13 January 2025
Teresa Cherfas reviews Memory Makers: the Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia by Jade McGlynn [Hardback, £18.00, 248pp, ISBN -9781350280762, Bloomsbury, London, 2023]
Whilst almost anyone who follows Russia’s war on Ukraine is familiar now with Putin’s obsession with history, few would realize how widely that obsession is shared in Russia. Among the memory makers of the title of Jade McGlynn’s outstanding new book, she includes: “the Kremlin, politicians, media, civil society and the many Russians who chose to sit down, stay watching and get involved.” That this obsession has been codified in the new Russian constitution of 2020 is astonishing and, for the most part, overlooked. Western policy makers and analysts were quick to pick up on the fact that the new constitution allows Putin to stay in power until 2036, but slipped in amongst the sweeping new legislature, almost imperceptibly, is the ‘duty to defend historical truth’ and ‘protect the memory’ of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union’s war against the Nazis from 1941-1945. It doesn’t need saying that the ‘historical truth’ in question is the Kremlin’s, and doesn’t include Red Army rapists in Berlin or the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.
Memory Makers is based on McGlynn’s PhD, research for which she undertook a full decade before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is clear that the war has only enforced her thesis.
Completed before the invasion of Ukraine, McGlynn has skillfully redacted her original manuscript to accommodate it. She makes a serious claim for Memory Makers in her opening chapter: “the activities and rhetoric it describes will show that this war was perhaps the only possible outcome of Russia’s preoccupation with policing the past – even if, personally, I did not believe it would come so soon.” In her view, Western policymakers and analysts who ignore the power of Russia’s propaganda and historical obsessions do so at their peril.
In July 2021, Vladimir Putin wrote a 5,000-word essay titled: “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In some circles, this was already seen as tantamount to a declaration of war, but what McGlynn does in Memory Makers is follow the thread of Putin’s diatribe right back to a speech from 2012, in which Putin first outlined the importance of the propagation of a ‘single stream’ view of Russian history, stretching unbroken across 1,000 years from Prince Vladimir to Vladimir Putin. Putin declared 2012 “the year of history” and claimed that Russia was in need of ‘cultural therapy.’ By 2020, McGlynn writes, Putin had “established himself as something of an historical op-ed columnist.”
Two years after that first speech, in March 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, prompting the Ukraine Crisis. The annexation was followed by the start of Russia’s eight-year long proxy war in Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, with Russian-supported separatists, joined by Russian soldiers with no identifying insignia (Putin’s ‘little green men’),waging war against Ukrainian armed forces.
This is the first of three stories examined by McGlynn, in which she describes and analyses the ‘historical framing’ they were afforded in official sources, media sources and acts of civic patriotism. McGlynn uses the term ‘historical framing’ to describe the technique that:
combined and demanded – but also distorted – knowledge of history, political culture, communications, nationalism and identity construction. Historical framing made history relevant to people right now by pretending that desperate traumas and euphoric triumphs from the past were being repeated in real-time.
Her second study is of the coverage of Western sanctions in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea: citing analysis of 3,889 examples of ‘historical framing’ between July and October 2014, it details how they used Soviet nostalgia and the trauma of the Soviet collapse to portray sanctions as a Western attempt to humiliate Russia, as in the 1990s, and even destroy it, as it supposedly destroyed the USSR. It deflects attention from the Kremlin-imposed counter sanctions and Russia’s increasing international isolation.
The third example is a rare English-language study of Russian media coverage of military intervention in Syria in 2015. Here, ‘historical framing’ took the context of the Soviet Union’s big power status post-war, when it was a big player in the Yalta new world order. Military intervention in Syria was framed as a regaining of Soviet superpower status: “Russian media were more interested in the geopolitical angle than events on the ground. Put succinctly, they cared more about how Syria made them look than how Syria itself looked.” The tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda ran a telling headline at the time, which McGlynn quotes: “If we are successful in Syria, then we will improve our position – whether in Ukraine or Zanzibar.” This begs the obvious question: how does Russia look on the world stage now that Assad has fled? Not so good.
