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CHAPTER 2
Political Uses of the Great Patriotic War
in Post-Soviet Russia from Yeltsin to Putin
Olga Malinova
After the collapse of the USSR all the former Soviet republics faced the
problem of reconstructing their national identities within the new geo-
graphical and symbolic boundaries and adapting the established narra-
tives of their collective pasts to the new political context. In the case of
the Russian Federation, this task has been particularly complicated due
to the special and ambiguous position of the Russian republic within the
USSR. On the one hand, Russians played a dominant role in the Soviet
system, and Russian was the Soviet lingua franca, for example; but there
were also ways in which the Soviet modernization project effectively
prevented the development of a strong Russian national identity. As
Geoffrey Hosking (2006) put it, “Russians were the state-bearers of the
Soviet Union, but they were also rendered anonymous by it” (405), and
“their” republic, the RSFSR, which lacked the republican-level structures
granted to the other Soviet republics, was something of an anomaly “in a
country where ethnic identity had become paramount” (377).
© The Author(s) 2017
J. Fedor et al. (eds.), War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8_2
O. Malinova (*)
National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Miasnitskaia Street 20, Moscow, Russian Federation 101000
e-mail: omalinova@mail.ru
44 O. MALINOVA
Furthermore, as the successor to the historical core of the former tsa-
rist empire, the RSFSR did not possess a “national” identity similar to
other Soviet republics where a specic form of nation building compati-
ble with the communist ideology was encouraged by the Soviet “afrma-
tive empire” (Martin 2001). Much like the English identity, the Russian
one had historically tended to be associated with the whole country
rather than with a specic part, and dominant historical narratives con-
rmed this vision. The problem was further compounded after the col-
lapse of the USSR in 1991, when the Russian Federation had to create
a substantially new identity. While Russian history provided a large stock
of symbolic resources that could potentially be used for building a new
national identity, this legacy was ideologically loaded and hence highly
contested. Both the pre-revolutionary imperial narratives and the dissi-
dent anti-Soviet counter-narratives were deeply controversial, sparking
erce political conicts and tending to divide society rather than foster
greater coherence.
The fact that the Russian Federation declared itself the legal succes-
sor to the USSR made the demarcation between “the Russian” and “the
Soviet” a difcult challenge for the political elites (Morozov 2009; Kaspe
2012). Initially, an attempt was made to dene a new Russian democratic
identity in opposition to the Soviet “totalitarian” past. This attempt
failed, and the governing political elite subsequently embarked on a
selective adoption of the Soviet legacy, avoiding its critical reassessment.
The more uncompromising critics of this policy have labeled it “re-Sta-
linization.” A more accurate label has been suggested by Ilya Kalinin,
who has dubbed this policy one of “nostalgic modernization” aimed at
“the positive recording of nostalgia for the Soviet past into a new form
of Russian patriotism, for which ‘the Soviet’ lacks any historical specic-
ity, but is rather seen as part of a broadly conceived and comically het-
erogeneous cultural legacy” (2011: 157).
Last but not least, Russia does not have an external Signicant Other
who could be blamed for the current political troubles in the same
way that other post-communist countries are able to blame Moscow.
Externalizing communism as an alien regime imposed on their nations
from outside, the political elites of the former communist countries man-
aged to mobilize their populations around the project of “returning to
Europe.” In Russia, the awareness that the destructive Soviet regime
was a homegrown phenomenon made building a positive collective self-
image somewhat problematic. Those attempts that have been made to
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 45
nd an external scapegoat for the shape of Russia’s twentieth century
tend to be based on conspiracy theories and a reluctance to confront the
past honestly and openly.
Given these difculties, and in the absence of a commonly accepted
grand narrative of the past, the memory of the Great Patriotic War has
proven to be the most “politically usable” element of Russia’s past.
First, the commemorative cult of the Great Patriotic War was effectively
institutionalized during the late-Soviet period and internalized by the
majority of the population via multiple channels of socialization (such
as education, the media, and popular culture). Second, this narrative
has consistently enjoyed a high level of social acceptance and has rarely
been subjected to criticism. Third, the memory of the war is versatile and
capable of tting various cultural frames, ranging from “heroic sacrice,”
“national glory,” “defense of freedom,” and “salvation of civilization”
to “mass suffering,” “unrecoverable losses” and “national victimhood.”
Consequently, it is hardly surprising that the memory of the war has
become the cornerstone of ofcial history politics in post-Soviet Russia.
The adaptation of the Soviet commemorative cult of the Great
Patriotic War to the Russian nation-building agenda did, however,
require a rearrangement of the established ofcial Soviet discourses and
practices of commemoration. The methods and strategies adopted by the
Russian ruling elite in this connection have evolved throughout the post-
Soviet period. In the early 1990s the ofcial symbolic policy was aimed
at legitimizing the ongoing reforms as the necessary dismantling of the
old “totalitarian” order. The contrast between the new, “democratic”
and the old, “totalitarian”/“autocratic” Russia was the central idea of
the ofcial narrative of the national past. In this context, the victory in
the war was re-narrated as a great feat of the people that was achieved
not due to the Communist leadership, but in spite of it. It became a story
of everyday heroism and the double victimhood of the people at the
hands of the Nazi and Soviet regimes alike. Quite soon, however, the
radical reassessment of the Soviet past in the midst of the troubled transi-
tion turned out to be politically costly because it was too painful for the
national self-esteem. As a result, from the mid-1990s some elements of
Soviet symbolic policy, in particular commemorative practices associated
with the war, were partially “rehabilitated.”
In the 2000s the ofcial narrative of the national past underwent a
substantial change. The idea of the contrast between the “old” and the
“new” Russia gave way to the concept of the “thousand-year-long”
46 O. MALINOVA
Russia, focused on its development as a “great power.” The critical atti-
tude to the Soviet past was replaced by its selective appropriation. The
Great Patriotic War became the culminating point of the new concept
of Russian history, but the emphasis of the ofcial discourse now shifted
to reincorporate the idea of the great state (its Communist nature now
largely left unmentioned). The idea of double victimhood virtually dis-
appeared from the ofcial discourse, and the theme of the heroism of
the Russian people who won a triumphant victory, brought freedom to
half of Europe, and made the USSR a world superpower, became more
salient.
