsin era. Arguing that it was normal for there to be such an intense focus on shared history, Pakhalyuk explains: Our people and society are searching for their foundations. Before this, it was the 1990s and that was full-on chaos. Lots of people wanted the place where they lived to unite them with other people, with the people they shared the place with [. . . In the 1990s) there was a lot of freedom, not everything was as bad as they like to make out nowadays. That much is obvious. But the main thing is that there was a lot of uncertainty, which links back to our [conversation] topic because the search for a national idea about the foundations of Russian unity begins with Putin in 2000. It is this that is the idea of patriotism. The problem comes with trying to decipher what is patriotism and why you must be loyal to your country – it is complicated because patriotism demands some form of continuity. And we haven’t found anything better than that we are all united by a shared history [. . .] here in Russia history plays a role that is not the same as in any other nation state but rather it assumes a heightened purpose because it becomes what I would call a ‘quasi-foundation’. RVIO Employee 2018

Konstantin Pakhalyuk’s eloquence throughout our interview suggests that RMHS’s employees are fully aware of their organization’s function and the role of the ‘call to history’. What is especially interesting here is the question of cooptation: although the Russian people are open to history as a foundation, how can this history be spread and promoted in a way that makes it unifying and makes people proud? Clearly, that requires a centralized approach, unerringly positive, but also interactive, with which people wish to engage. In many ways, this question also summarizes the RMHS’s mission: to produce the government and media’s approved cultural memory initiatives in a way that resonates with and interests ordinary people. To realize the unifying potential of history, the government also needs to encourage people to take an interest in the historical narrative, to imbibe it, even to practice it. In other words, they need to bring history back to life. One way of garnering interest in a traditionally academic sphere, such as history, is to render it less academic and more entertaining. Hollywood films or blockbusters like Dunkirk, Pearl Harbour and Saving Private Ryan are likely to have a much more formative

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impact on many American and British viewers’ impressions and conceptualizations of the Second World War than any history textbook. The same is true in Russia, where films and television shows are especially influential. This in part explains the RMHS’s and Medinskii’s focus on cinema and television, from policies to build a cinema in every Russian town to diatribes against American war films for their perversion of history, as noted earlier in this chapter. Through the RMHS, Medinskii has funded numerous Russian war films with the aim of dislodging Hollywood’s cinematic hegemony in the war film genre. Just some of the films involving RMHS writers include Stalingrad (2015); Battalion (2015); The Battle for Sebastopol (2015); Road to Berlin (2015); Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight Men (2016); Indestructible (2018); T-34 (2019); At Dawn it’s Quiet Here (2015); Convoy Forty-Eight (2017); Red Dog (2017); Seventy-Two Hours and Tanks for Stalin (2018); The Cry of Silence (2019); and Sobibor (2018). While each film had differing levels of RMHS involvement, Sobibor and Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight stand out for Medinskii’s personal participation, already referenced. Sobibor was a Russian war drama set around the uprising in the Nazi death camp Sobibor led by Soviet (and Jewish) soldier Aleksandr Pechersky. Sobibor reinforced a very pro-Russian view of history; for example, the Sobibor uprising was a Jewish uprising, but the Russian film styles it as a Soviet-led affair. While it is understandable that the creators would depict the German guards as sadists, the characterization of the Poles as self-interested and submissive probably tells us much more about the current state of Russo– Polish relations than it does about the historical reality (Sawkins 2020). The RMHS and a host of other organizations (the RHS, the Aleksandr Pechersky Fund and the Russian Geographical Society) collaborated to promote the film widely around the world, with screenings organized from Luanda, Angola to New Delhi, India. At home, the film was released to coincide with Victory Day celebrations and was advertised widely on television and billboards, including with a television programme about Sobibor, which followed a similar narrative plot to the film. Moreover, there was also an exhibition launched at the Moscow Museum of the Great Patriotic War, which was centred on the film’s theme (McGlynn 2020c). In this way, important war films repeated the Kremlin’s approved historical narratives, which were then reiterated through the media and other popular culture vehicles, which endows

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the (at times patently false) historical legends with a sense of accuracy borne of repetition and familiarity. Of course, if the average viewer was keen to learn more about the historical events they had just seen dramatized, they would likely look online. However, as detailed in Chapter 2, even before the introduction of more stringent media laws in 2022, Russia’s main search engine, Yandex, deliberately depopularized news and media sources offering alternative content to that of the Kremlin. Moreover, the laws on extremism, ‘rehabilitating’ Nazism and offending veterans have made many such sources exceptionally reticent to publish potentially contentious content on the Second World War, regardless of whether it is true. As such, it is highly likely that online searches would direct them to resources that reiterated the official Sobibor narrative. For example, a quick Yandex search of ‘Sobibor History’ in Russian showed a TASS article first, followed by Wikipedia, several other articles on the film by pro-government news sources and then the RMHS’s own historical portal entry about the film. The government’s control over (historical) content produces a warped environment in which even those who engage with history are directed to proKremlin versions of the past. The government and politicians also distracted from state involvement in memory initiatives by taking every opportunity to stress new projects as ‘grassroots’ endeavours, merely supported by the state or the RMHS. Medinskii deployed this tactic when promoting the film Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight, stressing its supposedly humble origins. As mentioned, the film’s creator had originally tried to crowdfund the costs, after all major film houses, perhaps not without justification, refused to contribute or support the content. This crowdfunding campaign brought it to Medinskii’s attention and he gave the film backing and money from the Ministry of Culture. Despite the considerable support from the Ministry of Culture, the RMHS’s promotional documents emphasized that the film was ‘created on the people’s funds’ (Bashkova 2017). This is important because it is another way for the RMHS and the government to present themselves as responsive to a societal need for positive patriotic history, rather than as the producers of it. It turns RMHS’s activities into part of a dialogue with society at large, one in which everyone is ostensibly united in a common view of the past. Another, admittedly extreme, way to avoid the elitist connotations of academic history is to abandon historical truth entirely. Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight

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recreates a Soviet propaganda legend about twenty-eight guardsmen who heroically defend Moscow from German tanks during the 1941 Battle of Moscow. The most startling element of the film’s plot is that the events in it are demonstrably untrue and that was discovered in the 1960s and has been public knowledge since at least the 1980s. In the original Soviet legend, all twentyeight men died defending Moscow, but when an academic found several of the men alive in the 1960s, the myth began to unravel, as documented in the Afanas’ev report. Brezhnev intervened personally to defend the myth, but when the archives opened in the late 1980s, everyone learnt that the legend was entirely concocted (BBC Russian 2016; Kostomarova 2014). Yet Medinskii chose to defend and promote this film, arguing that (fictional) legends are sometimes truer than truth anyway. It hardly bears stating that this reveals how little this campaigner against historical falsification really cares for accuracy. What it does encapsulate, however, is an attitude that privileges reducing the complexities of history into content that entertains and appeals, rather than educates or challenges.

Entertainment not education As the previous section has shown, the RMHS can produce entertaining pseudo-history that functions as a political tool of mass engagement. In the USSR, the Great Patriotic War sat at the heart of the development of the Soviet system, a touchpoint against and through which Soviet elites and ordinary citizens alike defined their lives, their beliefs and the world around them (Weiner 2002). Yet, despite this, when writing about the war cult in the 1970s USSR, Nina Tumarkin describes how ‘the cult of the Great Patriotic War appeared to have backfired, inspiring a callous derision on the part of many youths’ (Tumarkin 1994: 157). Discussing a similar disengagement, this time relating to how language became divorced from reality in the late USSR, the anthropologist Aleksei Yurchak (2005) argues that many Soviet citizens parsed and interpreted the authorities’ language, using it to ‘perform’ as expected, but no longer trusting or believing what it said. To avoid a situation where citizens simply hollowly perform or parrot the historical narrative without believing it or relating to it, the government and

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RMHS needed to bring history to life. This required ways of interacting with the past that extended beyond commemorative ritual and that could be depicted as grassroots or organic developments. This latter point was also important for government legitimacy since the argument that the government was leading and in tune with a growing national demand for a restoration of Russia’s roots required there to be active engagement from the public. Otherwise, it would look like just a top-down imposition of an ideology rather than the groundswell of cultural and historical awareness the Kremlin suggested was taking place in Russian society. The RMHS and other government-funded initiatives and organizations have met these requirements by making history relevant in a number of fairly imaginative ways. First, they have made it entertaining, as reflected in the glut of films and television shows on history, including not only those mentioned above but also highly conspiratorial and dramatic ‘documentaries’. But these efforts have extended beyond popular culture into more traditional spheres for engaging with history, such as museums, where the RMHS has championed an unscholarly and highly political approach to exhibitions and curation. It is worth noting that the RMHS’s contributions to museums and exhibition work grew notably after 2014 when Medinskii’s sister, Tat’yana Medinskaya, assumed the role of Deputy Director of ROSIZO, a museum and exhibition centre subordinated to the Ministry of Culture (Reiter and Golunov 2015). In these and other RMHS-backed and -funded exhibitions there was an unsurprising tendency to denigrate objective investigation in favour of narratives of heroization and glorification. Correspondingly, most of the RMHS’s exhibitions oversaw a move away from traditional academic approaches, focusing on emotive, even sentimental narratives that brought very little educational value. In the exhibition ‘Remember [. . .] the Soviet Solider Saved the World’, which ran from 2015 to 2016 across Russia, there were artefacts and images that reflected the heroism of Red Army soldiers in liberating European nations. The accompanying text presented these nations as ungrateful and dismissive of these sacrifices (Bashkova 2017: 16). The lack of objectivity incites emotions that reinforce the government narrative: we, the Russian people, made great sacrifices and those whom we liberated are ingrates. Without including any information on the post-war occupation of Eastern Europe, it would be impossible for the attendee to understand why these

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countries are ungrateful, thereby fuelling further division and enmity in a way that supports the government’s argument that Russian history, memory and identity are under attack from abroad. The emphasis on emotional arguments that vilify and/or deify rather than promote objective learning has belonged to a broader pattern among statefunded or promoted exhibitions and museums. It was made possible by the RMHS’s and other government-backed historical initiatives’ strong preference for multimedia and so-called ‘historical informational’ (istoricheskiinformatsiionnyi) – in other words, storytelling – exhibitions that were scarce of artefacts.5 The RMHS Soviet Nuremberg exhibition in 2016, for example, contained very few artefacts and instead just attempted to bring history to life through multimedia and installations. One of the most successful government exhibitions has been the Russia – My History series. Originally on display at Manezh Square in 2015, the exhibition was so popular that it was permanently relocated to a pavilion at VDNKh, a sprawling park complex originally built to showcase Soviet achievements. The exhibition contains no artefacts at all, a key reason it could be reproduced across a further twenty locations. Instead, it offers an experiential emphasis combined with a personalized narrative and focus on ordinary people’s lives, albeit with a marked tendentiousness. For example, the coverage of the 1990s is entirely negative. In the words of a former senior employee of the Museum of Modern History discussing the Russia – My History phenomena: It was interesting that this form of multimedia entertainment exhibitionshow, located outside the museum, was now playing the role of alibi, to construct an anti-academic narrative. The museum, however conservative it may be, must respect the facts and documents but at this exhibition there were almost no documents at all. Budraitskis 2016

5

To a certain extent, this mirrored developments across Western museums as well, which are increasingly interactive and focused on bringing events ‘to life’ (Hawkey 2004; Reading 2003). That said, the politicization of the narrative, with its constant references to Ukraine, and the focus on rhetoric over evidence, distinguished this and other Russian exhibitions. It also seems improbable that there would be such militaristic activities in most Western museums; for example, visitors can storm the Reichstag at the end of the main exhibition of the Moscow Museum of the Great Patriotic War.

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The former museum official also described the emergence of this exhibition as a sign of societal degradation, whereby people preferred to see Russian history as a multimedia project. The Russian Ministry of Education apparently also prefers this approach, having recommended a visit to one of the Russia – My History shows as an activity for all Russian schoolchildren (Minprosveshchenie Rossii 2021). This overly propagandistic approach risks upsetting historical enthusiasts who otherwise support the government. Pavel Zheltov is a historical re-enactor and initiator of several history clubs and festivals for adults and children alike, including ‘Forgotten Feat’ (Zabytyi podvig) a large annual historical festival in Novgorod. Zheltov has received presidential grants, cooperated closely with the RMHS and been lavished with praise by Vladimir Putin. However, in an interview with me, he expressed some recalcitrance over the government’s approach to encouraging public interest in history. Zheltov explained that he had noticed a sharp increase in attendees to his Saint Petersburg historical re-enactment clubs after the government began to promote its call to history. But among the newcomers, few cared to understand the facts of the historical events. Instead, they were ‘more interested in entertainment than in learning history’ (Zheltov 2018b). He described them, somewhat derisively, as ‘fellow-travellers’ (poputchiki) who lacked the commitment required to become amateur historians and who were just looking for a ‘pleasant way to spend their time’ (Zheltov 2018b ). If Pavel Zheltov’s experiences are anything to go by, the government’s approach has been somewhat successful. After all, the Kremlin’s aim was not historical enlightenment – whatever they might say – but rather creating the sense that ‘all of us, businessmen and employees, cultural practitioners and security officers, city dwellers and villagers, Russians and ethnic minorities have something in common, something that for all of us is very important. At this moment anything that makes us different or sometimes divides us is not important’ (Lanovoi 2015). Instead of expanding historical knowledge, the government and GONGOs try to turn history into a form of entertainment that reinforces prejudices and identifies emotion as the most authentic means of knowing the past. This approach to history is not necessarily unpopular. A military history club organizer who works with a regional branch of the RMHS but asked for anonymity saw emotional engagement as the ultimate goal of their work:

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If they want to learn facts and figures, then there are textbooks but for us, for our organization, the purpose is to make the young people feel a connection to the history. For this, we need to elicit their emotions, to make it so that they can relate to these people not as historical figures but as people like themselves [. . .] without this emotional connection, our work and its aim, to spread awareness of the heroism of our grandfathers, our ancestors, well it won’t be possible without emotions. But it also wouldn’t be desirable: without emotion you can’t understand history.6

Based on the organizer’s comments, it is clear that, for those fulfilling this type of role, emotion is not a distraction from learning about history but a facilitator to truly understand it. Although he had cooperated with RMHS, this organizer had established the clubs themselves, suggesting that the emotive conceptualization of history enjoys at least some popularity on a grassroots level. Likewise, despite his frustration with amateur re-enactors, Pavel Zheltov, the aforementioned organizer of several historical festivals, explained that emotion was essential to his approach to teaching the wider public about history: We understand that it is through emotions, through visualization, that a person will grasp the historical information first, much more than through a school textbook. This process began slowly at first, then it gathered speed and now it is becoming ever greater [. . .] When you form an emotional link with a historical topic [. . .] it brings history to life and you begin to think, what would I have done for my country if I had lived then? Zheltov 2018b

In his comments, Zheltov draws attention to an important point: by encouraging people to form an emotional link, they are much more likely to relate to the person or history, to empathize and so to imagine themselves in their position. In this way, an emotional link encourages imagination and the development of personal input. Yet, to really connect with people’s emotions, it is necessary to create some personal link, or at least a sense of continuity, with the past. As seen in the

6

This quotation was taken from an interview with an organizer in southern Russia in September 2018. The interview was conducted online, over Skype.

