The annual May 9 military parade means a lot to Putin. It has become a central element of his ideology, distorting the memory of the Great Patriotic War and repurposing it for modern use.
By Putin’s account, the Soviet defensive struggle against Hitler’s attack defines modern Russia and paints his own rule as a continuation of a permanent struggle against external threats.
Just as in 1941, Putin’s Russia describes itself as constantly menaced by enemies who spend morning, noon, and night working to harm Russia.
Every negative development and every failure in Putin’s Russia is, therefore, the result of external influences. Every criticism of Putin is whispered and guided by enemy agents. Jealous and hostile powers begrudge Russia its many qualities and blessings and seek to wipe it from the map.
Putin is prolonging the Great Patriotic War and the victory against Hitlerite expansionism into a new fight against what he terms fascism. This new fascism is unrelated to our understanding of the word. Indeed, its characteristics uncannily mirror Putin’s own regime and suggest his understanding of the word is its precise opposite. After all, fascism is founded on “extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites,” an economy coopted by the government, and the forced submission of the individual to the state.
Putin’s use of the word fascist is, therefore, no more than a label for those he disdains and a useful echo of the Communist regime’s wartime language. In this hall of mirrors, Putin is the supreme anti-fascist, and his opponents are fascists in the mold of Hitler.
The imagery and language of the Great Patriotic War are also employed to glorify a typically Russian cult of death and sacrifice. The more victims there are in his own ranks, the more valuable and precious is the ultimate victory. By that bleak standard, the almost 1 million Russian soldiers killed and wounded in his all-out invasion of Ukraine are an achievement rather than a national disgrace.
With this pernicious ideology, Putin appropriates the defense and sacrifices of the Soviet Union in World War II solely for Russia and makes no allowance for the other combatant nations and victors.
Historically, however, other nations did fight and contributed armies of millions and untold supplies of armaments to the Soviet Union. As for the Soviet victims (who may total 50 million), most were in what is now Ukraine and Belarus.
Many Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Georgians, Armenians, Jews, Tatars, and others fought in the Red Army during World War II. The ideological appropriation by Russians and Russia alone is historically wrong and slightly obscene.
The most perfidious part of Putin’s ideology is the instrumentalization of defense to justify attack.
Having suffered so grievously during the war (albeit in part because of Stalin’s incompetence; Soviet intelligence warned 47 times of the attack in the 10 days before its launch), the Soviet Union concluded that any future conflict would have to be fought outside its own territory.
That 80-year-old conclusion has put a critical card in Putin’s hands for use whenever he judges it best. By claiming that an attack on Russia is imminent, he can always justify an attack on neighboring countries as “defense.”
Yet there are risks and costs in this. Repurposing Great Patriotic War ideology for his own 21st-century purposes, Putin has inflated his imperial war of aggression against Ukraine into an existential question. Either Russia wins and subjugates Ukraine, or Russia’s existence is supposedly at stake. And if the war is going badly, only he can be blamed by ordinary Russians.
The lie at the heart of Putin’s war of aggression on Ukraine is that Russia might die in 2025 at the hands of an enemy that failed in 1941. The plain truth? That if Russia withdrew, the country could continue to live normally, peacefully, and undisturbed, though possibly with someone other than Putin in the Kremlin.
Nico Lange is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.). He is also a Senior Fellow at the Munich Security Conference in Berlin and Munich, and is Chair of Military History at the University of Potsdam and at the Hertie School of Governance.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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