Geopolitics, history and memory games. Jumping from the 20th to the 21st century

A memorial sign at the landing site of the Yevpatoriya landing. Opened in 2005 at the landing site of Soviet paratroopers in 1942. Photo: Anton Martynov / Shutterstock

A cold shower

Since February 24th 2022, Putin’s outrageous distortion of Ukrainian history to justify the full-scale aggression against Ukraine raises questions about the relationship between Russian geopolitical permanence and historical justification; and thus, what international law and world order mean to the Kremlin. Indeed, since that fateful date, we have seen a kind of “globalisation of bilateralism” that has imposed itself as the new world order. If Putin’s historical revisionist vision was necessary for him, like a fuse to ignite the war, very quickly the historical argument gave way to the voice of armed and nuclear threats. The whole world was inevitably involved, either because of the blocking of food exports, gas or fertiliser supplies, or because of the support of the West for Ukraine in terms of military equipment. At the same time, some autocratic countries also supported Russia. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, through his communication strategy, has largely contributed to the Europeanisation and globalisation of his country’s cause. Since then, one wonders what role and what effectiveness historical revisionism and historical memory games can have in Putin’s strategy.

The Russian aggression was like a cold shower for our optimism as citizens of the European haven of peace established during the last quarter of the 20th century. In Putin’s words, according to his essay published in July 2021 titled “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, he argues that ninth-century Kyivan Rus’ is the integral foundation of a people for whom the Ukrainian capital, this “mother of Russian cities”, is the cradle. “Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are the heirs of the ancient Rus,’” Putin wrote, “which was the largest country in Europe … History has decided that the centre of reunification, which continued the tradition of the ancient Russian state, should become Moscow”. Therefore, Moscow is no longer the “Third Rome”, but the “new Kyiv”. In the year 988 it was the conversion of the Grand Prince of Kyiv Volodymyr the Great to Byzantine Christianity that sealed the spiritual fate of Russia. We can thus formulate a hypothesis that 11 centuries later, Putin’s reason for waging war against Ukraine is motivated by an absurd dream: to restore this original empire.

However, is this assumption “real” enough to make the Russians rally around the idea of a reconquest? Is it not too abstract as a memory reference? Evidently, Putin’s geopolitics needs a historical narrative that is not only based on a collective cultural memory but also on reactive memory. It is about the memories of witnesses, therefore still alive in the memory of the elders.

Geopolitical thinking  

This design must be subjected to an analysis that blends the concept of geopolitics with that of the uses of history and historical memory. The second question which must be asked at this point is whether we can, or should, observe a break in the evolution of the uses of memory between the 20th and 21st centuries? A conceptual clarification is necessary here – we cannot speak of memory geopolitics but rather of a “memorial component” of geopolitical strategy. This observation requires us to look at the meaning of words, their narrative history and their relevance to factual history.

When we founded the journal Geopolitics in France in 1981 one of its founders, General Pierre Gallois, provided us with a definition of geopolitics to which we have adhered for the 40 years of our journal’s existence. It stated that “geopolitics is a combination of political science and geography, but it also consists of a study of the relations that exist between the conduct of a power policy carried out at the international level and the geographical framework in which it is exercised.” At that time, we were of course in the midst of an international crisis linked to the epic of the Polish Solidarność and the declaration of martial law by General Wojciech Jaruzelski. At that moment, memory studies were absent from the geopolitical approach, even if the most astute analysts associated the idea of a more or less static mental map of “world communism versus western democracy” with the European geographical space.

At its birth at the beginning of the 20th century, geopolitical thinking was based on a sort of Darwinian theory, pitting weak states against strong ones. It was dominated by the thought of Friedrich Ratzel, who believed that the driving force behind the formation of states was the struggle for “living space”. The person who most inspired Germany’s geopolitical strategies in the early 20th century was a geographer and senior officer named General Karl Haushofer, who was in close contact with Nazi party leaders. His relations with Nazi dignitaries such as Rudolph Hess ultimately gave him access to Adolf Hitler. Haushofer’s geopolitical concept of reconfiguring Germany’s living space, claiming to be a victim of the Treaty of Versailles, became the inspiration for war.

