Continuum of violence. Chain of impunity. The multifaceted war - armed, political, symbolic and cultural - waged by Putin against Ukraine is reminiscent of other past periods. People from Central and Eastern Europe, who survived Russian imperialism and Soviet repression, have a vivid memory of them, while those from Western Europe are often unaware of their existence. In his anti-historical propaganda venture, Putin can orchestrate a turning point: the "nationalization" of a victory once described as Soviet - to better obscure the role of the Ukrainians.
The Kremlin vainly attributed Russia's exclusion from the commemoration of the Normandy landings to the rank of a non-event, emphasizing that only the future commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Victory counted. This new symbolic expulsion, reinforced by the warm reception reserved for the Ukrainian president in Normandy on June 6, 2024, did not go unnoticed in Moscow. This is evidenced by the conversation between Vladimir Putin and foreign journalists, organized on the occasion of the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, during which the Russian president spoke at length about the history of the Second World War and its celebrations. The content of his introduction and the very fact that he embarked on historical digressions were not a priori surprising.
For a long time, and especially since the beginning of its large-scale aggression against Ukraine, the Kremlin continues to exploit the memory of the Second World War in order to turn it both into a tool for mobilizing the country's population, and into a main argument for legitimizing its ambitions in the international arena. scene and an inexhaustible source of vilification and attacks against Kiev. This time, however, in addition to the usual affirmation of the USSR's decisive role in the victory against Germany - a claim established as the legal norm in Russia - and insults against "Ukrainian neo-Nazis", Putin presented an idea that, if confirmed, would represent a significant evolution of official Russian rhetoric. He actually drew an equal sign between the Soviet Union and Russia to imply that it was the latter that would make the "substantial contribution to the crushing of Nazism" and thus denies any legitimacy to Ukrainian participation in the celebrations.
This idea, of course, is not new. But if its origins date back to the 1940s, and we find echoes of it - sometimes deafening, sometimes muted - in the second half of the 20th century, Moscow has mostly refrained from making it its official doctrine, as it contradicts both of the realities, both of this war, the burden of which was borne by the entire Soviet population, and the ways in which the memory of it was used in the (post)Soviet space.
Among the most famous precedents regarding "Russification" of victory, of course, is the toast raised by Stalin on May 24, 1945, to the glory of "the Russian people, who won in this war general recognition as the leading power of the Soviet Union." This speech, which strongly marked the minds of the people at that time, was part of a major trend that, from the middle of the previous decade, contributed to the transformation of the Russian ethnic group into primus inter pares, "elder brother" of the "great family of Soviet peoples" and rehabilitated Russian nationalism before adding, in the final years of Stalinism, a heavy dose of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Without systematically returning to this "National-Bolshevik" turning point, nor hinder the assertion of the Russian national identity she favored, Stalin's successors would seek to promote the concept of a "Soviet people" - an imagined community sharing a present and future rather than a past, in which the experience of war takes center stage. If the Russian people were treated as a "big brother," whose loyalty and self-sacrifice were beyond doubt, we were careful not to quantify - and therefore compare - the sacrifices and contributions of other nations. The feat was Soviet, as were the heroes and victims of the war - leading, among other things, to the Holocaust being ignored, whose deaths were hidden behind the "Soviet civilian population". While in foreign sources Red Army soldiers were often referred to as "Russians", the statues erected in Eastern Bloc countries were, with few exceptions, of "Soviet soldiers". If, on a pan-Soviet scale, most of the main sites of memory left by the conflict were linked to the imagination of the metropolis (the Siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Moscow, etc.), other places and stories relating to different spaces know considerable media coverage, such as the burnt villages of Khatin (Belarus) and Pirchyupai (Lithuania), the defense of the Brest-Litovsk citadel or the battle of the Dnieper. In the 1960s and 1970s, the entire Soviet territory, far beyond the regions that experienced battles and Nazi occupation, was covered with museums and war memorials that anchored the cult of war and Soviet victory in local memories.
Becoming a main pillar of the Soviet edifice in the last decades of its existence, this cult did not escape the debates and doubts caused by perestroika. Their scale differed in different republics. While the three Baltic countries offer an example of the most radical revision of this narrative, leading to a rejection of the entire Soviet legacy in this area, in accordance with the definition of the communist period as a period of occupation, most of the states that left the USSR retained to varying degrees its place in this memory. For many of them, World War II has long remained their "Great Patriotic War," despite its rereadings and the emergence of alternative narratives. Such was the case with Ukraine, a country that had paid one of the heaviest prices, with its 7 million soldiers mobilized into the Red Army (including 2.4 million killed in combat or in captivity) and its nearly 4.5 million civilians, who lost their lives during the Nazi occupation. Here, distancing from the Soviet narrative and commemorative tradition remained partial until the 2010s, despite the existence of competing memory related to the history of the nationalist movement and efforts to nationalize the country's history.
