Why does Putin fear history?

“Historians are dangerous people, capable of turning everything topsy-turvy. They have to be watched”-Nikita Khrushchev

On 28 December 2021, the historical, commemorative organisation Memorial was dissolved by the Russian supreme court. The act conformed to Putin’s traditional attack on his political enemy; they were labelled as Russophobic, part of a Western conspiracy against the patrimony and ‘historical unity’ of Russia. Two months later, on 24 February 2022, Putin commenced his invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has been accompanied by the relentless manipulation of history and truth: manipulation made easier by the vacuum left by groups like Memorial. Moreover, the dissolution of Memorial’s real history attests to Putin’s fear of history as a force for justice.

This essay contends that Memorial’s history is both public and Radical in nature, allowing it to fulfill an activist role. Memorial acted as a guardian of Soviet memory and produced history accessible to any Russian. The space left behind by Memorial’s destruction was replaced by Putin’s versions of history, history that fosters a manufactured unity, an elevation of Stalin, and a refusal to commemorate the record of Soviet atrocities. The core tenet of this essay is that Putin fears history because it is not his, and it is uncontrollable.

ESSAY:

Harvey J Kaye, in his lecture “Why do Ruling Classes Fear History” (1994) argued that ruling classes “fear history” because “they see and they know[…]that history has been, and remains, a process of struggle for freedom and for justice[…]at the political heart of which is the fight for liberty, equality, and democracy.” For Kaye, a ruler like Putin fears history as a force; an intellectual weapon in the fight for ‘liberty, equality, and democracy’, concepts that threaten his rule. By arguing that fear drives Putin’s weaponisation of history, this essay contends that justice and history work in tandem—and Putin’s fear of justice is at one with his fear of history. In particular, it will be argued that Putin fears public and Radical History, forms of history that render a critique accessible to a wide audience and denounce the ruling elites. Specifically, the Russian organization Memorial exemplified a form of history both public and Radical, and was met with the ire of Putin, being forcibly closed in 2022. The work of Memorial, aimed at honouring Soviet victims and preventing future atrocities, has been replaced by Putin’s historical narrative, which weaponizes an imagined past to justify, amongst other wrongdoings, his invasion of Ukraine.

Memorial was an international human rights organisation, established in Russia in 1989, with the purpose of unveiling Soviet crimes and preventing similar atrocities from being committed in post-Soviet states. “Memorial” included Memorial International and the Memorial Human Rights Centre. The former examined history and commemorated victims of Soviet political repression. This was achieved by cataloguing victims of repression in a database of more than 3,000,000 records. Not only does this remain online in an easily accessible and searchable website, but, prior to Memorial’s dissolution, both this database and a library of literature recounting Soviet crimes were physically available for loan and viewing in Memorial’s headquarters in Moscow. Emerging at the end of the reform era in the 1980s, Memorial was relatively untouched by the state until Putin’s rule from 2000, and was respected as an informal organization, of which there were several thousand in Russia by the late 1990s, by which time Memorial was estimated to have 20,000 members. Memorial continued to grow during the Yeltsin years, lobbying for a day of remembrance on October 30th each year for the politically persecuted of the USSR, and working on the law for the “Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.” The majority of their work in the decades prior to their dissolution was for the establishment of a virtual Gulag Museum in 2004, a form of public history accessible to any Russian, and filled with powerful symbols of day-day repression within the Gulag system such as letters, musical instruments, razors, work gloves and locks, which were available online via a collection of images.