At roughly the same time, the Soviet geopolitical strategy of territorial conquest was developed, sanctified by the messianic theory of the inevitable world revolution, notably by Lenin. It resulted in the failure of the Polish-Soviet War in 1921, contrary to Bolshevik plans. We can illustratively say that the meeting of these two geopolitical approaches resulted first in the 1922 Rapallo Treaty (with its secret clause of military collaboration) and then the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. After the victory in 1945, Stalin outlined his wish to surround himself with a security belt around the only socialist state, obsessed by the memory of the threats posed to the young Bolshevik revolution by the western countries supporting the White Russian armies. Here, he was already justifying the conquest of the USSR’s neighbouring states with history, interpreted in his own way. In Stalinist rhetoric, the conquest was camouflaged by the notion of “friendly countries”, friends forced to refuse the Marshall Plan and accept the COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. All this shows that geopolitical concepts are indeed closely linked to the historical context and configuration of political geography, as well as strategic constructions produced by the actors of international relations.

Obliteration of traumas

In the immediate post-war period, efforts were made to forget painful memories by adjusting historical and memory narratives to the idea of the necessary obliteration of traumas, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur would have said. Memorial actions subsequently fluctuated between over-valuing memory or obliteration. The political dictate of memory obliteration is illustrated in the 1946 words of Sir Winston Churchill, which are now presented by the House of European History on one of its walls in Brussels, where we can read: “We must all turn our backs upon the horror of the past. We must look to the future.”

Following the failure of Hitler’s project, the world order was frozen by the Cold War from 1948 to 1989. This can be summed up as a paradox formulated by the sociologist and specialist in international relations, Raymond Aron, who said that “Peace is impossible, war is improbable.”  At that time wars were far away, located in former colonies. Western and Eastern Europe lived in the Aronian paradox of the period of nuclear deterrence. History was taking place on the periphery of the western world and the memory of the history of the Second World War was repressed and pushed into the unconscious among its victims.

The last decades of the Cold War – between the 1970s and the 1980s – saw the emergence of polymorphous manifestations of memory. Paradigmatic studies were multiplying. These processes were just beginning to have an impact on geopolitics and the state of international relations. In these years, it was above all in the spaces of the nation states that national memorial undertakings were concentrated. In the West, the ongoing construction of Europe required a reconciliation of memories between the driving countries of this process, France and Germany. This process’s apotheosis was seen during the 1984 meeting of Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, who stood hand in hand in front of the tombs of the soldiers of the two nations involved in the Battle of Verdun. Between East and West, the first signs of Polish-German reconciliation appeared with a letter from the Polish bishops to their German counterparts in 1965, and the beginning of the “diplomacy of forgiveness”, with Willy Brandt kneeling in front of the Warsaw Ghetto monument in 1970. This is the period when the spirit of reconciliation reigned and when memory games served their most constructive purpose.

Soviet Russia, on the other hand, is full of various memory claims from within. This began very briefly during the so-called thaw of 1956, then widely in dissident literature, culminating in the Gulag phenomenon, under the major impact of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Here, memory helped civil society to reveal the historical truth of Soviet crimes.

In the West, as if by memory dissonance, among the young Germans of the 1968 generation, there is a demand to account for the crimes committed by their forgetful grandparents. This was met by the revival of “historical negationism” in Western Europe, which focused on challenging the universally accepted narrative of the Holocaust, with the denial of the existence of the gas chambers. In France, the academic world was shaken, notably by the activism of the negationist academic, Robert Faurisson, as well as, in a different way, by the controversy provoked by Hannah Arendt around the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Soon Germany will be confronted with a historians’ quarrel (Historikerstreit) regarding the relativisation of the origins of Nazism with the work of Ernest Nolte on the one hand, and on the other, demands to denounce the Nazi criminals who found refuge in post-war Germany with the blessing of the Allies.

