TALLINN, Estonia (AP) \u2014 Earlier this month, when\u00a0Tucker Carlson asked Vladimir Putin about his reasons for invading Ukraine\u00a0two years ago, Putin gave him a lecture on Russian history. The 71-year-old Russian leader spent more than 20 minutes showering a baffled Carlson with dates and names going back to the ninth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Putin even gave him a folder containing what he said were copies of historical documents proving his points: that Ukrainians and Russians historically have always been one people, and that Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty is merely an illegitimate holdover from the Soviet era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carlson said he was \u201cshocked\u201d at being on the receiving end of the history lesson. But for those familiar with Putin\u2019s government, it was not surprising in the least: In Russia, history has long been a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin\u2019s political goals. And the last two years have been entirely in keeping with that ethos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an effort to rally people around their world view, Russian authorities have tried to magnify the country\u2019s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. They have rewritten textbooks, funded sprawling historical exhibitions and suppressed \u2014 sometimes harshly \u2014 voices that contradict their narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Russian officials have also regularly bristled at Ukraine and other European countries for pulling down Soviet monuments, widely seen there as an unwanted legacy of past oppression, and even\u00a0put scores of European officials on a wanted list\u00a0over that in a move that made headlines this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the hands of the authorities,\u201d says\u00a0Oleg Orlov, co-founder of Memorial, Russia\u2019s oldest and most prominent rights group, \u201chistory has become a hammer \u2014 or even an axe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the early years of his quarter-century rule, Putin has repeatedly contended that studying their history should make Russians proud. Even controversial figures, such as Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, contributed to Russia\u2019s greatness, Putin argues. (Russian media have counted over 100 monuments to Stalin in Russia, most of which were installed during Putin\u2019s rule.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Russian president has said that there should be one \u201cfundamental state narrative\u201d instead of different textbooks that contradict each other. And he has called for a \u201cuniversal\u201d history textbook that would convey that narrative. But that idea, criticized heavily by historians, didn\u2019t gain much traction for quite a while \u2014 until Russia invaded Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year, the government rolled out a series of four new \u201cuniversal\u201d history textbooks for 10th- and 11th-graders.\u00a0One\u00a0featured a chapter on Moscow\u2019s \u201cspecial military operation\u201d in Ukraine, blamed the West for the Cold War and described the collapse of the Soviet Union as \u201cthe greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some historians derided it as blatant propaganda. \u201cThe Soviet Union, and later Russia, is (depicted in the textbook as) always a besieged fortress, which constantly lives surrounded by enemies. These hostile circles are trying to weaken Russia in every conceivable way and seize its resources,\u201d says historian Nikita Sokolov.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Kremlin-friendly vision of Russian history is also dominating a chain of sprawling, state-funded \u201chistory parks\u201d \u2013 venues that host history-themed exhibitions in 24 cities across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those venues were opened after a series of historical exhibitions in the early 2010s drew hundreds of thousands of Russians and received praise from Putin. Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), a Russian Orthodox bishop reported to be Putin\u2019s personal confessor, was the driving force behind them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Packed with animations, touch-screen displays and other flashy elements, those widely popular expositions were criticized by historians for inaccurate claims and deliberate glorification of Russian rulers and their conquests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One exhibition described Ivan the Terrible, a 16th-century Russian czar known for his violent purges of Russian nobility, as a victim of \u201can information war.\u201d Another was widely advertised with a quote falsely attributed to Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German Empire in the 19th century, that was removed swiftly after sparking outcry: \u201cIt is impossible to defeat the Russians. We have seen this ourselves over hundreds of years. But Russians can be instilled with false values, and then they will defeat themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Central to this narrative of an invincible Russia is the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.