Putin’s History 3.0 – historical revisionism in Russia of 9 May

On 9 May at the victory parade in Moscow, Putin is likely to present a new version of Russia’s WWII history along with updated narratives for the future.

The world war that never ended

Tuning into the world of Russian state-sponsored TV, films, museums or other cultural beacons of Kremlin ideology feels like stepping into a time machine. Every other evening, bloody battles are fought and Soviet heroes defeat Nazis while partisans stoically defend the Motherland against all odds. Loyal Soviet women work enthusiastically in arms factories and maintain the home front under the portrait of Joseph Stalin who, since productions from 2014-2015, has been given a more glorious role.

War nostalgia is not unique to Russia, but what stands out in the Russian case is the re-interpretation and mainstreaming of a single version of history across most spheres of society – culture, education, science, public information space, military teaching – and its ambitious promotion to the outside world. Short of other objectives, Putin’s Russia has made the ‘fight against Nazis’ its raison d’être, labelling almost any opposition as either Nazi or ‘Russophobic’. The 9 May parades in Russia have become reminiscent of religious ceremonies.

80 years on – and a new version of history

Has Putin changed his mind about history? Yes. While some elements have evolved gradually and gained more prominence, overall, we can identify three distinct versions of history in recent times, each reflecting a different view on other countries. For simplicity, we refer to them as Putin History 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, respectively.

Putin History 1.0 – the USSR and the collective victory

In the early 2000s, after Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin’s view was that the USSR fought Hitler together with the allies during 1941-1945. Moscow appreciated the support from the US, the UK and other Western allies while recognising that European countries under Nazi occupation had resistance movements playing their part in the collective victory over the Axis powers, in particular Nazi Germany. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which applied in 1939-1941 was rarely discussed, its existence having been de facto denied in the Soviet Union until 1989. See our analysis of how the view on the Pact has changed from embarrassment to praise.

Putin History 2.0 – the USSR and less West

During the 2010s, the focus gradually shifted to the idea that the USSR fought the war alone. Especially after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in the spring of 2014 and the subsequent deterioration of relations with the US, the EU and others, the sense of allied unity began to fade. Mainstream state TV, films and museums started focussing on Soviet history and Stalin came to prominence as a great strategist and leader. Stalin’s misconduct, paranoia, repression and purges of the USSR armed forces and initial failure to understand Operation Barbarossa were supressed in the public narratives.

Enter Russia only

In 2015, a landmark, state-sponsored exhibition called “My history 1914-1945” took a whole new look at the Tsarist Russian Empire and the glorification of its wars. The exhibition, showcased on high-tech screens, toured all over Russia and in occupied Crimea, and even went abroad.

The main messages were: the West always wanted to encroach on Russia, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a genius move by Stalin, and Russians must unite under one leader to fight. There was still space for other ethnic groups but the dominant character of Russia and Russians began to grow during these years. This second feature, the Russia focus, would intensify over the next ten years.

Putin’s History 3.0 – Russian supremacy; Europeans aided Hitler; Ukraine and others are Nazis

Putin’s text from July 2021 on the unity [read: primacy] of Russians in the relations with Ukraine marks the imperialist Russian supremacy ideology. In the past years this and a frustrated anger against Kyiv’s military resistance against Russia has influenced what is now a new approach to history.

Delete Ukraine: The new history seems more or less to delete Ukraine from the USSR’s fight against Nazi Germany, dismissing the fact that 6 million Ukrainians fought Nazism and that Ukraine was one of the ‘bloodlands’, the main battlegrounds in WWII.

Delete Europe: For the past year, a claim has been growing ever louder (and more absurd) suggesting that the European nations under occupation collaborated and assisted Hitler as their main policy. A fresh report by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs takes aim at practically all European states and people while presenting the view that Russia was the only power really fighting Nazi Germany.

A few snapshots from the report: France’s position as victor in WWII is called into question with a reference to Frenchmen (alongside many others) participating in the Nazi German SS. Poland is denied the right to raise questions about its fate as victim of both Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1939. All of the Baltic states are basically accused of siding with Nazism.

Things falling into oblivion in the new history

Now, it is extremely rare to see photos in Russia of historical events such as the joint Nazi German/Red Army parade held in Brest on 22 September 1939, where the two partners celebrated the occupation and partitioning of Poland.