Since the 2000s the triumphalist narrative of the Great Patriotic War
became the main pillar of the post-Soviet-Russian identity. This made it
particularly vulnerable to challenges posed by alternative interpretations
of the events of World War II that focused on the unseemly aspects of
Soviet policy (such as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Yalta agree-
ments, or the repressions directed against “disloyal” groups in the lib-
erated territories). As a result, since the mid-2000s Russia has been
perpetually involved in “memory wars” with other East European and
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries whose national
narratives relied upon anti-triumphalist versions of the history of World
War II. Later, in the context of the international conict caused by the
annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and Russia’s de facto involvement
in the military conict in East Ukraine, the triumphalist narrative of the
Great Patriotic War acquired a new dimension: it came to be used as a
marker of post-Soviet imperialist identity and became closely associated
with pro-Putin “patriotic” attitudes. As soon as this took place, both
heroism and suffering were overshadowed by another theme: the notion
of taking pride in a glorious past that raises national self-esteem in the
present.
In this chapter I examine the political uses of the Great Patriotic War
in post-Soviet Russia as part of the ofcial policy aimed at the (re)con-
struction of Russian national identity.1 A “usable past” has little to do
with historiography; rather, it is “an invention or at least a retrospective
reconstruction to serve the needs of the present” (Olick 2007: 19). The
need for “creating a usable past” was rst articulated in 1918 by the US
literary critic Van Wyck Brooks who argued that the young American
culture lacked shared historical references. Similarly to the USA one
century ago but for different reasons, contemporary Russia also suffers
from the incoherence of its national historical narrative; but unlike its
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 47
counterparts in the USA, the ruling elite in Russia considers the con-
struction of a “usable past” one of its political tasks. My understanding
of the political use of history corresponds with the denition proposed by
Markku Kangaspuro (2011), who argues that this notion refers to the
“use of history as an instrument of political argumentation” or to the
“attempts to attain power over history in the sense of hegemony of a
particular interpretation” (295).
Memory politics in post-Soviet Russia is an object of growing aca-
demic interest, not least due to recent heated public battles over the
interpretation of the Soviet past. Many authors have analyzed Putin-era
memory politics (Ferretti 2004; Zvereva 2004; Wertsch 2008; Malinova
2009; Miller 2009, 2012b; Kangaspuro 2011; Torbakov 2012).
According to Aleksei Miller, it is during the Putin era that Russia has
developed traits of a full-edged history policy, in other words, that a
whole raft of methods has been assimilated aimed at “the use of the
administrative and nance resources of the state in the sphere of his-
tory and memory politics in the interests of the governing party” (Miller
2012a: 19). The Yeltsin era has received less attention in the academic
literature (Zubkova and Kupriianov 1999; Smith 2002; Merridale 2003;
Koposov 2011; Gill 2012). Drawing on both this secondary literature
and my own research, I set out here to compare the Yeltsin and Putin
periods with a view to tracing continuity and change in Russian memory
politics in the post-Soviet decades to date.
Contributing to the existing body of literature, this chapter focuses
on political uses of the war memory by the governing political elite,
that is, by those who speak on behalf of the state or who have sufcient
resources to inuence the ofcial symbolic policy. The governing elite is
represented rst of all by politicians and top state ofcials, leaders of the
“party of power” (currently United Russia, previously Russia’s Choice
(1993–1995), Russia is Our Home (1995–1999) and Unity (1999–
2001)). It also includes functionaries of the Presidential Administration
and the party apparatus, political advisers, and some journalists and his-
torians close to the regime who are engaged in decision making in a non-
public or semi-public format. In my understanding, these actors promote
particular interpretations of the collective past in the course of pursuing
political goals such as legitimization of power, justication of political
decisions, mobilization of electoral support and reinforcement of social
cohesion (cf. Malinova 2011). A variety of political and social actors are
usually involved in interpreting the past at different societal levels, but
48 O. MALINOVA
the state has exceptional resources for the enforcement of a particular
version of the past. In Russia’s political system, decision making on issues
of symbolic politics is very much in the hands of the president and his
administration, and therefore in this chapter I mainly focus on presiden-
tial speeches and decrees. By analyzing political speeches2 and media cov-
erage of commemorative ceremonies I shall identify the main frames of
representation of the war in Russian ofcial discourse from Boris Yeltsin
to Vladimir Putin and Dmitrii Medvedev, revealing links between the
political use of history, on the one hand, and Russia’s domestic and for-
eign policy, on the other. The following two sections address political
uses of the Great Patriotic War in the 1990s and 2000s respectively.
The YelTsin era: abandoning The sovieT PasT,
searching for a new consensus
In the early 1990s the interpretation of the past in the public rhetoric
of the new Russian leadership served rst of all to legitimize the radi-
cal transformation of the Soviet regime which had been denounced as
“totalitarian.” The triumph of the democratic forces in August 1991
seemed to have opened up the opportunity to turn Russia into a pros-
perous democratic country with a market economy. Yeltsin’s reforms,
introduced in 1992, were supposed to create the Western-style institu-
tions necessary to embark on the road to “civilized,” “liberal capitalism.”
This nal choice in favor of the Western economic and political model
was paradoxically imagined in quasi-Marxist terms as a revolutionary leap
forward, a transition from failed socialism to a new historical formation.
This radical political agenda required a total rejection of Soviet ideol-
ogy and values. Certainly, the collective memory of the previous seventy
years could not be obliterated, but it had to be reevaluated and reframed.
The treatment of the two major events of Soviet history—the Great
October Revolution and the Great Patriotic War—demonstrates two
different ways of coping with the past in the 1990s. While the October
Revolution became a bone of contention between the liberals and the
Communists, the victory of 1945 turned out to be the only undisputed
positive achievement of the Soviet era.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the October Revolution
became an object of radical reassessment. Previously enshrined as the
triumph of the Communist idea, a moment of political and social
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 49
emancipation, the October Revolution was now redened as a catastro-
phe that interrupted Russia’s gradual but steady development along the
“normal” European path. As Boris Yeltsin put it, “the destructive radical-
ism” that stipulated “a disruption from February to October … explains
the loss of many achievements in the sphere of culture, economy, law,
and public development as a result of the break with the old order”
(Yeltsin 1996).
