The shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has induced a new reckoning with the Kremlin’s account of the national past, which features prominently in its packaging of the war. Two of the first studies to appear are by Jade McGlynn, a researcher in War Studies at King’s College London and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and commentator for the conservative British press—the Telegraph, Spectator, Times—and now the Guardian, too. McGlynn’s project is to ‘explain why so many Russians support their government’s unjust war against Ukraine and see themselves as the heroes, de-Nazifying Ukraine, rather than the perpetrators of atrocities.’ The first book, Memory Makers, is a scholarly work, based on McGlynn’s doctoral dissertation at Oxford and mostly written before the invasion. It examines the construction of a national narrative through the Russian media’s ‘historical framing’ of news events—the 2014 Ukraine crisis, Western sanctions, Moscow’s intervention in Syria. The second, Russia’s War, aimed at a broader audience, was rushed to press to coincide with the invasion’s first anniversary. It aims to explore how the Russian people view the war, in light of the media constructions that shape their perspective.
Memory Makers and Russia’s War overlap, but they are very different in style—and, strikingly, in argument. Both have met with glowing praise in the mainstream press. The Financial Times described Memory Makers as one of ‘the most penetrating studies of the Russian state and society to have appeared since the invasion of Ukraine’, which ‘explores the state-driven reconstruction and distortion of Russia’s past under Putin with authority and skill’. The Washington Post called Russia’s War ‘powerful and disturbing’, The Times found it ‘a thoughtful guide’ and the Times Literary Supplement considered it ‘urgently relevant, highly readable’, while a top nato official dubbed it ‘Superb—a must-read’. While the books do indeed contain some useful material, they are highly uneven and should be treated with more caution than this rapturous reception might indicate.
Memory Makers opens with a vivid evocation of a military parade in Red Square, to commemorate the 1941 Battle of Moscow. Above, giant screens portray footage of grim-faced Red Army ranks, marching past Stalin’s podium, ready to fling themselves into battle against the Nazis. Below them, marching to the same step, are the present-day Russian forces, watched by politicians, pop singers and brightly dressed children, bedecked in commemorative black-and-orange St George ribbons. In McGlynn’s account, this epic form of ‘memory making’, centred around the key myth of the Great Patriotic War, is not just a state-backed spectacle, although Kremlin ‘guardians of history’—such as Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and Vladimir Medinsky, Putin’s long-serving (2012–20) Minister of Culture and personal assistant—have been key figures in it. Broader layers of the population have been recruited to Putin’s version of Russian history, which according to McGlynn has become a new common sense that speaks to their position in the world.
While living in Russia between 2011 and 2015, McGlynn was struck by the contrast between the bbc’s account of the Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine and that of Rossiya–1, the main Russian tv channel, where Nazi-era footage of Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Waffen ss Division appeared on a loop in tv news coverage, spliced with present-day events. In Moscow she encountered frequent ‘anti-maidan’ protests, with kiosks and churches collecting donations for the Donbas militias. Russian representations of the 2013–14 events in Ukraine provided the topic for McGlynn’s master’s thesis at the University of Birmingham. In Memory Makers she widens the frame, analysing the invocation of history by media and government spokesmen between 2012 and 2021 on the flagship Sunday-evening tv news round-ups, Vesti Nedeli and Voskresnoe Vremya, the dailies Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda, weekly Argumenty y Fakty and various online news sites, including Lenta. This is backed up by further data analysis of official policy documents, as well as interviews and fieldwork conducted in Moscow and Voronezh.
As earlier studies have pointed out—Kathleen Smith’s Mythmaking in the New Russia (2002) and Thomas Sherlock’s Historical Narratives in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (2007) among them—the Yeltsin regime was more interested in denigrating the Soviet past than exploiting it. Yeltsin repurposed Soviet holidays, chose a new national anthem and swapped the red flag for the white-blue-red tricolour of the tsars. In the 1990s and early 2000s, post-Soviet ‘memory making’ was far more developed in Poland and the Baltic States, where Soviet monuments commemorating the Nazis’ defeat became points of contention, while the European Union issued a 2008 declaration equating the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Moscow responded with aggrieved protests but had no alternative narrative to offer, beyond the one developed under Brezhnev.
