“WE CAN DO IT AGAIN!”: THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN MEMORY POLITICS AND POLITICAL CULTURE

This dissertation examines the applications of Second World War in Russian memory politics and political culture. Drawing on original interviews conducted with notable Russian memory actors in academia, journalism, and politics, as well as a comprehensive database of Russian media sources between 2017 and 2023, this research argues that the reconstitution of the victory cult as a central pillar of Russian national identity began in the late 2000’s and was fully realized with the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The contemporary victory cult differs vastly from its Soviet predecessor. Whereas the Soviet mode of remembrance reflected the confidence and optimism of a victorious status quo power, post-2014 Russian memory politics channeled the anxieties and insecurities of a diminished post-1991 Russian state increasingly receptive to revisionist interpretations of the Soviet collapse and its geopolitical aftermath. The Russian cult of the Great Patriotic War is, in its core political manifestation, a state-sponsored mechanism for identifying, framing, and confronting adversaries within and without. This dissertation proposes an integrated narrative for understanding the driving dynamics of Russian memory politics as manifested in domestic and foreign policy. The former seeks to reconstruct the use of the victory cult by the state as a source of domestic consolidation and tool for the marginalization of opposition actors. The latter examines Russian memory politics as a series of discourses that articulate and inform national strategic culture and foreign policy. This dissertation ends with an analysis of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as the culmination of aggrievement and securitization narratives vis-à-vis the West and post-2014 Ukraine. Moscow’s original invasion plan was underwritten by ideas concerning Ukrainian statehood and the legacies of WWII, widely shared by Russia’s strategic elite up to and including President Vladimir Putin, stemming from and justified by contemporary Russian political memory. The results of this research are an important step toward a longue durée framework for conceptualizing Russian memory politics from the postwar Soviet Union to the contemporary Russian state. This research bears direct policy implications in its description of the ideological foundations of Russian strategic culture, operational codes of Russian elites, and Russian foreign policy rhetoric.