Clare Griffin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research centers on science, medicine, and expertise in the early modern Russian Empire, and on the relationship of these with colonialism and globalization.
This post is adapted from her 2023 article in Russian History, “Studying War in a Time of War: Russian Imperialism in the Seventeenth and Twenty-First Centuries.”
On 21 February 2022, just days before he would invade Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech that addressed not only the future of the two countries, but also their past. Citing historical figures from Catherine the Great to Nikita Khrushchev, he demonstrated—as he had done so on many previous occasions— that his views on history are fundamental to his politics.
This speech has ushered in a new era of cross-disciplinary work. In order to know about Russian politics, one must understand the Russian past; in order to be an effective historian of Russia, one must keep track of the present. Yet just how to deal with these links is not a simple question, and has prompted a variety of different answers, causing fundamental divisions within Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES).
We now have a community-wide focus on war in multiple ways. There is the study of the war itself in all its aspects; of the rhetoric that has been used to justify the invasion; of Putin’s memory politics and the linkages of past and present; and of the conflicts among colleagues on changing research priorities, teaching practices, and the language we use to describe our discipline and subjects. Even scholars whose work is not directly military in focus must and do think around the invasion. At the present moment, all REEES scholarship is the scholarship of war.
Putin’s Historical Interests Before 2022
Putin’s fixation on history did not begin in 2022. In 2009, the Russian government established the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests, just one of numerous policies designed to mold the study and teaching of history into a form the Kremlin finds convenient.
Yet in the runup to the invasion of Ukraine, this focus on memory politics increased. In summer 2021, Putin published an essay containing his thoughts on Russian and Ukrainian history. In claiming the inherent unity of those two countries several months before the full-scale invasion of February 2022, this work foreshadowed Putin’s attempt to make that supposed historical fact a present-day reality.
Putin’s memory politics includes historical events and figures from the Middle Ages to the fall of the Soviet Union. In that 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” his thoughts, perhaps surprisingly, overlap with my own work on seventeenth-century Russia. Throughout the essay, Putin names specific Ukrainian historical figures that he valorizes or condemns.
Despite the mention of Stepan Bandera, the Nazi collaborator the Russian president has often excoriated, in this piece he focuses not on modern, but on premodern Ukrainian figures. His strongest condemnation is reserved for the early modern Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host, Ivan Mazepa. In his role as hetman from 1687, Mazepa initially allied with the Russian Empire, but switched sides during the Great Northern War (1700–1721) to work with the King of Sweden instead. In Putin’s estimation, Mazepa was a man “who betrayed everyone.”
By contrast, Putin praises the earlier Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Like Mazepa (and any number of other early modern figures), Khmelnytsky also switched sides, breaking a previous alliance with Poland-Lithuania to join with Russia in the 1650s. In an eighteen-page article that covers everything from Medieval Kyivan Rus’ through to the Revolution of Dignity, Putin devotes significant space to his thoughts on early modern Ukrainian hetmans.
Putin’s memory politics utilizes certain historical points while strategically avoiding others. Besides their dealings with the Cossack hetmanates, Russia’s southern foreign politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also involved the Crimean khanate, a polity central to all conflicts in the region until its colonization by the Russian Empire in 1783. Despite its importance, Putin does not mention the Crimean khanate in his essay at all.
Indeed, this polity’s history is an inconvenience for Russian neoimperialism. Putin has consistently justified his actions by putting forth a narrative of the territorial and cultural continuity of present-day Russia and Ukraine from Kyivan Rus’ through the rise of Muscovy and the Russian and Soviet Empires. Acknowledging the Crimean khanate disrupts that narrative, since Crimea was never a part of either Kyivan Rus’ or Muscovy. Understanding Putin’s actions in the 2020s requires a thorough knowledge of the history of the region—only in this way can we perceiveto where Putin exaggerates, manipulates, and obfuscates.
The REEES History Wars
Politicians generallyhave no compunction about using an imagined past to justify present-day actions. Historians, for their part, have been circumspect in responding to this tendency. A number of historians would object to my attitude to Putin’s historical comments, even as I follow the work of many others who have taken a similar stance to mine. There are now distinct factions on the issue of if, and how, to study historical topics relevant to present-day politics.
2022 was a flashpoint for memory politics. On one side of the Atlantic, Putin was directly engaging in political uses of history. On the other, certain historians were arguing against engaging with any such politically relevant topic. In the US, then-American Historical Association president James Sweet published an Op-Ed complaining that historians chase topics because they have “political relevance,” a practice that he claims leads to bad history, setting himself up as a leading proponent of the “history for history’s sake” faction.
Despite his position as leader of the major US society of historians, Sweet failed to convince much of the field of his position. Indeed, the AHA soon published a response to Sweet’s piece, showcasing members who strongly disagreed with almost all of Sweet’s points. Other venues followed suit, putting out content more or less directly addressing Sweet’s position.
I contributed to one such publication, offering my thoughts on Putin’s misuse of premodern East Slavic history to The Many-Headed Monster’s “Monster Carnival 2022: Why Early Modern History Matters Now.” Other Slavic Studies scholars have made similar comments on the importance of taking on the politically relevant topics Sweet dismissed. Oleksa Drachewych, for instance, summed up his pro-interventionist stance by writing “[h]istorians have a duty to expose [the] falsifications [promoted by Putin], and to combat them by providing the public with a counter-narrative grounded in historical methods and research.” As politicians wage literal wars based on a supposed historical past, historians thus wage a war of words on if, and how, to respond.
Taking a Stand
Historians will inevitably take different stances on this issue, but here I want to make my own position clear. As someone currently writing on the history of war—specifically, on the history of Russia’s early modern southern wars of expansion—I cannot avoid dealing with the present conflict in my work.
But my attitude is also shaped by other considerations. Our friends, our families, our colleagues are literally under fire in a war justified by recourse to the history I study. For me, responding to Putin’s memory politics is good historical practice in more than one meaning of that term. We can, and have, created serious historical analysis by engaging with memory politics, and analysis that speaks to what the field and the general public want and need right now. But also—what we do and do not do in this historical moment matters. What I choose to do is use my expertise to push back against the rhetoric of this war. And I hope to convince others to do the same.
