History always served as a weapon in the former Soviet Union, a way to control the narrative and deny the truth of the past. Vladimir Putin is now attempting to control this narrative through war.
To Russian nationalists, if the Ukrainian language is classified as a derivative of the Russian language, the invasion looks less like an act of aggression and more like reintegration.
The Death of Stalin has been banned in Russia. While the film is hardly disrespectful to Russian people, it does make Putin uncomfortable with its satirical take of leadership.
The physical and political space of cities can be shaped from above or below, but few have had more revolutionary changes, first under the tsars, then the communists, than St Petersburg.
Because the Kremlin hopes to project strength and unity, history isn’t used as much to inform as it is to inspire, with events cherry-picked to fit within a fuzzy framework of ‘Russian greatness.’
In the 19th century, Russian intellectuals launched a search for historical evidence of their moral and military superiority. What they found drives what today some call “Russian aggression.”
On September 29 1941, Nazis murdered more than 30,000 Jews in a ravine outside Kiev. Dmitri Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, Babi Yar, is a damning critique of the Soviet Union’s lack of recognition of the massacre, and a condemnation of Stalinism.