How the Kremlin weaponized Russian history — and has used it to justify the war in Ukraine

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In this photo released by Sputnik news agency on Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, speaks during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin, Pool Photo via AP, File)

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A view of a Russian history textbook for schools with a sign on the cover reads “Russian history. 1945 year - beginning of the 21st century. Grade 11. A basic level”, in Tallinn, Estonia, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters. A new history textbook released by authorities last year featured a chapter on Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” (AP Photo)

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FILE - In this photo released by Sputnik news agency on Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024. When former Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week asked Vladimir Putin about his reasons for sending troops into Ukraine two years ago, Putin gave him a lecture on Russian history, arguing that Ukrainians and Russians historically have always been one people, and that Ukraine’s sovereignty is merely an illegitimate holdover from the Soviet era. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill arrive to attend the gala reception marking the National Unity Day at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014. From the early years of his rule, Putin has repeatedly contended that studying Russian history should make Russians proud of their country. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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FILE - Thousands of people wave Russian national flags as they gather on Red Square to watch a concert dedicated to the Day of Russia in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, June 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

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FILE - Russian soldiers march toward Red Square to attend a dress rehearsal for the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, May 7, 2023. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (AP Photo, File)

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FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, second right, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, right, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration Vyacheslav Volodin, fourth right, and Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov, third right, visit the exhibition “Orthodox Russia, My History, The Rurik Dynasty” at Manezh Exhibition Hall during celebration of the National Unity Day in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, centre, and participants of Volunteers of Victory Russian Public Movement visit the Interactive Museum “Russia – My History” in Volgograd, Russia, Friday, Feb. 2, 2018. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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FILE - Russian servicemen march during a dress rehearsal for the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, May 7, 2022. The parade will take place at Moscow’s Red Square on May 9 to celebrate 77 years of the victory in WWII. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

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FILE - Moscow students dressed in the fashion of the middle of the last century and Soviet style uniform perform “Victory Waltz” as a part of Victory Day celebration in front of the historical main gates of VDNKh, The Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, with the red star in the background in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, May 6, 2023. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (AP Photo, File)

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FILE - People attend the Immortal Regiment march through the main street toward Red Square marking the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II, in Moscow, Russia, Monday, May 9, 2022. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (AP Photo/Denis Tyrin, File)

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FILE - Communist party supporters with red flags and a portrait of Josef Stalin lineup to place flowers at his grave near the Kremlin Wall to mark the 70th anniversary of his death in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, March 5, 2023. Josef Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

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FILE - Oleg Orlov, a member of the Board of the International Historical Educational Charitable and Human Rights Society ‘Memorial’ (International Memorial), foreground right, lays flowers at the monument, a large boulder from the Solovetsky islands, where the first camp of the Gulag political prison system was established, near the building of the Federal Security Service (FSB, Soviet KGB successor) in Lubyanskaya Square in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Oct. 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Dmitry Serebryakov, File)

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FILE - Journalists work in a news room of the Dozhd (Rain) TV channel in Moscow, Russia, Friday, Aug. 20, 2021. In 2014, Russian cable networks dropped Dozhd, the county’s 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. The question caused an uproar, with officials accusing the channel of crossing moral and ethical lines and calling for its shutdown. (AP Photo/Denis Kaminev, File)

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FILE - A man holds portrait of his relative, a victim of Soviet-era political repression, as other people lay flowers and light candles at a monument in front of the former KGB headquarters in Moscow, Russia, Monday, Oct. 29, 2018, in an annual commemoration of the victims of purges under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Research and public debate about mass repressions by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin also have faced significant resistance in recent years. Historians and rights advocates say one reason is inevitable parallels to the ongoing government crackdown against dissent that has already landed hundreds of people behind bars. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

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FILE - In this image made from video released by the Russian Presidential Press Service, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressees the nation in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. Putin has argued that Ukrainians and Russians historically have always been one people, and that Ukraine’s sovereignty is merely an illegitimate holdover from the Soviet era. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. (Russian Presidential Press Service via AP, File)

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FILE - From left, Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Kherson region; Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Zaporizhzhia region; Russian President Vladimir Putin, center; Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic; and Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, pose at a ceremony to sign treaties to illegally annex Ukrainian territories at the Kremlin in Moscow, on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022. Putin has argued that Ukrainians and Russians historically have always been one people, and that Ukraine’s sovereignty is merely an illegitimate holdover from the Soviet era. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. (Grigory Sysoyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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FILE - A participant dressed in Red Army World War II uniform in the role of a military traffic controller takes part in a theatrical performance at an open air interactive museum to commemorate the 82nd anniversary of the World War II-era parade, at Red Square, in Moscow, Russia, on Monday, Nov. 6, 2023. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