The reinterpretation of the October Revolution can be found not only
in the rhetoric of the president, but also in the discourse of the left-patri-
otic opposition. The Russian Communists, reorganized after the failed
August 1991 coup, started to see the “Great October Revolution” not
so much as the victory of the working class, but rather as the triumph of
the national spirit. In their new rhetoric, the Soviet system now began
to appear as a realization of genuine Russian principles—collectivism in
various forms, drawing on concepts from Eastern Orthodox theology
and nineteenth-century Slavophile thought and the notion that Russia
was destined to be a Great Power. In short, while the new Russian lib-
eral leadership denied the October Revolution any positive meaning and
considered it a tragic rather than glorious event, the Communist opposi-
tion declared it a substantive element of national identity. In defending
the October Revolution and Soviet values as manifestations of national
identity, the Communists drew on the legacy of Soviet commemora-
tive culture, institutionalized in collective rituals, museums, texts, lms,
songs, and even jokes. The interpretation of this historical event became
an object of erce symbolic struggle that manifested itself every year in
the lead-up to 7 November, the former Day of the October Revolution.
This date remained a public holiday till 2004, albeit from 1996 under a
new title, as the “Day of Reconciliation and Accord.”
The Great Patriotic War stands in obvious contrast to the highly con-
troversial October Revolution. No signicant political force in Russia has
ever expressed any doubts about either the fundamentally positive mean-
ing of the victory in the war, or about its signicance for the collective
identity. This is not to say, of course, that the ofcial Soviet narrative of
the war has never been criticized and contested. The new awareness that
perestroika had brought about the horrors of state terror and the scale of
the people’s tragedy posed a serious challenge to the Soviet narrative of
World War II. Political actors had to take this challenge into considera-
tion even if they were not going to address it explicitly.
50 O. MALINOVA
In the rst half of the 1990s the new Russian ruling elite sought to
reframe the memory of the war according to the new vision of Russia
as a democratic European nation. This politics was manifested in the
revision of the ofcial commemoration rituals, in the public rhetoric
employed by President Yeltsin, and in the quest for new national sym-
bols. The victory over Nazism was represented as a heroic achievement
carried out by the people (narod) in contrast to the ofcial Soviet nar-
rative which had emphasized the role of the state and the Communist
Party. The new narrative partly relied on the political frames of the
Thaw era, when the name of Stalin had been banned from public use
and the heroism of the ordinary people as well as their mass suffering
has been brought to the fore (Koposov 2011: 98–100). But unlike the
Thaw-era narratives, the post-Soviet interpretations linked the people’s
suffering not only to Nazi atrocities, but also to the inhumanity of the
Soviet regime that strove for victory at any price. During the Thaw
Stalinist repressions were considered regrettable “excesses” (otdel’nye
peregiby) and the victory in the war served as the nal vindication of the
Soviet system. It is hardly surprising that soon after Khrushchev’s Secret
Speech in 1956 the theme of repressions vanished from the rhetoric of
the Soviet leaders (Koposov 2011: 99–100). It was the critical reassess-
ment of the “Soviet experiment” in the early 1990s that opened the way
for foregrounding the theme of double victimhood—caused by both
Hitler and Stalin—in the ofcial narrative of the war. The recognition of
the inhumane character of the Soviet regime gave a new inection to the
theme of heroism: the feat of the Soviet people was even greater in light
of the fact that victory was achieved not due to the Communist leader-
ship, but in spite of the Stalinist repressions.
This reframing of the Great Patriotic War can be traced out by
examining the evolution of the ofcial Victory Day celebrations dur-
ing the Yeltsin era. There is a common misconception that annual mili-
tary parades were held on Red Square on 9 May during the late Soviet
period. Annual military parades were in fact held during this period on
7 November, marking the anniversary of the October Revolution. After
the Victory parade held in June 1945 there were no Victory Day parades
until 1965, and from 1965 these were only staged once every ve years.
The practice of staging an annual Victory Day parade is actually a post-
Soviet tradition, invented in the mid-1990s. But prior to its invention,
post-Soviet Russian ruling elites did experiment with various commemo-
rative formats.
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 51
In 1992, when, for the rst time, Victory Day was celebrated in the
new Russia, there was no special ofcial ceremony. Yeltsin simply laid
owers at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin wall
before joining war veterans for informal celebrations in Gorky Park.
As early as the following year, however, on 9 May 1993, the Russian
President took part in the opening ceremony of the new war memorial
complex at Poklonnaia Hill. The ofcial festivities were thus relocated
from Red Square to a new place. The idea of constructing the new
memorial actually goes back to the 1950s; Poklonnaia Hill, in the west
of Moscow, was chosen for its vast space and beautiful view as well as for
symbolic reasons (according to legend, it was on this hill that Napoleon
waited in vain for the city delegation to bring him the key to the Russian
capital in 1812). The construction of the memorial started in 1983–
1984 and was only completed in 1995 due to the political turbulence
and economic crisis. In 1993 (and then again in 1994) the ofcial cele-
bration of Victory Day was staged as an opening ceremony to unveil par-
ticular sections of the new memorial. Thus, for the rst time since 1945,
the Victory Day ceremony took place at a new memorial site that had no
connotations with the Soviet tradition, but instead was associated with
the glorious history of Russian arms.
This attempt to change the Soviet style of the Victory Day celebra-
tions coincided with a growing conict between the President and the
Supreme Soviet that culminated in a violent confrontation in October
1993. The lack of a basic political consensus among the governing elite
made consolidation of the new commemorative tradition impossible.
In 1993 the leaders of the anti-Yeltsin Supreme Soviet were not even
granted access to the ofcial podium during the Victory Day celebra-
tions on Poklonnaia Hill (Zaiavlenie 1993; see also Smith 2002: 87–89).