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earlier analysis of historical framing, some of the media’s most emotive uses of history were in descriptions of heritage. Perhaps the most obvious examples of this were the calls to honour the memory of ‘your’ grandfathers in east Ukraine. This plays on emotion by speaking to ties of family and kinship. A similar approach is prominent in government-funded historical activities, such as military history clubs and tours, like the RMHS project Roads of Victory, designed to popularize military historical tours for the purpose of uncovering the ‘heroism of our grandparents and great-grandparents’ (R. Medinskii 2016). The geography of such tours and camps fulfils a similar function: almost all of the camps and tours in question take place in the historical sites under discussion, adding a sense of authenticity to the participants’ experience. Participants in the RMHS-organized Country of Heroes and Neva Bridgehead military historical camps have also had the chance to join a ‘search battalion’ in the hunt for the remains of Red Army soldiers who died in these fields. Moreover, camps and tours frequently invite veterans as educators or guests, which reduces temporal barriers by reminding participants that many of the events in question occurred within living memory. The inclusion of veterans individualizes the participants’ experience, which is brought to life and framed in intimate language. Historical re-enactment is another way for organizers to encourage participants of such camps, tours and other activities to engage with proKremlin cultural memory. To reinforce the sense of a lived personal experience, organizations like RMHS focus on providing opportunities for people to ‘relive’ their ancestors’ experience. For example, Pavel Zheltov’s ‘Forgotten Feat’ festival, part-funded by the RMHS, provides opportunities for adults to reenact the battles of the 11th Shock Army, who were largely ignored after General Vlasov’s treachery. On a larger scale, summer history festivals take place every year in Moscow’s main boulevards, where adults dress up and recreate historical episodes. Given the sudden popularity of re-enactment clubs during and following the Ukraine Crisis, it is perhaps also relevant that numerous key commanders in the Ukraine conflict, and later the Syrian intervention, were re-enactors of Soviet and Tsarist history, including, famously, Igor’ Strelkov. But dressing up is not just for grown men and some of the approaches referenced above became much more pronounced when targeted at children.

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Securing the past for the future The Russian government’s call to history placed a special emphasis on children’s patriotic education through history from the very beginning and the RMHS has played a prominent role in establishing historical initiatives for children. These are often innovative, as with the aforementioned Roads of Victory military history tours, which RMHS set up in 2014 together with Rosturizm (a federal tourism agency that was answerable to the Ministry for Culture until 2020).7 By 2019, over 718,000 children from across Russia had taken part in one of the thirty-three available tours, which they visit on an RMHS-themed yellow bus, receiving a passport in which they collect stamps for participating in different tours. The tours often reiterate key RMHS talking points, such as the tour to the monument to Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight men, outside Moscow. All tours are provided free to successful applicants. The stated aim of the tours is to ‘preserve Russian cultural historical traditions and engage children and young people with the history of our country’ (Dorogi Pobedy 2020) an explanation that would also serve as a passable mission statement for most of the RMHS’s youth-focused activity in the sphere of military history clubs and camps. Much attention has been paid to the establishment of military patriotic clubs and camps, such as the Youth Army, which exists under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence and which teaches children martial skills. Military history clubs and camps have often been lumped in the same bracket as military patriotic schemes, despite significant differences, including in the former’s focus on history for patriotic formation: the Ministry of Culture’s 2015 report referred frequently to activities designed to engender ‘historical patriotic formation’ and ‘respect for one’s historical heritage’ among the young (Minkul’tury 2015). In keeping with the above, Vladimir Medinskii has differentiated the role of military history clubs, which are part of the Ministry of Culture, from that of military patriotic clubs, which are supervised by the Ministry of Defence. At the opening of the Neva Bridgehead military history camp in 2015, Medinskii said that the most important aspect of a military history camp was that:

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Rosturizm was dissolved on 20th October 2022.

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. . . it hardens the spirit. The aim of the camp is not to prepare soldiers, there are special educational establishments for that sort of thing. Rather, it is to raise citizens and genuine patriots to tell the truth about the history of Russia. Zabelina 2017: 2

By this point, the reader may not be surprised to learn that the RMHS has played a prominent role in establishing, funding and expanding military history clubs and camps across Russia. Between 2013 and 2017, it assisted in the establishment of 110 military history clubs and camps. Since 2018, it has been co-developing with the Youth Army a network of camps known as Country of Heroes, alongside its ‘stand-alone’ offerings, which comprise a range of options from the Battle of Borodino camp to the Neva Bridgehead reconstruction and memory march, where children restage the Second World War battles around the Leningrad region (Zabelina 2017). But Country of Heroes, targeted at twelve- to seventeen-year-olds, is the jewel in the crown. It is a network of camps, held in 2019 and 2020, with five ‘streams’: Defenders (teaching first aid and survival skills); Media of Victory (teaching children how to be historical propagandists, including how to create information campaigns to spread Russian historical narratives); Guardians of History (teaching archaeological and tourism guide skills); Post No.1 (teaching how to be an honour guard); and Volunteers of Victory (teaching event planning, leadership and commemoration). There are six different camps in different locations with plans for twenty-eight camps by 2024. The rapid growth of this set of camps, as well as other individual camps, entails a scaling up of opportunities for children to engage, in an entertaining way, with the Kremlin’s approved historical narratives. The RMHS has also been active in funding local clubs and camps, even publishing a manual on how best to conduct them (RVIO 2016). The manual instructs that clubs only teach positive versions of Russian history and encourages the students to imagine themselves as fighters from the past. It also stresses the importance of battling historical disinformation and instilling a correct view of history, supposedly essential for proper moral development. Yet while the RMHS and the government encourage, direct and fund many of these clubs, children’s activities and clubs were organized around military historical themes long before 2012 (Hemment 2012). Such content reflects the

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cultural legacy of the Soviet Union, with many teachers simply establishing clubs along the same lines as those they attended as (Soviet) youth. The intensive politicization of the past in the USSR has benefitted the current Russian government’s instrumentalization of that same era and these processes have only accelerated with government input (Konkka 2020). Nor is this governmental input particularly unwelcome. In an interview I conducted, the leader of one RMHS-funded military historical club readily conflated historical knowledge with issues of politics and defence, especially disinformation, describing the purpose of their youth project as one of teaching children ‘accurate [pravdivuyu] history, regardless of whatever is going on in the world’ (Historical Club Organizer 2018). Anzhelika Barmushkina, founder of Rassvet v rossoshkakh (Dawn in Rossoshka),8 a Volgograd youth camp and club aimed at educating children about the Great Patriotic War, saw her organization’s purpose in similar terms: You need to be proud of your country, but this is impossible if you don’t know the history of your Fatherland. Everything that people [in foreign countries] are doing with regard to the memory of those who gave their lives for them is wrong [. . .] But we must do everything so that children and the youth know the real history.

As seen here and elsewhere in her answers, Barmushkina readily linked issues of defence and global problems to patriotism and (lack of) knowledge about history, reflecting government discourse on such issues, albeit in a more localized way (Barmushkina 2018). The club and festival organizer Pavel Zheltov raised similar themes but characterized his initiatives as a response to a public need, which was mixed with the government’s call to history: ‘it started from the growth of a wave of patriotic feeling and a quite large number of government-mandated projects in the country’ (Zheltov 2018b). Zheltov explained further that his club and festivals, and many others, were founded to help people discover ‘roots’ and to meet ‘a demand for stories about people’s own history’ that had emerged in society (Zheltov 2018b ). He stressed that this is especially important for

8

Rossoshka is a military memorial cemetery for those who died at the Battle of Stalingrad.

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children, as teaching them about history is a way to connect them with a broader idea of where and how they belonged to the nation. This sense of people’s own personal history is an important discursive element of numerous historical initiatives targeted at children, including the United Russia-run Historical Memory project, which over time has placed particular emphasis on educating non-ethnic Russian children about the war. In this it has recognized the shift from communicative to cultural memory as an opportunity to impose an official, centralized memory of the Great Patriotic War and to sideline divisive and/or traumatic memories of wartime events such as Stalin’s deportations of ethnic minorities. Those running the project have also directed their energies towards launching the Great-grandchildren of Victory project, which runs in schools, supported by local RMHS affiliates, to help children discover what their great-grandfather did in the war. Other government and RMHS-backed initiatives have included competitions for children to create Victory Museum exhibitions using family memoirs and the release of collections of children’s war stories and poems. By offering ample opportunities for children to re-enact or reperform the past, the organizers are simultaneously providing younger generations with memories centred on the past: shared childhood memories of engaging with history. This reflects not only the interconnectedness of patriotism and historical reference in Russian political discourse, but also the efforts undertaken to bring history to life, to take it from a received memory into a performed one. Bringing historical narratives to life reduces the abstraction of these notions. Given the growth in size and number of youth-focused military history activities, future generations are likely to be bonded by their experiences of the historical activities described in this chapter. These activities, perhaps more than the historical narratives, constitute a unifying experience. Provided the government continues to promote its initiatives across the country, activities like historical re-enactment, search brigades or historical blogging campaigns at summer camps will at least become a shared memory, perhaps even a rite of passage, for the current generation of young people. These shared experiences may provide future generations with new common memories of engagement with patriotic history – and especially the Great Patriotic War. The government’s active and practical promotion of history as a unifying force could, therefore, become self-fulfilling provided it is not

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undermined by an insistence on upholding patriotic narratives of the past that are too wooden and unresponsive. However, given that the RMHS’s leaders have no desire to see participants truly engage with historical enquiry beyond set confines or in a way that exposes the ‘black spots’ of this history, it seems unlikely that the government will realize the full potential offered by these shared experiences. The embrace of re-enactment, multi-media and physical activities must be read as an effort to bring history to life but not to set it free.

Taking over non-government movements: the Immortal Regiment The government’s insistence on directing and channelling popular interest in history can assume a relatively benign form, as discussed in the previous chapter. But as well as funding its own organizations, the government has staged takeovers of those organizations in the mnemonic sphere that were operating outside state control. The case of the Immortal Regiment (Bessmertnyi polk) is instructive here. Established by three independent journalists from Tomsk, the Immortal Regiment is a Victory Day mass movement march in which participants walk alongside portraits of relatives who witnessed the Second World War. In an interview with me in 2018, Sergei Lapenkov, one of the movement’s three founders and its chosen spokesman, explained that they originally envisaged the procession as a way to honour and remember family members who contributed to the Great Patriotic War effort, even where they did not fit official narratives: for example, family members who had been taken prisoner by the Germans. The idea was very popular, growing from one city in Russia in 2012 to 1,200 cities across twenty countries by 2015 (Lapenkov 2018). In Lapenkov’s version of events, the original organizers were keen to avoid political and corporate involvement with their grassroots movement; however, as the marches multiplied, their ability to unify people around a shared memory also drew the attention of the authorities, especially as the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over fascism approached in 2015 (Lazebnaya, Pokrovskii and Kozlovoi 2016). This culminated in government officials based in Moscow launching a hostile takeover of the movement, led by now Duma (and United Russia) member Nikolai Zemtsov, who had originally contacted

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the Immortal Regiment in 2013 to become a coordinator and to organize a version of the march in Moscow. Relations between the founders and Zemtsov soured over their differing approaches, with Zemtsov leaving in 2015 to establish a parallel organization with the identical name of Immortal Regiment (Lapenkov 2018). According to Lapenkov, the purpose of Zemtsov’s organization was to ‘swallow whole’ the original Immortal Regiment movement and this decision was taken in the Presidential Administration (Lapenkov 2018). Unsurprisingly, the existence of two parallel marches operating under the same name led to considerable confusion. The ‘new’ Moscow-based Immortal Regiment worked hard to lure coordinators to their side; Lapenkov claimed that some were bribed with new roles and that several budzhetnniki (people whose salaries are paid from the government budget) were blackmailed into joining the new organization or at least into leaving the original one (Lapenkov 2018). Meanwhile, the original organizers’ refusal to give way to the ‘new’ Immortal Regiment led to politicians making conspiratorial accusations about funding from the State Department (Lapenkov 2018). Such accusations drew on the connection between the founders and an independent news channel in Tomsk, for which all the original founders worked or had worked. According to Sergei Lapenkov, the channel was forcibly shut down by the local FSB who called for its closure due to its support for the ‘Immortal Regiment and the fact that we had (allegedly) specially created this in order to reformat historical memory’ (Lapenkov 2018). During our interview, Sergei Lapenkov constantly reiterated his original desire to make Victory Day a more personal affair and to avoid politicization at all costs, contrasting the government’s triumphalist treatment of history with the more understated approach of veterans. Arguing that ‘for us, the Immortal Regiment was, is and will remain a personal story of each person, not a history of the masses’, Lapenkov emphasized the difference in approach between the two Immortal Regiments by describing his as a movement, while the Moscow-directed one was an ‘organization’ (Lapenkov 2018). This difference is immediately obvious in the approach to (or arguably type of) politicization: in her study of the Immortal Regiment, academic Julie Fedor argued that the new, official iteration presented itself as the antithesis to colour revolutions and as the ultimate anti-Maidan (Fedor 2017: 326).

