The Cult of the "Great Victory"

Victory as a quasi-religion

History politics is the use of the past by the state: to mobilize voters, to justify foreign policy, to settle “historical scores.” Since 2014, history has become a hot topic of international politics, and Putin actively appeals to it to justify Russia’s imperial expansion^[1].

The most vivid example is the Russian cult of Victory. Prymachenko describes it as a militarist quasi-religion: the main cathedral of the Russian armed forces, built in 2020, bears, in place of a biblical quotation, Suvorov’s line “God is Victory,” and even priests objected to its consecration^[2]. The logic of the cult is simple: after the Second World War, Stalin became the “god” of the Soviet pantheon; when he died and Khrushchev declined to take that place, the vacancy was filled by the “Great Victory” — a new deity.

How the holiday itself was constructed

That the cult of Victory was constructed, rather than arising naturally, is evident from the very history of the holiday. In Soviet times, until 1965, May 9 was not even a day off and was not marked by parades — it was an ordinary working day^[16]. As Vitaliy Dribnytsia notes, the central Soviet holiday at the time was November 7 (the day of the “October Revolution”), but it was gradually losing popularity — and the state needed a substitute. The living memory of veterans, who had even before gathered informally on May 9, became a convenient foundation: under Brezhnev, in 1965, official parades appeared on Red Square, and the day was made a non-working one^[17]. In other words, the popular “nationwide” holiday is a product of late-Soviet history politics, not an unbroken tradition from 1945.

To this belongs the modern “Immortal Regiment” campaign as well. Dribnytsia stresses that it did not appear by accident^[18] — and this is indeed true, though the specific attribution in the video is imprecise: the “Immortal Regiment” is not a Brezhnev-era invention but an initiative of Tomsk journalists in 2012, which the state co-opted and turned into a large managed campaign as early as 2015. The essence does not change: both the parades and the “regiment” are constructed instruments, not organic national memory.

And as for why present-day Russia clings so tightly to May 9, Dribnytsia explains this through nation-building. The formation of a nation usually proceeds around unifying myths (the Ukrainian nation, for instance, coalesces around the myth of Cossackdom). The Russian nation, by his observation, is still not formed as a political one — it took shape as an imperial one, without a distinct national core, and is therefore forced to cling to external myths, and such a myth became May 9. A second function is preparation for aggression: having taken on the role of “victors,” Russia derives from it a supposed right to do whatever it wishes with neighboring peoples^[19].

Putin needs “Nazis”

From here there is a direct line to war. Putin aspires to become the “new Stalin,” but to ascend that Olympus he must defeat “mythical Nazis.” Where to get them? They were “found” in Ukraine — and thus a justification for the invasion appeared^[3].

The nature of this cult also matters. It is a cult of death, built around mass graves: in Russia the human being is a resource, like oil or gas, which the state mobilizes for its needs. A telling contrast: the Germans identified and buried their fallen by name, while the Soviet tradition left anonymous mass graves^[3]. The same attitude toward its own soldiers is visible in the current war as well.

The machine of history politics — and honesty toward one’s own myths

History politics operates on three levels: the public (museums), the didactic (school textbooks), and the analytical (scholarly history). The first two are direct instruments of the state^[4].

Here it is worth stressing a matter of principle: a true historian refutes myths regardless of their origin. Russian myths deny the very existence of Ukrainian identity, language, and history. But Prymachenko honestly notes that there are also national Ukrainian myths — for example, the legend of the “executed kobzars,” which has no archival confirmation, even though it lives in folklore as a response to the real terror of the Holodomor^[5]. Refuting myths is a craft, not a selective weapon.

Dogmas, rituals, icons

What this cult looks like up close is shown in detail by historian Ihor Shchupak. Like any religion, the “Great Patriotic War” rests on dogmas — “facts” taken on faith, with any attempt to challenge them meeting aggression. Among them are Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the pioneer-heroes, and the textbook “28 Panfilov men”: the myth of 28 heroes who supposedly stopped German tanks near Moscow is historically just as fabricated as the mythologized “battles” of Alexander Nevsky^[7].

The dogmas accrue rituals-fetishes. The St. George ribbon (in reality the Soviet Guards ribbon) is used no longer for remembrance but for the propaganda of a new war — it is stuck onto vodka, candy, manicures, even a German Mercedes. The “Immortal Regiment” too is done cynically: portraits are bought at the supermarket on the eve of May 9 and thrown away after the event^[8].

And the religious imagery of the cult is literal: an icon for the oath of Russian paratroopers depicts Stalin in the role of Jesus surrounded by “apostles.” This “pobedobesie” (“victory-frenzy”) penetrated Ukraine as well: in 2016, already after the start of the war, in the Kyiv metro station “Arsenalna” a woman in Soviet uniform with such an icon propagandized the “Russian world”^[9].