Communist and patriotic organizations arranged their own alternative
celebrations of Victory Day in the center of Moscow, posing a difcult
dilemma for the war veterans, who were forced to take sides on this
issue. Thus, the invention of a new tradition was impeded by an open
political conict. According to Kathleen Smith, the decision to transfer
the ofcial celebrations to Poklonnaia Hill was a mistake because it effec-
tively meant surrendering the center of Moscow, with its strong estab-
lished symbolic connotations of power and authority, to the Communist
opposition (Smith 2002: 89). In 1995, when the 50th anniversary of the
Victory was celebrated, the authorities partially reversed this decision,
moving the historical part of the parade (including the veterans’ march)
52 O. MALINOVA
to Red Square, while leaving the “modern” part of it (the demonstration
of military hardware) on Poklonnaia Hill.
The Yeltsin-era invention of new commemorative traditions also
involved widening the geography of the ofcial commemorative cere-
monies beyond the two capitals, Moscow and St Petersburg. During his
rst presidential term Yeltsin participated in jubilee celebrations mark-
ing the end of the Leningrad Blockade (January 1994) and the libera-
tion of Murmansk in the Soviet Arctic (October 1994). In the wake of
the 1996 presidential elections, in what appears to have been a last-min-
ute improvised gesture, Yeltsin ew to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad)
immediately after the parade on Red Square in order to welcome local
Soviet war veterans on Mamaev Hill. This symbolic gesture was unprec-
edented—no Soviet leader had ever left the capital city on Victory Day.
Another instance of reframing the memory of the war was the commem-
oration of Marshal Georgii Zhukov. A prominent Soviet military com-
mander who had led the decisive operations of the war, including the
defense of Moscow and Leningrad and the seizure of Berlin, Zhukov
had fallen into disfavor after the war. The 1957 October plenum of the
CPSU Central Committee accused him of “violating Leninist princi-
ples” and of the “exorbitant glorication” of his personal role in the war.
Despite this, Zhukov continued to enjoy popularity among war veterans;
his memoirs, published in 1969, were widely considered an important
source of “the truth” about World War II. After coming to power Yeltsin
ordered the construction of a monument to Zhukov in the center of
Moscow and established an order and a medal in his honor. These sym-
bolic acts were meant to “rehabilitate” the disgraced marshal who was
now in a sense reconstituted as a “victim” of the late Stalinist regime and
integrated into the glorious military history of Russia. Some observers,
however, saw the glorication of Zhukov as a disturbing sign of nostalgia
for an “iron hand” and a kind of surrogate for Stalin: “it was hard to get
rid of the impression that … Zhukov is just a substitute for somebody
else; the Marshal acts for the Generalissimus” (Sokolov 1995). An adher-
ent of the “victory at any cost” strategy and a commander responsible
for the deaths of millions of soldiers, Zhukov was a poor t for the new
anti-Stalinist narrative (Polianovskii 1995; Sokolov 1995).
The 50th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in 1995,
during which a number of previously rejected Soviet symbols were
reincorporated into the ofcial ceremonies, marked a new stage in the
evolution of Russian symbolic policy. During the lavish celebrations on
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 53
Red Square, the high ofcials of the new Russian state returned to the
top of the Lenin Mausoleum for the rst time since 1990. Moreover,
the Soviet red banner was “rehabilitated” as the “Banner of Victory” and
used during the ofcial ceremony alongside the ofcial tricolor ag. This
symbolic gesture was perceived by many as a return of “patriotism which
had previously fallen victim to profanation and falsehood” (Yashmanov
1996). Yeltsin publicly rejected accusations that the Russian authori-
ties were thereby supporting public nostalgia for the Soviet order. In his
interview with ORT TV channel he objected:
I disagree. I categorically disagree! This is simply primitive reasoning, in
my view. When Alexander Nevsky led the people to victory at Chudskoe
Lake, what kind of regime were they living under? Or how about Dmitry
Donskoi’s victory… Or the smashing of Napoleon? The regime at the time
was based on serfdom. So does that mean that serfdom was the decisive
factor in the victory of our people and our country? It’s exactly the same
situation today. No, the decisive factor was not the regime, but the people,
our people, its character, its patriotism, its love for the Motherland, its self-
sacrice…. The people was the decisive factor. And this victory belongs to
the people. And so does the holiday. (Yeltsin 1995b)
Yeltsin had good reasons for instrumentalizing the 50th jubilee of the
victory. This anniversary coincided with the escalation of conicts
between the government and the Communist opposition in the wake of
the 1995 parliamentary elections and the height of the military campaign
in Chechnya. Both factors hampered a demonstration of unity bet-
ting the solemn occasion. On 9 May 1995 the alternative march from
Belorusskii railway station to Lubianka Square organized by the opposi-
tion manifested mass support for the Soviet memory of the war and an
appeal for the restoration of the USSR (Krasnikov 1995). It had become
clear that any radical critique of the Soviet past would split Russian soci-
ety and alienate a large portion of the electorate.
After regaining ofce in 1996, President Yeltsin did not follow the
advice of those political allies who recommended that he “proclaim the
misanthropic Bolshevist ideology illegal” (Yakovlev 1996). In 1996,
a year before the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution, Yeltsin
issued a decree announcing 7 November “The Day of Reconciliation and
Accord.” This gesture, however, was half-hearted and did not bring any
new ofcial rituals of commemoration (Malinova 2015: 56–61). It failed
54 O. MALINOVA
in its attempt to reconcile the conicting political camps (Smith 2002:
83–85). The liberals, some of whom had now moved into opposition to
the government, argued that the Communists should admit their respon-
sibility for the crimes of the Soviet regime. This appeal for “repentance”
was insistently rejected by the left-patriotic forces. They meanwhile con-
demned Yeltsin’s “anti-national” and “criminal” regime and consid-
ered his critique of the Soviet past a further “humiliation of the Russian
people.” Characteristically, the term “fascism,” which had traditionally
been exclusively associated with Nazi Germany, was actively used in the
1990s in the domestic political struggle. Democrats used it to label rising
Russian nationalism and to cast a slur upon the Communists and their
allies from the Popular-Patriotic bloc (the so-called “red-browns,” in
democratic parlance). Thus, the memory of the war was used not only
for strengthening national solidarity, but also to marginalize political
opponents.
