The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War

by Jim Sciutto

In the years preceding the military buildup, Vladimir Putin had been quietly building a historical pretext for war. He based his claims on dusty maps and manuscripts in agencies and institutions charged with caretaking the history of the Russian state going back centuries. Quietly, Putin was aligning Russian academia and bureaucracy behind his plans. He transferred control of agencies and institutions few had ever heard of—the Federal Archival Agency, the Russian War History Association, the Russian Historical Society, the Russian Geographical Society—under the Kremlin and therefore under his personal control. “There was this mushrooming of these historical associations,” said Ambassador Hautala. “That was the time when we did realize that Russia actually has a fully fledged, state-led history program in order to explain things according to their politics and political needs,” he explained. “Up until that point, history was an open field of study, and you had different voices, and the mainstream was still academically serious. But then, we realized that this country has adopted the Soviet way of top-down historical definition and history is part of the state policy.” In short, Putin had been rewriting the history of Russia and—crucially—Ukraine to create a justification for war, bending what even his own fellow Russians knew and believed of history to suit his view and ambitions in the present. The new history stated that Ukraine was and always had been part of Russia and ...