The vacuum left behind with the disestablishment of Memorial in 2022, as well as the general censorship and persecution of academics and historians, has been filled by Putin’s “histories.” Arguably, Memorial was silenced in part because it threatened Putin’s “subtle supportive tissue of half-truths”, including Memorial’s emphasis on differences between Putin’s rule and that of Stalin, the disestablishment of historical unity with Ukraine, and departure from Stalinist repression. Thomas Sherlock, an American professor of political science, has argued that “Putin aimed to overcome the social crisis by emphasizing the achievements and heroism of the Russian nation and promoting a heroic version of national history that could serve as a basis for positive patriotism.” This suggests that an alternative to Putin’s history – with a focus on the iniquity rather than the glorification of Stalin’s rule– has the potential to expose the social crisis by disestablishing patriotism: a patriotism that is founded on falsified nostalgia for the often tyrannical regimes of the past. Indeed, Putin’s nostalgic history has yielded approval ratings of 70% for Stalin, an increase from the 46% of Russians in 2017.  Putin thus rightfully fears the role of commemorative historical organisations such as Memorial Society in destroying his nostalgic treatment of the Soviet era. Long criticizing an  “excessive demonization of Stalin”, Putin has mobilised history to produce a sympathetic portrait of Stalin despite the estimated sixty-one million deaths incurred directly by both his rule and the policies he instituted. Putin elevates Stalin by manipulating history in two areas. The first is the history of collectivization, which is believed to have led to ~12 million deaths. Many of these deaths were in the Ukrainian Holodomor.  Putin disregards this history, only remarking in 2009 on a broadcast in which he answered selected questions from Russian residents, “from 1924 to 1953, the country that Stalin ruled changed from an agrarian to an industrial society.” Collectivization led to the Holodomor, which some historians describe as a case of deliberate genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder states of Soviet economic policies that led to collectivization  “anodyne…yet each had to kill.” In order to employ a single historical perspective that supports a positive portion of Stalin’s rule (despite these atrocities), Putin’s “Russian Military Historical Society”, plays an important role in ensuring school textbooks reflect “a single perspective and an official viewpoint.” This “single perspective,” includes Putin’s willingness to normalise, even heroise Stalin – he is portrayed not as a tyrant but a strong leader who industrialised the Soviet Union and led it to victory in WW2. Putin’s reaction is thus directly threatened by the contrasting history of Stalin’s comprehensive persecution of millions of political victims constructed by Memorial.

To further combat organisations and histories such as that of Memorial, Putin formed his own public history by, amongst other efforts, establishing monuments. Asked by interviewer Oliver Stone, “what do you think about rebuilding monuments to Stalin and Dzerzhinsky,” Putin emphasised this rebuilding to be a “prerogative” of political bodies because of its glorification of a historic Russian might. Memorial presented a complete antithesis to Putin’s “prerogative”, endeavouring to erect monuments to those who were felled by Stalin. As such, Memorial directly challenged Putin’s “sick political imagination,” which Torbakov described as the governing of “a historical Russia”, one which “suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the perfidious ‘West’” in the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, fragmenting the “historical patrimony” of preceding leaders such as Stalin. Finally, Memorial’s focus on the minutiae of terror posed a challenge to Putin, whose writings—such as the widely publicised On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians—promoted a classless, monolithic identity in which Ukrainians and Russians form a “single whole.”  Memorial, in opposition, presented Russia and Ukraine as discrete cultural entities, with Ukraine as a victim of Stalinist industrialisation and collectivization. Despite acknowledging that history is “complex and multi-dimensional,” Putin equates opposition to his narrative with “Russophobia,” framing any disagreement with Russian expansionist policy as “hostile propaganda” that challenges his conception of this “single whole”.

