''In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, history is not remembered, it is curated. Over the past two decades, the Kremlin has cultivated a memory regime rooted in contradiction. It glorifies both executioners and their victims, reconciling Tsarist and Soviet legacies, and transforming once democratic commemorations into tools of state loyalty. This symbolic chaos is not incoherent, but a matter of strategy. By selectively invoking elements of Russia’s Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet pasts, the state has sought to forge a flexible ideological narrative to legitimise authoritarian rule while neutralising the moral challenges posed by historical trauma.
This brief outlines three central mechanisms of this strategy. First, the rehabilitation of the Soviet security services – through official ceremonies, monuments and the memorialisation of symbolic dates – has revived institutions once associated with political terror, while marginalising victim-centered narratives. Second, the use of political reburials and memorials has allowed the regime to fabricate a false reconciliation between “reds” and “whites” with a view to presenting a unified historical lineage without addressing the causes or crimes of the civil war and repression. Finally, the Kremlin has systematically repurposed national holidays, stripping them of their democratic or Revolutionary origins and rebranding them as expressions of imperial pride, militarised sacrifice and historical unity. Together, these processes reflect a larger shift in Russia’s state ideology, from a politics of reckoning to a politics of erasure''. (Abstract)