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By 2019, the Moscow organization had control over most marches, although the original movement continued to possess a considerable online presence and database of information on members of the Second World War generation. On the original Immortal Regiment website, there is evidence to support Lapenkov’s version of events relating to the takeover, while the site of the alternative Moscow-based Immortal Regiment provides a confusing and contradictory history of the origins of the organization (Bessmertnyi polk 2018). The alternative Moscow-based site is available at polkrf.ru. Its homepage opens with an exhortation to ‘Find People Who Think Like You’, an interesting contrast to the invitations to find the remains of one’s ancestors on the original website (www.moypolk.ru). The information available confirms that the Ministry of Culture and Moscow City Government, through the figure of Nikolai Zemtsov, appropriated the legitimacy of a popular grassroots movement. This suggests that local commemorative activities organized without state involvement are perceived as suspicious and even threatening to the government’s management of history (Lapenkov 2018). The government’s approach to the Immortal Regiment reflects the importance that they accord to carefully managing and curating emotive images of wartime heroism: in this case, as in others, they have made every effort to ensure that memory is not left to chance, nor placed in the hands of non-state actors. The initial emergence and immediate popularity of the Immortal Regiment is evidence of an organic Russian interest in a more apolitical form of remembering the dead that presumably remains unsated. In the ‘new’ government-led version, artificiality quickly began to replace authenticity and schoolchildren were sent out to parade with portraits of random people, not their relatives. The apolitical nature was lost, as Putin came to head the Victory Day Immortal Regiment procession on Red Square, often flanked by friendly foreign leaders. In this way, the government subverted the evident desire for a personal, apolitical connection to the reality of the Great Patriotic War, using it instead as an opportunity to politicize rather than honour the dead. In the end, this is perhaps one of the most painful and forgotten consequences of the Kremlin’s (ab)uses of the Great Patriotic War myth and of other forms of cultural memory. The Russian government’s efforts to use the memory of the war to negate the suffering of East Europeans are well documented. But it

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is much rarer to find coverage of how the Kremlin’s intensive efforts to appropriate the 1945 victory as its own also steal that experience from the Russian people(s). Through the Kremlin’s actions, the suffering and heroism of the Soviet and Russian nations no longer belong to them but to a government that distorts that experience for political ends and limits its citizens’ freedom to learn about their own traumatic and triumphant history. This reality is occluded from many by the way the historical threat is externalized, even though the biggest dangers often originate internally. Rather than consciousness, the Kremlin is occluding and preventing the knowledge of the past, a knowledge that should belong to the Russian people, not the state. As in the case of the Immortal Regiment, when presented with the possibility of a real historical awareness and conscience emerging, the Russian government stifled it in order to promote its own view of patriotism, which is merely packaged as cultural consciousness.

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Attaining Cultural Consciousness In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party tried (with varying degrees of success and effort) to convince its citizens that they were living in a socialist paradise. Rather than actually creating that paradise, the party’s efforts were too often directed at keeping itself in power. This chapter looks at a similar process, namely how the Kremlin uses history to support its argument that it is leading Russia(ns) to a state of cultural consciousness in such a way that it justifies the Kremlin’s power but does not entail actually creating any such awareness. So far, this book has largely focused on how the government defines what is acceptable memory and promotes this as historical truth through the media, through its laws and through creating a range of initiatives. By propagating its own historical narratives, and a preoccupation therewith, the Russian government has been able to promote a unifying idea that appeals to a variety of ideologies but also supports core elements of its own worldview: namely, the need for Russia to be a strong state, on a special path and with a great power mission. But the last element of this – the mission – also requires a sense of purpose. Shared cultural memory is unifying but it is not enough on its own: it can be used to support the idea of sovereignty but not as the mission itself, as its emphasis on what has passed makes it difficult to contain within cultural memory a sense of progress and momentum. To avoid this sense of stagnation – political and cultural – the government has used its call to history to contribute to a broader idea of cultural consciousness, in which the Russian people have a rare awareness of their own cultural value, destiny and traditions and a mission to help others rediscover their own cultural consciousness, awakening them from an American-imposed cultural slumber. This chapter elaborates on this idea, outlining its dependence on not only the call to history but also on the Soviet legacy of class consciousness, examining how it functions 157

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to give the call to history a broader purpose and mission, reinvigorating the meaning of Russiannness in a way that suits the Kremlin’s political needs and that will have intended and unintended consequences within and without beyond Russia’s borders.

What is cultural consciousness? ‘The Russian Federation has charted a course of strengthening its defence preparedness, its internal unity and its political stability’ – so speak the staccato but self-congratulatory opening words of the 2021 Russian National Security Strategy, a document ironically brimming with insecurity. The 2021 Strategy dedicates an entire section to cultural and spiritual values and historical truth, arguing that Russian identity and Russian people were under constant attack from efforts to distort and falsify Russian history. These threats emanated, allegedly, from the West and its agents in Russia, who were waging a campaign of cultural colonization. Despite the supposed magnitude of the threat, this and other official documents depict Russia as uniquely positioned to maintain its cultural sovereignty. Over the years, politicians have offered a host of explanations for this precocity, including the bizarre notion that Russian history has caused its people to develop a unique genetic code and the (somewhat) more credible argument that Russians’ attachment to and knowledge of history has made them prize their cultural sovereignty (BBC Russian 2013; The Times 2020). In other words, Russia’s knowledge and experience of history are providing the nation with protection against cultural colonization and assuring its continued cultural sovereignty. Cultural consciousness denotes a heightened awareness of Russia’s heritage, history and cultural uniqueness – interpreted in such a way as to justify the argument that Russia needs a strong state, is a great power requiring a special path and has much to teach others. Attained through ‘correct’ understanding of history and demonstrated through the performance of progovernment actions, cultural consciousness encompasses not only the endorsement of historical narratives, but also of religious values, traditional beliefs and a general illiberalism. That said, at its heart, it is history that

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functions as the nation’s mobilizing and unifying force, in that the government uses historical narratives and references to call the Russian people to practice and embody the ‘cultural consciousness’ that will defend them. In 2012, Putin announced that strengthening national consciousness would be a priority for his coming term, declaring that the definition of Russian identity was vague and needed refining (Prezident Rossii 2012a). The Russian idea, or what it means and should mean to be Russian, has long been the topic of heated debate and disagreement from the Russian Empire through to the present day (Brudny 1998; Seton-Watson 2017, 1961; Riasanovsky 2005; Billington 2004). The collapse of the Russian Empire and the USSR has left an imperial consciousness embedded within Russian identity and allowed a – sometimes ambivalent – form of imperial nationalism to develop (Pain 2004; 2016). Balancing Russia’s understanding of itself as a great power has often made it impossible for governments to accede to Russian ethno-nationalist demands and favoured the presentation of Russian culture as an entire civilization (Aridici 2019; Laruelle 2016a; Hosking 2006; Akopov et al. 2017). Appealing to a (vaguely and eclectically defined) cultural memory has very practical applications when it comes to bridging these concerns and divides: it allows for an ambivalence that can appeal to the diverse ideational influences within Russian politics and society, from neoEurasianism (Shalin 1996: 28; Bassin and Kelly 2012: 32) to Russia as the one true Europe. As detailed in the previous chapters, voicing and acting out the ‘correct’ memory of the past has assumed certain functions of ideology as a marker of belief and belonging (Koposov 2017). Instead of embracing a key ideology, the Kremlin has combined a melange of different pro-state arguments, cohering them around a paranoid and nostalgic worldview to accompany the thematic resurgence of identity in Russian political discourse during Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term (Teper 2016; Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2018; Roberts 2017; Akopov et al. 2017). There is little point in trying to discern a coherent ideology that will explain the Kremlin’s actions or interpretations; what you can find instead is an appeal to a unifying idea (a call to history) and an aspirational one (cultural consciousness), which endow Russia with a purpose.

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If history is why Russians belong together, then cultural consciousness is why Russia should exist as a nation. But if ideology and identity are slippery concepts, so too is consciousness – and the term cultural consciousness, briefly defined above, requires further elaboration. First, it is worth mentioning that while cultural consciousness is a term that I apply to describe my understanding of the discourse and practices promoted around history in Russia after 2012 in particular, the inspiration for the term stems from an interview with Vladimir Medinskii. Speaking to the Russian magazine Snob, Medinskii introduced the notion of cultural consciousness to describe what he saw as a nationwide cultural awakening taking place under Putin (Uskov 2013). His argument was that a new cultural consciousness had emerged alongside the political shifts that accompanied Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. Medinskii described how Russia had finally passed through the confused ‘Adam Smith’ views of the 1990s and Russians had become conscious (osoznali) of how much depends on the way history is told, including how society is constructed, the level of culture in society and what is being used to educate children. Speaking on behalf of the Russian nation, Medinskii asserted that Russia had reached a new level of understanding of itself, of the world and of the laws that govern the world and history. He argued that culture had come to play a much more prominent role in political discourse and explicitly invoked the concept of consciousness to describe this process, arguing that consciousness determines existence (bytie). This formula upends traditional Marxist thought, which argues that material reality shapes our ideas and conception of the world (our consciousness). For class consciousness, this means that your consciousness of the exploitation of the working classes is dependent on your material reality and position within the economic structure. However, in Medinskii’s rendering of consciousness, admittedly in a different context, it is your consciousness that determines your being: in this interpretation, your belonging to the working class would depend on your awareness of exploitation. Certainly your belonging to the Russian nation depends, in his view, on your awareness of ‘correct’ patriotic history. By defining patriotism through this idiosyncratic and largely media-concocted idea of ‘cultural consciousness’, there is, conveniently, no need for a more coherent or detailed set of ideational

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principles. This is why it is more useful to speak of consciousness rather than of ideology.1 Medinskii typifies the (pro-)Kremlin depiction of Russian identity as a category that is simultaneously expansive but also exclusionary. As Il’ya Kalinin has noted, no matter how large the party table, there can never be space for everyone (Kalinin 2015). The culturally unconscious are not invited to this particular party. At the head of this figurative table sits President Putin, who epitomizes cultural consciousness. The media presents Putin’s policies as being informed by the Russian historical experience and as parallels of historical precedents, depicting cultural consciousness as demonstratively recognizing Russia’s cultural worth, which is defined by its historical achievements, forever underestimated due to others exploiting Russia’s innocence. As detailed in earlier chapters, this journey has involved delineating what constitutes cultural consciousness and providing the language to articulate and express such awareness through the media’s use of historical framing and an appeal to various narratives. The government has also created practices and rituals that function as evidence of this consciousness. In this sense, cultural consciousness is central to the visions of patriotism promoted by the Russian government and media through its treatment of memory and invocation of history. Promoting these visions entails the celebration of cultural consciousness, as seen in the media’s depiction of heroes in the historical framing studies and elsewhere. According to the arguments put forward by politicians like Medinksii, Naryshkin and Putin, Russians’ attainment of cultural consciousness shows that they are uniquely informed about their own history, culture and heritage – an attribute that means they deserve a global leadership role. This is detailed in the opening passages of the Foundations of State Cultural Policy (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kul’turnoi politiki – OGKP), released in 2014:

1

In some sense, cultural consciousness could itself be understood as an ideology, certainly if we were to apply the Althusserian meaning to denote the ‘imagined existence of things’, whereby the speaker does not need to believe the ideas are true, but the ideology needs to produce practices and rituals. However, in the sense of providing a guiding justification for actions, as political ideology is normally understood, cultural consciousness falls short, especially as I understand it as a post facto, instrumentalist, explanation rather than a driving force of the elite’s behaviour – although this is not to say that it functions similarly for everyone. It is certainly conceivable that for Medinskii, cultural consciousness is an ideology and that it will become so for others.

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Throughout the entirety of our history, it is culture that has preserved, enhanced and conveyed to new generations the nation’s experience. It is culture that has been the basis of unity for the multinational people of Russia, inculcating feelings of patriotism and national pride. It is culture that has strengthened Russia’s standing on the world stage. Minkul’tury 2014

Similar language can be found across the annual reports released by the Ministry of Culture, as in the 2016 report on ministry activities, which states that ‘Russian culture has historically occupied a leading role in the world and is a powerful strategic resource for strengthening the country’s influence on the world stage’ (Minkul’tury 2017: 51). However, in order to realize the messianic benefits of cultural consciousness, Russians must first attain this consciousness. Or, in the words of Putin’s 2015 address to the Federal Assembly, quoting Nikolai Karamzin, ‘A Russian [russkii] should know his worth’ (Prezident Rossii 2015e). Vladimir Medinskii, as ever, took this further in a PR event for his book War: Myths about the USSR 1939 to 1945, when he claimed that problems in other countries, including Ukraine, were caused by their ignorance of historical reality. He argued forcefully that Western culture had caused Russians to forget their own historical value and that this process, under Putin’s ‘historical renaissance’ (vozrozhdenii), was being remedied but that Russians still had a fight on their hands (Sochnev 2015). As seen in Chapter 4, from early in his third presidential term, the statealigned media depicted Putin as in harmony with – even the embodiment of – the majority’s common-sense authenticity. They have evidenced this by stressing the president’s proximity to ordinary Russians through his flaws and his transgression of norms (Zhurzhenko 2018): for example, Putin’s use of slang or, more significantly, the decision to send Russian troops to annex Crimea (Izvestiya 2014). But as Putin’s third term progressed, the media increasingly framed the president as a symbol of the ultimate historicallyinformed patriot whose imbibing of historical memory had enabled him to strengthen Russia’s position and even re-establish its leadership role by helping other nations to regain cultural consciousness. This interpretation fed into and relied upon a more self-confident representation of government policies that was especially evident in media coverage of the 2015 Migrant Crisis in Europe

