On the Eve of the Invasion: Russian Media and the Great Patriotic War
David R. Marples and Oleksandra Nesina
The war in Ukraine is halfway through its fifth year and shows little sign of resolution. The Trump-initiated peace talks have failed, and at the time of writing, Vladimir Putin is allegedly considering full conscription to boost the size of the Russian army. It is instructive, in seeking the causes of the war, to focus on the Russian media a few months before the invasion took place, i.e., from January to December 2021, and early 2022. The media reflects the views of the Russian government and highlights the narratives the latter deems as most important for the public to hear. During the Putin presidency, and particularly after the start of his third term in 2012, the authorities have restricted independent reporting, and as during Soviet times, the media—and now social media—have become propaganda organs for the government.
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Focus on the months before the wider invasion of Ukraine is instructive in determining the motives of the Russian leaders for invading Ukraine. Two themes are immediately evident. The first is the focus on the Great Patriotic War (hereafter GPW). The second feature is the emphasis on Russian youth and their desires and motivations. Let us examine each in turn and then assess their contemporary relevance and links.
The Great Patriotic War
The media highlights anniversaries, such as the Siege of Leningrad, the Battles of Moscow and Stalingrad, and the Nuremberg Trials, but they also make a direct comparison with the war in Ukraine. For example, as February 2021 marked the anniversary of the “Road of Life,” which brought food to the besieged city of Leningrad, the Chair of Russia’s Federation Council, Valentina Matviyenko went to the city to honour those who had fallen. Though the Nazis had tried to destroy the city, she said, “Hunger, cold, and daily bombings did not break the supreme moral strength of Leningraders. We will always remember this heroic deed.”
As part of a project on the Day of Remembrance, the Archives of St. Petersburg Project published declassified photographs on their portal. The official date of the commemoration was 8 September. The crucial question is why Stalin allowed the city to starve because of his deep suspicions of enmity toward his leadership, but it is never explored.
Further, the antagonists are transformed into contemporary examples. The Red Army of 1941-45 is the Russian army of today; the Nazis are the Ukrainians, and their reported masters are the West and NATO. Moreover, there are no obvious breaks despite the passage of time. The claim is that the GPW has never ended; it is simply extended to the present. According to Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, the Special Military Operation is a continuation of the Great Patriotic War; in the present, as in the past, people are fighting “against a dark force that has engulfed Europe and was preparing to engulf the whole world.” The analogy is repeated across Russia in various forms. In some schools, soldiers participating in the war in Ukraine give talks in schools about the Great Patriotic War to engender concern among schoolchildren for both events, which are perceived as largely synonymous, however far-fetched that may appear to a Western observer.
Hence, on 28 January 2022, just over three weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, RIA Novosti recalled the Kyiv trial 75 years earlier, of 12 Nazis tried and hanged in the central square of the city for war crimes. Yet the current Ukrainian authorities, the article noted, are revering Banderites (followers of the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera) whose atrocities during the war exceeded even those of the Nazis. In Ukraine, however, it is claimed, a generation has grown up that does not consider the GPW as part of its heritage.
Ukraine and the Baltic States
Hence, the neighbouring states in this period are saying very different things. Latvia opted to ban the ribbon of St. George, widely used by the Russian army. In this way, according to the Russian media, the Latvians continue to honour pro-Nazi units in various ways. In August 2022, Estonia announced its intention to remove Soviet monuments from public places. It marked a sequel to a controversial decision in 2007 to remove the “Bronze Soldier of Tallinn” from its location in the centre of the city to a cemetery some distance away. The relocation involved exhuming bodies of Soviet soldiers and provoked riots that led to the stabbing death of a Russian man.
Similarly, in July 2021, the last two remaining figures of the Monument to the Glory of the Soviet Army were dismantled in Lviv and were taken to the Territory of Terror Museum. The monument, which had 30-meter tall stele, was unveiled in 1970, and the Lviv City Council decided to remove it in 2018. Russian Foreign Ministry official Aleksandr Bikantov called it a “cynical act of state vandalism, while the ministry issued a statement that “Once again, we are confronted with systematic attempts to falsify the heroic history of the peoples of Ukraine and all other countries of the former Soviet Union.”
In Ukraine, Zelensky issued a statement bemoaning the human losses of the battle to liberate Kyiv in 1943, which he regarded as unnecessary. The inference was obvious: that Russia expends the lives of its soldiers with little care about losses.