Diametrically opposed to this historical narrative of the elites, Memorial arguably exemplifies Radical History in practice, operating as an organisation within an activist framework that challenged dominant historical narratives. Memorial, for example, publicly argued for the genocidal nature of the Holodomor and elevated as “martyrs” “not the revolutionary saints and heroes of the Soviet pantheon, but those who had suffered at the hands of the Soviet regime in the labour camps and prisons”. As such, Memorial rebuked the “acceptance” of atrocity, which Radical Historian Howard Zinn argued was often seen as the price of “progress,” and presented a concrete purpose to their history: preventing recurrence. Memorial’s activist quality was evident in its use of history, for example, comparing Putin’s persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses to Stalin’s and Hitler’s. Memorial used the ‘power’ of the past to highlight the “absurdity” of Putin’s Russia: “Jehovah’s witnesses convicted under Soviet power[…]are recognised as victims of political repression in accordance with the Federal Rehabilitation Law (1991) and at the same time the current followers of Jehovah’s Witnesses are sent to prison”. By making these comparisons between historical and contemporary repression, Memorial successfully turned history into a weapon of resistance, maintaining Zinn's contention that knowledge of the past should guide moral judgement and political participation. Memorial realised that the society surrounding them was increasingly defying their charter of “preventing a return to totalitarian society,” and felt bound to act, even if that led to their eventual liquidation.

Before their destruction in 2022, Memorial’s ‘Radical’ search for justice was elevated by its use of public history. The virtual Gulag Museum formed in 2004, constituted a form of Public History accessible to any Russian: Memorial's Virtual Gulag Museum was a digital project created to document the history of Soviet political repression, featuring archives, survivor testimonies, and virtual reconstructions of labor camps. This history, before Memorial’s liquidation, was available for access in each of Memorial’s branches, from Moscow to Karelia, as well as via Memorial’s website, which received around 33,445 visits monthly in the period 2002-2025.  The Gulag Museum referred to its mission as the “need to understand the tragic Soviet past”, and at the forefront of their efforts was their extensive records (60,000 personal files of the victims), supplemented by a “collection of material artefacts from the “Gulag civilization”: everyday items, photographs, drawings and handmade books that were created by people behind bars or in exile.”  Memorial’s treatment of WWII reframed the narrative of Soviet victory by prioritising personal testimonies of victimisation, destabilising Putin’s version of the same event. One Memorial text focused on the plight of the worker post-war, facing shortages caused by faulty WW2 distribution, while Jolluck’s Exile and Identity. Polish women in the Soviet Union during World War II, the experiences of Polish women were highlighted.  This was Radical History, grounded in personal stories, and determined to make a political, as well as a historical point.

Historical accounts of Soviet oppression and efforts to establish Ukrainian nationhood and independence challenge the narrative Putin presents in his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Memorial’s accounts of the past offered a counter to Putin’s constructed national ethos – an ethos that pronounces him as a figure of historical authority because his patriotism is based on the personality cult of an absolutist leader. Instead, they drew parallels between him and ideologues or tyrants of the past—such as Ivan Ilyin and Stalin. This manifests in Ukraine, where Russian forces have destroyed “cultural, historical, and religious artifacts of significance,” “intentionally targeting” these sites in order to compromise Ukrainians’ abilities to “enjoy and have access to cultural heritage.” Putin seeks to destroy evidence of a discrete historical Ukraine – which he repudiated as a concept at the time of the invasion. History threatens Putin to the point that he risks indictment for war crimes under the Rome Statute: the Statute specifically condemns “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to[…]historic monuments” as a war crime. Historian Cristina Florea argues that “Putin knows that controlling history is his key to power,” and contemplates, for example, the current risk to Ukrainian archives detailing the historical atrocity of the Holodomor. At risk, she reasons, is evidence of Ukrainian nationhood: a history that in itself challenges Putin’s concept of a “forever Russia”—one that promotes monarchs such as Peter the Great, who disregarded any claim of a discrete Ukraine. In this context, Putin’s destruction of 257 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest in Ukraine is a direct result of his fear. Florea also argues that Putin destroys “records of the past” because without them, stories about Russia and Ukraine in history will be difficult to imagine, and the present will appear as the necessary culmination of the past. 