It is interesting to look at official state memory policies in the Soviet Union because it helps us to understand the turn of memory from the 20th to the 21st century. Despite, or because of, the primacy of Marxist-Leninist ideology, Soviet propaganda sought to consolidate a militaristic model in the collective memory. The discursive sources of Putinism, as diverse as they are, are obsessively aimed at two targets: the idea of empire and the apology of war. This is the common background of Sovietism, “orthodox” imperialism, Russian conservatism, Pan-Slavism, and Eurasianism. Putin can utilise this ideological mishmash because the collective memory of the Russians who support him was already pre-formed in the USSR and only then consolidated by the propaganda under Putin’s rule. The education of the Soviet citizens consisted of military preparation, their lives were spent in various military-patriotic associations. The calendar was filled with military holidays, honouring the fighters of the Great Patriotic War was a civic obligation. It was as if the Russian collective memory had been militarised.

State intrusion

The 1990s and the first years of the 21st century saw an intensification of the exchange of blows between the actors representing the interests of national or state groups that considered themselves to have been robbed by the Second World War. In the field of memory, the battle for adjustment between Russia and the countries liberated from the communist bloc took place, symbolically illustrated by discussions on the asymmetry of the EU’s memorial legitimisation, on the necessary requalification of communism as a totalitarian regime in the same way as Hitler’s regime. This battle resulted in an attempt to move from singular histories in a single museum narrative towards a transnational vision in a European House of History. Several transnational initiatives attacked the general design of the permanent exhibition in Brussels as ideological, Hegelian and neo-Marxist.

These entrepreneurs of memory achieved real legislative success in the EU parliament. In 2009 the European Parliament established August 23rd as a day dedicated to commemorating the victims of the two totalitarian regimes. In line with this, several EU member states banned elements of communist propaganda along with Nazi symbols. August 23rd is a strong symbol, as it was the date of the signing in 1939 of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with its secret protocol postulating the invasion of Poland by the two totalitarian countries.

This episode of European history remains to this day the most mobilising point in international memory relations between Russia and western historians, especially in declaring when the war began for the Russians. In May 2009 Dmitry Medvedev, then Russian president, elevated history to the level of an attribute of national “sovereignty” in the face of these symbolic initiatives by the EU and the Council of Europe to equate Stalinism (and even communism) with Nazism. On the 70th anniversary of the onset of the Second World War and the German-Soviet pact, which Europe was preparing to commemorate, Medvedev said: “One should not call black what is white, call one who was defending himself the aggressor…” These words were accompanied by the creation of a presidential commission to fight against the falsification of history. Many Russian historians protested at the time against the likely pressure of this supervisory body which, under the pretext of “tracking down and countering erroneous interpretations of history abroad”, would make the arbitrariness of political censorship official. The banning of the Memorial Association under a law that allows a local NGO to be classified as foreign-sponsored and therefore a foreign agent has definitely corroborated these fears. In fact, this phenomenon of state intrusion into the field of history is omnipresent in many societies.

The different regimes regarding the uses of memory coexist during the post-Cold War era. On the one hand, commissions of historians have multiplied, such as the one led by Anatoly Torkunov and Adam Rotfeld. This has an optimistic message to neutralise contentious points in Polish-Russian history, including the recognition of the elimination of Polish elites by Stalin’s NKVD in Katyń. Another commission of Polish and Ukrainian historians has tried to neutralise fanciful or differentiated historical interpretations of the Volhynia massacre and Operation Vistula, trying to quantify the number of victims on both sides and to understand the reasons for the massacres.

On the societal level, installation artists have commemorated the painful past surrounding the demise of almost the entire Jewish community in Poland with the intention of civic awareness and memorialisation. For example, this can be seen in the outdoor installation of a public bench with a kippah and the inscription “I/we miss you Jew” by Rafał Betlejewski. On the other hand, on July 20th 2013 in the small Polish town of Radymno, near Przemyśl, inhabitants went so far as to stage a grisly reconstruction of the Ukrainian attack and massacre of Polish villagers in the Volhynia region during the Second World War, with the effect of aggravating Polish-Ukrainian relations.

Revisionist mobilising discourse

It is in this period, at the turn of the 21st century, that we feel the need to reflect upon the concepts proper to political sociology, which include both the games of memory actors and their undertakings regarding the internationalisation of memory strategies. But first, to better define the concepts we need, let us go back to Putin’s historical strategy. Today, Putin appears to be a great continuator of the visions of Ratzel, Haushofer and especially Stalin. In reality, Putin basically thinks the same things but needs more justification. This is where a “memory masquerade” comes in, involving Nazism, racism, antisemitism and the reminder of the origins of Russia’s greatness.