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and Russia’s military intervention in Syria. Much of the coverage of the former gloated over Europe’s inability to handle the influx of people. Some sources promoted the narrative that the USA (with the UK) were deliberately orchestrating the crisis to destroy European identity (G. Zotov 2014; Larina and Chernykh 2015). Crisis and division in Europe were openly contrasted with Russia’s confidence in its identity. Indeed, according to the then-head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Konstantin Kosachev, a majority of ‘ordinary’ Europeans were now supportive of Russian actions around the world, including in Ukraine, and were disenchanted with their own governments (Fedyakina 2014). Domestic media presented Russia as the object of envy by other nations due to its cultural consciousness and patriotism (Chigishov 2015a: 11.00). In keeping with their use of anti-Western Westerners during coverage of Ukraine, sanctions and Syria, Russian media used pro-Kremlin foreigners to voice such admiration, as with Oliver Stone’s well-publicized comments that he admired Russia because Russians (especially Putin) knew history, unlike Americans (Korolev 2014e: 1.27.30). Russians’ alleged extensive knowledge of history is central to their ability to see the world and its events differently – that is, in their view, correctly (Minkul’tury 2016). During coverage of the intervention in Syria, the media promoted the argument that, since Putin had restored Russia’s sense of worth, Russians were duty-bound to help others regain theirs (Chigishov 2015c; Sapozhnikova 2015; Aslamova 2015). Here we see the emergence of a new form of Russian messianic thinking, referenced earlier, in which Russia acts as a beacon of cultural consciousness, showing other countries how to reconnect with and be true to their history and heritage (Prezident Rossii 2017a). The Russian government and its supportive media explicitly place the USA as the enemy of cultural consciousness, creating a sort of Cold War of historical memory, in which ‘recognizing one’s true history’ replaces the role of realizing class interest/agreeing to ally with communism and the USSR. By way of example, Russian media and military commentators claim that Germany is still occupied by the USA, placing the latter as an impediment to national sovereignty while also adding Cold War overtones (Latukhina 2015b). Russian state-aligned media has argued that ordinary Europeans supported Putin and were increasingly mistrustful of their governments for opposing him. To do so, they used interviews with (sometimes random,

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sometimes famous) Western external contributors to validate their characterization of Putin as a universal folk hero, presenting an internationalized variant of his leadership cult for domestic audiences. This narrative was exemplified by the use of external contributors and memory diplomacy, both explored in Chapter 4. It is this narrative that allows the Kremlin to claim it knows Ukraine’s true identity better than Ukrainians and that Russia was best placed to restore and protect that identity in 2022. In its domestic iteration, the narrative surrounding Putin’s alleged mass popularity among Europeans ostensibly derived from his courage to stand up against hegemonic Western powers, thereby asserting his confidence in, and faithfulness to, his country’s identity and history.2 Similar to earlier iterations, the media and government discourse during Putin’s third term contributed to creating a ‘media-wide universal norm of belonging to the majority’, which Ilya Kukulin has identified as an important part of patriotic propaganda in Putin’s third term (Kukulin 2018: 223). Sergei Markov, an academic close to the Kremlin, confirmed this emphasis on the majority as deliberate, describing the post-2012 focus on the people or nation (narod) as a transition to ‘democracy by the majority’, whereby the rights of the majority are defended against a supposedly aggressive and hostile minority (N. Petrov 2013). This narrative also connects neatly with illiberal and religious discourses in Russian politics, such as President Putin’s 2021 Valdai speech in which he bemoaned ‘wokeness’ and ‘cancel culture’ in the West (Prezident Rossii 2021). Such narratives are important to the functioning and context of the call to history and rely on a binary of the conscious and unconscious citizen. The government’s messianic interpretation of Russian cultural consciousness depends on a peculiar conceptualization of Russianness that reduces current events and Russian identity to little more than an idiosyncratic interpretation of history. Given that criticizing government policy is readily interpreted as a challenge to Russian memory, this results in the following conflations: 1. To oppose Russian policy is to challenge Russian memory or ‘history’. 2. To challenge Russian memory is to endanger and/or reject Russian identity.

2

While there may be some anecdotal evidence that Putin is popular with right- and left-wing groups for his illiberalism and anti-Americanism, respectively, overall polls show that Putin has an unfavourable image in the West (Pew Global Research 2018).

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The conversion of an understanding of history into a definition of belonging emphasizes the extent to which historical framing is aimed at securitization of even moderate political difference, leading one’s position on, say, the Kremlin’s actions in Syria to become an issue of existential security for the Russian nation. As seen in conjunction with other trends, this stigmatizes the opposition, positioning their divergence from the historical consensus – and their lack of cultural consciousness – as a threat to the very fabric of the nation. Vyacheslav Volodin articulated this position when he argued that Russians who disagree with their country’s war on Ukraine should be stripped of their citizenship (Moscow Times 2022). Yet at the same time, it is common to hear television commentators and Church leaders alike argue that ‘Russian [russkii] is a concept without borders stretching to all corners of the planet’ (Chigishov 2015f: 24.01), suggesting an inclusive approach to belonging. In rejecting a purely ethnic understanding of Russianness (russkost’), the emphasis is placed on Russian culture as something open to everyone, regardless of nationality. Likewise, in official political discourse, ethnicity plays a relatively unimportant role. Instead, political identity, as defined by historical interpretation, supersedes ethnic heritage when it comes to questions of Russianness. The cultural and civilizational meanings attributed to russkost’ mean that Russian identity can be claimed by non-Slavs (with correct cultural memory) but not by those ethnic Russians with political opinions opposed to those of the Kremlin, as reflected in the following tabloid comment: ‘Those people [who disagree with government policy on Syria] are no longer Russian. Those people are torn from their roots, from the history of their people. This concept of justice (which they lack) is truly lodged in the Russian genetic code’ (Tseplyaev 2015). Descriptions such as this emphasize that russkost’, despite its traditional ethnic connotations, has become a civilizational identity officially defined by political and cultural views.3 We also see here once more the realization of the mantra that consciousness (of correct memory) determines being (Russian).

3

None of this is to deny the practical reality of Russian racism towards non-ethnic Russians or the long history of imperialism towards other nationalities in the Russian Empire, the USSR and Russian Federation.

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The civilizational (re)branding of russkost’ abetted the increasingly messianic terms in which politicians and state-aligned media have described Russia’s post-2015 global prominence. Since 2015, discussions of Russianness have been much more likely to invoke the world stage, where Russia is now playing an active leadership role, at times presented as equal to that of the USA (Kremlin.ru 2016b). Predictably, politicians and the media grounded the reason for Russia’s newfound global prominence and return to great power status within a sense of historical destiny: ‘First and foremost, we need to learn the lessons of history to make peace, to strengthen the societal, political and civil harmony that we have managed to attain’ (Prezident Rossii 2016c). If this felt dramatic, then it was as nothing compared to the rhetoric in tabloids like Komsomolskaya pravda, which declared that ‘Russia is taking on itself this mission to overcome darkness in the world. Be it Napoleon, Hitler or ISIS’ (Gamov 2015a). Russia was, apparently, fated to this historical destiny, predetermined to play a certain role in the world. But the ability to articulate these arguments, to explain how this interpretation of history ultimately dictated one’s Russianness, was only part of the government’s challenge: how now to transfer a rather abstracted explanation into the practical realm?

Templates of cultural consciousness Self-identity involves re-enacting certain routines on a daily basis in order to sustain biographical continuity (Ejdus 2020: 22). In this vein, cultural consciousness needs not only to describe Russia’s historical uniqueness and mission but also to engender the creation and display of routines of cultural consciousness that show awareness of tradition, history and other ‘authentic’ values. But how can people perform their knowledge of history in an everyday sense? How do people know what to do, what rituals to perform? How do they know what is the ‘done’ thing and what other people are doing? This is where it is useful to consider in more detail pro-Kremlin media depictions of patriotism and how they became images of cultural consciousness. The government and media’s depiction of patriotic activities during President Putin’s third term contrasted somewhat with their approach before 2012. Ironically, as the state’s grip on power grew ever more constrictive, the

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government and its supportive media placed increasing emphasis on nurturing an image of bottom-up development of ‘historically aware’ patriotism. While this did not mean that the ‘for-show’ (pokaznoi) patriotism of Victory Day was abandoned, it did suggest that the government and media were curating, managing and appropriating grassroots patriotic tendencies. In so doing, the government sought to harness and politicize the legitimacy inherent in ‘ordinary’ patriotic activities, which have tended to be apolitical in the Russian context (Goode 2016). This followed an explosion of patriotism and nationalism after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which saw the government and especially Putin enjoy a wave of popularity, reflected in various ways and covered extensively by the media. As detailed in Chapter 5, the Russian government created a multitude of different memory-centred activities and practices, offering plenty of opportunities for people to engage with history and, in so doing, legitimize and bring to life its assertion that the Kremlin was leading Russian citizens to greater historical awareness and cultural consciousness. Some of these activities included speaking Russian; raising money for east Ukraine; commemorating Victory Day; wearing the St George Ribbon; waving Victory flags; defending Soviet memorials; fighting Banderites/pro-Maidan Ukrainians; boycotting Western food; holidaying in Russia; wearing T-shirts depicting Putin or Russian or Soviet missiles; oligarchs repatriating their wealth from offshore tax havens; attending military patriotic or military history clubs; and celebrating Russian history and culture (by attending exhibitions, festivals, etc.). The list encompasses a wide variety of activities, some unusual, some banal, but all of which are cited on numerous occasions by the media or politicians as evidence of individuals’ and groups’ patriotism and support for government policy: as the activities of culturally conscious Russians. Certain activities, such as boycotting Western food or wearing a St George Ribbon, were especially common in news articles and/or broadcasts. One element that made these activities culturally conscious rather than just patriotic was the way in which the media coverage linked them closely to historical analogies and references. In 2014, these practices were often closely linked to the Great Patriotic War, the event within which Russian media framed the Ukraine Crisis; for example, this was most obvious with the St George Ribbon, which came to be worn as a symbol of support for the Donbas as

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much as for the Second World War (Kolstø 2016). Alongside the repurposing of symbols such as the St George Ribbon, there were more dramatic examples of demonstrating one’s patriotism, including the media’s glorification of Russians volunteering to fight in the Donbas (Aslamova 2014; Chigishov 2014b: 17.33; Bas 2014). Stepping into central Moscow in 2014 you would come across kiosks set up by concerned individuals asking for donations and even volunteers for the fight in Donbas. I would later see cohorts of these volunteers in 2017 in Voronezh, where individuals would wander openly through the city centre in Russian army uniforms without insignia. These more dramatic examples of performing patriotism, while not limited to the Ukraine Crisis, proved the exception rather than the rule, at least until 2022. Instead, there tended to be a projected congruence between ordinary people’s everyday nationalism and the state’s own policies. For example, after the West imposed sanctions on Russia following the downing of MH17, the media covered patriotic boycotts of Western products, presenting ordinary Russians’ embrace of domestic products as the antidote to the decadent 1990s and wild capitalism (Saltykova 2014; Lenta 2014i). The media and government also accentuated the involvement of Russian citizens in reporting Western restaurants to the authorities for largely imagined infractions, celebrating ordinary people’s supposed support for Russian counter-sanctions on Western produce (Domcheva 2014). Thus, methods of resistance to Western symbols reoccurred across the media and were emphasized as grassroots phenomena that were creating a sense of camaraderie between government and people, as with claims that government officials were replacing foreign cars with Russian ones (Argumenty i fakty 2014e). In 2022, Russian media gave extensive coverage to the trend of putting stickers saying ‘Come on then, off you go’ on Western chain stores that had announced they would leave Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine. In fact, rather than noble or sacrificial, many of the patriotic demonstrations in 2014–15 were highly accessible but also commodified, creating patriotic branding that modern citizens could embrace, such as attending exhibitions, wearing vatniki (padded jackets associated with patriotism inflected with Soviet nostalgia) and even consuming salads moulded into the shape of mass war graves (Digital Icons 2017). The best-publicized patriotic branding exercise was the marketing stunt-cum-protest by two young entrepreneurs selling pro-

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Putin T-shirts bedecked with Iskander missiles and mocking the West in 2014 (Khozhaleteva 2014a). In this way, the media encouraged audiences to affirm not only political support but also a certain interpretation of the Soviet Union, the 1990s or the Great Patriotic War by wearing brands and copying heroes held up for emulation. Once successful, these stunts, or aktsii, tended to be repeated across events: for example, the wearing and designing of political statement T-shirts re-emerged after the intervention in Syria (Ovchinnikov 2015). In 2022, tourist shops began to sell T-shirts emblazoned with the prowar ‘Z’ symbol, following this same pattern. As in the last example, such activities did not have to reference history explicitly, but the intensive historical framing of core actions of government policy turned any pro-government act into a symbolic assertion of support for its political uses of history and vice versa, by conflating current events so fully with past episodes. In this way, demonstrations of patriotism in certain conditions are depicted not only as support for the government but also as an embrace of certain understandings of history. For example, Russian media can invoke Soviet history when extolling the virtues of such patriotic activities, fusing patriotic feeling with a sense of connection to the Soviet past (Skoibeda 2014c). On other occasions, the historical reference can be more explicit yet still mundane and refer to activities that would be unwittingly carried out by many, from holidaying at home in Soviet-era resorts to watching Soviet cartoons (Argumenty i fakty 2015a). Yet, it was only through media framing that some of the so-called patriotic activities were signposted as such. Most Russians holiday at home and eat domestic produce; by depicting these as patriotic acts of allegiance to government policy and a continuation of a historical tendency, the media could politicize and historicize the apolitical and the contemporary. At its most obvious, the media employed the spectacle of cultural consciousness as a depiction of patriotic Russians coming together to (ostensibly) celebrate and experience history in a way that also demonstrated allegiance to government policy (either directly or indirectly by affirming the government’s approved cultural memory). The various calls to remember and defend ‘our’ history by ordinary civilians and government ministers alike implied an equality of agency that depicted politicians as ordinary participants rather than puppet masters in this ostensible wave of patriotism (Grishin