Strikingly, it was not until 2012 that what McGlynn dubs the Kremlin’s ‘call to history’ took off. As Putin returned to the presidency after the Medvedev interlude, a faltering economy and protests over electoral fraud and corruption necessitated a new strategy of legitimization. This ‘conservative turn’ also responded to nato’s bombardment of Libya and overthrow of Gaddafi. Memory Makers lists a series of post-2012 policy statements, projects and decrees concerned with national history: the establishment of historical societies, commissioning of new textbooks, battle reenactments, commemorative fairgrounds and travelling museums. In 2020 the constitution was amended to ‘protect the memory’ of the Great Patriotic War; spreading false information about Soviet activities during the War—blemishing the official picture of Russian heroism—was forbidden, as was the rehabilitation of Nazism. The laws were selectively applied, including against Alexei Navalny, though McGlynn reports that in 2016 a schoolboy from Perm was charged for writing that the Soviet Union did bear some responsibility for the War, because it had invaded Poland under the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact.
Yet for the most part, this was not a coercive imposition but an inclusive and participatory project, responding to what McGlynn describes as ‘a genuine public appetite for a more patriotic history’ after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. Putinist memory-making put ethnic Russians at the centre of the story but it did not exclude others, making it an effective strategy to unite an ethnically and confessionally diverse population. The approach was eclectic, freely mixing imperial and Soviet imagery to celebrate the great successes of the past—above all the Great Patriotic War, ‘the backbone of the Kremlin’s call to history’, according to McGlynn, but also Prince Vladimir and the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’, Nevsky’s victories over the German and Swedish invaders, the triumphs of Peter and Catherine, Soviet superpower status, the launch of Sputnik and the ‘golden age’ of prosperity and stability under Brezhnev.
However, memories of repression were not entirely denied. In 2017, for example, Putin led the opening of a Wall of Grief to honour the victims of Soviet persecution. The closure of Memorial in 2021 was not a ban on all discussion of the subject, just on ‘unusable’ versions. Indeed, tragic or traumatic events were often invoked as warnings: the 17th-century Time of Troubles, the February and October Revolutions, Lenin’s nationalities policy, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos and criminality of the 1990s demonstrated what could happen when the Russian state was weakened or had foreign ideas imposed upon it. What remained constant, McGlynn argues, were three foundational themes: a strong state, a unique development path and a great-power mission, the ‘central pillars’ of the Russian national project.
McGlynn’s media analysis details the shifting historical narratives used by Moscow to interpret the unfolding crisis in Ukraine. Some of this is familiar. Between the overthrow of Yanukovych in February 2014 and the election of Poroshenko’s government that May, she counts over 3,500 comparisons—or conflations—of Ukrainian protesters with the Nazi-era hard right, and Donbas militias with Soviet defenders in the Great Patriotic War. Focusing almost exclusively on the far right’s presence at the Maidan, the Russian media systematically linked Svoboda and the Right Sector to Bandera, while the Foreign Ministry released archival materials on the oun’s war-time atrocities. The Odesa fire in May 2014, in which some forty anti-Maidan protesters who had barricaded themselves inside a trade-union centre were burnt to death, was immediately compared to a 1943 massacre in the Belarusian village of Khatyn. McGlynn vividly describes the outrage in Moscow when the interim government in Kyiv banned the St George ribbon and preceded ‘to strip Russian-speakers of their rights’, noting the build-up of popular pressure for military intervention. Intriguingly, though, she finds that the media relied less on historical framing when things seemed to be going the Kremlin’s way.
A different narrative was invoked to contextualize the Western sanctions imposed after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, then ramped up in July 2014 after Donbas militias shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane, mistaking it for the Ukrainian Air Force. As prices rose and supermarkets emptied, the Russian media evoked the economic crisis of the 1990s after the collapse of the ussr, depicted as the culmination of Western assaults on Soviet sovereignty. The press and tv made frequent mention of the humiliations imposed by the imf. But the reassuring message was that Russia was stronger and more self-sufficient now, and would not bow to pressure. Putin was cast as a reassuring Brezhnev-like figure, ensuring the country’s economic stability through well-judged investment in domestic manufacturing as import substitution.
In 2015, a complementary framing portrayed Moscow’s military support for the Assad regime in Syria as a great-power intervention, upholding the norms of international law in the fight against isis. The media reminded viewers of the 1945 Allied summit at Yalta, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill mapped out the post-war order, as a highpoint of international cooperation. The narrative gelled with the story in Ukraine: the great victory over Nazi Germany, moral as much as military, had earned the country a leading role on the world stage. It built, too, upon the narrative of a strong and stable Russia, commanding respect for its ability to withstand Western sanctions, but also reaching out to Washington to form a common front of responsible powers against the threat of Islamist terrorism. In all three cases, the historical framing proposed a continuity with selected ‘good’ aspects of the ussr. The Communist period was de-ideologized, as McGlynn puts it, to support the claim for a ‘just restoration of the post-Yalta order and Soviet great-power status’.
