The claim that romanticizing the Soviet Union has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin, modern-day Russia, or the war in Ukraine has become a knee-jerk defense among the authoritarian left. They repeat it as if this secondhand nostalgia for the USSR (something neither they nor their families experienced themselves in most cases) were just an aesthetic preference or a noble form of anti-capitalist sentiment, neatly detached from present-day violence. But it isn’t.
The war in Ukraine is not simply a dispute over borders or territory. It’s an existential state-driven imperial project, fueled by myths of historical entitlement and great-power restoration. The ideas that “justified” Soviet domination did not disappear with the collapse of the USSR. They continue to shape the language, symbols, and historical narratives promoted by the modern Russian state. The Kremlin regularly draws on Soviet symbolism and historical myths to present Russia as the rightful leader of a supposedly unified “brotherly” people, while denying neighboring nations full political agency and treating their independence as conditional or temporary.
“geopolitical catastrophe” and reviving old ghosts
Vladimir Putin has never been shy about how he feels. In his 2005 State of the Nation address, he famously declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” This wasn’t driven by some sentimental nostalgia for socialist economic planning or Marxist internationalism. Instead, the Kremlin views the collapse of the USSR as the unjust dismemberment of a historical Russian state and the loss of territories and populations it never truly accepted as independent. This grievance narrative, kept alive by the structural survival of post-Soviet elites who seamlessly traded their party cards for political and economic power after 1991, has defined Russian foreign policy for over two decades.
The modern Russian state operates on a mashup of historical eras that, on paper, are structurally incompatible. It explicitly rejects the revolutionary, internationalist doctrines of early Bolshevism, with Putin frequently complaining that Vladimir Lenin planted a federalist “time bomb” that artificially fractured the state and “robbed” Russia of its core lands. Yet, simultaneously, the Kremlin fiercely preserves the Soviet Union’s centralized autocracy and imperial borders. This worldview is heavily influenced by Eurasianism, an ideology that portrays Russia as a unique civilization locked in a struggle against Western influence. In practice, it allows the Kremlin to blur the distinctions between the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, and modern Russia, treating them as different chapters of the same historical project. The result is a worldview in which neighboring countries are not treated as sovereign states with agency of their own, but as territories that have drifted from Russia’s orbit. When they choose closer ties with Europe or the West (or anything aside from Russia), Moscow often treats it not as a legitimate political choice but as an act of hostility that must be dealt with.
historical revisionism as imperial doctrine
Putin’s 2021 essay, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, made the Kremlin’s worldview crystal clear. He argued that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” dismissed modern Ukraine as an artificial creation, and portrayed the Soviet recognition of Ukrainian nationhood as a historic mistake.
In his telling, the USSR’s federal structure and weak commitment to national self-determination fractured what should have remained a single political and civilizational space under Moscow’s leadership. It echoed 19th century imperial thinking, when Tsarist officials dismissed Ukrainians as “Little Russians” and denied the existence of a distinct Ukrainian language, culture, or national identity.
By invoking Soviet-era borders and portraying Ukraine as a beneficiary of historical “gifts” from Moscow, Putin merges Tsarist and Soviet history into a single story: Russia as the rightful center, its neighbors as simple provinces. When he declared in February 2022 that Ukraine was “an inseparable part of Russia’s history, culture, and spiritual space”, he was reviving a familiar imperial claim rooted in Soviet supremacy: nations once ruled by Russia never fully escape its reach.
By 2025, the message had become even more explicit. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin stated that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, all of Ukraine belongs to Russia, and revived the old rule that “wherever a Russian soldier sets foot, that’s ours.”
And this imperial form of historical revisionist rhetoric has also been met with domestic measures.
In December 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial, a highly respected organization dedicated to documenting Stalinist repression and preserving the memory of the Gulag system. In April 2026, the authorities went further, officially designating Memorial an “extremist organization” in a closed-door proceeding. The decision effectively criminalized one of the last major institutions devoted to historical accountability inside Russia. The state declared the simple act of documenting Soviet repression to be “vocally anti-Russian” and an attempt to destroy “the foundations of Russian statehood.” By legally equating human rights defenders with terrorists, the state attached a 12 year prison sentence to the mere act of remembering. In order to justify a 21st century war of imperial conquest, the Kremlin does everything it can to weaken public memory of the 20th century empire’s victims.
This erasure occurred in lockstep with the systematic rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin in official narratives and school textbooks from a genocidal authoritarian into a brilliant wartime strategist and nation builder. And the same manipulation of history lies behind the Kremlin’s claims of “denazification” in Ukraine. It ignores the fact that Ukraine is a multiethnic democracy led by a predominantly Russian-speaking president whose family suffered during the Holocaust, yet Russian state media routinely depicts the country as a Nazi regime. The accusation is ironic, given Russia’s own record. Far-right ultranationalists, white supremacist groups, and openly neo-Nazi figures have operated within Russia for decades, while several Russian military and paramilitary formations have displayed neo-Nazi symbols or maintained links to the far right without preventing their integration into the broader war effort.
But contemporary and historical accuracy isn’t the point. By presenting the invasion as a continuation of the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, the Kremlin taps into one of the most powerful narratives in Russian political culture.
Once that framing is accepted, ordinary standards of judgment begin to disappear. Negotiation becomes appeasement and occupation becomes liberation. “Denazification” functions less as an explanation for the war than as a means of granting moral legitimacy to actions that would (and should) otherwise be seen for what they are.
the role of aesthetics and symbolism
As reporting by outlets like Meduza has documented, the Kremlin is actively reviving Soviet iconography as a primary mechanism of state control.