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2014b; Y. Novoselova 2014). This technique cleverly suggested an organic emergence of patriotic feeling, with the government in harmony with, rather than seeking to direct, this phenomenon. Yet, there is little evidence that cultural consciousness is or was an entirely genuine (or indeed an entirely artificial) phenomenon, in which ordinary Russians perform acts of patriotic engagement with history en masse in order to show their allegiance to the government (Goode 2016; Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2018). Much more provable is how the Russian state appropriates and curates images of engagement with Russian history for the services of legitimizing the government and its policies. The purpose is seemingly to suggest that Vladimir Putin has enabled an incredible historical awakening in Russia and also to then encourage this awakening within certain limits. In theory, this awakening leads people to realize that historical memory is central to Russian identity, an awareness that strengthens the nation internally and on the world stage. However, in practice, there cannot be any real discussion of historical consciousness being awakened, given the Kremlin’s (well-documented) use of disinformation, myths and false narratives to build appealing and usable history, measures of persecution and legal mechanisms to target those who add to historical knowledge, and its surreptitious and dishonest efforts to promote state initiatives as bottom-up while it appropriates and redirects for its own ends genuine grassroots efforts to raise public consciousness of core historical events and apolitical acts. In other words, this was not about truly engaging people with history but about creating a sense of engagingness, through activities and language that appeared to engage but actually refused or redirected the agency of those involved. In this, it had much in common with its forerunner: Soviet templates of class consciousness

From the vanguard of class to cultural consciousness Cultural consciousness is a political device, or template, borne out of the need to make history into something that offered not only unity but also purpose – justification and aspiration for the future, as well as legitimation of the present. Given that cultural consciousness is ultimately a rhetorical device, an image grafted onto society, rather than an actual process, it is not that surprising that

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it should build on previous rhetorical devices and templates used to imbue Russian identity with a sense of purpose and mission. Specifically, the Russian media and politicians’ use of cultural consciousness to legitimize government policy has roots in Soviet media traditions and templates of class consciousness, defined here as awareness of one’s social class and how it relates to the class struggle, particularly (self-awareness of the) exploitation of the working class. Soviet depictions of class consciousness emerged in literary, political and journalistic writings soon after the 1917 October Revolution, as Soviet authors looked to establish new heroes. In the post-Soviet Putin era, the Russian media’s presentations of cultural consciousness are indebted to Soviet, especially Socialist Realist, traditions of depicting class consciousness. For example, both post-Soviet and Soviet templates show individuals demonstrating their awareness (be it of the cultural or class struggle) in a way that suggests they are becoming cognisant of the past oppression and exploitation of one’s political community and attaining a sense of collective recognition of the community’s value (Halfin 2000). The obvious difference between the two lies in the role of history: where (in theory) Soviet ideologues’ obsession with history centred on its role in asserting the truth of the ascendancy of the working classes, since 2012 historical episodes have been used to assert the primacy of russkie as a people (narod). But even this takes its lead from the Socialist Realist emphasis on narodnost’, in the sense of being of and for the people, which accentuated the role of the instinctual in depictions of class consciousness. As such, both paradigms focus on narodnost’ and provide a messianic vision of Russian identity, often used to justify geopolitical goals, that presents the Russian (or Soviet) government as the vanguard of an alternative worldview. In the present day, Russia’s mission is not to oppose capitalism but Western cultural dominance by showing culturally oppressed peoples how to engage and reconnect with their real national history and culture. The media and politicians’ redesigning of Soviet templates of class consciousness to encompass national-cultural, rather than class, identity was far from perfect nor was it especially innovative. The Soviet state adapted class consciousness paradigms for patriotic ends during the Great Patriotic War and at various stages throughout the USSR’s existence (Dunlop 1983: 18). From its earliest days, the USSR accepted, promoted and reinforced ethnic particularism,

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even where this went against class interest (Slezkine 1994) and to such an extent that the USSR arguably ‘upended’ Marx’s dictum that being determined consciousness by making one’s class dependent on one’s attitudes, as seen during dekulakization, when peasants were often deemed ‘kulaks’ due to their views on the new Soviet authorities rather than because they possessed bountiful riches (Viola 2013: 16). This connects it to Medinskii’s argument that consciousness determines being, and to media depictions of cultural consciousness, in which being Russian depends on possessing the correct consciousness of one’s cultural and historical roots, rather than the reality of one’s actual national identity determining one’s awareness of cultural and historical insights. Other similarities between the Soviet application of class consciousness and the post-Soviet templates of cultural consciousness include the positioning of the Russians as first among equals. In the late USSR, russification was used ‘to fortify the fading legitimacy of Soviet power based on Communist ideology’ (Billington 2004: 31), but the Stalinist media also presented Russians as the vanguard of communism, both as the leading light of class consciousness and as the defenders of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War (Brandenberger 2002).4 In this interpretation, the Russian nation assumes the role of both leader and liberator, allowing countries and peoples to become more sovereign through Russia’s guidance and (paradoxically) rule over them. The line between class identity and cultural nationalism was blurred in official Soviet discourse as early as the 1930s (Suny 1993), which facilitated and influenced the postSoviet media’s borrowings from class consciousness in their depiction of patriotic awakenings. These overlaps between cultural and class consciousness are best understood as the convenient adaptation of a Soviet type of thinking about belonging and identity (class consciousness) that has left remnants in Russian culture and discourse. Its emergence here is not random: (post-)Soviet citizens and institutions have often retold the Chernobyl disaster and the Leningrad blockade in Socialist Realist narratives, deliberately or not (Kirschenbaum

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For an investigation of the complexities underpinning Soviet leaders’ attitudes towards the Russian nation, especially in the memory of the Great Patriotic War, see Jonathan Brunstedt’s The Soviet Myth of World War II (2021).

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2006). For example, in retellings of Chernobyl, witnesses have used Socialist Realist tropes to recast and revise the truth about the event into a narrative of heroic triumph rather than condemnation of everything wrong with late Soviet society (Johnson 2019). In other words, it also relates to a political use of history and historical distortion. As such, the media’s adaptation of the class consciousness paradigm to create an image of Russians reaching a patriotic awakening, under Putin’s guidance, was the borrowing of an accessible and convenient template rather than an explicitly pro-Soviet act. This accessibility would have made rhetorical borrowings from the Soviet class consciousness paradigm even more natural for journalists, who may well have reproduced them unconsciously. The post-Soviet audience’s familiarity with the class consciousness discourse would also have clarified the state’s expectations of them; that is, many would have understood the need to assert – or at least assent to – the Kremlin’s narrative in order to show their culturally conscious credentials. Ideally these assertions would involve visible but seemingly spontaneous displays of loyalty. This would have been clear through the media’s borrowings from the mobilizational use of class consciousness in the Soviet context, where visible displays of loyalty and belonging often took the form of repeating formulaic language, performance and mass demonstration (Priestland 2007; Lenoe 1998). In the post-Soviet media and politicians’ depictions of cultural consciousness, it is both an emotional, instinctive response and a learned one. Analysis of Soviet media depictions of class consciousness show that it was structured around similar forces, namely what has been called the spontaneity/ consciousness dialectic (Clark 1981). In the traditional Soviet Socialist Realist rendering, a person moved from an instinctual and spontaneous sense of class justice towards genuine class consciousness with the help of the party (Clark 1981: 85). In this sense, consciousness has clear practical connotations: if spontaneity is unguided, anarchic actions, then consciousness denotes activities guided by political forces, the party in the USSR and the global leadership of Vladimir Putin today. This spontaneity does not obstruct the attainment of class consciousness (Krylova 2003). In Socialist Realism, (class) instinct was a necessary precondition to the achievement of class consciousness and a combination of

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the cerebral and the instinctual (or affective) was needed in the ideal Soviet New Man of the 1920s and 1930s (Halfin 2003). The emphasis on the instinctual, combined with a willingness to be guided by political superiors, can also be found in depictions of cultural consciousness, although of course rather than a ‘class’ instinct, there is instead a national/cultural instinct in the Putin era.5 This cultural instinct is ultimately the sense, or feel, of historical authenticity or pravdivost’ (veracity). Such attitudes featured in the media’s mockery of proWestern intellectuals and in the government and media’s discursive pivot towards ordinary people (narod), whom they depict as the bearers of a common-sense Russian wisdom and resistance to Western infiltration (Khozhaleteva 2014b; Chernyak 2014; Kagarlitskii 2014b). This folksy emphasis ties back into narodnye (or ‘people’s’) values, discussed earlier in relation to the uses of history, but it was also a feature of many Soviet literary and media depictions of class consciousness. The media’s projections of cultural consciousness reinforce understandings of history in keeping with ‘the Soviet didactic tradition, where the emphasis is on history as scientific truth (restricting room for interpretation or debate) and on associated patriotic or moral lessons’ (Brown 2015: 215). Both forms of consciousness depend on a ‘true’ understanding of history, or the ‘laws thereof ’, to function (Halfin 2000). During Putin’s third and fourth terms (despite the malleability of the Kremlin’s official historical narrative), media and politicians depicted ‘history’ as a firm and credible framework through which to interpret political events, although evidently this is no longer indebted to MarxistLeninist theories. If the latter viewed history as dialectical and eschatological, then in its current guise, history has become a cyclical process doomed to repeat itself because others forget its essentialist lessons.6 Being able to recognize and identify these lessons – to behold the ‘truth’ contained within history – is cited as evidence of cultural consciousness but it also reveals the unusual relationship to truth being promoted in Russia and elsewhere.

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As the academic Julie Fedor has also noted, the importance of an instinctual understanding of Russianness has also bled into notions of (the Eurasianist idea of) passionarnost’, whereby those cultures fated to survive are those with the greatest natural drive to action (Fedor et al. 2017: 333). The term ‘essentialist’ is used here in the philosophical sense to denote the belief that things have a defined set of immutable characteristics that make them what they are and that the purpose of studying these things is to identify the characteristics.

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Beyond post-truth: history as allegorical truth The information revolution sparked by the internet has led to a process of democratization of memory, in which increased access to information, sources and competing narratives has given rise to a greater variety of historical interpretation. While uprooting history from being an elite-driven project is unquestionably positive, the equation of expertise with ‘I did some research on the internet’ is unquestionably negative and both are attendant consequences of this democratization. It has amplified, perhaps necessary, arguments over who ‘owns’ history and whether it is simply a set of competing narratives, whether history can ever be fixed or whether it must always be subject to revision (and, if so, then according to which criteria?). These arguments can be deeply polarizing, given they are closely interconnected with identity, both national and personal or familial. In this way, which version of history you profess – and each nation has its own specificities – is reflective of how you see the world, of your identity and of your truth. Defending it is about defending who you are, at your very core, against those who would seek to deny you. In such conditions, understanding history, and its meaning to your culture and identity, is achieved through feeling rather than through scientific examination Since the overwhelming amount of historical information and knowledge available today mean that it is often possible, at an amateur level, to argue the toss about different historical events, arguments over the past quickly move from the realm of fact, objectivity and truth into ones of symbolism, identity and consciousness. The Kremlin has been quick to understand and utilize the potential of casting knowledge of history as a form of consciousness, going further than most in its efforts not so much to decouple history from truth but to replace truth with historical myth, under the guise of ‘consciousness’. This explains the paradoxical situation in which leading Russian politicians constantly insert themselves into historical discussions, displaying an obsession with policing deviant narratives at home and abroad (declaimed as ‘historical falsification’) but fuel these same campaigns through their own historical distortions. Many of the versions of history they promote as examples of historical justice and truth are widely known to be untrue and, on occasion, these same politicians even admit that the versions of history they are funding are untrue and that this does not matter (V. Medinskii 2017).

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None of the above prevents these politicians from continuing to rally against the ‘historical falsifications’, even ‘perversions’, of others. At first, this could appear to be little more than yet further evidence of the Kremlin’s disregard for the very concept of facts and its embrace of post-truth politics. The Oxford English Dictionary defines post-truth as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ’. In addition to this focus on emotions overriding fact, post-truth has also been widely interpreted as a type of anti-truth, typified in the postmodernist attitudes that underpinned Russia’s first twenty years following the Soviet collapse, which, with their popular embrace of the idea that ‘nothing was true’, have been well documented elsewhere (Pomerantsev 2014; Satter 2003). Such studies note the nihilistic attitude towards objectivity that has since come to be seen as typical of Russian media disinformation techniques, especially in those outlets targeted at foreign audiences, such as RT and Sputnik. However, it is more fruitful to understand Russia’s post-2012 environment not as an outright rejection of truth and evidence but rather as an embrace of an allegorical understanding of (or approach to) truth, in which an event is described and depicted in such a way as to reveal a hidden and higher meaning. Any view of domestic Russian media or politicians as wholly repudiating the entire concept of truth is only of limited value, especially when applied to the post-2012 era. Since Putin’s return to the presidency, he, his media and his colleagues have rather used the concepts of historical truth and cultural consciousness to fulfil the function of truth – even if not to tell the truth. Separating out what this means in practice requires some consideration of the language being used to discuss the (rather abstract) concept of truth. In Russian, there are two words for truth: istina and pravda. While istina has connotations of essential religious or spiritual truth, pravda has ‘connotations of justice and “rightness” at least as much as of truth’ (Lovell 2018). The conceptualization of truth being discussed in relation to ‘historical truth’ or ‘history as truth’ would be translated as pravda. The roots of this word in justice and righteousness point to a moral order rather than a legalistic one shaped by Western technocratic forces. The historical context here is also important: the Soviet legacy of ideological thinking, with its understanding of the world using reasoning based not on fact but on ideology, or an axiomatic premise, may also