Absent from Memory Makers’ account, however, is any systematic attempt to analyse Russian national narratives in a comparative framework, drawing out their similarities and differences to American, British, French or German ideologies. McGlynn periodically gestures in this direction, noting in the final chapter that the promotion of national-historical narratives is ‘far from a uniquely Russian phenomenon or pathology’. She cites Fukuyama’s maxim that, in a post-ideological age, the fight for the future has been replaced by a battle to define the past, and offers journalistic illustrations such as Brexiteers invoking the Battle of Britain. But she makes no attempt to work these prescriptions through. Missing, too, is any consideration of the theoretical problems involved in conceptions of collective ‘memory-making’, as discussed by Maurice Halbwachs, Marc Bloch and Pierre Nora, or of what Edgar Wolfrum called Geschichtspolitik. The upshot is an unstable grasp of the relations between propaganda and ideology, state and nation, mass media and popular beliefs. As a result, each can be hyperbolized, leading to such absurd claims as McGlynn’s assertion that the invasion of Ukraine was ‘the only possible outcome of Russia’s preoccupation with policing the past.’
Russia’s War retreads some of the same ground as Memory Makers—literally, at some points, in the same sentences—but inverts the argument. Instead of Russians’ history being policed, it is they themselves who are to blame for the war due to their ‘diseased conception of Russian identity’. Putin ‘doesn’t shape Russians’ views on foreign policy or Ukraine so much as he articulates them’—he is ‘the symptom not the cause’. Western analysts may have been duped by liberal friends in Moscow and Petersburg who claim they don’t know anyone who supports the war, but these are an unrepresentative clique. For the majority, resentment and historical trauma have mutated into an ineluctable force that ‘leaves no space for hope, only revenge’. ‘Resistance,’ writes McGlynn, ‘is futile.’ As proof, Russia’s War cites Putin’s 80 per cent approval ratings, invoking the ‘list’ experiments conducted in 2015 by Timothy Frye’s research team to show that Putin’s popularity was real.
McGlynn’s research for this book involves sixty interviews with Russians, including regime intellectuals like Dmitri Trenin, Fedor Lukyanov and an unnamed Foreign Ministry official, conducted online or by email; plus data analysis of posts from the social-messaging app, Telegram. The result is a strange mixture of cool analysis (by the intellectuals) and tabloid headlines (on Telegram), bound together by what can only be described as an unrestrained rant from McGlynn against all things Russian. While Memory Makers’ style was somewhat dry and clunky, with tracts of undigested PhD-ese, Russia’s War sees McGlynn in Spectator-journalist mode, drawing on biological metaphors like ‘disease’ in an attempt to attract a broader audience. Her analysis of sixteen Telegram channels, using categories like ‘Russophobia’ and ‘clash of civilizations’, leads her to conclude that the population is getting a ‘highly emotional’ infusion of ‘things they want to believe’—the message that Russians are ‘misunderstood angels’ and that all Russian war crimes are fake news. Russian society is characterized by a ‘self-centred lack of empathy and acceptance of brute force’, with ‘apathy’ and ‘extremism’ serving as two mutually reinforcing sides of the same coin, both originating from a flawed relationship to the past.
This lurid stuff is flatly contradicted by the layered analyses of the Russian interviewees, whether one agrees with them or not. Trenin, ex-director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, supplies three reasons why Russians might support the invasion: the failure of eight years of diplomacy to stop what he describes as Kyiv’s bombardment of the Donbas; Kyiv’s growing animus towards the use of Russian, excluding the language first from universities, then schools; and perceived American interference in Ukraine. But, Trenin adds, Putin’s propaganda had for too long projected a false image of a weak, semi-collapsed Ukraine and said too little about the real make-up of its society, ideology and army. He is also critical of the Kremlin’s conduct of the war: the aim of the assault on Kyiv was to frighten away the authorities, which didn’t work, but also to draw Ukrainian forces away from the south and east, which did. Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, clarifies for McGlynn what he thinks Putin was saying in his 2021 essay, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’: the two states can co-exist, but only if they remain friendly. He traces Russia’s wary view of nato back to the attack on Belgrade in 1999, immediately after its first wave of expansion: ‘bombing a large European capital in peacetime, it caused a lot of shock.’
