A regime that can offer its people no future does the next available thing: it seizes the past. This is not a metaphor. On his inauguration day in May 2024, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the “Foundations of State Policy in the Sphere of Historical Enlightenment,” which quietly accomplished something no free country would attempt — it defined history as a state-regulated activity. A presidential commission was created. Disputed historical questions — the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyn massacre — could now be referred upward, to bodies like the Security Council or the State Council, for adjudication. Read that sentence again, because it contains the whole disease in miniature: in Russia, what happened in the past is now, in principle, a matter to be decided by the same organ that runs the secret police.
This is the formal death of history as a science. Once you remove a discipline from the people trained to practice it and hand its verdicts to political organs, you have not reformed the discipline; you have abolished it and kept the name. And the reason a regime reaches for this particular instrument is worth naming plainly. A government with a credible vision of tomorrow does not need to litigate the thirteenth century. It is precisely because the “Russian world” points only backward — because it is a story about where the country supposedly came from and never a map of where it is going — that the past becomes the regime’s single most valuable territory. Having nothing to promise, it nationalises memory.
Engineering Generations
The clearest evidence that this is aimed at the future, not the past, is what is being done to children. The target of the rewritten history curriculum is not the historical record; it is the mind of the next generation, and the goal is to set that mind like concrete before any alternative narrative can reach it.
The architecture has been assembled in stages, each one reported as a routine administrative decision. In January 2022, as the standoff with NATO sharpened, the Institute of World History announced a new schools concept for general history that abandoned “Europocentrism” and reframed Russia as belonging to “Asia” — stripping Europe of its place at the centre of world civilisation precisely at the moment the state was severing itself from Europe. In April 2022 the education minister, Sergei Kravtsov, announced that history would now be taught from the first grade, while the president promoted on camera the notion that Rurik was a Slav and the Normanist theory a slander. By August 2023 the new mandatory eleventh-grade textbook was ready for the classroom: seventeen paragraphs on the “special operation,” warnings to teenagers about “staged fakes,” its war chapters transcribing the statements of officials and television propagandists without attribution, feeding straight into the compulsory state exam.
And the exam itself was rebuilt to match. The revised tests dropped the Golden Age — Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol — and restored the Soviet propaganda novels, The Young Guard and How the Steel Was Tempered. They added questions demanding that the student “understand” the annexation of Crimea and the war, demonstrate “patriotism” and “pride,” and — most revealing of all — they removed the very words “democracy,” “civil society,” and “rule of law.” When a state deletes a concept from the examination a child must pass to graduate, it is not editing a syllabus. It is editing the range of thoughts the next generation will be able to think. Loyalty, not knowledge, becomes the graduation requirement.
The aim of all this has an old and precise name. The intent is to manufacture a generation of mankurts — the figure from legend who, having had his memory destroyed, no longer knows his own kin and will obey any master, even kill his own mother on command. A person without memory of his origins is structurally incapable of conscience. That is not a side effect of the project; it is the project.
Criminalising Memory
If you cannot let people remember freely, you must make some memories illegal, and you must destroy the places where they are kept. Russia has done both.
The legal scaffolding came first. The 2020 constitution now forbids “belittling the feat of the people” in Article 67.3 — which raises a question its authors cannot answer: which organ decides what counts as belittling? The prosecutors? The FSB? And is the leader’s own claim that “Lenin created Ukraine” now a state-protected fact, immune to a historian’s objection? When the state writes and legally enshrines an official history, it converts a leader’s improvisations into protected dogma and makes rhetoric a material force the citizen has no standing to contest.
Then came the demolition of the institutions of memory, and here the regime crossed a threshold. The deliberate destruction of the bodies that document a predecessor’s crimes and preserve the names of its victims is a reference point — the marker of a critical line being crossed toward mass repression. It signals that the spiritual heirs of the executioners have decided memory itself must be erased. In November 2021 the Prosecutor General filed suit to liquidate Memorial, the historical-memory society founded in 1989 under Andrei Sakharov, guardian of more than three million names of the victims of Stalin’s terror. The case was likened, accurately, to the Third Reich’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws — a law lawless in its essence, executed by prosecutors and judges who function as instruments, ready to liquidate any organisation on order, even one that scrupulously obeyed the unjust statute used against it. The Supreme Court did the deed in late December, on the cynical pretext that Memorial “distorted” the memory of the USSR and the Great Patriotic War; the prosecutor argued, with a straight face, that the absence of a “foreign agent” label in Memorial’s materials could “cause depression in citizens.” The timing was its own message — the strike was set for the New Year holiday lull, when the victims were least able to respond, and was paired with a fifteen-year sentence for the historian Yuri Dmitriev, who had spent his life exhuming the mass graves of the purges.
The campaign did not end with one organisation; it has become total. By 2024 the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions had been deleted from school calendars; the “Returning of the Names” reading at the Solovetsky Stone was banned for a fifth straight year and its livestream blocked; the “Last Address” plaques — small markers naming individual victims at the doors of the homes they were taken from — were being prised off walls in bulk. The Gulag History Museum in Moscow was shut on a transparently fake “fire-safety” pretext about metro ventilation. The head of the presidential human-rights council, Valery Fadeev, went on the record urging that the Solovetsky Stone be moved off Lubyanka Square so that it would stop spoiling the mood of FSB officers, and praising the removal of the victims’ plaques. The ground is being cleared so that a Stalin cult can be erected on it, and the demolition is carried out with the zeal of the descendants of the prison guards.