In her first study of the Ukraine Crisis, McGlynn shows how the Russian regime’s official pronouncements and the Russian media’s coverage of the Crisis conflated it with the Great Patriotic War in a masterful example of ‘historical framing.’ By now, we are all familiar with the way in which Ukrainians are described in Russian sources as Nazis, their government as fascists, their army as Banderites, evoking Stepan Bandera and the OUN’s ‘treachery.’ But these tropes began over a decade ago, now ‘hyper exploited’ to fit the real time full-scale war. McGlynn explains:
Having fully developed the frame over the initial stages of the Ukraine Crisis, the government and media could then invoke it for emotional impact without having to preprocess audiences – Russian viewers already recognised the story. By 2022, they had watched it for eight years: in this context, Putin’s objective of denazifying Ukraine did not sound obscene – it sounded overdue.
Memory Makers is informed by McGlynn’s first-hand descriptions of her own experience of place and atmosphere in Russia. It is an essential part of her book’s value, since so often in the West the visual landscape in which most Russians live is completely missing or overlooked. What she calls the “temporal blurring” of historical framing is, she argues, facilitated by the Soviet era infrastructure of many provincial towns in Russia and their street names. As a student, McGlynn lived in Voronezh, where, she tells us, she lived in a Brezhnev-style block of flats in Voroshilov St., and had to walk along Kirov and Friedrich Engels Streets to get to Lenin Square. It’s just a short step to reimagining the Soviet past in Russian provincial towns like this. The contemporary relevance of Soviet experience to lives today is almost a given. As Voronezh was largely destroyed in the Second World War, there was little to remind people of its pre-Soviet existence: “Soviet remnants provide a supportive infrastructure for the Kremlin’s uses of history, while also revealing that many sections of the country do not see any real need to move on in any case.”
By evoking what McGlynn describes as “this uneasy nostalgia, (…) the Kremlin has been able to make history an issue of everyday importance and existential security.”
Memory Makers draws on numerous academic studies in an extensive bibliography, which point to the ways in which many countries all over the globe have used history and historical framing in nation-building and the forging of a political and cultural identity. But McGlynn is not alone in arguing that a special case can be made for the role of history in the post-communist space after 1989. As countries needed new pasts to create new futures, disenchantment with Marxist ideology meant that a new nationalist revisionist history was needed as a unifying glue. It could be, McGlynn writes, that it was in reaction to nationalist revisionist history in the Baltic States, Poland and other countries, and their presentation of the Soviet occupation as a Russian one, that Russia’s history obsession was kick-started.
Quoting Benedict Anderson’s 2016 book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, McGlynn concurs that “for a nation to exist, it must connect its dead, living and yet unborn to an imaginary community,” adding, “This requires a powerful story, or what the Israeli historian Yael Zerubavel calls a ‘master commemorative narrative,’” and she concludes:
Through its uses of history, the pro-Kremlin master commemorative narrative supports three broad arguments: that Russia needs a strong state; that Russia has a special path of development; and that Russia is a messianic great power with something unique to offer the world.
It’s not just Putin, but Dmitry Medvedev in the Security Council, Sergei Lavrov in the Foreign Ministry, and Sergei Naryshkin in the Foreign Intelligence Service, who have been promoting the securitisation of history and its centrality to Russian policy. McGlynn analyses and quotes from the annual National Security Strategy of 2015 for her thesis, but picks it up again in 2021 for this book, when, she writes, it is “on a crusade to politicise and polarise every aspect of Russian culture (…) The 2021 NSS cites the defence of historical memory as a strategic priority for the nation’s security and devotes a section to the defence of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, culture and historical memory.”
It is the counter arguments – just ask the Chechens or Kalmyks – disproving Russian ‘historical unity’ that indicate why the government promotes it so assiduously.
In a chapter titled ‘Living Forms of Patriotism,’ McGlynn takes her analysis to the outward manifestation of ‘historical truth’ by the people on the streets and in the public spaces of the Russian Federation. In this tour de force of research and analysis, she shows the ways in which vast swathes of Russian society have themselves been co-opted by the ‘call to history’ into performative acts of commemoration and memory of Russia’s heroic past and selfless sacrifice. Civil initiatives have been hijacked by the regime (the case of the global Immortal Regiment stands out) and squeezed into a straitjacket of regime dictated ‘spontaneous’ participation, whilst approved civic groups and military history clubs are in receipt of huge amounts of government funding and Kremlin hand-outs. These are classic GONGOs – Government Organised Non-Governmental Organisations.
