The memory of World War II—or the Great Patriotic War, as Russia calls it—occupies a cult-like status in Russian popular and political culture. At home, the Russian government has co-opted and instrumentalized the powerful memory of Soviet heroism and victimhood to legitimize its rule.
In this version of the past, there is rightful pride in the valor and victory of the Soviet army but little mention of long-established truths, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, mass rapes, and the disastrous retreat of 1941. The Russian state’s narrative downplays the terror of the Stalin years; dismisses the Holodomor famine, which killed millions of Ukrainians; and denies its repression of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The suffering of ordinary people under communism is absent, pushed out by an ever-growing nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s great-power status.