This is why the assault on memory is, at bottom, an assault on conscience. Conscience is impossible without memory; a society that erases its record of what was done erases the faculty by which it might feel the wrong of doing it again. There is a reason such societies share a common fate — the Third Reich showed where the road ends. And here lies the regime’s miscalculation, because nullifying history is a boomerang. In March 2024 a Duma bill by Konstantin Zatulin and Senator Sergei Tsekov moved to declare the 1954 transfer of Crimea to Ukraine “legally void,” part of “cleansing Russia’s legal heritage of null acts.” But once you grant that a state may simply annul the inconvenient acts of the past, you have opened a two-way door: by the identical logic one could void the sale of Alaska, the independence of Finland, even Yuri Dolgoruky’s founding of Moscow. A weapon that nullifies the other side’s history nullifies your own.
The Substitute Myths
What gets installed in the cleared space is not history but a set of consoling fictions, and they have a recognisable structure.
The central one is the victory cult — pobedobesie, the frenzy around the ninth of May. It is the regime’s founding myth, and it is best understood as a raider-style privatisation of a triumph that was never Russia’s alone to claim, a lie nested in three layers like a matryoshka. The first lie: the people who won that war were the great-grandfathers of today’s Russians, not today’s Russians, who did nothing and inherit no glory. The second: the victors were the anti-Hitler coalition and the Soviet Union, not “Russia.” The third: the Soviet Union itself was a union of fifteen republics, of which the Russian republic was only one. Strip away the three lies and the sacred procession is revealed for what it is — a borrowed grandeur worn by men who earned none of it.
Beneath the victory cult sits an older and uglier falsification: the myth of the “all-people’s war.” The Great Patriotic War was not, at its outset, the unanimous national rising of legend. Millions of Soviet soldiers surrendered in the first months, and many simply would not defend Stalin’s regime — a population brutalised by collectivisation, by the Holodomor, by the Gulag, with some choosing even Hitler as the lesser of two evils. Stalin’s own answer was the line “we have no prisoners of war, only traitors”; the NKVD massacred prisoners during the retreats; Vlasov raised an army of a hundred and thirty thousand men against the Soviet state. None of this fits the legend, which is exactly why the legend has to be enforced by law rather than defended by evidence.
Alongside the victory cult runs a parallel fantasy aimed at a different audience — the “beautiful Russia of the past,” the lost-paradise myth that pre-revolutionary Russia was a stable, flourishing country wrecked only when the “cursed Bolsheviks” arrived as if from another planet. This fiction is held even by educated people — doctors of science who genuinely believe in a wonderful Tsarist Russia destroyed by invaders from nowhere — and it feeds an uncritical monarchist nostalgia that conveniently forgets everything that actually produced 1917.
The method that ties these myths together is the privatisation of the classics: the construction of a fake unified heritage in which mutually antagonistic figures are recast as a single brotherhood of patriots. Propaganda lumps Nicholas I together with Lenin and Stalin, Bunin and Sholokhov and Bulgakov, into one sacred national canon — and then attacks a new film of The Master and Margarita for offending it, never mind that Bulgakov was unambiguously anti-Soviet. It is the same operation one could perform on Pushkin or Shakespeare: divide the world into the sacred and the profane, and quietly erase what the writers actually meant.
History Is a Science
The remedy is to refuse the premise on which the whole project rests. There is a seductive formula — “history is politics turned toward the past” — and the moment you accept it you have joined the falsifiers, because “politics turned toward the past” is the precise definition of fabrication. History is a science. It stands to its pseudo-version as astronomy stands to astrology, as genetics stands to Lysenko’s quackery, as real chronology stands to Fomenko’s invented one. It rests on a vast, mutually corroborating mass of evidence — dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, birch-bark letters — that no charlatan can overturn by decree. When propagandists declare that “if the Panfilov men did not exist, they must be invented,” they are not writing history; they are confessing that they have left it.
There is a tell that exposes the folk-historian every time: the claim to be the first real authority, who pronounces everything before him worthless. The honest scholar argues with his predecessors; the charlatan erases them. It is the move that equates a conscientious historian like Klyuchevsky — fired under the last Tsar for saying out loud that the heir would never reign — with a state propagandist whose job is to manufacture a usable past.
And there is one final trap, the most tempting because it feels like fighting back. When the regime weaponises history to claim territory — when it argues that Kyiv “returned” to the empire, that this land or that belongs to Russia because of who supposedly lived there a thousand years ago — the instinct is to answer in kind, to produce a rival historical pedigree proving the opposite. Do not. The moment you argue your country’s claim from who lived somewhere centuries ago, you are using the exact logic of the men you oppose, and you have climbed into their trench. The only legitimate basis for the borders of a state is international law and their inviolability — not historical pedigree, which in this context is pure speculation. Modern nations cannot be projected backward onto the past; no people “stole” a name or a history or a capital from another. Crimea is Ukraine, full stop — not because of Scythians or Greeks or Cimmerians, but because the borders of 1991 are the borders the law recognises.
That is the whole answer to the war on history. You do not win it by assembling a better myth. You win it by refusing the genre — by insisting that the past is not a state asset to be privatised, not a weapon to be aimed, but a record to be kept honestly, because a people that keeps its record honestly keeps its conscience, and a people that lets the record be rewritten loses, along with its history, the capacity to know itself.