Writing (and Rewriting) Russian History

On the Media

Days before Russia invaded Ukraine 3 years ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin read an essay he’d written in 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” wherein he claimed that Ukraine is a fake country that was invented by Lenin. This version of Russian history, which is full of inaccuracies amplified on Russian state media, has been used by the Russian state to justify their imperialist wars. But the myths in Russia's state-sponsored version of history are not new. In fact, Mikhail Zygar, a Russian investigative journalist, has traced the myths back at least as far as the middle ages. In Zygar's book, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, he unravels a thousand years of fables that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. In this conversation with Brooke which we first aired in 2023, Zygar recounts and contextualizes the history-fueled ingredients of today's Russian propaganda, and talks about his mission to write new works of Russian history that account for the country's colonial past, and present.

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