Katie Stallard writes:

The Russian president is the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes, and I have seen this playbook in action in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insist that they too are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries.

Yet we must not assume that this autocratic rewriting of history, driven largely by a desire to consolidate power, affects only a dictator’s domestic population (though it does). In fact, these retellings matter far beyond, encompassing expansive territorial ambitions and aggressive foreign policies that threaten neighboring democracies, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan—and Ukraine—and whip up nationalist fervor against the United States and its allies.

As Putin is currently demonstrating, these questionable historical narratives in faraway autocracies are a problem for democracies too.

During his “re-education” in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is asked to repeat the Party’s slogan about the past. “Who controls the past controls the future,” he responds obediently. “Who controls the present controls the past.” Though their individual approaches to controlling that past differ significantly, Putin, Xi, and Kim share an obsession that Orwell would have recognized.

Since he first came to power more than two decades ago, Putin has elevated the memory of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is referred to in Russia, to the status of a national religion and positioned himself as the heir to that legacy, and the tireless defender of Russia and Russians everywhere against their contemporary threats. He calls the Ukrainian leadership “fascists” to remind his compatriots of the enemy they faced, insisting that they are confronting a resurgent menace.

He does not, however, invoke the terror and the strategic blunders that the country’s wartime leader Joseph Stalin committed. Instead, Putin has sealed off the official version of history from scrutiny, passing new laws that make it a criminal offense to challenge the authorities’ account or to question the true scale of Soviet heroism. He has also closed down independent organizations that sought to preserve the memory of Soviet-era atrocities. He is interested in remembering only the aspects of history that serve his current political needs. [Continue reading…]