Every May 9, millions of Russians flood the streets with photos of the family members they lost in World War II. Victory Day, celebrated annually since 1995, is a powerful and recurring image in modern Russia. From a very early age, kids are taught about the struggles their grandparents had to overcome for them to have a peaceful sky over their heads. The scale of sacrifice that every Russian family had to make during the Great Patriotic War causes a deep personal resonance toward the annual event. The origins of this celebration are genuine; it is meant to be a somber day of mourning and remembrance, but in the last few years, it has become a militaristic, propagandistic spectacle. The Kremlin has transformed the collective memory of World War II from a unifying historical trauma into a potent ideological weapon to justify aggression, consolidate power, and silence dissent both at home and abroad.
The Soviet Union’s human cost of victory in WWII was about 24 million lives. Despite a national emphasis on the importance of this history and Russian triumph over fascism, Russian society is disinterested in acquiring nuanced historical knowledge. Surveys conducted by the Levada Center show that Russians of all ages consider movies and documentaries as reliable sources of information. According to these surveys, few Russians know basic facts about the war, such as its causes, the number of human losses, dates of main battles, and state participants. The modern public perception of WWII and fascism is not born of factual and historical understanding but is rather a product of state propaganda perpetuated through media and the film industry. Value systems for the entire post-Soviet generation were partially shaped by the media, including films, print, and new media. Now these value systems can be reshaped by the movie industry, which is controlled by the Russian government.
Collective memory is the shared pool of memories, knowledge, and narratives that bind a nation together, shaping its identity and values. Russians remember being the victors over fascism. The Kremlin’s main goal is to persuade the Russian population into thinking that this victory gives Russia a perpetual excuse for any sins it may commit. The Russian government uses this special pass to legitimize its political authority, justify current policy decisions, and create “in-groups” and “out-groups.” The Russian government claims the country is surrounded by enemies and must fight to defend Russia’s sovereignty, thereby protecting its “traditional values.”
The first step of Russian propaganda was to create a “fascist” enemy within the country. During protests in 2013–2015, the main one being the Bolotnaya Square protests, the regime labeled protesters as “fascists” and “national traitors,” drawing a direct parallel to Nazi collaborators, specifically the Russian Liberation Army (the Vlasov army) that fought under German command during WWII. This activates deep-seated cultural fears—the fascist threat—to undermine the protests’ legitimacy and moral standing. The Russian media has established a strong correlation between fascist war crimes committed during WWII and the activities of modern anti-Kremlin protesters, thus trying to manipulate the Russian collective memory.
Name-calling is the oldest trick in the dictator’s handbook, and the Russian government uses it very often. While the Kremlin associates Putin with victory and the Soviet legacy, Ukrainian protesters are depicted as the descendents of the Nazi regime. Knowing how much gravity the words “Nazi” and “fascist” hold in the eyes of an average Russian citizen, Russian propaganda uses these terms as a blanket, emotional label to villainise the entire Ukrainian state and resistance. The Russian government has launched a pro-regime propaganda machine which began with biased news that presented the Ukrainian political resistance as the initiative of neofascist groups. Pro-government media has created a bridge between Nazi history and the modern Ukrainian situation and attempted to falsely portray Ukraine as planning military action against ethnic Russians in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin is distorting the ideology to revive imperialist Soviet nostalgia and to justify the country’s current authoritarianism. The main goal is to make Russians believe they need to liberate grand Soviet cities, such as Kyiv, that were lost in the dissolution of the USSR to make their country powerful again. Statements on Russian state television are just one example of how this is achieved. When the German government agreed to supply tanks to Ukraine, it did not take long before Russia accused Germany of “a war planned in advance” and attempting to keep Russia weak.
Education also serves as a powerful tool for creating Russia’s nationalist sentiment. In August 2023, Vladimir Medinsky proposed a new, mandatory Russian history textbook for high school students. Use of the books began in the fall of 2025 and represents the pinnacle of the Russian government’s attempts to reshape the country’s collective memory of World War II and use Nazi allegations as a political tool. The textbook includes sections on the Russian military “providing peace” in 2014, when Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. The book also frames the 2014 Maidan revolution as a “fascist coup” and presents the 2022 full-scale invasion as a necessary and heroic “Special Military Operation” for denazification. Ukraine is repeatedly labelled as a “Nazi state.” This creates a single, unchallengeable historical narrative for a new generation of Russians to internalize, ensuring the long-term stability of the regime’s ideology. After the start of the war in Ukraine, a new subject—“conversations about important things”—was introduced in Russian schools. This subject is aimed at teaching patriotism to Russian kids and telling them about the values that they as Russians should support, particularly how a person that loves one’s country is meant to be ready to “bear arms in its defence” in dangerous times. From the first grade in school, children are taught that Russia is the only country that stood up against fascism, and the war in Ukraine is portrayed as the continuation of that war against “fascism.”
The Kremlin has systematically transformed a sacred, unifying memory into a divisive tool for authoritarian consolidation and imperial aggression. This process corrupts genuine historical understanding and grief, replacing it with a shallow, militaristic patriotism. Populist parties and regimes resort to a wide range of different means, including antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia, in their efforts to strengthen national identities. They use the politics of memory as a means of sowing division rather than promoting integration. History is being rewritten, and the ultimate cost of this weaponized memory is measured not just in distorted history books but in the lives lost in Ukraine and the freedoms suppressed within Russia.