The pope has ventured into treacherous territory. In impromptu remarks to young Russian Catholics in recent days, he told them not to forget their heritage: “The great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire.” The Kremlin found the remarks “very pleasing”; not surprising when Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great and harks back to 18th-century imperial glory to deny the existence of an independent Ukrainian identity. Ukrainians responded with fury, accusing the pontiff of using Russian talking points.
The Vatican stressed that Pope Francis’s remarks were not praising Russian imperialism, and he has repeatedly condemned the invasion of Ukraine – though he did draw controversy last year by suggesting that Nato’s expansion might have been a contributory factor. But the past is particularly fraught terrain because Mr Putin has made it his battlefield. Though latterly he has reached further back, towards the empire, his nationalistic account of a greater, stronger Russia draws primarily upon the Soviet Union’s victory in the second world war: “The answer to the implosion of 1991 … was the triumph of 1945,” writes the Guardian correspondent Shaun Walker in his book The Long Hangover.
This narrative has not merely been used to justify aggression – claiming the need to “denazify” Ukraine – but has also paved its way. “This war was perhaps the only possible outcome of Russia’s preoccupation with policing the past,” argues Dr Jade McGlynn in Memory Makers, adding: “Putin and those around him have started to believe their own lies.”
Last February’s invasion was preceded by Mr Putin’s 7,000-word essay “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. New school textbooks portray the “special military operation” as part of the country’s historical mission. But while his obsession with the past has ramped up in recent years, it was evident much earlier. In 2009, the government launched a special commission “to counter attempts to falsify history”. As discontent with his leadership grew, the efforts to inculcate “correct” history and target alternatives intensified. In 2021, Memorial, the human rights group founded to document Soviet political terror and its victims, was forced to close.
Authoritarians around the world heed the Party’s maxim in George Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” They aim not merely to promote themselves, and erase taints to their own reputations or those of their movements, but to forge a national identity that will cement their power. This practice is seen from Hungary and Poland to India – where school textbooks were recently edited to remove references to Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition to Hindu nationalism and chapters on the history of the Muslim Mughal emperors.
The most striking parallels with Russia, however, can be found in China. There, too, history is central to the political project. The appeal of a narrative of glorious national recovery from foreign aggression is rooted in multiple 20th-century traumas. Like Mr Putin, Xi Jinping has created what Dr McGlynn calls a “constructed constancy” that blurs contradictions – though Beijing invokes 5,000 years of history to Russia’s mere 1,000 – and presents a choice between tight political control or chaos. He too sees alternative narratives as an existential threat to the regime, outlawing “historical nihilism” – what others might call memory, or fact. As the old Soviet joke suggests, the future is certain under these leaders: it’s the past that has proved unpredictable.