What if we’re talking about not one, but 500,000 lives? How could it possibly ignore half a million people? … It could. The machine doesn’t care. It’s willing to easily pay such a terrible price because the leadership has a whim—to liberate Kyiv by the anniversary of the October Revolution.
A response was soon forthcoming from Nikita Buranov, described as an expert with the Russian Military Historical Society. He claimed that Zelensky’s comments bore no relation to reality and that the Ukrainian president should consult the memoirs of German General Erich Manstein, which praised the tactical and operational methods in the liberation of Kyiv. “This is not a story of boundless indifference and cruelty, as Zelensky points out. This is a story of a colossal, massive military operation, one of the largest in human history,” Buranov declared.
Russian spokesperson Maria Zakharova pointed out in late April 2021 that the Ukrainian leadership continued to pander to nationalist radicals, distort the memory of the GPW, and glorify Nazi collaborators. She notes how on 1 January each year, the radical nationalists commemorate the birth date of the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Stepan Bandera, with a torchlight procession through the streets of Kyiv.
She adds that two months earlier, a former member of the SS Division Galicia (Halychyna) was buried with honours in the town of Stryi in western Ukraine. At the same time, in Lviv, the authorities began the demolition of the Glory Monument honouring Soviet soldiers in the GPW. On 28 April, to the anger of the Russian authorities, Ukrainian “radicals” marched through the streets of Kyiv to honour the SS Division and, without hindrance from the Ukrainian authorities, despite a ban on Nazism in Ukraine issued in 2015.
In October 2021, RIA Novosti complained that in Lviv region, the year 2022 had been denoted “the year of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Earlier in the year, several deputies in the Rada had requested that, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of UPA’s founding, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych be restored to their title of “heroes of Ukraine.” Former president Viktor Yushchenko had conferred the title on Shukhevych in 2007 and on Bandera in 2010, but the awards had been rescinded as soon as Viktor Yanukovych won the presidency later in 2010.
The significance of these concerns becomes evident when one considers the demand to end neo-Nazism in Ukraine, used as a cause for the invasion on 24 February 2022. Ironically, the concern about such symbolic acts has increased over the past few years, as figures such as Bandera are now used regularly for street names across Ukraine, and even for a sausage named after him. The remains of former nationalist leader Evhen Konovalets were recently exhumed in Luxembourg and transferred to Ukraine for reburial. And the military wing of OUN, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), has become a source of tensions between Ukraine and Poland.
Veterans
The media articles stress that Russians must respect official memory and narratives of the GPW, and they must honour veterans and remember the legacy of their grandparents and great-grandparents, who fought for their futures. The late opposition leader Aleksey Navalny allegedly insulted veteran Ignat Artemenko in a video that the former posted online in June 2020. In February 2021, a Moscow court fined Navalny 850,000 rubles and sentenced him to 42 months in prison. Later that same month, TASS news agency reported that several deputies of the State Duma had drawn up amendments to introduce criminal sentences for insults to GPW veterans.
The Duma announced its intention to classify such insults as a form of rehabilitation of Nazism and impose a sentence of up to five years in prison, or three years of forced labour, or a fine of 2-5 million rubles. The same source observed that a resident of Yakutia was fined 100,000 rubles for posting a picture of Adolf Hitler on social media.
In July 2021, the Russian Investigative Committee took issue with the content of the play “First Bread,” written by Rinat Tashimov, at the Sovremennik theatre, which concerned how aimless young people often opted for a military career. A monologue by the main character, played by Liya Akhedzhakova was deemed to be insulting to veterans by the public organization Officers of Russia, who filed a complaint. In addition to insulting veterans, the organization complained that the content included obscene language and same-sex love.
The image of veterans has become a fantasy. The Russian authorities perceive them as flawless personalities who have guided the population through past decades but are now infirm and requiring help. In an article of February 2021, Natalia Osipova writes:
If we go back to the 1940s, we see them as twenty-year-olds, strong, happy, determined to live forever. With that special, deep, compassionate, and wise gaze that’s unmistakable in old photographs. Even without their epaulets and medals. People who have seen it all, who spent four years at the bottom of hell, look like the righteous. They changed world history and then went on to other important endeavours: creating the economy, cinema, science, and space.
She takes issue with the term “veterans” and suggests it be replaced by “frontline soldiers.” “Say it—and you immediately want to straighten up, square your shoulders, and raise your head. Say it.”