During his second term Yeltsin tried to play the role of political arbi-
ter calling for a national consensus and the invention of a “new national
idea.” He was particularly willing to use the shared memory of the war
as a means of promoting “national accord and unity” (Yeltsin 1999). In
practice this meant the partial re-adoption of Soviet symbols. In 1996
a presidential decree ordered the ofcial usage of the “Victory Banner”
alongside the state tricolor. Hence, this Soviet symbol, which had been
selectively revived already in 1995, became one of the ofcial symbols
of the new Russian state. In the context of acute and ongoing political
struggle and the absence of a consensus on the fundamental elements of
the new collective identity among political elites, together with the weak-
ness of the state, a radical reassessment of the Soviet past turned out to
be too problematic.
This did not mean, however, that the governing elite renounced any
attempts at further reframing of the most “usable” symbol of the collec-
tive past. In summer 1996 Yeltsin established the Day of Memory and
Sorrow on 22 June, the day of Hitler’s attack on the USSR in 1941.
This decision could be seen as an attempt to create yet another occasion
for the political use of this important symbol, an occasion that would,
moreover, be relatively independent of the Soviet ideological legacy. In
contrast to Victory Day, the new date was less connected with triumph
and military glory and more focused on suffering and victimhood.
This day is also commemorated in Belarus and Ukraine, which makes
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 55
it yet another occasion for demonstrating the “unity” of the East Slavic
world.
Analysis of Yeltsin’s formal speeches on the occasion of Victory Day
in 1995–1998 also indicates an endeavor to reframe the former Soviet
discourse about the war. The rst president of Russia never interpreted
this event in terms of the victory of the Soviet state and/or social sys-
tem. Instead, he preferred to pay tribute to the people who had won the
war. He insistently represented the Victory as “a symbol of the courage,
patriotism, self-sacrice of the soldier and the general, the sailor and the
pilot, the worker on the home front and the partisan, the member of the
underground and the nurse at the front hospital” (Yeltsin 1995a).
Nor did Yeltsin miss any occasion to appeal to the unity of the peoples
of the CIS. Following the established pattern of speeches made by Soviet
leaders, he also constantly recalled the cooperation with the Western
members of the anti-Hitler coalition and called upon the former Allies to
overcome the “political legacy of the Cold War” (Yeltsin 1995a). He was
particularly willing to use the common memory of the War for propa-
ganda on the theme of “national accord and unity” (Yeltsin 1999). As
we shall see below, the same basic frames would also be used by his suc-
cessors. It was Yeltsin and his speechwriters who laid the foundations of
the new commemorative canon of the Great Patriotic War in post-Soviet
Russia.
The PuTin era: The greaT PaTrioTic war
as a MYTh of naTional TriuMPh
With Vladimir Putin’s arrival in the presidential ofce, the symbolic
politics of the Russian state underwent another transformation. Unlike
Yeltsin who was involved in the bitter political conicts of the 1990s
and usually sided with the liberals against the left-nationalist opposi-
tion, Putin, a relative newcomer to public political life, was able to
position himself “beyond” both ideological camps. Seeking to con-
solidate the frustrated and divided Russian society, he borrowed some
ideas from the repertoire of the left-patriotic opposition and reintro-
duced selected symbols of the Soviet past. Three federal constitutional
laws from 25 December 2000 established the ofcial state symbols of
the Russian Federation (RF): the State Flag, the State Coat of Arms,
and the National Anthem. Most controversial and widely debated
56 O. MALINOVA
was the revival of an adapted form of the Soviet anthem, now fur-
nished with new lyrics. (In 1990 the Soviet anthem had been replaced
by Mikhail Glinka’s “Patriotic Song,” but the Glinka anthem had
not proved very popular.) At the same time, the tricolor that invokes
the legacy of the Romanov Empire and was used by the democratic
opposition in the days of the August 1991 coup was conrmed as the
National Flag of the RF. The Coat of Arms, the two-headed eagle, also
derives from the earlier coat of arms of the Russian Empire. Combining
heterogeneous historical symbols in a kind of post-Soviet bricolage,
the laws on ofcial state symbols sketched out the contours of a new
approach to the national past.
The new historical narrative presented in Putin’s ofcial rhetoric
emphasized the value of the “thousand-year-old” Russian statehood
as the central element of the national identity. The idea of a “strong
state” as the foundation of Russia’s past and future greatness was sali-
ently expressed in the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly in
2003. Putin warned against the threat of the country’s disintegration
and spoke about the “truly historic feat” of “retaining the state in a
vast geographic space” and of “preserving a unique community of peo-
ples while strengthening the country’s position in the world” (Putin
2003). This rhetoric demonstrated a fundamental change in the atti-
tude to the Soviet legacy and to the collapse of the USSR; the latter
now came to be seen not as the “foundational act” of the new Russian
nation as in the Yeltsin era but as a betrayal of the Russian tradition of a
strong state.
As a presidential candidate, in his programmatic article “Russia at
the Turn of the Millennium” (1999) Putin had argued that “it would
be a mistake to ignore and, moreover, to reject the undoubted achieve-
ments of that time [i.e. the Soviet period].” In the same publication,
however, he also mentioned the “enormous price” that had been paid
by the whole society for the failed communist experiment and argued
that “for almost seven decades we traveled down a dead-end route which
led us away from the main road of civilization.” It seems that from the
very beginning, Putin did not share Yeltsin’s critical attitude towards the
Soviet past in its entirety. At the same time, however, he subscribed to
the liberal-democratic interpretation of the transition from communism
as a return to the “main road of civilization.”
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 57
A more apologetic attitude to the Soviet past was proposed in the
Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly in 2005, when Putin called
the collapse of the USSR “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the
century” (Putin 2005a). This statement contrasted sharply with Yeltsin’s
interpretation of this event as the unavoidable “natural” death of a sys-
tem which was doomed to collapse: “the Soviet Union collapsed as a
result of a total crisis, it was torn to pieces by economic, political and
social contradictions” (Yeltsin 1996). Now that the ideas of the “great
power” status and the “thousand-year-old” Russian state shaped the of-
cial narrative, the demise of the Soviet Union was redened as a “catas-
trophe,” caused by the ill-considered actions of irresponsible politicians.
It was Russia’s position as the heir to “the great Soviet country,” and not
the country’s departure from the totalitarian system, that was empha-
sized in the ofcial rhetoric during Putin’s second term.
