To Justify His Unjustifiable War in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin Rewrites History and Invents a Glorious Past.

The harder it will be to wake up from this nightmare for the Russian people.

A few weeks ago, on April 10, 2022, in the middle of the Ukrainian war, two columns of dozens of trucks and Kamaz excavators suddenly appeared on the road to Smolensk, Russia, and with Russian flags flying, they aggressively drove towards the Katyn monument. The disturbing “Z” signs, displayed on the vehicles, which all Russian army equipment in Ukraine bears, seemed to announce a form of punitive operation.

Sanctioned by the authorities, it seemed to target the memorial erected in memory of the 22,000 victims of the famous massacre of Polish officers, policemen, and intellectuals, who were shot in the back of the head by the Soviet special services NKVD, in 1940, in a forest of Katyn, in the middle of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. When they arrived at the scene, two of the excavators stood still in a threatening posture, reminiscent of the indecent brutality of the Russian military's behavior on Ukrainian soil. As if they were going to crush the monument, to erase from Russian memories this cumbersome past.

Finally, nothing happened. But it was later learned that this “citizens' initiative”, intended to intimidate Warsaw, had been aimed at “drawing attention” to the actions of the Polish authorities who dismantled several monuments to the glory of the Red Army in Poland because of the liberation (from Nazism) had turned into the occupation of Polish territory by the Soviets for fifty years.

In March 2022, deputies of the Federal Duma and the Duma of the Smolensk region had already proposed to dismantle the Polish part of the memorial, explaining that the “Katyn affair” had to be revisited, given the current position of the Polish leadership towards the war in Ukraine. The events surrounding the execution of the Polish officers “should be considered by historical truth, law, justice, and common sense,” they explained in a petition quoted by the newspaper Kommersant, arguing that Moscow had given in to Warsaw “to have good relations” with it. A way of suggesting that Russia had been forced to return to the old Soviet thesis attributing the massacre ... to the Nazis!

As early as 1990, the government of Mikhail Gorbachev and then that of Boris Yeltsin had officially recognized the Soviet responsibility after decades of lies, beginning a painful work of memory. In the early 2000s, Putin and then Medvedev had also confirmed this position, and reluctantly opened part of the archives. “History is politics directed towards the past, some forces have an interest in using it, they are happy with the show of force of the Kamaz trucks”, reacts Denis Nikitas, director of a citizen project based in Smolensk, which aims to give back to the country “a history centered on the individual, based on the memory of his personal experiences”.

He insists that “many people are opposed to disturbing the dead of Katyn. There is a whole independent current that respects historical truth. Nikitas does not believe that "the official position will be challenged”, referring to the condemnation of the incident by the former Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky, who is close to Putin and who, as the head of the powerful Military-Historical Society, was involved in the emergence of the Katyñ Museum.

Founding myth

The historian Irina Cherbakova, a member of the management of the Russian Memorial organization, now dissolved by the authorities, is much more circumspect. “For some years now, historians close to the Kremlin have been creeping back to the old thesis of Nazi responsibility, and it is not impossible that this will become the official thesis once again,” warns the intellectual who has left Russia, where, according to her, “a totalitarian regime with elements of a fascist dictatorship” is emerging.

For this specialist in the memory of Stalinism, the return to manipulation and the reconstruction of a mythical history can be explained by the foundations of the Putin ideology:

“The core of this approach is that we have always been surrounded by enemies, always threatened and that we won the battle against Nazism all by ourselves. Putin believes that all the reproaches expressed by the West and Memorial, on the fact that the USSR was a totalitarian terrorist state, are not admissible, and that the 1990s are responsible for having blackened Russia ... He wants to rehabilitate it.”

An enterprise that relies on the glorification of the role of the USSR during the Second World War and thus gives a central symbolic power to the ceremony of May 9, this “Victory Day”, which has become the most important holiday in Russia. Hoping to turn it into a triumph this year, Putin seems to have gone so far as to plan the military operation in Ukraine so that it would be finished by the time of the celebrations, which he intended to organize in Kyiv, as revealed by the discovery of parade clothes in the vans abandoned by the Russian troops.

This obsession with May 9 has not always existed. After Stalin's 1945 victory celebration, the tyrant himself renounced it, fearing that it would give too much prominence to the actions of his generals, especially the very popular Georgi Zhukov, whose charisma he feared. After 1956, a completely different approach to the war emerges, woven from memories, emotions, and testimonies that emerge with the Khrushchevian thaw.

