For Putin, Contemporary Russian Nation was Born Not in 1991 but in 1945, Sokolov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 2 – Russian historian Nikita Sokolov argues that “the main propaganda construction of Putin’s Russia consists in the idea that Russian society was born in 1945” rather than in 1991, according to Vadim Stepanov in a review of the revival of propaganda in Russia after the start of the first and especially the second Chechen war.
    Summarizing Sokolev’s thinking, Stepanov says that “it is extremely important for any civil society to recognize the moment o fits founding. The French have the Day of the Taking of the Bastille, the Americans, the war for independence, and the USSR, the Great October Socialist Revolution” (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/12/02/ot-chechni-do-velikoi-pobedy).
    “After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the authorities of the Russian Federation had to choose a new date,” Stepanov says and then continues with the following quotation from Sokolov himself:
     “The obvious moment of the founding of the new Russia should have been August 1991. Rusian citizens independently and without any help or pressure came out into the streets and said ‘No, we do not want to be Soviet anymore … we want to live freely in conditions of the market and democracy. But such a choice would put human rights at the forefront as well as the values of the individual and his or her freedom and the ability to make decisions. And that did not play at all into the hands of the fellow KGB officers who came to power together with Putin.”
    Consequently, Putin and his team reached back to 1968 when the Brezhnev regime organized the first victory parade and put out a narrative to justify it and made May 9 not a memorial date but a celebratory one, as Lev Rubenshteyn subsequently recalled (meduza.io/feature/2023/01/07/iz-vremen-sssr-sovet-mogu-dat-prostoy-ne-nado-boyatsya).
    The Great Victory has become the core of Putin’s ideological construction, Sokolov says, to which has been added only the idea of sovereign democracy as developed by Vladislav Surkov. The historian explains:
    “We seem to have a democracy but out own now with the abolition of gubernatorial elections and the absence of a free press. And this is our tradition binding. From here have come a stream of talk about how Russia has always been a besieged fortress, especially in history textbooks where there is Stalin, the leader of Victory and the head of the well-functioning soviet system, but there is absolutely no Len-Lease.
    “Since the mid-2000s, the majority of state propaganda narratives have been built around these two ideological constructs: the great victory and sovereign democracy. Even in the first month of the covid pandemic, pro-government media tried to blame the West for the disease. And the slogan ‘we can repeat’ acquired a popular and sad significance in the Russian-Ukrainian war.”