As Victory Day approached in 2021, a poll revealed that 64% of Russians approved of the new laws to criminalize insults to veterans and 88% confirmed that their relatives participated in the Great Patriotic War. The equation of the veterans with the current military adventures is evident. The state, and Putin personally, keep their memory alive by inflating their accomplishments and idealizing their personalities.
Schooling the Younger Generation
Yet it is asking a lot of youngsters to expect that they will pay attention to events that occurred over 80 years ago. In a survey conducted early in 2022 and published in February, the press service of the Russian film and internet content festival asked Russian schoolchildren to name their heroes. Most named their parents and other family members, and a meagre 5.4% chose the heroes of the Great Patriotic War.
Earlier in 2021, Putin expressed outrage that school history textbooks were omitting events such as the Battle of Stalingrad. In response, Sergey Kravtsov, head of the Russian Ministry of Education, announced that an audit would take place, and the issue was resolved by the spring of the year, according to the presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. Thus, the authorities have instilled a military-patriotic education, with an established textbook (which is also used in Belarus). Some prominent journalists have criticized Russian influencers for mocking official memorial days.
The textbook is authored by Putin’s aide and Chair of the Interdepartmental Commission on the Historical Education of Russia, Vladimir Medinsky and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) Rector Anatoly Torkunov and is mandatory for all high-school students. It adopts an exclusively Putinist version of Russian history. Thus, for the modern period, one can read that the Second World War was started by Poland, that Stalin was justified in deporting Crimean Tatars in 1944-45, and not least, that the Soviet Union, almost exclusively, was responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
But the younger generation sometimes demurs. In November 2021, in an interview with Ksenia Sobchak, rapper Alisher Morgenstern commented that Russia was spending too much money commemorating Victory Day and that it was unnecessary to celebrate this day. The same source maintained that people should not live in the past but rather seek to achieve new “victories” in information and space technology.
The response was emphatic. The head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, immediately ordered an investigation into Morgenstern’s remarks as an insult to “the historical memory of the defenders of the motherland.” Morgenstern apologized for his comments the next day and said that his comments were taken out of context. The Russian Public Opinion Research Center conducted an opinion poll, which found that over 68% of Russians disagreed with Morgenstern, though the older generation was far more negative than those aged 18-24.
Another article attacked an artist for producing a pornographic painting that demeaned Victory Day-also given as its title. The artist was 25 years of age, and thus part of “Morgenstern’s generation.” However, wrote Natalia Osipova, the painting fell under Article 354.1 on “insulting veterans of the Great Patriotic War and showing disrespect for the days of military glory.” The article goes on to attack Western rewriting of the Nuremberg Laws and the origins of the Second World War.
Though veterans will soon pass away and be part of historical memory rather than living reality, they are extolled as ideal members of society who can stand as an example to the younger generation. However tenuous it may be, they provide the link between past and present necessary to sustain the myths of the GPW as historical and incontrovertible truth.
Conclusion
The preponderance of GPW narratives in the Russian media serves a dual purpose. First, the idea of a continuing war against enemies from the West helps to justify Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbour. By continuing to use Nazism as the main danger, the years 1941-45 link up to 2022-26, with the enemy changing its name rather than its substance. If 88% of Russians can maintain links to a long-distant war, it is logical to emphasize such ties in the contemporary era. In this way, Ukraine as an independent state can be deprived of agency, and several prominent Russian statesmen continue to deny its existence.
Second, the GPW is closely tied to Russian national identity, despite a growing generational gap that is hard to conceal. The Putin regime is hierarchical, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and anti-Western, attitudes that, while extreme, do have some historical analogies dating back at least to the Westernizers vs Slavophiles debates of the 19th century. Since the GPW is receding in memory and the veterans are passing away—about 6,800 remain—it needs to be a vital point in current narratives to remind people of the victories, however distorted the analyses have become. As it has become a criminal offence to deny the official version of the Great Patriotic War, one can assume that the process will continue.
Was the 2022 invasion of Ukraine about diverse and hostile interpretations of the past? One can say that the statement is at least partially true, though we have covered only the Russian perspectives. The war frames Russia’s contemporary identity, and official narratives have become sacrosanct. History has become a legal and political weapon to frame Ukraine as a neo-Nazi state that has violated the memory of the “great victory” of 1941-45.
David R. Marples is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Oleksandra Nesina is Head of the International Exhibitions Section at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, Kyiv, Ukraine.