The idea that emerges is in resonance with what is said in the West: “Never again”. It was under Brezhnev that glorification returned in force, as the regime ran out of steam and sought a source of legitimacy. Parades were resumed, and nearly 80,000 monuments to the glory of the heroes of the war were erected throughout the country. This cult of the Great Patriotic War, which is based, it is true, on emotion and the colossal sacrifice made by the Soviet people (28 million deaths officially recognized), will, however, weaken during the years 1980-1990, to give way to a passionate debate aimed at shedding light on the crimes and dark pages of communism.

But with the first Chechen war, the discrediting of democracy by criminal privatizations, and the passing of the baton from Yeltsin to Putin, this window of freedom quickly closed, as did access to archives. As soon as he arrived, Putin appropriated the victory against Nazism as a founding myth. “This does not mean that all Soviet history is glorified. The attitude towards the revolution, for example, remains negative, because it appears to be a source of trouble. The great terror is not denied either, but Putin will indicate that the issue is settled with the opening of a museum of Stalinist crimes and the erection of a Wall of Sorrow in 2017," notes historian Emilia Koustova, professor at the University of Strasbourg in France.

For the power, no question of dwelling on those responsible for Soviet crimes. “The goal is to do everything to install safeguards, to prevent the national novel from crumbling, especially for everything related to the war and the role of Stalin,” continues Koustova. A selection that will retract the dramatic purge of the army on the eve of the German invasion, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the crimes of the NKVD, or the key importance of the American Lend-Lease, which made the United States the supplier of weapons of war to its allies, especially the Soviets.

A surreal “return” to the past

In 2014, the new slogan turned from “Never again” to “We can repeat” the victory ... A shift that will gradually drag the country to war and see Moscow refer to Ukraine as “the outpost of a Western Nazism” existentially threatening Russia. “The comparison that was made between Putin's war and the Soviet resistance during the Nazi invasion is a real insult to the memory of the fighters of the Second World War; it was a defensive war, for survival, which has nothing to do with the aggression that Russia is committing today against the Ukrainians,” notes the historian Irina Cherbakova, indignant.

Irina Cherbakova is concerned that so many Russians subscribe to this false thesis, “because they have been brainwashed by propaganda and want to continue to think that they are the best and have suffered the most”.

In a recent podcast, Putin opponent Garry Kasparov notes this:

“We have a totally surreal situation where Russian Minister Sergei Lavrov accuses President Zelensky, a Ukrainian Jew, of being a 'Nazi,' arguing in support of his 'Jewish blood of Hitler' thesis. And, at the same time, we have a Ukrainian army fighting with German tanks against a Russian army that accuses him of Nazism but behaves like a fascist.”

All busy with its dream of “repeating the victory”, Russia pursues, with the invasion, a kind of surrealist “return” to the past, “substituting the old imperial project for a conception of the future that the primitive autocratic power that leads it is incapable of producing”, regrets a Russian observer. “Putin thinks he is in 1991, he is erasing the last thirty years as if they had not happened. This unrealism leads us to catastrophe, we keep repeating the same tragic mistakes, we are always outside the normal historical process”, for Kasparov.

This is probably the reason why red flags and statues of Lenin have reappeared like a bad joke in the wake of the “Russian liberators in Ukraine”. The Kremlin even decided to make a babushka who had welcomed the Ukrainian troops with a red flag the symbol of liberation, christening her “Babushka Z”, and immediately erecting a statue to her in the ruins of Mariupol, to prove that the Putinian “neo-empire” has its legitimate supporters in Ukraine.

It doesn't matter that the aforementioned babushka has since explained that she had taken out the Soviet flag because she wanted to prevent her house from being destroyed (it was, however). It doesn't matter that she regretted having been “used against Ukraine”, in an interview with a Belarusian journalist who visited her.

In the world of Putin's propaganda, the facts of the present and the past are variable. This greatly darkens Irina Cherbakova, who announces “a real catastrophe” when reality finally strikes:

“The only thing that can get us out of the impasse is a truth cure. But it won't come by itself. We complained about the 1990s, and it's true that they were painful, but I'm afraid we'll have to pay a lot more this time to get out of this dictatorship.”