This selective appropriation of Soviet symbols was, however, by no
means wholesale or unequivocal and in no way meant a total apology
for the Communist regime. Speeches by Putin and later Medvedev con-
tained numerous negative judgments about the Soviet system, which
was blamed for economic failures and social stagnation, especially in the
system’s last decades. The positive aspects of the Soviet past mentioned
in these speeches were associated mainly with the idea of a great state
that had stood the test of World War II, succeeded in (albeit imperfect)
modernization, and bestowed upon the country a leading position in the
world. Totalitarian features such as state violence and political repressions
were bracketed out of this picture.
In its ambivalent attitude to the Soviet past, Putin’s regime
denounced as “wrong” the leftist traditions of disobedience, revolution,
and revolt, and sought to marginalize contentious and divisive histori-
cal symbols. In 2004, the most controversial public holiday, the Day of
the October Revolution (from 1996 to 2004 the Day of Reconciliation
and Accord) (7 November) became a normal working day. As a sort of
substitute, a new state holiday, the Day of National Unity, was intro-
duced on 4 November, marking the anniversary of the popular upris-
ing which expelled alien occupation forces from Moscow in November
1612. The new holiday, another attempt to restore the continuity of
Russian history, did not become popular and was instead appropriated
by nationalists and right-wing extremists. An annual “Russian March,” a
58 O. MALINOVA
mass nationalist manifestation, now traditionally takes place in the major
Russian cities on 4 November. Paradoxically, by trying to marginalize
left-wing and communist symbols as destructive, the regime created new
symbols which were used to legitimize right-wing extremism.
This turn in memory politics from “repentance” to “pride” and from
the birth of a new democratic Russia to the “centuries-long” tradition
of Russian statehood explains why the myth of the Great Patriotic War
has remained the most usable element of Russia’s past. Comparable in
its signicance to certain other meta-events of Russian history (such
as the victory over Napoleon), the war is still present in “communica-
tive memory” (Assmann 2008). Politicians addressing it can still count
on a strong emotional resonance in Russian society. And unlike many
other Soviet symbols and narratives, the war memory did not become
an object of zero-sum political games. Despite competing interpreta-
tions of this event, virtually all political actors—nationalists, liberals,
and “state managers” alike—agree on the signicance of the victory in
World War II in Russian and world history. According to my calculation,
speeches on the occasion of various war anniversaries and memorial dates
make up around 33% of all commemorative addresses by Russian presi-
dents between 2000 and 2014 (Malinova 2015: 156–175). This share
has remained quite stable throughout this period. No other event of the
“thousand-year-long” history is comparable with the war in terms of sali-
ency in the ofcial rhetoric.
To identify core meanings and interpretations of the Great Patriotic
War in the presidential speeches, in the following section of this chapter I
will use frame analysis, a method that has become increasingly important
in studies on political communication in recent decades (e.g. Entman
1993, Simon and Xenos 2000). Notions of frames and framing go back
to Erving Goffman (1974) who sought to explain how conceptual
frames—ways of organizing experience—structure an individual’s per-
ception of society. In media and political communication studies framing
is seen as actively applied by speakers/communicators who address an
audience in order to promote a particular interpretation of a given issue.
According to Entman, “to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived
reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a
way as to promote a particular problem denition, causal interpretation,
moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (52). From the
frame analysis perspective, a presidential “message is constructed in such
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 59
a way as to contain certain associations rather than others” (Simon and
Xenos 2000: 367). This means that speakers (speechwriters) consciously
choose to stress particular aspects, meanings, and interpretations of a his-
torical event depending on their political agenda, the current situation in
the country, and foreign policy priorities. The repertoire of frames can
reect continuity and succession, on the one hand, or political innova-
tion and a break with predecessors, on the other. Table 2.1 presents a list
of the main frames used by Russian presidents in the ofcial discourse on
the war. These frames are identied in the ofcial speeches delivered by
Putin and Medvedev between 2000 and 2016 on the occasion of Victory
Day.3
As Table 2.1 shows, there are four main frames that were present in all
speeches between 2000 and 2016, namely: commemoration of the war
victims and their suffering (1); paying tribute to the war veterans (2);
continuity of generations (3); and the political lessons of World War II
(4). It is not coincidental that all four frames can be traced back to the
Soviet period. The continuity with the Soviet rhetoric is especially obvi-
ous in the case of frame 4: in a similar way to the Soviet leaders in the
1970s–1980s, both Putin and Medvedev spoke on behalf of the country
that had defeated Hitler’s Germany and liberated Europe from the Nazi
yoke and in this way had gained a moral right to be a guardian of the
international order. Depending on the political context the “lessons of
World War II” are invoked in relation to such themes as international
cooperation, avoiding confrontation, and respect for national sovereignty
and international norms. This frame is often used in the foreign policy
discourse (recall, for example, Putin’s speech in Gdansk in September
2009 marking the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II). It
also contributes to the (re-)construction of the Russian identity around
the idea of a “great state” as it allows “Us” to be presented as one of the
main guardians of the international order.
