The Ideological Blueprint for Invasion
In a landmark essay published in July 2021, six months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin laid out a historical narrative that denied the very existence of Ukraine and Belarus as nations distinct from Russia. He asserted that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were all “heirs of ancient Rus,” which he described as the “largest country in Europe.” This foundational text, experts argue, provided the ideological pretext for the war that followed, challenging post-Cold War borders by framing them as historical aberrations.
A Dangerous “Revisionism”
“Vladimir Poutine instrumentalizes a very old historians’ quarrel. This is revisionism,” analyzes Carole Grimaud, a doctoral student in Information and Communication Sciences specializing in Russian geopolitics. She draws a parallel to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, where historical claims about Serbian heritage in Kosovo were later politicized with devastating consequences. “That’s when it becomes systematically dangerous,” she warns.
Russian archaeologist and historian Aleksandr Musin, now a refugee in France, observes that “the Russian aggression against Ukraine seeks its legitimation in the reinterpretation of the Middle Ages.” At the heart of this memory battle is Kyivan Rus, a medieval polity centered around Kyiv that the Kremlin presents as the direct predecessor of the modern Russian state.
Deconstructing the Myth of a Unified Rus
Contrary to the Kremlin’s narrative, historical reality is far more complex. “It is presented as the direct predecessor of Russia although the historical relations between Rus’ and Russia, as well as between the Rus’ and the Russians, are much more complex than those between the Franks and the French and between Francia and France,” explains Musin.
Carole Grimaud clarifies that Kyivan Rus “was not really a country but a set of principalities, a confederation of sorts,” stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea and encompassing diverse Slavic populations. This confederation’s history does not support modern claims of a monolithic, continuous Russian state encompassing Ukraine.
Academic Pushback and the Battle for Sources
Facing this state-sponsored rewriting of history, academics are mobilizing alternative narratives based on sources marginalized by Russian propaganda. A key project is the new “Cultural Transfers” chair at the Condorcet Campus, inaugurated in early February, which aims to translate the First Novgorod Chronicle into French. This 12th to 14th-century text is crucial because, as Aleksandr Musin notes, it “shows that Novgorod did not consider itself part of Rus'” and highlights “significant differences between the regions of Eastern Europe, both culturally and in terms of identity.”
Musin points out that Russian propaganda heavily relies on manipulating another text, the “Tale of Bygone Years” (the Primary Chronicle), while largely ignoring the First Novgorod Chronicle because it contradicts the narrative of a unified, homogeneous historical space.
A Closing Space for Historical Research
This instrumentalization of history in Russia is accompanied by a severe crackdown on independent research. “Russian historians can no longer work. The archives have gradually closed, topics are tightly controlled,” alerts Carole Grimaud. In this context, she argues, the free academic world outside Russia stands as one of the last bulwarks against the falsification of history for geopolitical aims.