In the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, reversing decommunization is treated almost as a core tactical objective. Russian troops routinely raise the Soviet Victory Banner over administrative buildings in towns like Pisky and Rozivka, while re-erecting long-dismantled statues of Vladimir Lenin and Maxim Gorky.
The Kremlin’s knack for opportunistic myth-making reached peak absurdity with the phenomenon of “Babushka Z.” In April 2022, a video went viral showing an elderly Ukrainian woman, Anna Ivanovna, greeting Ukrainian soldiers with a Soviet flag under the mistaken belief that they were Russian troops. The Russian state instantly manufactured her into an ideological saint. Within weeks, her likeness was mass-produced on murals, billboards, and military patches across Russia. Senior occupation officials even went so far as to unveil a monument to her in the gutted ruins of Mariupol, declaring her a symbol of generational continuity and imperial loyalty.
The punchline, of course, was as predictable as it was tragic. Ivanovna had only brought out the flag to placate the soldiers in a desperate bid to protect her village. When she eventually fled her home after it was destroyed by Russian artillery and her actual, vocal opposition to the invasion became an undeniable public relations liability, state media quietly and efficiently removed her from public memory.
But by then, the fact-checked reality didn’t matter. The myth had already served its purpose for the Kremlin’s core pro-war demographic of Russians over the age of 45. For this generation, a curated Soviet nostalgia is the only remaining framework capable of creating a cohesive and proud national identity. Lacking any forward-looking vision to offer its public, the Russian state is forced to drag out the symbolic ghosts of the USSR to gloss over its deep domestic issues.
youth weaponization
Perhaps the most far-reaching and systematic element of this strategy is the campaign of forced Russification targeting the educational system in occupied parts of Ukraine, a process scholars have accurately described as “educide.” The Kremlin views schools as critical battlegrounds for altering the long-term identities of Ukrainian youth, executing an educational takeover through heavy financial coercion, surveillance, and sheer physical violence. Ukrainian-language curricula have been banned outright, and teachers who refuse to cooperate face starvation, detention in “basements,” and physical torture.
This entire apparatus is a meticulous revival of the Soviet educational script, which viewed the classroom not as a place of learning, but as a factory line engineered to manufacture Homo Sovieticus: the compliant, denationalized Soviet citizen. Just as the USSR enforced strict, centralized control over everything taught across its republics, the Russian Ministry of Education recently approved an official “concept for historical education” to grant the state absolute, ironclad veto power over school curriculums in occupied territories.
History education itself has been weaponized through a single, mandatory textbook series authored by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky. Echoing the Soviet Union’s total monopoly on historical truth, these textbooks are expanding their ideological distortions to prepare for a mandatory rollout across all grades, beginning with 5th year students. The curriculum teaches that Russia is the perpetual victim of Western conspiracies, claims Ukraine is an “artificial state,” and frames the ongoing invasion as an act of legitimate self-defense.
This indoctrination mirrors the old Soviet pipeline of the Pioneers and Komsomol, modernly rebranded as the “Movement of the First” and the hyper-militarized “Yunarmiya.” Under the guise of patriotic education, Ukrainian children as young as 6 years old are subjected to a modern version of Nachalnaya Voennaya Podgotovka (the Soviet program of mandatory school-age basic military training). They are trained in weapons assembly, tactical drone operation, and simulated combat through state-run initiatives like the “Zarnitsa 2.0” games.
Simultaneously, the state continues the massive, bureaucratic transfer of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to remote “summer camps” in Russia like Artek and Smena. Masked by the Kremlin as “rehabilitation and health programs,” these facilities operate as re-education centers. Just as the Soviet Union historically utilized forced deportations and aggressive “Russification” to dismantle distinct ethnic nationalities, this modern apparatus systematically strips away Ukrainian heritage to forge a compliant, unified citizenry loyal only to Moscow.
the authoritarian left’s cherry-picking
The authoritarian left still treats the Soviet Union less like a brutal historical reality and more like an edgy aesthetic they can bend and mold to fit their own perception. They view it as a principled, flawless, anti-imperialist experiment where deaths and deportations were just unfortunate clerical errors. With that level of cherry-picking, it’s easy for them to give Putin’s Russia the same pass by dressing up an imperialist war of conquest as a progressive push for a “multipolar world.”
It’s easy for them to share stylized memes of brutalist architecture or corny Soviet cosplay from the safety of their (largely Western) unbombed homes, claiming their affinity for these aesthetics is harmless. But you can’t romanticize the Soviet machine without also romanticizing the system that crushed dissent from the Baltics to Central Asia, which is the exact system Putin is trying to rebuild right now.
And the Kremlin counts on this nostalgia, hijacking the language of “anti-fascism” to justify wiping a sovereign country off the map. The relationship is not perfectly linear, but many of the myths, symbols, and historical narratives that sustained Soviet imperial power have been repurposed by the modern Russian state. From Prague to Vilnius, from Tbilisi to Kyiv, the hammer and sickle or the busts of Lenin doesn’t stand for workers’ struggle. It stands for tanks in the streets, stolen independence, cultural erasure, and the ugly reality of occupation.
radical dumpling: screaming into the void about anti-fascism and anti-imperial consistency, from somewhere between east and west.
This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.
More content from this blog
- Trump Would Back Ukraine If Putin Was Black, by Terrell Jermaine Starr – 25 October 2025
- From Hope to Disillusionment: Bolivia After 20 Years of MAS, by Linda Farthing and Benjamin Swift – 3 September 2025
- A review of Lachlan McNamee’s “Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop”, by Jacob Gerner Hariri – 1 September 2023
- We Demand the Unconditional Release of Yaser Ahmadinejad! – 29 May 2026
- White But Not Quite: Racism By and Racism Against Eastern Europeans. Lecture by Ivan Kalmar – 20 November 2022