1/10/20
The 75th anniversary of the end of World War II was the only forthcoming event Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned in his New Year’s address to the nation. Creating an alternative to the dominant Western narrative about that war is key to Putin’s way of securing Russia’s place in the world. Putin has appeared lately to be obsessed with World War II, discoursing about it at every opportunity — during an informal session with other post-Soviet leaders, at his big end-of-year press conference, in a meeting with Russian tycoons, at the Defense Ministry in the presence of top generals. He’s talked time and again about delving into archival documents; he’s mentioned working on a scholarly article about the war. Even for a leader who has made the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis (seen by many as a triumph over a rotten Europe) a cornerstone of the new Russian national identity, Putin’s evident emotional involvement and the sheer time investment are unusual. That’s because Putin, his foreign policy advisers and his propagandists see the dominant narrative of the war shifting against Russia. Throughout the Cold War’s worst years, the victorious alliance of the Soviet Union, the U.S., the U.K. and France was a reminder that cooperation was possible. There is, however, a tendency to dump that baggage now and to treat Russia as a villain without any qualifications. Late last year, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was asked to recall when he’d changed his mind. His response: What I’ve really changed my mind on was whether it is possible to reset with Russia. I really thought, as I think many foreign secretaries and prime ministers have thought before, that we could start again with Russia. That it’s a great country we fought with against fascism. It was very, very disappointing that I was wrong.
The Kremlin is extremely sensitive to such signals — not just for domestic propaganda reasons, but because Russia’s global power is still based on some important spoils of World War II. As one of the nations that vanquished Hitler, the Soviet Union didn’t just win control over Eastern Europe, it received a place atop the postwar global order and an all-important permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. If the Soviet Union is primarily seen as Hitler’s ally at the outset of the war — which of course it was — rather than a Hitler conqueror at its conclusion, if Russia has never really been on the right side of history, it has no claim to moral authority and to a role as a global arbiter. To Putin, that role is, in a way, as important as Russia’s nuclear shield. The ability to say authoritatively what’s right and what’s wrong is, after all, a major part of what makes the U.S. a global superpower. Kremlin-linked historians and propagandists see the shifting narrative as the result of Eastern Europe’s increased role in the continent as a whole. Since, of all European nations, Poland and the Baltic states are the most concerned with the policy and politics of memory, their loud voices have drawn the European political elite’s attention away from the victory and toward the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, in which Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin’s USSR divided up spheres of influence in Europe. One result of this was a European Parliament resolution last year that equates the Soviet regime with the Nazi one in terms of the damage done to Europe, a document that has been a strong irritant to the Russian leadership and to Putin personally. Much of Putin’s foreign-policy activity this year will be directed toward trying to rebuild a more Russia-centric concept of the victory over the Nazis. This is territory where Putin isn’t prepared to give ground, and given the enormous complexity of the historical material as well as the cross-currents of Israeli, U.S. and European memory politics, he can put up quite a diplomatic and propaganda fight.