Putin’s Genocidal Quest for Symbolic Immortality, Part 5

The architecture of a crime

This is part five (out of six) of the essay “Putin’s Genocidal Quest for Symbolic Immortality”. Previous parts: (1) Introduction, (2) “Moscow is silent”, (3) His-story of Ukraine, (4) “A fascist coup!”.

An acquaintance of Vyacheslav Volodin, chair of the lower house of the Russian parliament, described him as “not the most intellectual person”, but someone who “is able to sense quite a lot – not with his brain but with his spine. A lot of his moves are made instinctually – he follows his nose and he knows which way the wind is blowing”.¹

It was exactly Volodin’s gut feeling that led one of Russia’s most influential officials not only to identify Putin with the entire country, but also to tie Russia’s future to Putin’s personal continuity. “If there is Putin, there is Russia. Without Putin, there is no Russia”, Volodin said during a closed-door meeting in 2014.²

Volodin’s adulation of Putin – likely underpinned by his own aspirations for power – is one of the countless elements in Russia’s sovereign feedback loop: a system that has supported, amplified, and reinforced the central myth of Putin’s view of the West and Ukraine – a myth shaped both by Russian and Soviet imperial legacies, and by Putin’s personal experiences. It is precisely this state of mirrors that has transformed Putin’s individual quest for symbolic immortality into a collective Russian war against Ukraine – and has helped turn his idea of changing the past to correct the present into the brutal reality of an anti-Ukrainian genocidal endeavour.

This transformation was all but inevitable. As Putin’s regime hardened into deeper authoritarianism – especially after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 – those around him who dared to suggest less radical paths in dealing with the West and Ukraine were steadily marginalised and silenced. In their place, more extremist voices rose, not just tolerated but ushered into the mainstream. By the time Russia launched its full-scale assault on Ukraine, Putin’s personal vision of the West and Ukraine had become the rhetorical bedrock: politicians and officials were permitted to be more extreme than Putin – but never, under any circumstances, less.

Putin’s real-world popadanstvo has relied on three major, overlapping and mutually reinforcing mechanisms: pan-Russian ultranationalism, historical revisionism, and dehumanising political technology.

The main amplifiers of Putin’s pan-Russian ultranationalism are the so-called siloviki – representatives of Russia’s armed ministries and security agencies. Putin himself is one of them, having come from the ranks of the KGB/FSB. Andreas Umland and Martin Kragh have explored the political ideas of the Russian siloviki, focusing on Nikolai Patrushev, who succeeded Putin as head of the FSB in 1999 and later served as Secretary of Russia’s powerful Security Council from 2008 to 2024.³

Patrushev fully shares with Putin the core mythological view of the West and Ukraine in relation to Russia:

In an attempt to suppress Russia, the Americans, using their proxies in Kiev, decided to create an antipode of our country, cynically choosing Ukraine for this purpose, trying to divide an essentially united [pan-Russian] nation. Speaking of denazification, our goal is to defeat the bridgehead of neo-Nazism created by Western efforts near our borders.⁴

In other words, the West is seen as having forged the idea of a sovereign Ukraine into a fascist instrument of division and betrayal against Russia.

For Umland and Kragh, the viciousness of Patrushev’s anti-Ukrainian sentiments captures the characteristic posture of the siloviki – a stance rooted in the denial of Ukraine’s legitimate statehood, peoplehood, and leadership. By portraying Ukraine as a country gripped by fascism and Western subversion, Patrushev and his allies seek to explain how a nation they claim does not truly exist can nonetheless resist Russia’s assault. In the siloviki’s imagination, Ukrainians become enemies of Russia either by refusing to accept themselves as a mere branch of the Russian people, by collaborating with the West in its alleged war against Russia, or by doing both.⁵

In its turn, the mechanism of historical revisionism deepens the sacralisation of Russian history and infuses a sense of perpetuity into the idea of a Western conspiracy against Russia, with Ukraine portrayed as just one malign element among many.

