Visitors check out the exhibits at the "Russia - my history" historical park at Moscow's VDNKh. c) Maxim Blinov / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.Vladimir Putin thinks about history. His reading tastes tend towards histories, and his rhetoric is often rooted in historical parallels, however questionable. He appears increasingly concerned about his own place in it. Apparently, when Putin meets historians these days, he almost invariably asks them what must be an uncomfortable question — what they think future historians will write about him.
However, this isn’t just a case of Putin’s personal taste and vanity, but also a sense that the Russian state’s legitimacy rests on its ability to shape the historical narrative. It may not be quite as neat as Orwell’s formulation (“who controls the past controls the future”), but whether appealing to memories of the Great Patriotic War to sugar-coat current hardships, or recreating the political and religious history of Crimea to justify the 2014 annexation, the political dimension of history is rarely far from the minds of Russia’s rulers.
Since before his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin has pushed not only the creation, but the standardised imposition of a “new Russian history” curated to maximise political advantage to the regime.