A tendency towards the “nationalization” of the war memory is
reected in the frequent use of frames 6–9 (the victory as a unit-
ing symbol, as a manifestation of the national character, and as a cen-
tral element of the national history narrative; and the contribution of
different nationalities of the RF to the victory). The nationalization of
memory refers to the “re-narration of the Great Patriotic War and the
re-interpretation of its key events, symbols and its historical lessons in
the process of the construction of new post-Soviet national identities”
60 O. MALINOVA
Table 2.1 Framing the Great Patriotic War in ofcial speeches by Putin and Medvedev on the occasion of Victory Day,
2000–2016
Years Frames 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
1 Remembering
victims and
their suffering
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
2Tribute to war
veterans
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
3 Continuity of
generations
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
4 Political les-
sons of WWII
XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXX
5 War as a
symbol of
patriotism
XXXXXXX
6 Victory Day
as uniting
symbol
XXXXXX XX XXX XXX
7 Victory as
manifestation
of national
character
XXXXXXX XXXXXXX X
8 War as central
element of
national his-
tory narrative
X X X XXXXXX
(continued)
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 61
Table 2.1 (continued)
Years Frames 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
9Contribution
of different
nationalities of
RF to victory
XX X XXXXX
10 Victory as
common
heritage of
CIS countries
XX XXX XXXXXX XX
11 Atrocities and
crimes of Nazi
Germany
X X X X X X
12 Reconciliation
with former
enemy
X X X
13 Cooperation
with Western
Allies
XXXX XXXXXX X
14 Critique
of Western
partners
X X X
15 Need to
strengthen
Russian Army
X X X X X X X X
16 WWII as
reminder of
basic human
values
X X X X X
62 O. MALINOVA
(Zhurzhenko 2013). As shown above, Victory Day has remained a sym-
bol uniting all Russians beyond political and ideological cleavages (frame
6). Table 2.1 illustrates the continued use of this frame in the twenty-
rst century (with the exception of 2006 and 2009). As Medvedev
stated on 9 May 2008, Victory Day is “a holiday that has forever
become a symbol of our national unity” (Medvedev 2008). While this
frame was in fact introduced by Yeltsin, the next frame (7)—the war as a
manifestation of the national character—was brought in by Putin:
Dear veterans, we are accustomed to being winners. This habit has entered
our blood stream, and it has helped us to secure other victories, not only
on the battleeld. In the future, too, it will come to our aid in peacetime,
it will help our generation to build a strong and ourishing country and
to raise high the Russian banner of democracy and freedom. Our people
has gone through many wars, and that is why we know the price of peace;
we know that peace is rst and foremost a stable economy and prosperity.
(Putin 2000)
With some variations, the idea of the victory in the war as a manifesta-
tion of the Russian national character was included in several speeches by
Putin and Medvedev. Victory Day came to be represented as a “festival
of the glory and triumph of our people” (Putin 2012). “Nationalizing”
the memory of the war, Putin and later Medvedev sought to integrate it
into the “centuries-long” Russian state history and traditions of military
glory. In this respect, the Great Patriotic War became a central element
of the national historical narrative (frame 8).
Other Soviet-derived frames were used less consistently between 2000
and 2016. For example, the contribution of Russia’s numerous nationali-
ties to the victory (frame 9) was invoked in order to stress the “multina-
tional” composition of the Russian Federation. Its frequent use in recent
years can be explained by the alarming tendency of growing ethnic ten-
sions in today’s Russia, and is thus related to frame 6 (national unity).
In the speeches of Putin’s third presidential term a clear emphasis
is placed on frame 5: the war as a symbol of patriotism. This is hardly
surprising given that since 2012 “patriotism” has been a buzzword in
Russian political discourse. Remarkably, in the 2000s there was no spe-
cial talk about the patriotism of Soviet soldiers—but this silence rather
reects the fact that this was so obvious that it went without saying. In
2010 and 2011 Medvedev picked out this frame in the context of the
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 63
patriotic education of the younger generations. In more recent memo-
rial speeches by Putin this theme has acquired the status of an iden-
tity marker and model of behavior. For example, Putin has interpreted
Victory Day as “a sacred symbol of loyalty to the Motherland, [a sym-
bol] which lives inside every one of us” (Putin 2013); “a holiday when
the all-conquering power of patriotism reigns supreme, when we all
feel with special intensity what it means to be loyal to the Motherland
and how important it is to be capable of defending her interests” (Putin
2014).
The reframing of war memory also concerns international aspects of
political discourse and reects Russia’s foreign policy agenda. The ofcial
Victory Day speeches almost invariably contain references to the victory
as a common political and historical legacy of the post-Soviet countries
(frame 10). The notions of a “joint victory” and “shared war memory”
serve to legitimize Eurasian integration projects in the post-Soviet space,
now claimed as belonging to the Russian sphere of inuence. On the
occasion of the 60th anniversary of the victory in 2005, Putin spoke
about the sacrices made by “all the peoples and republics of the Soviet
Union” and concluded that “9 May is a sacred date for all countries of
the Commonwealth of the Independent States (CIS)” (Putin 2005c).
The Baltic countries, whose leaders declined Putin’s invitation to attend
the ofcial commemoration in Moscow, were thus symbolically excluded
from the “community of common memory.”
Considerable attention in the presidential speeches has tradition-
ally been devoted to relations with the Western countries (frames
11–14). The historical cooperation with the Allies (frame 13) has been
invoked more consistently than the historical hostile relations with Nazi
Germany. References to the cruelty of Nazi Germany (frame 11) have
primarily been intended not to recall former hostilities but rather to
stress the exceptional suffering and heroism of the Russian people and
to highlight the “price” paid for the victory. The theme of the people’s
double victimhood—at the hands of Hitler and Stalin alike—has virtually
disappeared from the ofcial discourse. Occasionally (in 2005 and 2011)
Germany was also mentioned as a country that had successfully over-
come its past and had now become a good partner for Russia (frame 12).
One could argue that such rhetoric was supposed to signal Moscow’s
interest in a “special relationship” with Germany, which is Russia’s most
important partner in the EU.
64 O. MALINOVA
Cooperation with the Western allies (USA, Great Britain and France)
during World War II has been systematically invoked in connection with
contemporary problems in Europe and in the world. In 2007 Putin
argued for “common responsibility and equal partnership” in interna-
tional relations as a strategy to meet the new threats caused by “the same
disdain for human life, the same claims for absolute exclusiveness” as fas-
cist ideas in the twentieth century (Putin 2007). These new threats jus-
tify the need to strengthen the Russian army (frame 15). The memory
of World War II is used not only as an argument for further cooperation
with the Western countries (frame 13), but also for criticism of today’s
hegemonic Western politics (frame 14). Sometimes former partners in
the anti-Hitler coalition appear as threatening the international order.
In 2010, making a transparent allusion to contemporary US politics,
Medvedev stressed that:
The war demonstrated the terrifying potential consequences to which
claims to world domination can lead. [It showed] just how dangerous
attempts to use coercion against free peoples and sovereign states really
are. (Medvedev 2010b)
Finally, World War II has been interpreted in terms of basic human
values that are shared by the West and Russia alike, including free-
dom, justice, dignity, and security (frame 16). This representation
obviously resulted from the redenition of Soviet values. It contrasted
sharply with the ofcial discourse of the 1990s. In 1995 Yeltsin argued
that it was only the end of the Cold War that had made it possible to
enjoy the real fruits of the victory of 1945 and to transform Europe
into a “united community of democratic nations”; he spoke about the
future which “humanity will enter, having rejected forever such dread-
ful notions as ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘nationalist hatred,’ and ‘world war’”
(Yeltsin 1995a). Ten years later, Putin offered a very different basic
narrative of the connection between Soviet Victory and human rights.