Historical revisionism in Russia is largely channelled through the Russian Military Historical Society, headed by Putin’s aide and former Minister of Culture (2012-2020) Vladimir Medinsky, and through the Military Historical Journal, overseen by the Ministry of Defence. The Russian Military Historical Society floods the public sphere with patriotic fervour through multimedia exhibitions, monumental memorials, battle reenactments, military-historical tourism, and intensive work with children and young people.⁶ At its helm, Medinsky has become the chief architect of a state-driven, nationalist version of history, championing a singular “patriotic” narrative that exalts Russian greatness, defends Soviet-era myths, and casts Russia as both the eternal target of Western aggression and the steadfast bulwark against it.

As Andreas Heinemann-Grüder shows, the Military-Historical Journal also serves as a mouthpiece for a state-controlled, glorified vision of Russian and Soviet history, playing a central role in the broader project of memory politics – the reshaping of historical consciousness to suit present political needs.⁷ Its mission is to instil national pride through tales of Russian and Soviet heroism, especially on the battlefield.

In these narratives, Russia stands alone as the rightful moral heir to the Soviet Union’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War”, while other European nations are accused of falsifying history and whitewashing their alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany. At the same time, these myths fiercely deny any Soviet complicity in the outbreak of the war, erasing from memory the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the joint invasion of Poland in 1939.

German and Soviet officers celebrate the joint invasion of Poland in occupied Polish city of Brest in September 1939

Criticism of the Soviet Union’s collaboration with the Third Reich is presented as an attack on Russia’s honour and moral standing. Seen through this lens, the Russian war against Ukraine “appears as a defence of the ‘Great Victory’ in the Second World War, and thus rather as a holy war to defend the collective image of self than a war to achieve defined goals. The narrative is fundamentalised and essentialised, elevated to the status of a religious obligation”.⁸

As with the denial of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Russia’s historical revisionism also seeks to erase evidence of its own culpability, particularly in relation to Ukraine. One of the most striking examples of this practice is the deliberate suppression of the memory of around two hundred Ukrainian cultural figures – writers, playwrights, scientists, and others – who were arrested on fabricated charges by Soviet security agencies and executed in the Sandarmokh forest in Karelia in 1937.⁹

Sergei Lebedev notes that the Sandarmokh executions expose a historical continuity in Moscow’s systematic violence against Ukrainian national identity, culture, and political autonomy. Acknowledging this legacy would compel Russia to confront its colonial and repressive past, to recognise the long-standing policy of suppressing Ukrainian (and other non-Russian) nationhood, and to undermine the narrative that Ukraine naturally belongs under Russian control.¹⁰

Since Russian historical revisionism imagines Russia as the perennial victim of Western aggression, events such as the Sandarmokh executions and the Nazi-Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939 must be erased from public memory – either by criminalising their discussion or by effacing the places of remembrance.

Soviet propaganda portrayed the “Great Patriotic War” as just yet another episode of the West’s perennial aggression against Russia

Ultimately, Russian historical revisionism seeks to perfect the past by constructing a mythologised continuity of the “Great Russian” civilisation, whose integrity is portrayed as being constantly challenged, directly and indirectly, by the West. Today’s eliminationist war against Ukraine is held up as both the existential expression of Russia’s historical destiny and as the act that brings this mythologised past into reality. This creates a closed loop: sustaining the invented past demands violence, and violence, once unleashed, feeds back into the myth of the tripartite conflict in which the West uses Ukraine to harm Russia.

Pan-Russian ultranationalism and historical revisionism amplify the existing elements of Putin’s vision of the West and Ukraine. In turn, political technology reinforces that vision from a managerial perspective.

Contemporary Russian political technologists emerged in the 1990s; their role was to manipulate electoral campaigns in favour of those politicians who could afford to hire them. In this sense, they differed little from Western political operatives, consultants, and PR managers. But over time, emboldened by their domestic triumphs in steering public opinion, Russia’s political technologists evolved into something far more nefarious. Today, although many still serve politicians and officials, political technologists increasingly see themselves as a distinct managerial caste of social architects, guided by their own grim philosophy – one rooted in the belief that ordinary people are incapable of governing themselves and must be shaped, steered, and ruled from above to ensure the proper functioning of society.

