The Day Russia’s War Collided With History

Never mind that it was the Soviet Union, not today’s smaller and weaker Russia, that won World War II, or that the Red Army was a multinational force. Millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, and others fought and died, and Ukraine and Belarus, in particular, suffered catastrophically under German occupation. Russians don’t even bother to deny these facts—they have simply erased them from history. By a master stroke of mythmaking, Russia has recast the Soviet victory as an exclusively Russian achievement, hoarding all the glory, all the victimhood, and all the symbolic capital of anti-fascism. The result is the myth of the Russian steamroller—historically righteous, militarily unstoppable—that grinds enemies to dust and makes resistance not only futile but immoral.

A mainstay genre of Moscow’s war propaganda is the claim of a direct, unbroken moral continuum running from the Great Patriotic War—what Russians call the eastern front in World War II—to the so-called special military operation, which everyone else calls the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this telling, history is not analogy but destiny. Recruitment posters and billboards produced by the Russian Defense Ministry make the point visually: a Red Army infantryman in a 1940s olive tunic clasps hands with a soldier in modern Russian camouflage, as if the two conflicts were interchangeable chapters of the same war. The comparison is not only a top-down directive but also a deeply internalized belief among Russians.