”Great Patriotic”: a term that hides 1939

The cult itself rests on a substitution of the name. The author of the Vox Veritatis project, Vitaliy Dribnytsia, in a radio interview singles out three overarching Russian myths about the war: that the “Great Patriotic War” is a separate war from the Second World War; that in 1939–1941 the USSR committed no aggression in Eastern Europe; and that only the USSR won the Second World War^[10]. The first myth exists for a reason: counting from June 22, 1941, masks the fact that the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with Germany’s attack on Poland — and on September 17 the Red Army too entered Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany as early as September 3, 1939: the “Great Patriotic War” brackets out nearly two years during which the USSR was not a victim but an accomplice in the partition of Europe^[11].

This is not a metaphor. The USSR and the Third Reich jointly partitioned Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, held a joint parade in Brest (on the Soviet side, brigade commander Semyon Krivoshein), and Stalin, in a telegram to Hitler at the end of September 1939, wrote of “friendship sealed in blood.” Then came Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the annexation of the Baltic states — what Dribnytsia calls “an ordinary partition of Europe between two predators”^[12]. The term “Great Patriotic” is needed by the cult precisely because it erases this period and turns the aggressor into a liberator — for more detail on the pact itself, see “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”.

That this is not a chance turn of phrase but a constructed concept is evident from how differently the name developed on the two sides of the border. In an interview with the channel “Inter,” Dribnytsia, who himself taught history from 1991, traces the evolution of Ukrainian textbooks: at first, until the first genuinely Ukrainian editions of 1992–95, they used Soviet ones, in which the “Great Patriotic War” prevailed; then they gradually moved to the concept of the Second World War, in which the “Great Patriotic” is only a part; there were attempts to call it the “German-Soviet war”; and now the European view of the Second World War as a whole has become established^[20]. In Russia the opposite happened: the attempts of the 1990s to move away from the Soviet concept came to nothing, and there they returned to the version that the “Great Patriotic” is a separate war in which the USSR was merely defending itself, while the occupation of Eastern Europe in 1939–41 is entirely justified^[21]. The very concept, Dribnytsia stresses, was from the outset invented precisely in order to drown out, in the mass consciousness, the fact of the shared start of the war with Hitler.

A Vlasovite ribbon under the banner of Victory

The same logic of “joining the unjoinable” surfaces in the cult’s principal fetish — the St. George ribbon. Besides passing itself off as an old imperial ribbon (when it is in fact the Soviet Guards ribbon), Dribnytsia points to an even sharper contradiction: the black-and-orange ribbon was a symbol of Vlasov’s army — collaborationist formations that fought on the side of the Wehrmacht, and whom the Soviet army tried not even to take prisoner but to destroy as traitors. As a result, present-day Russia has combined in one ritual the cult of the red banner of Victory with the symbolism of the very collaborators it supposedly fought^[22]. When this is pointed out to Russians, Dribnytsia notes, they stubbornly refuse even to hear it and convince themselves that the ribbon is “from the First World War.” This joining of the incompatible is a characteristic feature of present-day ruscism: the cult of victory over Nazism coexists peaceably with the revival of collaborationist symbolism.

”The Second Front”: another Soviet frame

The same principle — a name that rewrites reality — operates in the myth of the “Second Front.” In Soviet (and present-day Russian) historiography, the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, is called the “second,” as though before it the West had not been fighting. Yet Great Britain was a participant in the war from September 1939, and in no Anglo-American historiography is Normandy called the “second front”: this is a purely Soviet term^[13]. The logic is simple: following Stalin, only the Soviet-German front was considered the “first,” while the fighting in North Africa, Italy, the Pacific, and the Atlantic were not fronts for Stalin — so the opening of Normandy was presented as his personal achievement, that he had finally “pressed” the Allies into it^[14].

The scale of the Western operations refutes this. The landing in Sicily (Operation Husky, July 10, 1943) was even larger than Normandy in the size of the first day’s landing force — about 180,000 against 156,000 (Dribnytsia cautiously estimates the Sicilian landing at roughly 150,000). The Italian campaign removed Mussolini’s regime and pulled German divisions away from other theaters^[15]. The historian’s conclusion is blunt: the Second World War was won by the anti-Hitler coalition, not by “the USSR alone” — and this fact directly destroys the cornerstone of the cult of the “Great Victory.” The context of the war itself is in the article “The Second World War”.

What this means

The cult of the “Great Victory” is not memory but a political technology: it turns the past into fuel for the present war. It is telling that in 2023 Ukraine abolished the Soviet “May 9” and returned to the European tradition — the Day of Remembrance on May 8^[6]: the rejection of the cult of victory in favor of remembrance of the victims is precisely the line between the instrumentalization of history and respect for it.