At least some of the West’s disbelief over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 came from the absurdity of Vladimir Putin’s stated justifications. The threat of NATO expansion toward Russian borders? Surely, he knew that the alliance — chronically underfunded; brain dead, according to French President Emmanuel Macron; and postured for deterrence — posed no peril to Russia. The presence of Nazis in Ukraine? True, a handful of Ukrainians recall their joint anti-Soviet operations alongside the Wehrmacht with a discomforting pride. Still, a nation that had freely elected a Jewish president seemed an odd candidate to revive Nazism as a political force. 

To Western eyes, therefore, the invasion appeared to make no sense. But in two new books, Russia analyst Jade McGlynn presents a powerful and disturbing case that the invasion had a convincing historical logic to it, for Vladimir Putin and for Russians more generally. In “Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia,” she argues that the invasion was “perhaps the only possible outcome of Russia’s preoccupation with policing the past.” In “Russia’s War,” she shows how deeply and fully the Russian people have accepted the historical narrative justifying this war. Taken together, the two books suggest that we have been looking in the wrong places to understand Russian motivations.

The Russian historical narrative, according to McGlynn, posits that when the state is strong and the people united, Russia achieves greatness, such as defeating Nazi Germany and launching Sputnik. When the state is weak and the people disunited, as under Boris Yeltsin, the West exploits and weakens Russia and its people. Russian media thus treat Western support for Ukraine not as a response to the invasion of Crimea in 2014 but as a long part of a Western “war” to keep Russia weak and therefore exploitable. Why else, Russians ask, would a debauched West support Ukrainian Nazis if not to use Ukraine as a proxy for perpetuating the West’s centuries-long quest to keep Russia weak and divided?

McGlynn argues that it is a mistake to dismiss this policing of the past as mere propaganda or brainwashing. She argues that the regime uses history to “develop cognitive filters and heuristics” that create comfortable spaces for framing the present. Key themes include the insistence that Ukraine has always been an extension of Russia, never a nation in its own right, and that the Russian state has played a key role in protecting the Russian people from the persistent existential dangers that lurk outside the country’s borders. 

The Russian state has used a heavy hand to enforce its view of the past, firing or imprisoning many of those who disagree with it. But as McGlynn shows in “Russia’s War,” the most effective methods are much more subtle. What she describes as “agitainment” in television news and a tightly controlled internet blur the line between fact and fiction.