Weaponizing History

Rewriting the past, one conflict at a time

a documentary film broadcast in late May on the state-owned Rossiya 1 channel recounted a series of events in a certain Eastern European country as follows. As NATO forces held military exercises near this country – historically within Moscow’s sphere of influence – an opposition group began to destabilize the domestic situation. They pretended to be a political party, but in fact were Hitler sympathizers who looked a lot like hired mercenaries and had stockpiled weapons to stage an armed revolt in the capital of this peaceful country, an ally of Russia.

Sound familiar? No, it was not a documentary about Ukraine and the Maidan events of 2013-14. Instead, it was a film about the Warsaw Pact and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Well, not actually an invasion, the film claimed, using Soviet propaganda footage and memories of a former Soviet sergeant who was part of the invading army, but a necessary step to prevent a NATO-backed mutiny of Nazi youth in Prague, something that would have destabilized the entire Eastern bloc. The Czechs were so happy to see arriving Soviet tanks, the film averred, that they gave commanding officers a feast and the soldiers a bus full of gifts.

Such a program would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, when President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia bears moral responsibility for the 1968 invasion. And it is yet another example of how history is being rewritten here with astonishing speed.

The documentary aired during prime time and drew immediate condemnations from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, who are perhaps Russia’s closest allies in Eastern Europe today (their two heads of state were the only European leaders in Moscow on May 9).

Revisionism, or rather, Soviet-Historicism, is also being reflected in the interpretation of events associated with the Second World War. In May, Putin stressed that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was only struck because the Soviet Union was left “one-on-one” with Hitler, and it was necessary for the USSR’s security. He did not mention the secret protocols to the pact, which divided up Eastern Europe (and led to the annexation of the Baltic states, see page 19), and so he was reminded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel that, without the secret protocols, the pact is indeed “difficult to understand.” Merkel called the deal “wrong.”

Victory Day featured commemorations of Stalin that cast him as a great commander and strategist, omitting his role in the catastrophic military defeats that nearly lost the war in 1941-43 (see page 60).

“Only recently, key issues of our view of Stalinism were at the center of public historical discussion,” said historian Alexei Miller. “Suddenly all that is marginalized. Instead, at the center is the topic of our eternal struggle against the West, the topic of our Orthodoxy, which, as we recently learned, came not from the shores of the Dnieper, but from Crimea.”