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Articles on Russian history

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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)

Putin’s war on history is another form of domestic repression

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

Long before shots were fired, a linguistic power struggle was playing out in Ukraine

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)

Deep-rooted Russian fear of the West has fuelled Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

Just because deep-rooted Russian fears might not seem reasonable doesn’t mean they aren’t real in Vladimir Putin’s mind.
On the streets of Petrograd on July 4, 1917, when troops of the provisional government opened fire on demonstrators. Viktor Bulla/Wikimedia Commons

Conquered city, site of revolutions from above and below

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.

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