Under Putin, Talk about the Past ‘New Opium for the People,’ Pakhalyuk Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 4 – Moscow’s use of the past is transforming history into “a new opium for the people, called upon to ease the pain of changes and to create the sense that ‘the new normal’ is not that new, Konstantin Pakhalyuk says. To encourage that sense and prevent Russians from asking questions, the Kremlin offers a history that is tautological, boring and lacking in ideas.
    The historian, who is now listed by the Russian government as “a foreign agent,” says from the Kremlin’s point of view, these characteristics are an advantage in that they encourage people not to focus too much on the specifics of the past but rather to accept without much reflection the official version (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/01/04/pobedim-otlakiruiut).
    Pakhalyuk says there are three core principles in the construction of such a history: First, the government hopes to continue to play on the cult of victory; second, it wants to promote imperial and Russian ethno-national values; and third it seeks to link the ideas of victory and sacrifice and to promote the idea that only the state can protect Russians from injustice.
    To that end, Kremlin propagandists have stepped up talk about “the genocide of the Soviet people” so as to convince Russians that throughout history, the Russians themselves have been “the chief victims, something that means that there cannot be any moral doubts” about what they have done or are doing.
    All these principles help define how Moscow treats the current war in Ukraine, a conflict which “has not so much acquired its own face as become part of existing commemorative traditions.” That should surprise no one because for the Kremlin “history is the language of the powers that be and not of the people.”