Courtesy of www.babel.ua

The material support from the allies, such as the crucially important US Lend–Lease to the Soviet Union, is close to getting the same fate as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact during the USSR: neglected to the point of denial. Even though Stalin himself said at the Tehran conference in 1943 that ‘without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war’ and later repeated the same to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Historical revisionism with “Nazi” all-over

In our first article, we examined how Putin and the official Russian perception of WWII fighting has developed to gradually exclude more and more countries from the once privileged role of brother- in-arms. The Allied and Western countries have fallen out of favour Western democracies are accused of pushing Hitler to attack the USSR and the role of nations and people from former Soviet republics including Ukraine is increasingly put into question – despite 6 million Ukrainians having fought Nazism. More and more, the claim in Putin’s “History 3.0” is that USSR equals Russia and Russians were the only ones really fighting Nazi Germany, while others were either collaborators with the Third Reich or just pretending to fight.

The Third Reich and the EU

A striking feature in recent years across the Kremlin-affiliated outlets is that the EU is equalled with Nazism. The language has become vulgar with phrases once heard in late-night bars now being mainstream in official communication. We will spare you the details to not provide them with more oxygen, but TV-shows, caricatures and AI-generated material showing leaders from the EU, NATO or Ukraine in Nazi uniforms, with swastikas, as rats, hyenas or similar are now widely circulated by Russian state and Kremlin-affiliated outlets.

The rhetoric and political messaging have hardened considerably in the past year. Prominent public personalities known for their close connections to the Kremlin, such as state-TV anchor Vladimir Solovyov and RT’s Chief Editor Margarita Simonyan seem to be competing to see who can take the derogatory defamation to the highest (or lowest) level. The social media account of former President Medvedev, now Russian Security Council secretary, is a cesspool of nuclear threats and calls for the eradication of European states like Poland.

The Izvestiya outlet, known for its close Kremlin links, promotes the notion that Nazi Germany simply changed colours and their descendants reincarnated in the form of the EU. Our Database is rich with examples of claims such as ’the EU revives Nazism’, which are being spread across the Kremlin ecosystem in multiple languages, including on the RT and Sputnik networks.

Intellectual absurdity – a narrow vocabulary and weaponising insults…

We are not soft-skinned, but it is time to call a spade a spade. Calling the EU, European leaders and Zelenskyy ‘the reincarnations of Nazism’ is absurd and an intellectual insult to the rest of the world. The fact that “Nazi” seems to be the only key term in Moscow’s vocabulary illustrates how narrow-minded propaganda-borne systems tend to become.

As political scientist and thinker Ivan Krastev said: Putin’s system has violated one of the most important rules: not to trivialize Nazism.

Like a drug addict, the system requires ever-stronger doses and accelerate misuse of, in this case, the emotional triggers in communication. They function like a beacon, giving one thin ray of direction that is mandatory to follow. Their only resources are mass, repetition and suppression.

It is not difficult to see why all the Russian state’s resources in the information space are mobilised against the EU. Brussels and the EU system has become the target of Moscow’s complex and deep frustration –both with the long-desired but never achieved quick victory over Kyiv, as well as the relationship with a neighbour, Ukraine, now in an abysmal tailspin.

In the past years, a central claim has emerged in the Russian rhetoric designed to give this anger a more ‘objective profile’. The claim goes that the countries of the ‘collective West are currently trying to falsify history and glorify Nazi criminals’. It is sometimes hard to confront such allegations of ‘being Nazi’ head-on because Russian officials and pro-Kremlin commentators are often vague about how, exactly, Western countries official policy are ‘falsifying history’. In reality, Moscow often blows out of proportion individual, small number private gatherings of old war veterans and try to label this as ‘glorification of Nazism’.

… and speaking of being soft-skinned

The tendency to use the Nazi claim less as a credible accusation and more as a rhetorical hammer, delivered as an insult, is common in Russian state and pro-Kremlin outlets.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dared to invite European officials to attend the World War II commemoration in Kyiv on 8 May, Russian state outlets accused him of ‘ignoring the victory over Hitler’. As if Moscow has a monopoly as the one-and-only place to mark the victory over Nazi Germany. The ‘revising history’ slur has become one more insult that Moscow hurls at its critics.

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Article and pictures first time published on the EUvsDisinfo web page here and here. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.