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have facilitated the current government and media’s framing of lies and halftruths as types of ‘allegorical’ truth. If there is a tradition of deferring to, or at least not openly ridiculing or challenging, interpretations from authority that directly contradict objective fact and reality, this makes such patterns of discourse easier to accept when they re-emerge. Blame should not be laid too firmly at the feet of Russia’s communist past, however, given that in some ways the Kremlin’s current allegorical approach can be seen as a departure from the Soviet era when the authorities expended considerable energy on making the ‘evidence’ match their story. If we return to the legend of Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight discussed earlier, then examining how the Soviet authorities reacted to efforts to demythologize the story reveals interesting contrasts with the approach of the current Russian authorities. As discussed in Chapter 5, the Soviet authorities suppressed reports, such as the Afanas’ev Report, which concluded that the legend was pure fantasy, with Leonid Brezhnev himself speaking out to discredit the report and attendant rumours. Such efforts would obviously have been more effective in the highly restrictive and restricted information space of the USSR, but they also reflected a concern with making objective truth appear to align with what the government wanted to pretend was true. By contrast, the Putin-era Russian governments have displayed considerably less concern about aligning their version of history with that of objective fact. In 2016, the head of the State Archive, Sergei Mironenko was sacked after he published and promoted evidence that the Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight legend was demonstrably untrue. While this may appear to be a continuation of the Soviet approach, it is complicated by the fact that Medinskii himself, who was at the centre of the dispute with Mironenko, admitted that the Panfilov’s TwentyEight story was objectively false. In his view, it was not important whether the event happened: what was important was that it represents truth, that it functions as allegorical truth. In an article justifying his decisions with regard to this affair, Medinskii argued his case by claiming that absolute objectivity did not exist, that myths were also facts and that there were no definite events, only interpretations of history: ‘There are no historical conceptions that are the “one and only truth” or “genuinely objective” ’ (V. Medinskii 2017). The then Minister of Culture continued by arguing that history should be seen from the point of view of national interests. His confused interpretation of truth and

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history in this affair was encapsulated in the following quotation: ‘This legend has become a material force – more terrible and more wonderful than any fact from any real battle’ (V. Medinskii 2017). The director of the film, Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight, Andrei Shal’opa, a close ally of Medinskii, expressed similar sentiments: ‘The feat of Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight is part of our national culture, a myth that is so powerful it does not make any sense to argue about it. The historical dispute over Panfilov is senseless and immoral’ (Kostomarova 2014). Thus, although the government and its favoured cultural practitioners frequently decried the risk of historical falsification, they cared little for historical objectivity: this was a question of moral correctness, of consciousness. Taking this moralizing into account reveals a perverse logic to the authorities’ insistence on upholding and defending the ‘truth’ of official, often disproven, versions of history. The government’s dismissive attitude towards historical objectivity does not necessarily contradict their simultaneous invocation of history as truth or evidence insofar as politicians reference history as a higher form of truth, as an event that, even if it did not take place, should have done because it revealed something significant and accurate about the Russian people. The government presented the ability to see this ‘something’ as the purpose of studying history: ‘if you can’t see fact in the myth then that means you cease to be a historian’ (V. Medinskii 2017). In other words, myths like Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight, or the claim that the mass graves of Sandarmokh contain Soviet POWs, are presented and at least partially accepted as true not because people are certain these events took place (that does not matter) but because they are symbols of the greater truth of Russian/Soviet bravery and suffering in the Great Patriotic War. By contrast, in challenging the symbol, one also challenges the truth that it symbolizes. Taking this approach, the crux of any matter resides not in the concrete facts of what took place in the past but in whether the historical episode being invoked reveals a deeper truth about the heroism of the Russian people, their sacrifices and their messianic global role to spread this truth. Applying such logic, to deny the veracity of a historical episode on the basis of specific documents, or lack of proof, is akin to denying the whole wider truth attached to it, an act that would be perceived as unpatriotic, as seen in the case of Sergei Mironenko. This is the process by which a person’s view of history is extrapolated into a choice between different realities and also different

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identities. In the broader scheme of cultural consciousness, people who focus on historical inaccuracies in (usable) Soviet war myths show themselves to be unconscious of this higher truth. This approach to truth is in itself an assertion of Russian identity, of cultural consciousness, of the right to a different truth, posited as more powerful than fact. An understanding of history as a type of higher truth informs and is informed by the use of historical framing to present current events through a detailed historical analogy, as detailed in Chapter 3. This media technique familiarized audiences with the use of history as an allegory for understanding the present and the broader truth of what is happening in a confusing and overwhelming world. Ultimately, if cultural memory disguised as ‘history’ is the (main) vehicle used to promote the template of cultural consciousness, then cultural consciousness is the process by which you learn to discern the truth contained within this history. But while emotionally compelling, such approaches are based in insecurity, in the anticipation that facts will contradict the message. To avoid this investigation, everything is moved onto the level of emotional gratification while historical enquiry is delegitimized and codified, with consequences for the understanding not only of the past but also of reality. Unfortunately, this is not a process that is unique to Russia. The tendencies described in this chapter are observable around the world, as explored in the final chapter.

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The Endlessness of History In a secular world [. . .] history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History

Where next for Russian history? Every nation’s sense of identity is dependent on its ability to tell itself a coherent story about how it came to be, why it deserves to be and who belongs. This story should give not only definition to that sense of identity but also imbue it with a sense of purpose. Throughout its lifespan, any nation will need to adapt this story and to create new chapters, but always with an eye to the past: either in rejecting or in selectively embracing that which has gone before. In many ways, 2012 was the year when Putin had to address the absence of any such narrative for the post-Soviet Russian nation. Yeltsin’s embraces of anticommunism, Russian nationalism and capitalism had failed to win hearts and minds, which were more preoccupied by hungry stomachs and national decline. The early Putin years had also failed to elucidate a new narrative, with those in charge instead focused on improving material conditions, enhancing national sovereignty and cementing their power. By 2012, as mass protests and a decline in economic growth threatened this arrangement, the need for a coherent national narrative became ever more acute. The authorities used cultural memory and claims of historical awareness to fill this gap, telling a story of how Putin was leading Russians to the embodiment of cultural consciousness. In Russia’s war in Ukraine, with its imperialist overtones and explicit calls for ‘denazification’, we are seeing the ugly consequences of Russian

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leaders’ messianic belief in their unique access to truth and their right to bring others to cultural consciousness, willingly or not. Chapters 2 through 6 of this book detail how the Russian government inculcated a political preoccupation with history and transformed it into a usable identity. They examine where and how the Kremlin’s obsession with the past feeds into a broader idea of cultural consciousness, which in turn depended on creating the language and practices to describe and enact this cultural and historical awareness. On one level, the government’s intensive uses of history are aimed at creating a narrative that distracts from government failings, promotes government policies and reinforces the Kremlin’s view of current events. On another level, such depictions and efforts bolster and manipulate a unifying sense of identity via a government-directed campaign to place historical interpretation at the centre of cultural consciousness and therefore at the centre of what it means to be Russian. Central to achieving this is the technique of historical framing, which I analysed through three case studies in Chapter 3. These case studies outlined how politicians and the media achieved the conflation of the past with the present, namely through the use of narratives that described these events as the revisiting of past triumphs (intervention in Syria) and the remedying of past traumas (sanctions), or even a combination of the two (the Ukraine Crisis). Due to the media’s tendency to adapt to the government’s political (especially foreign policy) objectives, I initially envisaged historical framing as performing a purely time-limited, specific and pragmatic function: that of convincing the audience that the Russian government’s policy response to a given crisis was the correct one, as well as distracting viewers from any negative consequences. However, by contextualizing historical framing within the government’s wider treatment and uses of history, it became clear that historical framing was also contributing to, and even facilitating, a discussion on a more symbolic level of what it means to be a good Russian, what makes Russia a nation and the existential topic of why the Russian Federation should exist. Such questions took me a long way from my starting point. In opting to examine the political use of history in the post-2012 Putin era, my initial aim was to understand how the Russian media and government conflated the past with the present. This procedural emphasis stemmed from my interest in language and in how Russian media presenters moulded it into the types of

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manipulative narratives broadcast in Russian coverage of the 2014 Ukraine Crisis; I was fascinated, if troubled, by their politicized and almost blasphemous banalization of epic Red Army battles especially when it was combined with a genuine and tender recounting of suffering and sacrifice during the Great Patriotic War. The level of commitment and detail, plus the effects it had on people around me, meant that, despite the hyperbole, bombast and sometimes blatant disregard for fact, I wanted to take their arguments seriously. I disagreed with the coverage and found it cynical but just because something is propaganda does not mean it is or is not believed, a lesson of all too much relevance to Russia’s 2022 war on Ukraine as well. Based on my own experiences of living in Russia during the EuroMaidan protests, annexation of Crimea and (outbreak of) war in Donbas, I had initially assumed that the conflations deployed at this time were especially exaggerated, and the invective especially vitriolic, due to Russia’s historical relationship with Ukraine and the fear of ‘colour’ revolution that has been a mainstay in Russian discourse since at least the 2007 Munich Speech (Prezident Rossii 2007). However, this proved not to be the case: the media and politicians employed a similar level of hyperbole across the other case studies, even in some of the less tabloid publications (Lenta, Argumenty i fakty), suggesting that this exaggeration was more broadly typical of historical framing. This made it clear that historical framing was not a narrative applied just to the Ukraine Crisis but a media technique, into which different news events and different historical periods could be fed. Historical framing did, however, evolve in tune with the government’s shifting priorities, as seen in the move from a defensive to an aggressive tone between 2014 and 2015. This change was somewhat unexpected given the Russian media’s frequent emphasis on Russian victimhood in their coverage of Western foreign policy prior to this. The shift in tone demonstrated the close connection between historical framing and the wider political project of defining what it means to be a good Russian, as well as reflecting an increased (geo)political self-confidence. This development also enabled the more messianic bent of cultural consciousness to take a more prominent form than was the case from 2012 to 2014. As such, following the thread of media coverage during these pivotal years provided not only clarity on the detailed use of historical analogies, but also shed insight into political processes underway in

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Russia – processes of significance beyond its borders, given that Russia’s political preoccupation with history and the meaning of patriotic identity accords with, and illuminates, trends outside the borders of the Russian Federation.

The future of cultural consciousness According to the Russian media and government’s depictions of patriotism, cultural consciousness is attained through, and evidenced by, a true understanding of historical (allegorical) truth. Essentially, this idea can be reduced to the tautological formulation that Russians are defined by (and special because of) their unique understanding of their own history and culture but that you can only be Russian if you possess this consciousness of your culture (primarily history). Cultural consciousness is not a coherent ideology so much as a way of selling the core components of a worldview – that Russians needs a strong state, that Russia must develop along its own special path and that Russia is a great power with a mission to carry out in the world – in a way that also underpins the approved cultural memory. Even the most cursory of inspections reveals that cultural consciousness offers a conceptualization of Russianness lacking in any concrete vision of Russia’s future beyond that of influence and power projection. Despite the media’s depictions of the template of coming-to-cultural-consciousness and the politicians’ heated orations equating Russianness with an embrace of historical justice, this is first and foremost a discourse of political legitimacy. As the Russian academic Igor’ Zevelev argues, it is about keeping the elites in power: In the end, from the broad assortment of ideas that appeared in intellectual discourse about Russia’s post-Soviet identity over the last twenty years, were chosen those [strands] which seemed the most suited to legitimizing the government and strengthening the independence, strength and influence of the Russian state. Zevelev 2014

The lack of a vision for the future reflects the cynicism inherent in the government’s efforts to subjugate discussions of Russian identity to their own immediate political requirements: Russian history, politics and identity are all

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instruments through which to legitimize the government and its rule. In place of ambitious plans or hopes for the future, there is, once again, this sense of nostalgic anticipation: looking forward to the future only for its similarities to the past. This also helps to deflect from the current lack of any attractive or viable political alternative to Vladimir Putin. Moreover, cultural consciousness provides a spur to action and a sense of purpose that can be realized outside of Russia’s borders, mobilizing and justifying Russian military action in Ukraine. This sense of purpose, alongside the well-documented appeal of nostalgia, and the opportunity to present Russia as restoring at least some of a lost and idealized past, will likely encourage the Kremlin to continue to return to the emotive and symbolic potential of uses of history, from historical framing through memory wars to memory diplomacy. For this reason, the government and media’s uses of history will only become even more extreme as their war in Ukraine continues, especially if it continues to flounder. Consider, for example, the winter of 2019–20, when Putin responded to his flagging popularity ratings by engaging in a memory war over the causes of the Second World War with various Polish politicians (BBC 2019a) and by promising to inscribe into the new constitution the sanctity of the ‘true’ memory of the Great Patriotic War and Great Victory (Sokolov 2020), a promise he kept. Consider also the Moscow city authorities’ efforts in 2021 to distract from antigovernment protests sparked by Aleksei Navalny’s Putin’s Palace YouTube exposé by introducing a referendum over whether to return a statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Soviet secret police, to Lubyanka Square. The selected examples above show the diverse application of history in Putin’s Russia and the diverse historical narratives put into political employment: what might be ignored or disdained at times (Dzerzhinksii, Lenin) may prove useful or be brought into the fold depending on political need. But to function, all of these efforts depend on a level of emotional gratification and on engaging the public. After all, ordinary Russians can and will reject and approve and adapt different aspects of the official representations of the past; they are not merely passive receptacles of the official top-down narrative, even taking into account the limits that the government have placed on historical enquiry with the aim of constricting debate. Although this book is concerned with official efforts to control and inculcate a narrative, including how the Kremlin adapts to citizen-led efforts, it is worth

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noting that existing empirical studies of Russians’ collective memories of the Second World War suggest they are markedly homogenous but differ (in terms of content) from other combatant nations’ collective memories (Abel et al. 2019). This is despite the generational divide caused by perestroika, in which those who grew up before Gorbachev’s reforms demonstrated more detailed knowledge of key events of the war compared to those who grew up during the reform era, who were also more willing to engage critically with history (Wertsch 2002). Certainly, the legislative changes that have occurred under Putin have made critical engagement a less promising endeavour, but the lack of historical knowledge has no doubt also worked in the authorities’ favour. Research has shown that those who are most committed and attentive to Putin’s selective commemorations and narratives, reading his articles with gusto, also scored the lowest among all participant groups in an objective Second World War knowledge test, despite evaluating their knowledge highly – alongside their willingness to ‘correct’ false Western historical narratives (Frederick and Coman 2022). This is merely another representation of what we have already seen: that the promotion of history as a form of cultural consciousness is about power- and identity-building rather than knowledge of oneself or one’s nation. It is perhaps for this reason that there is so much emphasis on triumph and celebration: many Russians were traumatized by the sudden collapse of the USSR, by the collapse of not only its prestige but also their own. Jobs that were high-status and useful went for months unpaid, whereas those previously (and often correctly) stigmatized as criminals and speculators were now on top. This topsy-turvy moral universe led many to reach for certainties of old and the Russian government found a way to fit these into a neat narrative that made sense for the contemporary era and its own political requirements. Some have taken this focus on the positive aspects of Russian and Soviet history as evidence that the Kremlin just sweeps tragedies under the carpet. However, the reality is somewhat different: the Kremlin’s uses of history are in fact dependent on a lurking and enduring sense of political, national and often personal trauma and tragedy. That sense of loss and humiliation is politically convenient provided it can be diverted to support the three core elements of the Kremlin’s worldview: Russia needs a strong state; Russia must follow its own special path of development; Russia is a messianic great power.

