In the summer of 2021, Vladimir Putin published an essay of nearly 5,000 words in which he tried to demonstrate that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”, artificially separated by Russia’s enemies. The text, a blend of imperial nostalgia and selective rewriting of the past, quickly became his manifesto for the impending invasion.
Seven months later, Russia was bombing Ukrainian cities, illegally annexing territories, and killing tens of thousands of civilians – all in the name of a reinterpreted history, writes Kyiv Independent.
Since then, Putin has turned historical discourse into a political weapon. He did it again in February 2024, in a marathon interview with Tucker Carlson, where he gave a veritable lecture on invented history: from the founding of the medieval state of Kievan Rus in the 9th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He repeated the same tirade, diplomatic sources say, in front of Donald Trump at the Alaska summit in August.
“For Putin, history is an arsenal from which he chooses the right weapons to strike his enemies,” explains French historian Françoise Thom.
“A country with an unpredictable past”
Reinterpreting the past is not new in Russia. For centuries, every new tsar, general secretary, or president has rewritten history textbooks. “Russia is a country with an unpredictable past,” joked comedians at the beginning of the 2000s.
But Putin has taken this habit to the extreme. He has made historical mythology a tool for legitimizing war. He has chosen from the past only those episodes that served his narrative about the “historical unity” of Russians and Ukrainians.
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