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FILE - Demonstrators hold Russian state flags and flags with with the letter Z, which has become a symbol of the Russian military, and a hashtag reading “We don’t abandon our own” during the action “We do not abandon our own” to support the referendum, on Manezhnaya Square near the Kremlin and Red Square with the Historical Museum in the background in Moscow, Russia, Friday, Sept. 23, 2022. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. In an effort to rally people around the flag, the authorities have sought to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

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FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures after speaking to winners of cultural, scientific and sports student competitions at the Museum and Theatre Educational Complex in Kaliningrad, Russia, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. From the early years of his rule, Putin has repeatedly contended that studying Russian history should make Russians proud of their country. In Russia, history has long become a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

By DASHA LITVINOVA

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Earlier this month, when Tucker Carlson asked Vladimir Putin about his reasons for invading Ukraine two 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.

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’s sovereignty is merely an illegitimate holdover from the Soviet era.

Carlson said he was “shocked” at being on the receiving end of the history lesson. But for those familiar with Putin’s government, it was not surprising in the least: In Russia, history has long been a propaganda tool used to advance the Kremlin’s political goals. And the last two years have been entirely in keeping with that ethos.

In an effort to rally people around their world view, Russian authorities have tried to magnify the country’s past victories while glossing over the more sordid chapters of its history. They have rewritten textbooks, funded sprawling historical exhibitions and suppressed — sometimes harshly — voices that contradict their narrative.

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 put scores of European officials on a wanted list over that in a move that made headlines this month.

“In the hands of the authorities,” says Oleg Orlov, co-founder of Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent rights group, “history has become a hammer — or even an axe.”

THE GLORIFYING

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’s greatness, Putin argues. (Russian media have counted over 100 monuments to Stalin in Russia, most of which were installed during Putin’s rule.)

The Russian president has said that there should be one “fundamental state narrative” instead of different textbooks that contradict each other. And he has called for a “universal” history textbook that would convey that narrative. But that idea, criticized heavily by historians, didn’t gain much traction for quite a while — until Russia invaded Ukraine.

Last year, the government rolled out a series of four new “universal” history textbooks for 10th- and 11th-graders. One featured a chapter on Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, blamed the West for the Cold War and described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Some historians derided it as blatant propaganda. “The 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,” says historian Nikita Sokolov.

The Kremlin-friendly vision of Russian history is also dominating a chain of sprawling, state-funded “history parks” – venues that host history-themed exhibitions in 24 cities across the country.

THE SILENCING

As celebrations of Victory Day over the years grew more imperious, Putin’s government grew less tolerant of any questioning or criticism of the Soviet Union’s actions in that war — or generally.

In 2014, Russian cable networks dropped Dozhd, the county’s 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.

That same year, the Russian government adopted a law that made “rehabilitating Nazism” – or “spreading knowingly false information about the actions of the USSR during World War II” – a criminal offense.

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 “the Communists and Germany attacked Poland together, unleashing World War II.” In the years that followed, the number of convictions on the charge only grew.

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.

Two historians involved in researching Stalin’s mass executions in northwestern Russia were jailed in recent years – prosecutions on unrelated charges many link to their work. Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights group that drew international acclaim for its studies of political repression in the Soviet Union, has been shut down. It continues to work, but its activities in Russia have been significantly curtailed.

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 — called “Returning the Names” — was started in 2007 and once attracted thousands of people. In 2020, Moscow authorities stopped authorizing it, citing COVID-19.

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’s “Returning the Names,” which in 2023 went ahead in dozens of cities abroad and online.

“We see this very clearly” since the Ukraine war began, says Baryshnikova. “Any grassroots civil movement or statement about the memory of Soviet terror is inconvenient.”

THE JUSTIFYING

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’s life for a greater cause; and the cult of war.

“Of course, (the latter) is never explicitly spelled out,” Eidelman says. Instead, the narrative is: “`We have always strived for peace … We have always been attacked and merely fought back.’”

That laid the perfect ideological groundwork for the invasion of Ukraine, she says, and points out how the “Never again!” sentiment about World War II for some in Russia in recent years became “We can do it again” — a popular slogan after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the Kremlin adopted increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward the West.

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’s constitution — a new clause that stipulated Russia is “united by a thousand-year history” and “enforces protection of the historical truth.”

In 2020-21, Putin published two lengthy articles on history — 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.

History “has been used to legitimize the regime essentially since the beginning of Putin’s rule,” Ivan Kurilla, a historian at Wellesley College, said in a recent article. And with the war in Ukraine, it “finally took a central place in the state ideology next to geopolitical talk about sovereignty, the ‘decline of the West’ and the protection of traditional values.”

DASHA LITVINOVA

Litvinova is an Associated Press correspondent covering Russia, Belarus, Central Asia and the Caucasus. She is part of the team that covers the Russia-Ukraine war. She has covered Russia and the region for over a decade.