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The historical narratives being used, as well as the very notion of cultural consciousness, with its invocation of allegorical truth, appeal to a sense of injustice and humiliation that is continuously stoked in Russian political discourse. Many of the elements seen in historical framing are also features of other illiberal discourses and processes of securitization underway in Russian politics. This is especially true of the more symbolic elements, such as the efforts to use historical truth as a unifying idea. By way of example, the notion of Russia as a last bastion of truth and morality has figured prominently in post-2012 discourses on gender identity, feminism and LGBT issues, reflecting the importance of messianism to Russian conceptualizations of its national mission (Healey 2017). Othering is also central to cultural consciousness and to wider Russian political discourse, especially in the form of everyday antiWestern and anti-American discourse. This crossover recalls my interview with Konstantin Pakhalyuk from RMHS, in which he connected the emergence of the call to history with the broader conservative political turn (RVIO employee; Pakhalyuk 2018). However, to identify official Russian political treatment of history too closely with conservative values would involve overlooking many aspects that intersect with left-wing populist discourses. Nestled alongside the denunciations of ‘Gayropa’ and the demise of the family, Russian media makes numerous derogatory references to neo-liberalism and virulent capitalism in a manner that would be perfectly at home in hyper-partisan left-wing websites like the Canary (Argumenty i fakty 2014c). More obviously, the claiming of the anti-fascist mantle against Ukraine resonated with numerous European leftwing politicians and parties, from Syriza to Jeremy Corbyn (Győri 2016; Lenta 2015b). Although this may be limited in Europe now, given widespread disgust at Russia’s war on Ukraine and massacres of civilians in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere, there is still scope for Russia to build on a narrative appeal beyond their borders in the future by placing increased emphasis on political meanings associated with, but transcending, the Soviet Union, such as internationalism, anti-imperialism and egalitarianism, something it has already begun to do through its practice of memory diplomacy, discussed in Chapter 4. This interdiscursivity with populist illiberal (economic or social) discourses across the political spectrum and across the globe helps to entrench and normalize the often-conspiratorial messages contained within the narratives. Such

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discourses feed off one another: for example, research has shown considerable confluence and mutual admiration between Russian narratives and the American and European far and alt-right (Laruelle 2015; Shekhovtsov 2018; Klapsis 2015). In this way, understanding the Russian narrative also helps us to understand how such narratives are functioning in the West. As suggested by the epigraph to this chapter, while the preoccupation with history may have been especially pronounced in Russia since 2012, it did not simply start then and it is far from a uniquely Russian phenomenon or pathology.1 Much like nostalgia, it can be seen as a ‘local variation on the global trend of post-ideological political culture predicated on the backwards glance at history’ (Platt 2019: 232). Historical (re)tellings have displaced the parabolic role of religion in explaining morality, good and evil. This also helps to explain why the use of history in Russia, and elsewhere, functions so much like ideology, that other replacement for religion, mirroring Nikolai Koposov’s (2018) argument that Europe as a whole, not just Russia, is moving from the age of ideology to the age of memory. Cultural consciousness as a concept creates and thrives on conflict and binary opposition. It is therefore unsurprising that elements of it should also feature in other countries’ coverage of polarizing issues. Some of the obvious examples of historical framing outside Russia are to be found in nondemocratic countries; for example, the journalist Katie Stallard has studied the way that China and North Korea (and Russia) explain wars through reference to other wars (Stallard 2022). In his excellent book Never Forget National Humiliation, the academic Zheng Wang charts a remarkably similar process to Russia’s in China, showing how the Chinese Communist Party not only survived but even thrived after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, regaining the support of many Chinese citizens through ideological reeducation of the public via history and historical narrative (Wang 2012). Portraying China as the victim of foreign imperialist bullying during ‘one hundred years of humiliation’, the Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of historical narratives and rewriting and teaching of history explains remarkable shifts in Chinese domestic and foreign policy but also partly explains the Communist Party’s continued hold on power. 1

For more on the debate as to whether Russia’s (ab)use of history is a unique case, see Torbakov 2016.

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Other parts of the communist and post-socialist world provide further, ample, parallels with Russian uses of history, including some that provided a dark portent for Russia’s massacre of Ukrainians. The Yugoslav wars saw an intensity of historical framing against which even the war in Ukraine would pale. Most prominently, Serbian media relentlessly instrumentalized the memory of Croats in Second World War atrocities to depict the 1990s’ Croat army as 1940s’ Ustaše fighters reopening Jasenovac and resuming Ante Pavelic’s genocide of the Serbs. Such language was accompanied by ceremonial reburials of Serbs slaughtered during the Second World War, as Tito’s death paved the way for a more open remembrance of the Croatian genocide against the Serbs during the 1940s, but also for its politicization by those in power in Belgrade. As with references to Banderites and pro-Maidan Ukrainians in Russian media coverage of the Ukraine Crisis, the terms Ustaše and Croat became interchangeable during the war (Thompson 1999). On the other side, many Croats and Bosnians called the Serbs Chetniks, in reference to the Serb nationalist forces who, at various points, fought against and with the occupying Nazi forces in Serbia. The unprocessed memories of the Second World War haunted the war that took place some fifty years later. However, historical framing and politicized uses of history are far from unique to the post-communist world and we see liberal democratic countries pursuing increasingly similar tactics. By way of example, during and following the 2016 Brexit referendum, certain sections of the British media and politicians (especially those belonging to the European Research Group faction within the Conservative Party) repeatedly invoked a heavily mythologized cultural memory of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain as evidence of the UK’s ability to succeed outside the EU and a reason to pursue a so-called ‘hard’ Brexit. In this narrative, Britain could stand alone now, outside Europe, because it did so in 1940. During the Brexit negotiations, Mark Francois MP even tore up a warning letter from Airbus chief executive Tom Enders during a live BBC interview, with the words: ‘My father was a D-Day veteran, he never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son.’ In this ‘Brexit as the Second Battle of Britain’ performance, the history invoked is easily debunked by a simple mention of the British Empire, which would reveal that the UK did not, in fact stand alone, or of the fact that Winston Churchill would have much preferred not to stand alone. However, this debunking does not make the

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‘Britain Stands Alone’ narrative any less powerful or credible because, to many people, this portrayal represents an allegorical truth, namely that Britain’s leaders and people did display bravery in opting not to surrender to Nazi Germany when the rest of Europe was occupied and the USA and USSR had yet to enter the Second World War. Similar patterns in the uses of history are also observable in the so-called ‘new world’. History and memory wars are being waged with increasing vigour in the USA, where the divisive memory of the Confederacy is used in the South to determine who is a real Southerner and to call out to a forgotten culture, which is supposedly at risk of being lost. The constant arguments over statues to Confederate fighters are ultimately an ugly debate about who belongs, or who is a fully-fledged American, even culminating in murder in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. As elsewhere, these statues tell us very little about the past: many of them were erected long after the end of the Civil War and some stand in areas that were not even part of the USA at the time. In America, as in Russia, we see history rendered as a symbol of people’s politics and worldview but also of their identity and belonging. The invocation of history and the intense political uses of the past are consequences of and a contributing factor to politics and societies in which history and identity are ever more closely intertwined. As noted, there are often direct points of comparison with trends in Russia. To return to the UK, several cities witnessed large protests in 2020 against colonialist statues and the UK’s colonial legacy. Protestors especially objected to the glorification of slaveowners. The protests raised substantive topics, worthy of considered debate, but these were ultimately often reduced, by both sides, to an overemphasis on the historical figure of Winston Churchill and whether he should or should not be ‘cancelled’. Naturally, one side’s opposition to him merely polarized those who revered Churchill and who saw any defacement of his statue as not only an effort to undermine or challenge his legitimacy but also as a challenge to people’s identity and way of seeing themselves. Watching the far-right descend on central London to defend Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square from protestors, it was hard not to draw parallels with the defence battalions set up in Ukraine to defend Lenin and Soviet war memorials at the outbreak of the 2014 war in Donbas. It was even harder not to draw parallels between the UK and Russian government when, around this time, the then Culture Secretary,

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Oliver Dowden, began writing frequent media columns decrying unpatriotic or ‘woke’ activists and their ostensible obsession with denigrating English history. As such, in the UK and elsewhere, there are forces at play similar to those in Russia. As in the Russian examples, politicians and certain sections of the media conflate the past with the present, frequently using the former to explain why something is happening or will happen in the future, thereby meeting the basic definition of historical framing. Ministers and journalists turn an interpretation of history into a question of who is a patriot and who belongs. The fact that historical narrative is always a reflection of who elites think should belong (i.e., should be reflected in the narrative) is reversed into the equation that if you do not espouse the narrative, you do not belong. The presence of a free and democratic media in the UK and the other liberal democracies listed above will not necessarily undermine the potency and potential of such narratives, but they will provide a contestation and prevent the codification that has stifled historical enquiry and objective truth in Russia. That said, in a worst-case scenario, this freedom could also work to enhance polarization and undermine some of the constructive or unifying aspects of the Kremlin’s intense uses of the past in Russia. While the above examples, like my research findings, present a bleak picture of historical framing’s uses, there is nonetheless evidence that its inherent mobilizational and emotional appeal could be repurposed to positive ends. A study of documentaries in Sweden and Germany on migration showed that they made considerable use of historical parallels to justify a pro-migrant stance following the 2015 migrant and refugee crisis (Wagner and Seuferling 2019). The Ukrainian government has also positively invoked myths from the Second World War to inspire their nation’s resistance to the Russian invasion. Invoking history, therefore, is not an inherently negative act or impulse towards ‘othering’. In fact, perhaps it is only by counterposing different, nuanced, historical narratives, or different interpretations of history, to those invoked by populists on all sides that it is possible to counter the emotional appeal of the more negative types of historical framing described in this book as well as the attendant claims to authenticity and a higher sense of truth. Exploring how to neutralize media narratives that instrumentalize powerful cultural memories will be of increased relevance in an age marred by political unpredictability

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and so-called national populism (Eatwell and Goodwin 2018). It is important that the emotive power of historical language is not simply ceded to the demagogues. While exact ways to counteract this demagoguery lie beyond the scope of this book, the emergence of historical framing and intensive political uses of history, not only in Russia but in various and notably diverse countries, shows that paying attention to political processes and discourse in Russia is necessary for understanding global political processes. Russia is an extreme example, due to its Soviet legacy and authoritarian regime, of the undermining (and redefining) of truth in political discourse, but this crudeness makes it easier to identify patterns there that may be present but more understated in other societies. Further impetus to this is added by Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, which functions almost as a test of Kremlin historical propaganda and ability to export abroad its vision of cultural consciousness as the quintessence of national identity, located in a supposed ‘historical truth’. Writing in April 2022, Russia’s invasion has failed on coming into contact with real Ukrainians as opposed to those constructed in mythomaniac minds. But this should not distract from the point that the cultural consciousness argument provides a lightning rod and easy explanation as to why this or that nation is unique and special, making it appealing to many politicians. While memory making remains such a productive tactic, governments and other memory actors worldwide are likely to continue expanding their instrumentalization of memory, seeing the past not as a prologue but as a usable pretext. Let the scorched rubble and dismembered bodies scattered across Ukrainian lands stand as testimony to the malevolent power of memory and myth making.

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Index Afghanistan NATO war in 14, 78 Soviet war in 14, 78, 83, 90 algorithms 48 All-Russian National Front 134 Al-Qaeda 78 Andropov, Yurii 13, 77 anti-Maidan 70, 72, 153 antisemitism 62, 68, 86, 107, 130 Arsyukhin, Evgenii 81–2, 112, 113, 117 Artek, holiday camp 118 Assad, Bashar Al- 89, 92 Baltic States 7, 9, 34, 42, 64, 104–5, 107–8 Bandera, Stepan 4, 23, 58, 61–4, 66–7 Banderites 23, 43, 60, 62–6, 68, 70, 73–4, 106, 167, 189 Beevor, Antony 43 Bleu, Ivan 118 Bolotnaya protests 59 see also protests Bolsheviks 13, 96, 185 boycott, Western produce 118, 167–8 Boym, Svetlana 14, 113 Brezhnev Leonid 13, 15–16, 24, 70, 76–8, 85–7, 103, 142, 177 Britain 10, 105, 123, 189 uses of history by, 189–91 capitalism 94, 168, 171, 181, 187 transition to 13, 82, 118 Catherine the Great 13 Chechnya 64 Ramzan Kadyrov 35 wars in 78 Chernobyl 14, 172–3 children’s patriotic movements 36–7, 130–1, 145, 147–54, 160 Youth Army 36–7, 149 China 124, 188 Churchill, Winston 93, 121, 189–90

Cold War comparisons with 16, 88–101, 109 historiography of 77–8, 85, 96–9 INF Treaty 83–4 nuclear weapons 78–9, 95–6, 98 results of 78, 95–100 Soviet superpower status during 24, 78, 90–1, 95–100 US victory in 53, 77, 95, 97, 100, 163 Collective Security Treaty Organization 89 Colour Revolution 59–60 Commission to Prevent the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests 9, 38, 41, 104 communism 7, 56, 83, 155, 163, 177, 189 deideologization of 83, 85–6, 98 ideology of 19, 83, 94, 172 memory of 7, 54, 103 messianism 100, 120–1, 163 monuments/symbols 7–8, 12, 62, 70, 93, 103, 105, 107, 119, 167 nostalgia for 103, 168 consciousness class consciousness 160, 170–4, 180 cultural consciousness 22, 25–7, 97, 119, 130, 157–79, 184–5, 187–8, 192 constitutional amendments of 2020 3, 11, 30, 42, 185 corruption 15, 18, 79, 132, 136, 185 countersanctions 18, 24, 84–8 Crimea 123, 137 Russian annexation of 18, 23, 29, 39, 47, 54, 58–65, 71–4, 88, 162, 167, 183 cyberattacks 9, 74 Depardieu, Gerard 115 disinformation 65, 75, 96, 149–50, 170, 176 see also falsification of history distortion of history, see falsification of history Dmitriev, Yurii 45

