Whoever controls the past controls the present; and President Vladimir Putin has entrusted the rewriting of Russian history to a self-proclaimed historian who fabricated his work.

Vladimir Medinsky, former Minister of Culture from 2012 to 2020 and chief Russian negotiator in the talks with Kyiv, cited several apocryphal quotes from Napoleon and Bismarck in Istanbul to justify the war against Ukraine. This wasn’t his first fabrication. No one ever found the five monographs he supposedly wrote before becoming minister, and the university almost stripped him of his degree in 2017 after finding dozens of irregularities in his thesis, which relied on the far-right writer Oleg Platonov, a disseminator of antisemitic conspiracy theories such as the Protocols of Zion (a hoax created by the Tsarist police). “Their assessment [of experts] can be positive or negative depending on whether they pursue Russia’s national interests,” wrote Medinsky — the man Putin has ordered to write the new history textbooks for schools — in his thesis.

Putinism claims that the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet front during World War II, did not end in 1945 and continues today against Ukraine. On Manezh Square, opposite the Kremlin, giant posters depicted a Soviet soldier in battle on Victory Day. The caption read: “Victory will be with us.” In the future, not the past.

The Great Patriotic War occupies a third of Medinsky’s history textbooks for 15- and 16-year-olds, but Stalinist repression and its millions of victims are barely summarized in eight of its 945 pages. And of this brief mention, half is devoted to the rehabilitation of those who were repressed, with a striking final conclusion: “This reckless decision [the pardon] contributed to the growth of nationalism in the Baltic countries and western Ukraine.”

The books justify all of Russia’s wars. “The border was only 32 kilometers from Leningrad,” they emphasize, explaining the invasion of Finland in 1940. The Soviet offensive against Czechoslovakia in 1968 was necessary because the democratic reforms in Prague “caused an internal crisis actively promoted by the West,” is another pretext.

Likewise, the famine that killed “between five and seven million people” in Ukraine and southern Russia between 1932 and 1933 is excused in just two paragraphs by claiming that there was “a mistake in the collectivization” of the farms. And Medinsky doesn’t mention the executions and arrests within the POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) on Stalin’s orders during the Spanish Civil War, but blames the defeat on “the mutual struggle within the Republican ranks.”

The Gulag, the endless network of Soviet punishment camps through which millions of civilians passed and died for decades, is mentioned twice in the textbook. “The USSR achieved its economic independence thanks to the heroism and work-related enthusiasm of the population, and the mobilization of all material and human resources (including the Gulag system),” the authors explain.

Schools have been able to choose their history books freely since the fall of the USSR, but the Kremlin imposed a single official policy last year. “Before, there were good and bad options for schools. Now, modern textbooks repeat Soviet rhetoric and accusations,” Alexei Makarov, a member of the Memorial Research Center, told this newspaper in an office of what was the NGO for Soviet historical memory, which was liquidated by the Kremlin just before the war.

“The government is preparing society to become accustomed to eternal confrontation, as there will always be someone who wants to destroy us,” the expert adds.

Medinsky’s revised history books conclude with a chapter on the “special military operation” that captures all the official rhetoric about the supposed “Nazification” of Ukraine. He fails to mention that in 2013, many months before the Maidan protests, Putin deployed his army to the Ukrainian border and blocked the transport of goods to the country, which was flirting with the European Union, among other coercive measures.

“The books mention that there was repression, some mistakes, but we won the war against Nazism. That’s the most important thing. That, and the fact that we won alone, without our ”sworn friends” — a Russian concept of Western countries that classifies them as frenemies,” Makarov adds.

The Kremlin accuses Europe of having forgotten Nazism, but in its school history books it barely devotes a few paragraphs to the Russian and Soviet imperial repression of the Jews.

An exhibition with deliberate ellipses

The State Historical Museum is still hosting the main anniversary exhibition, No Right to Be Forgotten. 80 Years of the Great Victory, with many deliberate ellipses. The exhibition accuses Finland and the “nationalists” of the Baltic countries and Ukraine of collaborating with the Nazis, but makes no mention of the Holodomor [the death of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s from a famine caused by Soviet policies] or the previous invasion of these countries in 1939 and 1940.

The exhibition begins in 1941, not 1939, when Moscow and Berlin divided up the Baltic states and Finland with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Kremlin passed a law in 2022 making it illegal to draw comparisons between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. Paradoxically, the Soviet government recognized the secret clauses of that agreement in 1989, and Putin himself condemned it in 2009.

“Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians have forgotten about the Great Patriotic War,” says 44-year-old Diana, a visitor to the exhibition. Her friend Elena, 52, adds: “We grew up with the same cartoons and movies. We grew up in the same country.” The two women repeat that all wars “are bad,” but at the same time justify the invasion of Ukraine. “Without the special military operation, what would have happened to those people? Would they be Nazi Germany?” Diana wonders.

A system based on passive support

There is little ideological debate in the country; Russians often hate discussing politics and claim to stay away from the news, even though they define themselves as patriots. However, Putin’s clique has tried, unsuccessfully, to articulate an official ideology of the regime for the past 25 years.

“Putin perfectly understands the mood of the population,” says Russian academic Vladislav Inozemtsev on the other end of the phone. “Putin is very intelligent. If he had started the war against Ukraine 15 years ago, the regime would have fallen. He does everything very slowly. Hitler arrested the opposition after four weeks. Putin continues to spread terror and abolish laws 25 years later, but he holds elections, amending the constitution to be reelected. He says: look, the people elect me, we are not a fascist state, we are a normal democratic country.”

The flexibility of the official discourse was reflected by Putin himself two weeks ago. “Nationalism is the first step towards Nazism because it is not based only on love for one’s own ethnic group, but on hatred for others,” the president said. Eleven years ago, in 2014, after annexing Crimea and setting fire to eastern Ukraine, Putin declared: “I am the greatest nationalist in Russia.”

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