A grave miscalculation

Without Putin’s re-enactment of World War II on a national scale, there would be no place for either this current parody of the USSR, or the language of hatred towards Ukraine, Europe and the whole world. The Kremlin’s post-modernists borrow Soviet slogans to justify their power and turn back time, having done their best to revive the late Stalinist era.

This fictional country ruled by Vladimir Putin is populated by courageous soldiers, their wives and their many children. Together they are ready to obey any order the homeland gives them, the more criminal the better. Look no further for real cases of “discrediting the army” and “falsifying history” — the classic thought crimes of the late Putin era. World War II, the worst tragedy ever to befall both the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, is now being used to justify the bombing of Kyiv and Odesa.

The logic behind this propaganda is tried and tested: since Russia defeated Nazism, anyone who is against Russia is a Nazi, while Russia’s own crimes can be overlooked indefinitely, or, at least, for as long as Putin remains alive. 

Sergey Stepashin, another scion of the secret services who was once seen as a potential successor to Boris Yeltsin, recently said that Russia was preparing its own version of the Nuremberg trials for the Ukrainian leadership. For the first time in recent history, role-playing re-enactors have managed to take over a country and kill hundreds of thousands of people in order to cosplay their own illustrious forebears.

The “special military operation” was planned as a two-week miniature World War II that would end with the Russian flag being raised over the Verkovna Rada, followed by show trials, summary executions and a fresh partition of Europe to usher in Yalta 2.0, Putin’s new world order. Instead, it has become a hopeless war of attrition with no end in sight.

Russia has fought longer wars, of course, and some, like the war in Afghanistan, are still barely touched upon in the collective historical memory, even though many of its witnesses are still alive. Never before has the memory of World War II been used to justify an attack on a neighbouring country with close familial, cultural, and economic ties to Russia, however. 

Soviet troops weren’t creating a “re-enactment” in Afghanistan, if only for the fact that they were fighting in a completely foreign land, rending any comparison to World War II moot, even if using the term “a limited contingent of Soviet forces” to describe those invading the country is as shameful a euphemism as the “special military operation”.

Though anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million Afghans died in that war, never since World War II have so many Russians come home in coffins as they are from Ukraine at the moment.

So desperate was he to be remembered by history as another “unifier of Russian lands”, Putin temporarily put aside perfecting his kleptocracy to pursue his fantasy. However, he will actually go down in history as a failed version of Stalin, and one who has been sending Russian soldiers to their deaths in eastern Ukraine for four years now with negligible results

Putin’s horrific miscalculation now looks set to herald a broader conflict involving Donald Trump’s US and Xi’s China, which is watching the collapse of international institutions and law with great interest. By any standards, Putin’s war is an embarrassing failure that will be mocked in future textbooks as an example of an unmitigated political blunder.

The transformation of Russian society presents another important parallel with World War II. The USSR entered the Second World War with an ideology of world revolution, a country exhausted by collectivisation and the Great Terror, and with demography as a driving factor as millions of young peasants moved to cities in search of a better fate. 

In the post-war era, the USSR was indeed a new country: a superpower vying for global hegemony and espousing a Russian neo-imperialist ideology. One aspect of that ideology was a clear call for an end to political terror — the victors believed they deserved a normal life, and indeed, within weeks of the dictator’s death in 1953, Stalinism was in retreat.

The Russia of 2026 is also visibly different to its pre-war self. Fear is a legal currency while justice has been dismantled. Murderers are released from prison to fight in Ukraine before being discharged and allowed to return home to commit fresh crimes as anything can be justified for Putin’s war.

Criticising the leader is treason. Art and culture have been hijacked and censored. The economy functions on murky schemes and parallel imports. But unlike the USSR under Stalin, the demographic statistics don’t bode well for Putin and a post-war recovery. There is no workforce, just as there is no fairytale land of brave servicemen and their wives raising large families.

Despite removing a million young people from the country, sending hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers to their deaths, committing every imaginable war crime, losing allies and turning nearly all of Russia’s neighbours against it, Putin forges ahead with his historical re-enactment, apparently unaware that it is also the greatest historical defeat he could possibly inflict upon his country.