\u00a0Marked on May 9\u00a0\u2014 Germany officially capitulated after midnight Moscow time on May 9, 1945 \u2014 the Soviet victory has become integral to Russian identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people in the war, pushing German forces from Stalingrad, deep inside Russia, all the way to Berlin. The suffering and valor that went into the German defeat have been touchstones ever since, and under Putin Victory Day has become the country\u2019s primary secular holiday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the authorities, \u201cRussia\u2019s history is a road from one victory to the next,\u201d sums up Orlov, whose group\u00a0won the Nobel Peace Prize\u00a0in 2022. \u201cAnd more beautiful victories lie ahead. And (the Kremlin says that) we must be proud of our history; history is a means of instilling patriotism. Of course in their view, patriotism is appreciation of the leadership \u2013 be it the leadership of the czarist Russia, the leadership of the Soviet Russia or the current leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As celebrations of Victory Day over the years grew more imperious, Putin\u2019s government grew less tolerant of any questioning or criticism of the Soviet Union\u2019s actions in that war \u2014 or generally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2014,\u00a0Russian cable networks dropped Dozhd, the county\u2019s sole independent TV channel, after it hosted a history program on the 1941-44 Siege of Leningrad and asked viewers to vote on whether Soviet authorities should have surrendered Leningrad to save lives. Famine in the city, now called St. Petersburg, killed more than 500,000 people during the siege. The question caused an uproar, with officials accusing the channel of crossing moral and ethical lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That same year, the Russian government adopted a law that made \u201crehabilitating Nazism\u201d \u2013 or \u201cspreading knowingly false information about the actions of the USSR during World War II\u201d \u2013 a criminal offense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first conviction on those charges was reported in 2016. A man was fined 200,000 rubles (about $3,000 at the time) for a social media post saying that \u201cthe Communists and Germany attacked Poland together, unleashing World War II.\u201d In the years that followed, the number of convictions on the charge only grew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Research and public debate about mass repressions by Stalin also have faced significant resistance in recent years. Historians and rights advocates cite the inevitable parallels to the current crackdown against dissent that has already landed hundreds of people behind bars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two historians involved in researching Stalin\u2019s mass executions in northwestern Russia were\u00a0jailed\u00a0in recent years \u2013 prosecutions on unrelated charges many link to their work. Memorial, Russia\u2019s oldest and most prominent human rights group that drew international acclaim for its studies of political repression in the Soviet Union,\u00a0has been shut down. It continues to work, but its activities in Russia have been significantly curtailed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And a queue of people waiting for their turn to read out the names of victims of Soviet repressions no longer snakes through central Moscow streets in late October. The tradition to read them aloud once a year in front of a monument to victims of Soviet repressions \u2014 called \u201cReturning the Names\u201d \u2014 was started in 2007 and once attracted thousands of people. In 2020, Moscow authorities stopped authorizing it, citing COVID-19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The authorities are threatened by efforts to preserve historical memory, and it has gotten worse since the war in Ukraine began, says Natalya Baryshnikova, producer of last year\u2019s \u201cReturning the Names,\u201d which\u00a0in 2023 went ahead in dozens of cities abroad and online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe see this very clearly\u201d since the Ukraine war began, says Baryshnikova. \u201cAny grassroots civil movement or statement about the memory of Soviet terror is inconvenient.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to prominent history teacher Tamara Eidelman, the historical narrative the Kremlin is trying to impose on society contains several main elements: the primacy of the state, the affairs of which are always more important than individual lives; the cult of self-sacrifice and readiness to give up one\u2019s life for a greater cause; and the cult of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOf course, (the latter) is never explicitly spelled out,\u201d Eidelman says. Instead, the narrative is: \u201c`We have always strived for peace \u2026 We have always been attacked and merely fought back.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That laid the perfect ideological groundwork for the invasion of Ukraine, she says, and points out how the \u201cNever again!\u201d sentiment about World War II for some in Russia in recent years became \u201cWe can do it again\u201d \u2014 a popular slogan after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the Kremlin adopted increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, in the years before the Ukraine war, Putin cited history increasingly often. In 2020, during a reform that reset the limits on his presidential terms, a reference to history was even added to the country\u2019s constitution \u2014 a new clause that stipulated Russia is \u201cunited by a thousand-year history\u201d and \u201cenforces protection of the historical truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2020-21, Putin published two lengthy articles on history \u2014 one criticizing the West for actions leading up to World War II, another arguing that Ukrainians and Russians have always been one people. In an address to the nation days before sending troops into Ukraine, he once again invoked history, claiming Ukraine as a state was created artificially by Soviet leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
History \u201chas been used to legitimize the regime essentially since the beginning of Putin\u2019s rule,\u201d Ivan Kurilla, a historian at Wellesley College, said in a recent article. And with the war in Ukraine, it \u201cfinally took a central place in the state ideology next to geopolitical talk about sovereignty, the \u2018decline of the West\u2019 and the protection of traditional values.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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