In Russia, the cult of victory in a version close to the Soviet version returned in the mid-1990s, before a few years later Vladimir Putin made it a key element of his rhetoric and a major tool in the service of his politics . Showing an extremely ambiguous attitude towards the USSR, he unhesitatingly adopted the entire Soviet narrative of the "Great Patriotic War"; and in turn used it to carry out a selective rehabilitation of the Stalinist past. Since the late 2000s, this strategy has been accompanied by a growing intolerance of any questioning of the heroic history of Soviet actions in the day before, during and after the conflict, with victory against Nazism seen as a source of reliable legitimacy for the USSR and its successor Russia. A series of laws passed in the last ten years - such as those punishing denial of the Soviet Union's decisive role and banning comparisons of Nazi policies with those of the Soviets - have created a judicial straitjacket that now makes any critical analysis of Soviet actions during the war impossible.
These laws, like many other threatening words and gestures by the Kremlin related to the memory of the war, were partly a response to what it perceived as external attacks on its vision of history. Since the 2000s, numerous memorial conflicts have pitted Russia against its Eastern European neighbors, especially the Baltic countries, where monuments to the Red Army, defined as an army of occupation, were dismantled and where visions radically opposed to the Soviet and Russian ones triumphed.
Establishing itself as the heir and guardian of the Soviet memory of the war, is not Putin's Russia seeking to monopolize this symbolic capital to the detriment of other countries of the USSR? Although there was never a shortage of commentary attributing the Soviet victory to Russia alone, or even to ethnic Russians alone, the Kremlin remained cautious for a long time, preferring to exploit this political resource, which in the post-Soviet space was the shared experience of and memory of the war.
The term "Soviet" it is also used in the speeches of Putin, who did not hesitate to emphasize the multi-ethnic composition of both the Red Army and the victims of the Nazis. This is evident from the scandal caused in 2010 by his claim that the Soviet Union — or Russia? (this was not made clear as the then Prime Minister used the pronoun "we") — would have won the war even without Ukraine's contribution. This sentence, dropped during a question-and-answer session with Russians, appears today as a harbinger of the coming tipping point. However, other strong gestures in the direction of monopolization and nationalization of victory did not follow then. Russian authorities continued, on the contrary, to emphasize this history as a shared experience in the defense of what they did not mind presenting as a "common homeland" of the nations that became sovereign in 1991.
On the occasion of celebrating the victory in 2021, Putin offered a detailed and extensive vision of this homeland: "People of all nationalities and all faiths fought for every inch of their native land: for the fields around Moscow, for the rocks of Karelia and the passes of the Caucasus, for the forests of Vyazma and Novgorod, for the shores of the Baltic Sea and the Dnieper, for the steppes of the Volga and the Don...". The experience of the war, presented as a guarantee of privileged relations with the former Soviet republics, a kind of umbilical cord connecting them to imperial space and time, the memory of it turned out to be a great tool for Russian intervention, as the example of Ukraine showed, with unheard of violence.
Since 2014, Russia's aggression has been accompanied by an increasing exploitation of history in general and references to World War II in particular. Used to denigrate the Ukrainian government and justify Russia's actions, this reference has also served to develop the idea of a shared past - from which will flow an obligation to have a common present. Thus, having become a "chief historian" as the large-scale invasion approached, in the summer of 2021 Vladimir Putin emphasized the participation of Ukrainians in the Soviet battle: "For Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the Red Army or among the partisans, The Great Patriotic War was truly patriotic because they defended their home, their great common fatherland. This heroic generation fought and gave their lives for our future, for us. To forget their feat is to betray your grandfathers, mothers and fathers."
So should we see in this recent attribution of victory over Nazism to Russia, undertaken by Vladimir Putin in the context of his non-invitation to the D-Day celebrations, a change of sentiment or an underlying trend leading the Kremlin to "nationalize" ; the memory of the war by abandoning the remnants of Soviet internationalist rhetoric in his speech? This is not out of the question due to the combined effect of Russia's isolation and the fears raised - especially among its former Soviet neighbors - by the use of the memory of the war, as well as the rise of xenophobia and nationalism in the country.