Russian authorities have consistently turned to history as one of their main tools for political mobilization and for justifying the war against Ukraine. Historian Sergei Erlikh, a doctor of historical sciences and editor-in-chief of the journal “Historical Expertise,” said this in a conversation with historian Konstantin Pakhaliuk.
According to Erlikh, references to history in modern politics are gradually replacing older ideologies, and in Russia this trend is reinforced by Vladimir Putin’s personal interest in the past. He argues that the president’s view of Russian history has become part of the logic of the war, which is now in its fifth year since the invasion began on February 24, 2022.
The historian says that when building collective identity, the authorities rely above all on a shared past rather than on an image of the future. He recalls that in the 1920s the USSR tried to unite society through the project of world revolution, but by the early 1930s history had returned to schools as a more stable foundation.
At the same time, Erlikh argues that today’s Russian historical policy is internally contradictory. Putin, whom he describes as more anti-Bolshevik and closer to the imperial tradition, simultaneously relies on the cult of the Great Patriotic War, in which the Soviet state and Stalin occupy the central place.
“The Russian authorities’ vision of the past is schizophrenic,” Erlikh says, describing the coexistence in official memory of imperial symbols, White Guard imagery, and the Soviet victory narrative.
He notes that the Kremlin uses the memory of the war as fuel for resentment and militarized mobilization. In this version of the past, the emphasis is placed not on the price of war and the many millions of losses, but on the USSR’s superpower status after 1945 and on the image of an external enemy, now projected onto relations with Ukraine, the West, and a supposedly “united Europe.”
In Erlikh’s view, depending on political circumstances, the Russian leadership alternates between the image of a Russian national state and that of a multiethnic imperial civilization. In the interview, he also links this rhetoric to a broader struggle between political myths in the modern world.