If the claim of Putin’s fear of history is evident in Ukraine, further evidence of such fear is clear in his dissolution of organisations such as Memorial. Memorial’s liquidation in 2022 was arguably a personal decision of Putin’s, with prosecutor Aleksei Zhafyarov describing Memorial as a “terrorist organisation” aiming to rehabilitate “Nazi criminals.” These claims were consistent with Putin’s speech to a human rights council months earlier in 2022, in which he argued that Memorial glorified Holocaust deniers. The victimization of Memorial began with historical work being confiscated from Memorial’s St. Petersburg branch by police. This appears to have been due to Memorial’s screening of the film Revolt: the Litvinenko Affair, which has been banned in Russia since 2007.  Persecution of Memorial intensified after the passing of the Russian foreign agent law in 2012 (generally accepted as a move by Vladimir Putin to deal with protests against his re-election as president in March 2012).  In 2014, the branch of Memorial that worked to prevent atrocities and political crimes from recurring in Russia (Memorial Human Rights Centre) was designated a foreign agent by Russian authorities and, in 2016, the entirety of Memorial was designated as a foreign agent. Putin’s strategy for dealing with his enemies - accusations of possessing child pornography, sexual assault and, more broadly, accusations of participating in a homosexual conspiracy representing the interests of the EU and NATO- were then employed to target specific historians who worked for Memorial, a concept of artificial ‘Russophobia.’ For example, the head of Memorial in the Northern Karelian region (bordering Finland and thus a region of extreme strategic importance for Russia’s ‘defence’ against NATO), was convicted on charges of child pornography and is now serving a 15-year sentence. Similarly, in 2018, Oyub Titiev, the head of Memorial's Human Rights Centre in Chechnya, was sentenced to four years in a labour camp for drug possession. Finally, Orleg Orlov, a human rights activist who received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Memorial in 2022 was sentenced to two-and-a-half years for “discrediting the armed forces” by protesting against the war in Ukraine. Historian Timothy Snyder finds that “one can record that these people [or in Memorial’s case, organisations] were not fascists or Nazis or members of a gay international conspiracy or Jewish international conspiracy or a gay Nazi Jewish international conspiracy, as Russian propaganda suggested to various target audiences.” But, by 2019, a campaign of persecution seems to have become a decision to destroy Memorial completely. In late 2022, Memorial was completely dissolved and appeals by Memorial to the Russian supreme court were dismissed. Memorial had aimed to “promote development of civil society and [a] democratic state[…]excluding the possibility of return to totalitarianism” through “restoring historical truth and perpetuation of memory.” The dissolution of Memorial by Kremlin authorities suggests the truth of what Kaye claimed when he referred to autocrats “seeing and knowing” that “history has been, and remains, a process of struggle for freedom”. Putin fears history, because it poses a direct threat to the claims of his regime about Russia, about Ukraine, about Stalin, and about Putin himself. The history Memorial presented, both public and radical in nature, was obviously feared by Putin: fear is what explains the repression, and ultimately the destruction of Memorial.

In 1994, Kaye ended his lecture with the argument that those who fear history “fully expect the historic and perennial demand for power to the people to be renewed. It’s reflected in their eyes.” Kaye’s argument provides a framework for understanding Putin’s fear of history, and his subsequent determination to control it. Unlike groups such as Memorial, who regard history as a form of social activism that can see justice done, Putin sees history as a weapon on a battlefield to be deployed against demands for justice and “power to the people.”

Appendix A: A Russian political cartoon demonstrating the likeness between Putin and Stalin. The cartoon suggests not only is Putin seen as Stalin in the eyes of the public, but he sees himself as inseparable from Stalin. (Credit to KEMO via Ostroy, 2013)

Appendix B: A poster by Turkish protesters against the war in Ukraine displaying Putin as the synthesis of Stalin and Hitler. Both, in Memorial’s records, are inexcusably genocidal. (Credit to Burhan Ozbilici via Portnikov, 2023)

Appendix C: Modern Russia, where a protester can be arrested for displaying a blank sign. (Credit to Visegrád 24 via Twitter)

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Author: Patrick Cassidy