He described the Victory of 1945 as having “raised high the value of
life itself, and called for a genuine respect for the individual and for
human rights” (Putin 2005b). In other words, the Soviet Union could
claim credit for these positive developments. Those elements of Soviet
actions which did not t this picture, such as political repressions, eth-
nic deportations, and intolerance, were “forgotten” in this version of
the war narrative.
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 65
conclusion
In post-Soviet Russia, the Great Patriotic War turned out to be the
most “politically usable” element of the collective past due to its previ-
ous institutionalization and its uncontested positive meaning. Both the
Yeltsin and Putin regimes sought to shore up their legitimacy by present-
ing themselves as the “heirs” of the glorious victory over Nazi Germany.
The use of the war memory, however, differed remarkably during the
1990s and the 2000s. Yeltsin’s leadership tried to separate the memory
of the people’s heroic feat from the failures of the Soviet regime and
Stalinist crimes. Considerable efforts were made to change the estab-
lished commemorative canon and to foreground previously downplayed
aspects of the war, representing it as a story of heroism and double vic-
timhood at the hands of the Nazi and Soviet regimes alike. This interpre-
tation corresponded to the ofcial concept of the new Russian identity
that accentuated the historical rupture between the Soviet state and post-
Soviet Russia.
The explicitly anti-communist, anti-Soviet approach to the recent past
was abandoned by Putin’s leadership. A new emphasis was placed on
the idea of the continuity of the “thousand-year-old” Russian state, and
the critical attitude to the Soviet past gave way to its selective appropria-
tion. The victory in World War II and the post-war success of the USSR
as a world superpower were turned into important elements of the his-
tory of the great Russian state. The ofcial triumphalist narrative of the
war was cleansed of any negative aspects associated with the totalitarian
regime (Stalinist repressions, the failures and incompetence of the Soviet
military leadership, its indifference to the human costs of military suc-
cess4). Instead of double victimhood at the hands of the Nazi and Soviet
regimes alike, the theme of mass heroism and suffering as the “enormous
price” paid for the victory took up central position in the ofcial canon
of commemoration.
In today’s Russia the myth of the Great Patriotic War is loaded with
multiple meanings, some of them originating from the Soviet era, oth-
ers reecting Russia’s new status and the geopolitical situation. Drawing
on my analysis of frames used by Putin and Medvedev in the of-
cial speeches they delivered between 2000 and 2016 on the occasion
of Victory Day I argue that especially prominent in this period were
attempts to tailor the discourse about the war for the purposes of con-
structing a new Russian identity, boosting intergenerational solidarity,
66 O. MALINOVA
and promoting national unity over political, ideological, and ethnic
cleavages. Some scholars have argued that the Great Patriotic War has
become a foundational myth for post-Soviet Russia (Koposov 2011:
163). As I have shown here, this was at least in part a consequence of the
failure of attempts to create alternative foundational myths based on the
birth of the new Russian state from the ruins of the USSR.
Given the central function of the war myth in Russian nation build-
ing—and Russia’s self-understanding as a great power with geopolitical
ambitions in Europe and in the world—one can easily explain Russia’s
erce resistance to the historical revisionism that developed in Eastern
Europe, in particular concerning the role of the USSR in World War II
(Onken 2007; Mälksoo 2009; Kangaspuro 2011; Torbakov 2012). The
memory of the war serves as an important source of legitimization for
Russia’s foreign policy and therefore, as Torbakov has argued, “Moscow
perceives attempts of some new EU members to correct the ‘mnemonic
map of Europe’ as a desire to question the self-perception, prestige and
the international status of Russia” (Torbakov 2012: 103). This is where
the domestic and the international dimensions of memory politics in
Russia come together: the memory of the war has become a unique sym-
bolic resource for constructing national identity, and as long as it has
mass support, the prospects for acceptance of alternative revisionist narra-
tives of World War II by the ruling elite will remain very slim. The most
likely scenario is that Russian and European narratives of World War II,
together with the political purposes they serve, will continue to diverge.
Acknowledgements The research on which this chapter is based
was supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities, grant no.
11-03-00202.
noTes
1. It is a matter of debate whether post-Soviet Russia can be considered a
“nation” (Miller 2007; Zevelev 2009; Malinova 2010). For want of a bet-
ter term, however, and taking into consideration the different meanings of
the term “nation” in Russian and English, in this chapter I use the terms
“national identity” and “national history.”
2. Presidential speeches are available starting from 2000, when the ofcial
website of the President was created. Speeches of President Yeltsin were
not published in full; even the ofcial newspapers such as Izvestiia and
Rossiiskaia gazeta published only extracts or summaries. This may have
2 POLITICAL USES OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA … 67
represented a deliberate attempt to break with the methods of Soviet
propaganda, which paid heightened attention to the rhetoric of the party
leader, and to adopt the Western approach to media coverage.
3. Transcripts are available via the ofcial websites http://www.kremlin.ru
and http://archive.kremlin.ru. In my analysis, I rst identied the main
frames and then registered corresponding statements. My aim was to
reveal the repertoire of frames and not to measure the frequency of their
use.
4. The only exception here was Dmitry Medvedev’s interview for the newspa-
per Izvestiia, published on the eve of the 65th anniversar y of the Victory.
In this interview Medvedev gave “an ofcial assessment of the gure of
Stalin,” arguing: “Stalin perpetrated a mass of crimes against his own
people. And despite the fact that he worked very hard, despite that fact
that under his leadership the country achieved successes, what he did to
his own people is unforgivable” (Medvedev 2010a). (It is perhaps note-
worthy that Medvedev switched to the passive form when it came to
addressing the issues of Stalin’s crimes; a literal translation of the Russian
original would be “that which was done in relation to one’s own people is
unforgivable.”)
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