Such views do nothing to dent McGlynn’s conviction that Russians are so traumatized by the ussr’s collapse that they have channelled their ‘atavism, aggrievement and aggression’ into a political force. She ends her ‘journey’ into ‘the darker part of humanity and Russian culture’ with an evaluation of their character defects. Sadly, these people simply ‘lack the strength and moral autonomy to separate themselves from national narratives and reassert their humanity.’ She aligns herself with Alexander Etkind’s diagnosis of Russia as the ‘land of the unburied’, fated to repeat violent traumas it has failed to mourn. The only way for Russians to change their ways is to perform a ‘historical reckoning with Soviet perpetrators’. In the meantime, McGlynn is ‘compelled by honesty’ to state that trying to ‘understand’ Russia is a waste of time.
I was less than confident about the author’s honesty by this stage. A good number of sentences had been lifted from a 2022 article I wrote for the Australian journal Aeon about Russian nationalism, which McGlynn does not cite. Here is one passage, describing the ‘redemptive masculinity’ at stake in the post-Soviet Brother movies, a Russian answer to Rambo:
Neumeyer:
Danila, the protagonist of the hit movies Brother (1997) and Brother 2 (2000), is a young veteran of Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya from a poor provincial town. In an early scene, his grandmother . . . sends him to Saint Petersburg . . . Danila becomes an earnest vigilante who hurts the bad guys (especially men from the Caucasus) and protects the weak (poor Russian women and men). In the sequel, Danila travels to the us to rescue the victims of an evil empire run by American businessmen in cahoots with Chicago’s Ukrainian mafia and ‘new Russians’ in Moscow . . . In the climactic scene, Danila takes revenge by committing a mass shooting at a nightclub in the city’s Ukrainian district. Moral righteousness is clearly on his side: Danila declares his love for the motherland and repeats Second World War-era slogans such as ‘Russians in war don’t abandon their own.’ . . . Brother 2 was released in 2000, the year that Vladimir Putin ascended to the presidency.
McGlynn:
Danila is a young veteran of Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya. Hailing from a poor provincial town, he travels to Petersburg where he becomes an earnest vigilante who hurts the bad guys (especially men from the Caucasus) and protects the weak (poor Russian women and men). In the sequel, Danila travels to Chicago to rescue the victims of an evil business empire run by American businessmen in cahoots with local Ukrainian mafia and ‘new Russians’ in Moscow. In the climactic scene, Danila avenges the death of his friend by carrying out a mass shooting at a nightclub in the city’s Ukrainian district. Moral righteousness is clearly on his side: Danila declares his love for the motherland and repeats Second World War-era slogans such as ‘Russians in war don’t abandon their own.’ Brother 2 was released in 2000, the year that Vladimir Putin ascended to the presidency.
Passing off writing and concepts from other authors as one’s own is never an acceptable practice, but it is particularly inappropriate for a scholar whose chosen methodology is discourse analysis. Following the 2022 invasion, McGlynn became a prominent pundit about Russia on the basis of her positioning as a moral arbiter who unveils the ugly truth. Regrettably, this status appears to rest on rapidly produced work that does not always live up to normal standards of scholarship. For its part, Memory Makers is diligently researched, with interpretations that are largely grounded in evidence. Careful data analysis helps distinguish the book from the sea of writing on the Kremlin’s uses of the national past, revealing how the intensity and tropes of ‘historical framing’ have shifted over time, depending on official requirements.
Yet while this discursive emphasis is Memory Makers’ strength, it is also a significant limitation, as it occludes the pushback and alternative voices that persisted throughout the 2012–21 period McGlynn covers. Russians’ views on history have never been an echo chamber. Even as the Kremlin began issuing ‘memory laws’, writers continued to produce pluralistic appraisals of the past, spread through organizations like Memorial, which continues to support public-education initiatives even after its official banning, as well as independent publishing houses like Rosspen and professional archivists, historians, teachers and journalists. Since 2022, some of the institutions that fostered this open-ended historical investigation have been forced to close and many of Russia’s finest historians have fled abroad. They continue working and publishing nevertheless, in Russian and other languages. The officially approved discourse of an authoritarian government should never be read as a direct reflection of what the population ‘really thinks’. Reading Pravda and the materials disseminated by Soviet Pioneer camps would create one picture of public attitudes; studying dissident literature and popular culture would offer another.