The guiding hand directing and overseeing many of these projects was Vladimir Medinsky, Russian Minister of Culture from 2012 until 2020, whom McGlynn describes as a ‘committed mythomaniac’:
From 2012, the area of historical and cultural heritage played a dominant role in the ministry’s activities, as documented in the many hundreds of pages of reports they released between 2012 and 2020 (Minkul’tury 2019). These reports show that the Ministry of Culture organised around one million educational events a year, a majority of which focused on preserving history and (an eclectically defined) historical truth.
Medinsky, it turns out, is even more of a zealot than Putin. His ministry drafted the Foundations of the State Cultural Policy of the Russian Federation (2014) about what to promote and why and how. McGlynn writes:
It abounded in historicism, arguing that the purpose of promoting cultural education was, first and foremost, to create a common worldview among the Russian people. Its second aim was to create a spiritual cultural matrix for the nation (a ‘cultural consciousness’ if you will). Despite liberally sprinkling the text with quotations from Putin, the President’s team blocked and disowned the draft. A Presidential Administration working group eventually rewrote the Foundation from scratch, producing a more sober and less politicised view of Russian cultural policy.
Shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Medinsky had called Ukraine a historical phantom. He was Putin’s choice to lead the initial rounds of Russia’s negotiations with Ukraine in March 2022. Despite, or perhaps because of, his pronouncement on Ukraine, the talks were doomed.
The ‘duty to defend historical truth’ and ‘protect the memory’ of the Great Patriotic War are nothing short of criteria for citizenship now in Russia. Against this, the severity of the foreign agent law becomes palpable: its meaning has been absorbed into official and unofficial Russian discourse; no one who challenges ‘historical truth’ can be a Russian patriot, nor can he call himself a citizen of Russia. The Russian opposition, in exile or prison, seems further than ever from influencing the political process now.
What McGlynn discovers through her research is that: “the media’s hyperbolic invocation of history is clearly aimed not only at legitimizing government policy but also at constructing and imposing a revised understanding of patriotism, of the meaning of Russianness and even of truth itself.”
Citing the Yugoslav Wars, and the Serbs’ and Croats’ historical framing of the enemy, McGlynn is careful not to make out that Russia’s memory makers inhabit an exclusive realm. Her painstaking research and engagement with her thesis provides an invaluable window into Russia’s history obsession and the ways in which its machinations have penetrated deep into its soil, from the Kremlin all the way down, to pervade the cultural consciousness of a disparate nation.
It would be wrong to assume, however, that Russians as a whole buy into this and McGlynn’s research does not include public opinion polling on this question. Since 27 February 2022, the independent Russian pollster, Levada Centre, has been asking Russians once a month, across the sociological and geographical spectrum, whether they ‘personally support the actions of Russian military forces in Ukraine.’ Each time, a very large proportion of respondents—between seventy and eighty per cent—say they either ‘definitely’ or mostly support them. However, the Levada Centre has come under criticism for the very framing of the question (clearly intended to avoid government censorship that does not allow people to call the conflict a ‘war’) and the very nature of attempting to poll in an authoritarian state makes it a dubious venture. Yet, Levada’s consistently high pro-war figure, has framed a lot of perceptions, including inside Russia, and possibly Jade McGlynn’s too. For a more nuanced understanding of ordinary Russians’ support for the war, the work of P.S. Lab (see Keith Gessen, ‘Do Russians Really Support the War in Ukraine?’ The New Yorker, 10 January 2025 and publicsociologylab.com) is a very good starting point. Rather than asking scripted questions, its researchers spent a month each in different towns of the Russian Federation, engaging with inhabitants in seemingly spontaneous conversations. Their findings show conflicted, contradictory and confused responses that are all too human and understandable. The majority of their respondents inhabit the middle ground between support for and opposition to the war. Their conclusions give me, at least, reasons to be cheerful.
In a coda written in April 2022, McGlynn acknowledges the demonic strength of the Kremlin’s ‘historical truth’:
Let the scorched rubble and dismembered bodies scattered across Ukrainian lands stand as testimony to the malevolent power of memory and myth making.
McGlynn’s book is academically impressive and full of fascinating detail and analysis. Maybe the circumstances in which it was written made it impossible for her to give full weight to the unpredictable human factor that flows beneath the official version, but that tension is what has always made Russian history endlessly engaging.