The portfolio of historical and memorial references does not stop at European history for Russia. Since Putin’s speech to the audience of sad and empty-looking regime beneficiaries, except for the infantile excitement of Ramzan Kadyrov, on September 30th 2022, after the counting of the so-called democratic referenda, to announce the annexation of the four oblasts of Ukraine, the Russian president has been emphasising a clash of civilisations in the style of Samuel P. Huntington. He reminds the Russian generation that lived under Soviet rule of its dominant ideology: the accusations against the colonialist West with the American devil and his axiological degeneracies as a main topic. However, the core of the revisionist mobilising discourse is not the thousand-year-old history of Russia, such as that recounted by Putin at the beginning of the invasion in February 2022, nor that of the clash of civilisations. At the centre of the memorial device is the “Great Patriotic War”.

In the early 2000s, and even more so since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, a memory offensive has taken place around the “Great Patriotic War” against Nazism of 1941-45, to the point that it is now a kind of mystical cult. In fact, in order to justify the reconstitution of the empire by military means, Putin must not only have his army and generals behind him but also the population as a whole. It is a question of building legitimacy by resorting to the historical vision. Putin’s geopolitics of Russian conquest has nothing to do with historical truth verified by the academic approach. What counts is the mobilising effectiveness of the narrative.

In order to achieve this effect, a certain type of memory must be used – a reactive memory of the Russians. This is the memory of the Second World War. The Great Patriotic War is not a lieu de mémoire, even if it has several locations, such as the Battle of Stalingrad or the Soviet flag planted on the Reichstag in Berlin. It is rather, as I used to say, a “memory deposit”. Through its metaphorical connotations, this concept is more than lieux de mémoire. It is in fact a stock of resources that can be recycled in the present political or geopolitical stakes. Various actors draw on these deposits for the symbolic materials needed to encourage action.

In the case of the Great Patriotic War, this is the living memory. This material is based, as Adam Michnik metaphorically put it, on the “egoism of pain” connected to the human costs suffered by the Soviets, and on the exaltation of pride in victorious sacrifice. Although there remains an obstacle to these uses by Putin, namely the controversy over when the Great Patriotic War actually began and what actually happened between 1939 and 1941. Yet the Putin narrative does not need to explain itself to the Russian population. Exploiting this memory deposit is enough to gain the support of around 80 per cent of the population for his strategy of including Ukraine in the empire.

Almost 20 years later, towards the middle of the 21st century, Professor Geremek’s observation has become obsolete. Collective memory is summoned not to support diplomatic negotiation but, to paraphrase Karl von Clausewitz, to justify a particular foreign policy by other means – that is by war and the geopolitics of territorial expansion. But we can also see that while Putin only needed historical justifications to explain the launch of a geopolitical adventure, when the guns started shooting, his memorial discourse became muddled and incoherent. Perhaps because remembering the tribute of blood paid by the Russian and Ukrainian parts of the population between 1941 and 1945 encouraged a reflection on the meaning of today’s sufferings, thanks to the Russian and Ukrainian blood that is shed abundantly in the war against Ukraine. This potentially risks turning the Russian population against the geopolitics of conquest and its memory make-up. But this is unfortunately only another hypothesis.

This text has been published in December 2022 by Observing Memories Issue 6. In this version it has been adapted to New Eastern Europe’s style and audience.

Georges Mink is permanent professor at the College of Europe in Natolin and Emeritus Director of Research at the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique (CNRS, France) and Université de Paris X, Nanterre. He is also a former president of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (2015-2021). He is a sociologist and political scientist specializing in Central and Eastern Europe. His most recent books include La Pologne au coeur de l’Europe, de 1914 à ces jours, Histoire politique et conflits de mémoire, Paris, Buchet Chastel, 2015; Polska w sercu Europy, od 1914 do czasow najnowszych, historia polityczna i konflikty pamieci, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków, 2017. He is also a member of New Eastern Europe’s editorial board.

commemoration, history, memory, Russian history, Vladimir Putin