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Moscow museum equates Ukraine invasion with Second World War [1]
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Date: 2023-04
This isn’t the Soviet countryside in the autumn of 1941, but the Victory Museum in Moscow on a grey winter’s day a year or so after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, the difference between the war being re-enacted here in Russia’s largest museum of military history and the one currently raging a few hundred kilometres to the south is increasingly blurry.
History plays a key role in the official Russian discourse surrounding the invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the Second World War – or the Great Patriotic War, as it’s known from the Soviet perspective – and its supposed parallels with Russia’s current war has become a major trope in the state’s efforts to legitimise Putin’s foreign policy and compel the population to endure the hardships it entails.
The Kremlin drew similar parallels back in 2014, during Russia’s initial intervention in Ukraine. In fact, mythologising the victory over Hitler has been a cornerstone of the Putinist project since the early 2000s. While Putin was cementing Russia’s neoliberal kleptocracy, steadily rolling back the democratic advances of perestroika and the 1990s, that victory cult took on ever greater proportions.
It was embodied by ever larger and more spectacular commemorative military parades, featuring reenactments by extras in WW2 uniforms and vehicles. In a disorientating era of post-history, such performative patriotism became a way of linking the generations, experiencing historical connectedness and finding unity.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/victory-museum-moscow-ukraine-russia-nazi-history-great-patriotic-war/
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