While Memory Makers is generally circumspect about its claims, Russia’s War throws caution to the wind. McGlynn’s argument that Russians pushed Putin to launch the 2022 invasion is tenuous in light of prewar polls indicating that most had no interest in taking over eastern Ukraine, much less the rest of the country. The post-invasion rally-around-the-flag effect cannot be projected backwards to infer causation, especially in light of the much harsher crackdown in its wake. Though Russia’s War invokes Frye’s 2015 assessment of Putin’s approval ratings, it fails to mention that his team conducted a follow-up study in 2020–21 whose results, in their own words, ‘paint a more ambiguous portrait, such that there is considerably more uncertainty about Putin’s true support.’ The Russian Analytical Digest symposium on this question in February 2023 revealed sharp disagreements. Polling by the Chronicles Project suggests that a third of Russians are ‘conscious supporters’ of the war, but the views of the other two-thirds are less clear.
In the absence of reliable data to back up its central thesis about the Russian population’s collective guilt, Russia’s War offers psychological truisms, with frequent recourse to projection and rhetorical questions: ‘Why resist the comfort of lies and myth?’, McGlynn asks. Her contention that soldiers’ mothers subscribe to the Kremlin’s packaging of the war because the alternative would be too painful is challenged by such counterexamples as the wives and mothers of mobilized men who have staged protests around the country. Though not all of them oppose the war on principle, they are united in their desire to get their loved ones home; an estimated 17,000 Russian soldiers died fighting to take the small Donbas town of Avdiivka, more than were killed during the entire Soviet war in Afghanistan.
The responsibility of ‘bystanders’ who do not actively oppose a conflict is indeed a serious question, though in Russia’s War it is not examined with any degree of depth. McGlynn argues that the us and uk populations should be held responsible for the invasion of Iraq, but the millions who marched in protest against it cannot be as culpable as Bush and Blair. McGlynn deploys a ‘spectrum of allies’ approach—active supporters, passive supporters, neutrals, passive opponents, active opponents—which sees all the categories save the hardened opposition as potentially manipulable: passive opponents can be neutralized, neutrals turned into passive supporters. The paradigm pits a heroic minority of convinced and vocal opponents—under current Russian law, likely to be serving lengthy prison sentences—against a cowardly herd. Yet resistance to authoritarian rule can assume a variety of shifting guises, deploying ‘the power of the powerless’ (Václav Havel) or ‘the weapons of the weak’ (James Scott). The Russian website ovd-Info, which tracks political arrests, lists many who were jailed for actions they probably didn’t consider overt protests, such as social-media posts or remarks that an eavesdropper (or parishioner, or student) reported to the authorities. They took a chance, however small, and paid the price.
Russia’s War essentially resurrects the ‘Homo Sovieticus’ stereotype, depicting 144 million Russian citizens as deficient in ‘empathy’. But positions on the war are a matter of politics as much as ethics. Both Alexei Navalny and would-be presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin, who was banned from the ballot, criticized the war out of concern for dying Russians just as much as (or more than) solidarity with Ukraine. But whether rooted in self-interest or altruism, the upshot for Ukraine’s independence can be the same. In 1990, Yeltsin made the populist decision to shrug off the so-called ‘burdens of empire’, supposedly draining resources from the Russian people, and announced his support for Ukrainian sovereignty. McGlynn is clearly aware of this precedent; Russia’s War contains a copy-and-pasted sentence I wrote on the subject from the article mentioned above. Yet the book foregoes any real consideration of historical contingency in favour of fatalistic tropes. I share McGlynn’s admiration for Ukraine’s courageous resistance, but tabloid tactics, both intellectual and methodological, do not serve its best interests. A scholar’s task is to elucidate, but Russia’s War does not really try. If almost everyone in Russia bears equal responsibility for the war, then no one does.
In his recent election campaign, Putin touted a huge social-spending and infrastructure package, including payouts to families, subsidized mortgages and higher minimum wages, which he claims will be funded through progressive taxation. Such moves preserve the appearance of economic stability and help to ensure some of the compliance McGlynn identifies. Regardless of what they think about the war and Putin’s other policies, however, Russians don’t have the choice of voting him out of office. Here it’s worth noting that a nation’s relationship to its past does not necessarily predict its future trajectory. Something else is needed: politics. Navalny, with his Smart Voting system and broad-based regional coalitions, understood this. He was likely murdered for it. After his death this February in an Arctic prison, many thousands of people left flowers in his honour at his grave or at local sites across the country. Some of them were beaten or arrested. They do not need lessons in morality from foreign analysts who risk nothing by expressing their own—in this case, highly conformist—view.