In his discussion of the role of political technologists in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Andrew Wilson shows how their denial of individual agency has been translated into imperialist geopolitical directives.¹¹ Drawing on the theory of the “Russian world” developed by Georgiy Shchedrovitsky, the concept of “supra-societies” formulated by Aleksandr Zinoviev, and Karl Schmitt’s notion of “Great Spaces”, political technologists such as Sergey Kiriyenko deny Ukraine any geopolitical agency. They assert that if the Russian elites so desire, the “Russian world” must be imposed on Ukraine, regardless of the will of its citizens.¹² After such an imposition, Ukrainians are to be reprogrammed and re-educated into Russians; those who fail to conform are to be exiled – or annihilated.¹³

Neither pan-Russian ultranationalism, nor historical revisionism, or political technology has introduced any qualitatively new elements into Putin’s perspective on the role of the Ukrainian national project in the West’s perennial warfare against “Greater Russian” state. His understanding of that role had been shaped well before he started working in post-Soviet Russia. Yet his notion that an alternative history could be transformed into political reality might have remained little more than a fantasy without the environment created by these three mechanisms, each amplifying and reinforcing the fever of his imagination. Whether the operators of these mechanisms share Putin’s visions of symbolic immortality, or whether they are – more likely – driven largely by financial gain and career ambition, they have become willing executors of his sick dream and equal accomplices in his inhuman crime.

Read the final part: “The ruin”

1. Andrey Pertsev, “Putin po familii Volodin”, Meduza, 7 April (2022), https://meduza.io/feature/2022/04/07/putin-po-familii-volodin.

2. “Volodin: ‘Est’ Putin – est’ Rossiya, net Putina – net Rossii’”, MK, 23 October (2014), https://www.mk.ru/politics/2014/10/23/volodin-est-putin-est-rossiya-net-putina-net-rossii.html.

3. Martin Kragh, Andreas Umland, “Ukrainophobic Imaginations of the Russian Siloviki: The Case of Nikolai Patrushev, 2014-2023”, Centre for Democratic Integrity, 6 October (2023), https://democratic-integrity.eu/ukrainophobic-imaginations-of-the-russian-siloviki/.

4. Ivan Egorov, “Patrushev: Zapad sozdal imperiyu lzhi, predpolagayushchuyu unichtozhenie Rossii”, Rossiyskaya gazeta, 26 April (2022), https://rg.ru/2022/04/26/patrushev-zapad-sozdal-imperiiu-lzhi-predpolagaiushchuiu-unichtozhenie-rossii.html. For stylistic purposes, I use the Romanised Russian, rather than Ukrainian, version of the name of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

5. Kragh, Umland, “Ukrainophobic Imaginations of the Russian Siloviki”.

6. Dietmar Neutatz, “Putins Geschichtspolitikmaschine: Die Russländische Militärhistorische Gesellschaft”, Osteuropa, No. 12 (2022), 143-164.

7. Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, “Memory, Myth, and Militarisation: Russia’s War Propaganda and the Construction of Legitimised Violence in Ukraine”, Centre for Democratic Integrity, 1 December (2024), https://democratic-integrity.eu/memory-myth-and-militarisation/.

8. Ibid.

9. Sergei Lebedev, “Sandarmokh, a Symbol of Russia’s Historical Responsibility for Colonial Violence against Ukraine”, Centre for Democratic Integrity, 14 November (2023), https://democratic-integrity.eu/sandarmokh/.

10. Ibid.

11. Andrew Wilson, “The Methodology of the ‘Russian World’ as the Technological Foundation for Ukrainophobia”, Centre for Democratic Integrity, 31 October (2023), https://democratic-integrity.eu/the-methodology-of-the-russian-world/.

12. Ibid.

13. Anton Shekhovtsov, “The Shocking Inspiration for Putin’s Atrocities in Ukraine”, Haaretz, 13 April (2022), http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-04-13/ty-article-opinion/the-shocking-inspiration-for-russias-atrocities-in-ukraine/00000180-5bd0-d718-afd9-dffc6b210000.