The counteroffensive is underway – Ukraine is doggedly defending its integrity. Meanwhile, Russia’s soldiers seem to be dreaming of the Tsarist or Soviet Empire.
Moscow – The battlefield is turning red, and some of the dead may have been resurrected: Vladimir Putin’s invasion army is increasingly wearing insignia from Russia, which seemed to have thought about it for a long time – for example, on the sleeve the bright red banner with a yellow hammer and sickle. The heads of communist thinkers and leaders can also be seen again. That’s what reports anyway RadioFreeEurope. Scientists view these signs in the Ukraine war critically: as a long shadow of the Soviet empire, as Bernd Löhmann, for example, writes for the think tank Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.
Visually, Russia attacked Ukraine quite soberly: with a mostly roughly painted “Z” on the vehicles – in addition to the many meanings that were assigned to this letter, it is certainly primarily intended to distinguish between friend and enemy: the two former brother nations are fighting with mostly the same vehicles and weapons against each other. What photographers have now captured in the theater of war is even more crude: Russian soldiers wearing red patches on their chests or sleeves. On it you can see: hammer and sickle or additionally the letter combination “CCCP”, the Cyrillic abbreviation for “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, long known and feared in the West as “USSR”. Patches with the likeness of Josef Stalin have also appeared.
Image gain: Putin’s invasion with a historical model
Videos of Russian tanks rolling across the Ukrainian Dnipro River with the red flag with a hammer and sickle flying – the banner of the former Soviet Union – are also circulating on social media. This image may seem surprising to laypeople, but scientists recognize the symbolic nature of the fact that the Russian attack on Ukraine took place in the 100th year after the founding of the Soviet Union. “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a revival of the Russian Empire, but under communist ideology and with totalitarian aspirations. The Soviet culture of remembrance was a factor that consolidated the empire. Therefore, their preservation is crucial to the realization of Vladimir Putin’s imperial plans,” writes Ukrainian historian Yana Prymachenko.
“Vladimir Putin constantly reminds us: the Soviet Union has not really collapsed for everyone, even if the former Tsarist Empire is certainly much closer to him,” adds Frank Priess from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and speaks of an “imperial revival” of the Russian Federation. Other historians judge more cautiously and break down the alleged retro wave primarily to individual people: The comeback of Soviet imagery is currently an expression of individually perceived conditions, but it is also clearly the result of propaganda controlled from the Kremlin, says historian Ian Garner.
Loss of image: Without the “Eastern Bloc”, Russia lost influence
The patches now worn into battle are reminiscent of the hardened fronts between the West and the “Eastern Bloc” between the mid-1940s and the late 1980s of the last century. And although these antagonisms should have long been outdated, Russian propaganda is picking up the old narrative patterns again – for example by justifying the claim that the reaction of the NATO states to the Russian attack on the neighboring country was motivated by supposed anti-Russian sentiment and people of Russian descent are no longer safe in the West.
The Russian government denies any responsibility for the military escalation and instead claims that it was forced into war. Russia is trying to mix up perpetrators and victims. According to the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Russian allegations about Ukraine’s alleged atrocities against its own people in Donbass are outrageous. It is also absurd that Ukrainian territory poses a threat to Russia.
Image maintenance: war as a comeback of “friendship between nations”
The patches with a hammer and sickle, with Stalin’s stylized likeness or the bunker wall relief made from the heads of Marx, Engels and Lenin glorify the glue that has long since crumbled between the societies of the former giant empire: the “friendship of peoples”. The Russian writer Elena Chizhova already suspected in 2018 that the earlier brotherly kiss between communist leaders may have been motivated by calculation rather than genuine affection New Zurich newspaper: “As an integral part of the ideology, ‘friendship of peoples’ was highly valued during Soviet times. The tradition lives on in Russia, but you don’t have to look far for xenophobia: the citizen, who is notoriously enslaved by the state, always needs someone he can still look down on.”
At that time, Crimea had already been a bone of contention between Ukraine and the Russian occupiers for four years, and the invasion of Ukraine’s regional integrity may have already been part of the Kremlin’s deployment plan. In September 2003, the conflict over the Tusla peninsula once again brought Russian-Ukrainian relations to the brink of armed conflict. For the first time in modern times, Russia openly threatened the territory of Ukraine. Leonid Kuchma, then President of Ukraine, was provocative at the same time with the thesis that most Russians “historically consider Ukraine to be an inseparable part of Russia, which was ceded only through a strange misunderstanding.”
Historians viewed Tusla as evidence that much of the Russian population continued to confuse the former empire with Russia, even though the Soviet Union had long since dissolved. Ian Garner sees the current patches as reflecting the individual helplessness of the soldiers at the front: Even if they distrusted Putin’s narrative patterns or had no clue about national security interests – after all, they had to believe in something. Even if only with a hammer and sickle.
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