The war in Ukraine is just the latest chapter in a long, tangled relationship between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Russian traditional wooden matryoshka dolls showing Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on sale in a street souvenir shop in Moscow.
(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
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.
A woman holds a placard with the words ‘language is a weapon’ written in Ukrainian during a 2020 protest of a bill that sought to widen the use of Russian in Ukrainian public education.
Evgen Kotenko/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sit far apart during talks in the Kremlin in Moscow a week before Russia invaded Ukraine.
(Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
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.
On the streets of Petrograd on July 4, 1917, when troops of the provisional government opened fire on demonstrators.
Viktor Bulla/Wikimedia Commons
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.
Did college help don Michael Corleone become a better criminal?
Facebook/TheGodfather
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.’
Russian defense minister during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow.
REUTERS/Yuri Kochetkov
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.”
The 1976 memorial at the Babi Yar massacre site only recognised Soviet victims, despite the killing of more than 30,000 Jewish people. In 1991 a Jewish memorial was installed nearby.
Jennifer Boyer/Flickr
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.
Over a period of 30 years, millions of criminals and political prisoners were sent to Soviet labor camps.
Wikimedia Commons