229

230 Donbas 66, 54, 58, 60, 69, 71, 74–6, 168, 183 Donetsk People’s Republic 60, 71–5 Dozhd’ 40, 47 Dzerzhinsky, Feliks 185 Eastern Europe history of 123–5 memory politics of 7, 27, 104 Soviet liberation then occupation of, 3, 123, 154–5 Eurasianism 159, 174 EuroMaidan 4, 18, 47, 57–65, 70, 74, 117, 183 see also War in Ukraine Europe depictions of 68, 86, 96, 162–4 European Union 18, 57, 59, 67, 75–6, 80, 95, 125, 189 Russia as anti- 27, 130 Russia as saviour of 108, 120–1, 143 Russia as the ‘true’ 121, 159 Russia’s relationship with 81, 107, 187–90 falsification of history 9, 25–6, 30–3, 38, 41–3, 104–8, 131, 142, 149, 158, 176–8 films 131–43 Hollywood 139–40 kinofikatsiya 132 Panfilov’s 28 140–2, 178 RMHS films 140 Sobibor 140–1 Flight MH17 18, 52, 75–6, 79, 89, 168 foreign agents 25, 104, 109–11 law 10, 20, 46–7 Foreign Policy Concept 30 Foundations of the State Cultural Policy 130, 161 France 123 Germany 96–7, 124–5, 191 East 124 Nazi 42–3, 51, 67, 92 Gorbachev, Mikhail 13, 77, 82–5, 186 government-organized NGOs 134–5, 145 great power status 12–16, 21, 27, 29, 85, 88–92, 101, 120, 157–9, 166, 184, 186

Index Great Patriotic War Battle for Moscow 1, 39 commemoration of 65–74 commodification of 167–9 comparison with Ukraine Crisis, Conflict and 2022 War 23, 51–74, 116–17 deportations 137, 151 films 133 Great Victory of 1945 15–16, 20, 27, 60, 68, 72, 92–3, 185 Khatyn 4, 70 laws about 3, 39–44 in museums 140, 142, 144 in popular culture 6, 16, 38–9, 133–54 Pride in 20, 73, 185 Putin-era narratives of 10, 13, 15–17, 21, 109, 116, 167, 178 revisions of 41, 43, 117 in school textbooks 35 Soviet narratives of 171–2, 178, 43 in Ukraine 51–74, 117 see also Second World War; Victory Day Gulag 10, 20, 45 Helsinki Agreement 79 historical framing compared with historical analogy 55 definition of 4–5, 23–5, 51–7 of intervention in Syria 88–101 outside Russia 27, 188–92 positive examples 191–2 of Sanctions 75–88 of Ukraine crisis 57–75 ‘Historical Memory’ project 38–9, 151 homophobia 18, 26, 86, 155, 187 human rights 10, 31, 45–6 identity construction of 3, 11–13, 49, 116, 138, 159–63, 181–2 depriving others of 132, 163–5 literature on 6–8, 15–22, 166 Russian 29–32, 73, 99, 120, 159, 164–5, 170–5, 179, 185 threats to 105, 110, 119, 144, 158 IMF 78–80 Immortal Regiment 12, 25, 39, 128, 152–5

Index imperialism 69, 74, 121, 159, 165, 181, 187–8 imperial history/Tsars 12–13, 20, 34, 38, 135, 137 INF Treaty 83 Information Security Doctrine 30–1 internet in Russia (RuNet) Vkontakte 43, 48 Yandex 48, 141 ISIS 89–94, 96, 166 Kadety 12 Kadyrov Ramzan 35 Katyn 36, 106 Khatyn 4, 70 Kiselev, Dmitrii 47, 57, 95, 97 Koposov, Nikolai 6, 45, 159, 188 Kremlin domestic policy 2–4, 32–7, 175, 182–6 foreign policy 165, 173 Kremlin.ru 56 and the media 4–6, 42–9, 56 usable past 7–22, 39–40 worldview 5–7, 38, 159, 161, 164, 166 Lavrov, Sergei 30, 56, 89, 124 Lenin, Vladimir 185 monuments to 63, 103, 190 Leningrad blockade 40, 44, 47, 172 Luhansk People’s Republic 60, 71–3 McDonald’s 118 see also boycott, Western produce Magnitsky Act 18 media argumenty i fakty 55 Dozhd’ 40, 47 independent media 40 Komsomolskaya Pravda 56 Kremlin control over 46–9 Lenta 47, 56 RIA Novosti 47 Rossiiskaya gazeta 57 Rossiya segodnya 47 self-censorship of 44, 48 television 46, 48–9, 56, 114, 131–2, 140, 143, 165 use of external contributors 114–16 Vesti nedeli 56–7 Voskresnoe vremya 57

231

Medinskii Rostislav 133, 136 Medinskii, Vladimir on consciousness 160–1, 172 as Minister of Culture, 25, 128–34, 148 on myths 110, 141–2, 175, 177–8 PhD 44 role in RMHS 25, 34–5, 127–8, 135–42, 148 on Russia 18, 35, 160–2 on Western popular culture 110, 132–3 Medvedev Dmitrii 9, 30, 38, 41, 65, 100 Memorial 10, 20, 45, 109 memory diplomacy 27, 121–5, 164, 185, 187 memory laws in Central and Eastern Europe 104, 107 in Russia 23, 40–2, 45 messianism 14, 119–21, 162–6, 171, 178, 182–3, 187 Mikhalkov, Nikita 136 Military Doctrine 2014 30–1 Military History Clubs and Camps 37–8, 128, 131, 137, 145–9, 167 Country of Heroes, 36, 147, 149 Dawn in Rossoshka 150 Forgotten Feat 127, 145, 147 Neva Bridgehead 148–9 Military Patriotic Clubs and Camps 37–8, 147–8, 167 Ministry of Culture 43, 127–36, 141, 143, 148, 154, 162 Ministry of Defence 37, 96, 148 Ministry of Education 37, 44, 128, 145 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 35, 56 Mironenko, Sergei 177–8 Mironov, Sergei 81 MMM 129 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 36, 60, 124 Munich Speech, 2007: 8, 104, 183 museums 34, 38, 122, 133–4, 137, 143, 151 Museum of Modern History 144 of the Great Patriotic War 140, 144 Perm-36 20 ROSIZO 143 Russia – My History 144–5 Napoleon 13, 54, 166 narodnost’ 171 Naryshkin, Sergei 30, 38–9, 93, 161

232

Index

national identity 6, 13, 19, 30, 105, 120, 172, 192 National Security Strategies 30–2, 83, 90 nationalists in Russia 16, 19–20, 69, 159 in Ukraine 62, 64 NATO 68, 79–80, 96, 110, 124 Navalny, Aleksei 42–3, 48, 80, 112, 185 Nazis/Nazism concentration and death camps 69, 132, 140–1 defeat of 8, 92, 108 Goebbels, Joseph 66–7 ideology 63–8 invasion of Soviet Union 15, 39, 70, 131 rehabilitation of 11, 42–6, 119 Röhm, Ernst 67 Ukrainian nationalists and 4, 23, 60–8, 70, 73–5, 123 NGOs 32, 134 nineties crime 79 democracy and governance 160, 168 economic crises and poverty 76, 112, 117–18 freedoms 46, 160, 168 memory of 55, 79–82, 138–40 Western treatment of Russia 77–83 nostalgia 14–15, 24, 37, 79, 86–8, 103, 118, 124, 168, 185, 188 October Revolution 13, 34, 39, 171 Odesa, Trade Union Building Fire 70, 116 oligarchs 80, 136, 167 Orange Revolution 61 Orthodox Church 19, 35 OUN (Ukrainian Nationalist Organization) 23, 61–3 Panfilov’s 28 131, 140–2, 148, 177–8 parades November Parade 1, 39 POW 51–2 Victory Day 8, 16, 33–4, 39, 72 patriotism defining 4, 14, 16, 160–8, 184 problems of 4, 14, 23, 139, 150 youth 127–31, 36 Perestroika 10, 16, 82, 84–5, 186

Poland 7, 19, 29, 42–3, 104–8 populism 17, 27, 111–14, 116, 187–92 Poroshenko, Petro 60, 74 post-truth 175–9 Pravyi sector 61, 74 Prokhanov, Aleksandr 16 propaganda 48, 57, 96, 113, 164, 183 Prosveshchenie, publishing house 35 protests 2011/2012: 9, 17, 46, 59–60, 112 anti-Maidan 70, 72, 153 pro-Ukraine (March of Peace) 63–4 Putin, Vladimir Crimean annexation and 18, 23, 39, 47, 54, 58–60, 64–8, 71–4, 88, 123, 162, 167, 183 first two presidential terms 8–10 181 historical articles 29–30 Munich Speech, 2007 8, 104, 183 nation-building and 8–11 patriotism and support for 14–18, 26, 127, 167–8 on Russian identity 29–30 Reagan, Ronald 82–4 Red Army 9, 23, 39, 44, 51, 105, 108, 132, 143, 147, 183 religion diversity and multiconfessionality 19, 121, 138 religious values 26, 158, 164, 176, 188 Russian Army 43, 110, 135, 168 Russian Orthodox Church 19, 35 revisionism of history, see falsification of history Revolution of Dignity, see EuroMaidan Roads of Victory 147–8 Rogozin, Dmitrii 135 Rokossovskii, General 137 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 93 Roskomnadzor 48 Rosmolodezh 37 Rospatriottsentr 37 Rossotrudnichestvo 163 Rosturizm 148 Russkost’ 165–6 Russian Historical Society 33–4, 140 Russian Military Historical Society 25, 34–6, 45, 122, 128, 134–52

Index Russian Schoolchildren’s Movement 37 Russia Today (RT) 11, 65, 124, 176 Russian World 71 Russophobia 107–9 Saint George’s Ribbons 39, 51, 72–3, 119, 122–3, 137, 167–8 Volunteers of Victory 122–3, 149 Voronezh 103, 168 sanctions boycott, Western produce 118, 167–8 comparisons of Western sanctions with collapse of USSR 75–88 counter-sanctions 18, 24, 84–8 third-wave 75–7, 120 Sandarmokh 46, 78, 178 Second World War anti-Hitler alliance 92–5 causes of 29, 36, 42 commemoration of 34, 123–4, 133–4, 186 difference from Great Patriotic War 15 falsification of 41, 43, 93, 141 Nuremberg Trials 42–3, 73, 144 results of 90 see also Great Patriotic War Serbia 80, 124, 189 see also Yugoslav wars Shakhnazarov, Karen 84 Shoigu, Sergei 30, 108, 135 shortages 112 Siege of Leningrad, see Leningrad blockade Simonyan, Margarita 47 Slutsky, Leonid 136 social media 48, 115, 123 socialism, see communism Socialist Realism 171–3 sovereignty 32, 48–9, 66, 77–80, 82–4, 125, 157–63, 181 Soviet Union collapse of 75–88; see also nostalgia food of 86–7 public holidays in 8, 42 Russia’s status after 88–93 superpower status of 79, 88–101 unipolar world order after 88–90 war memorials of 70, 93, 105, 107–8, 119, 167, 190

233

SS Galichina 4, 63 stability 9, 13, 24, 32, 41, 76–88, 158 Stalin, Joseph memory of 12, 109 repressions 20, 45, 151 and the Second World War 1, 39–40, 93, 172 State Programme for Patriotism 133 Wall of Grief 20 Stone, Oliver 115, 163 Strelkov, Igor 69, 147 Surkov, Vladislav 9 Svoboda 62 SVR 30, 38 Syria Russian intervention in war 88–101 Soviet relations with 37, 97–101 Tallinn, 2007 protests 9 Tatars 64 textbooks 146, 34–5, 61 Timchenko, Galina 47, 56, 58 see also lenta.ru Tsarism 12, 38, 137, 147 Ukraine 2022 war on 2, 21, 36, 40, 44, 65, 89, 108, 113, 136, 191 Conflict (2014) 18, 61–79 Crisis (2014) 57–75 EuroMaidan 4, 18, 47, 57–65, 70, 74, 117, 183 history of 23, 30, 61–2 identity of 30, 189–91 Odesa Trade Union Building Fire, 70, 116 OUN/UPA 23, 63 United Nations founding of 92, 94 Putin speeches at 92–4 United Russia 17, 112, 137, 152 Historical Memory project 38–40, 151 Ustase 189 USA 10 in Cold War 190, 94–101 Russian relations with 18, 32, 47, 57, 59, 67, 75–8, 80–5, 89, 91, 118, 163, 166 wars of 8, 105–6

234 Valdai 77, 79, 91, 95, 164 Victory Day in Russia 8, 16, 33, 39, 140, 152–5, 167 in Ukraine 71–5 Victory Organizing Committee 108 Vlasovites 44, 147 Volodymyr/Vladimir the Great 13, 29 Volodin, Vyacheslav 30, 165 war, in Ukraine (since 2014-) 51–88 2014 war in Donbas 47, 57–79, 136, 190 2022 war 65, 108, 113, 168, 191, 192 Russian-backed fighters 23, 58, 61, 68–71, 115–16 ‘Self-defence battalions’ 63, 68

Index Yalta conference 90–5, 123 Yanukovych, Viktor 18, 57–60, 62, 70 Yeltsin, Boris 8, 80, 84, 106, 139, 181 see also Nineties Youth Army 36–7, 149 Yugoslavia bombing of 80, 124 wars in 2, 27, 189 Yukos 80 Zakharova, Mariya 93, 105, 108 Zemtsov, Nikolai 152–4 Zhukov, Georgii 138 Zinoviev, Alexander 85

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