There’s one thing that Ukrainians, ordinary Russians, Vladimir Putin and westerners all have in our heads during this conflict: the second world war. An old-fashioned land invasion is terrorising the same cities as the German invasion of 1941, history’s largest military operation.
The scenes of families sheltering from bombs in underground stations, or trying to squeeze on to terrifyingly packed trains, are instantly familiar. Even the tanks and the confused, underfed Russian conscripts haven’t changed much. History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as tragedy.
If some western societies remain obsessed with the second world war, the effect is much greater in the former USSR: an estimated 24 million Soviet citizens were killed, compared with under one million (still an unimaginable carnage) from the US and UK combined. So how do our collective memories of that war shape our understanding of this one — and perhaps even shape the current war itself?
Putin, born in 1952, is among the last politicians whose worldview comes from the second world war. He has told differing versions of a story about how his father supposedly found his mother barely alive on a pile of corpses during the siege of Leningrad. Their older son, Viktor, died in the siege.
As Putin has grown more history-obsessed, he has cranked up the jingoism of Russia’s official war story. In his telling, which it’s dangerous to question, the USSR didn’t really collaborate with Germany from 1939 to 1941, but beat Hitler alone and was never thanked by the west.
This is a ratcheting up of the Kremlin’s de facto ideology of recent decades: world war twoism. Jingoistic myths about the Great Patriotic War have been propagated by Putin’s adviser Vladimir Medinsky, who is now Russia’s chief negotiator in the “peace talks” with Ukraine. No wonder Putin’s justification for this war is “denazification”. The implication: it’s a fight to the death.
There is some truth in his accusations of Ukrainian collaboration with Nazis. Stalin’s pre-war brutality killed millions of Ukrainians, so when the Germans arrived, some people greeted them as liberators. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists at times fought on the Nazi side and massacred Poles and Jews. The Red Army in Ukraine was considered both “our” army and “their” army, liberator and Russian occupier.
Zelensky is creating an inclusive Ukrainian nationalism, which casts ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, Jews, Muslims and everyone else as Ukrainians together
There is one contemporary version of Ukrainian ethnonationalism that is anti-Russian, anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, and soft on Nazism. Some politicians, including previous president Petro Poroshenko, have whitewashed UPA fighters into nationalist heroes. Neo-Nazis joined Ukraine’s Euromaidan protest movement of 2014, and the neo-Nazi Azov battalion has fought Russia since the Donbas. But Ukraine’s far‑right is marginal, getting 2 per cent of votes in 2019.
Putin was never very interested in his denazification narrative, and may not even believe it himself, argues Dimitar Bechev, political scientist at Oxford. The Russian president had hoped for a quick war that would barely require narratives. However, his “denazification” story ran up against Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky, three of whose great-uncles were executed by German occupiers.
“How can I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked Russians in a video recorded in his native Russian, not mentioning his Jewishness but referring to his grandfather, who fought in the Red Army. A Jewish comedian has become “the hero of Ukrainian history”, says anthropologist Marina Sapritsky-Nahum.
Zelensky is also changing what it means to be “Ukrainian”. In what could be his last days alive, he is creating an inclusive Ukrainian nationalism, which casts ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, Jews, Muslims and everyone else as Ukrainians together. Ukrainian writer Vladislav Davidzon calls it “the polyglot nationality of a thoroughly traumatised nation that just wants to exist”. It’s also a new-model nationalism that western European countries could learn from.
Putin’s story of Russia liberating yet another “Russian” territory from “Nazis” no doubt persuades many Russians, but on Russian-language social media, Ukrainians have evoked a contrasting Russian memory: Hitler’s invasion. “This reminds us all of 1941,” said Zelensky after Kyiv was bombed. His adviser Oleksiy Arestovich compared Kharkiv with Stalingrad.
Putin’s army is inadvertently rubbing in the parallels, bombing the Holocaust memorial of Babyn Yar and rerunning the Wehrmacht’s destruction of Kharkiv. One Russian eminently credentialed to channel national memories of war, Elena Osipova, 77-year-old survivor of the Leningrad siege, protested against Putin’s invasion, was arrested and, after her release, protested again.
The watching country most obsessed with the second world war may be Germany. German softness towards Putin’s Russia was partly informed by never wanting to be the bad guys again. But the moment Putin seemed to become the bad guy of 1941, Germany turned: out with Russian gas, in with defence spending and arms to Ukraine.
For now, we’re reliving 1941. Other historical parallels will emerge, possibly including 1917, when hungry and war-fatigued Russians brought down the tsar.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022
