Putin’s Invention of Russian History
The unprovoked war of Russia against the Ukraine is the most recent illustration of this almost universal syndrome of the failure to learn from its own violent history. The February 24, 2022, will be remembered as Vladmir Putin’s “Day of Infamy,” to quote a famous phrase President Franklin D. Roosevelt used in his speech to Congress on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On February 24, 2022, the Russian president announced the “special military operation” of invading the Ukraine. In a long speech, Putin presented the reasons for the invasion that primarily reflected the sentiments of his often-expressed regrets about the collapse of the Soviet Union and his longing for the creation of a Eurasian power with Russia at its center. Nothing in this speech indicated any recognition of Ukraine’s status as an independent state that had emerged with 14 other states after the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s and was affirmed by a rebellious Ukrainian civil society again and again from 2004 to the present. This self-assertion of the Ukrainian nation has obviously not entered Putin’s understanding of recent history. Using slogans about hardcore Nazis operating at the center of the Ukrainian state indicated his attempt to employ the emotional memory of the victory over Nazi Germany in WWII, which is always celebrated on May 9 with an impressive parade on Moscow’s Red Square. Yet, as successfully as this propaganda ploy worked to initially get the support of the Russian public and silence all critics, it failed to stop the Ukrainian resistance from becoming the representative of a unified Ukrainian nation. In addition, it provoked anger and contempt against Putin’s actions in almost all Western countries and engendered military and financial support for the Ukraine.
Putin’s imperialist activism is remarkable for another reason. He appears to be completely oblivious about the violent Ukrainian chapters in the his- tory of the Soviet Union when, in the early 1930s, between four and five million Ukrainians starved to death because of Stalin’s collectivization of the Ukrainian agriculture. Today, all over the Ukraine, next to the Holocaust memorials that commemorate Nazi Germany’s genocidal extermination of millions of Jews, one encounters monuments commemorating the Holodomor, the death of millions of Ukrainians by starvation. This Holodomor oblivion of Putin is even more exacerbated by his attempt to silence all commemorations of the victims of the Stalinist terror and the Gulag regime.
In a remarkable coincidence, the invasion of the Ukraine was accompanied by the attempt of the Russian government to prevent the annual reading of the names of people murdered during Stalin’s terror campaign in the mid-1930s. This annual ceremony, known as “Returning the Names,” was organized by the Russian civil society organization Memorial that was the co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. According to an account by Valerie Hopkins and Nanna Heitmann in the New York Times (October 30, 2022), Memorial was forced, under the pretext of pandemic precautions, “to reconfigure the tribute and break off in small gatherings, after the government banned the daylong reading, planned for Saturday at Lubyanka, which typically attracts thousands of attendees.” The article also notes that “to restore what he perceives as the glory of Soviet-era Russia, the Kremlin has grown increasingly loath to discuss crimes committed by the Soviet government, or of portraying Stalin in a bad light. Mr. Putin has only intensified a more heroic portrayal of that era as he has sold his war in Ukraine to ordinary Russians.” The authors sug- gest that this revisionist reading of Stalin by Putin has led people to believe “that Stalin played an ‘entirely positive’ or ‘rather positive’ role in the life of the country.” This shift in the positive perception of Stalin “has grown from 40 percent in the early 2000s to 70 percent in 2019, according to research from the Levada Center, an independent pollster.”
