Antisemitic Propaganda and Disinformation in Putin’s War Against Democracies

 on the Crocus City Hall outside of Moscow in March, Aleksandr Dugin, the influential Russian ultranationalist ideologue, 

 on his Telegram channel that the real culprit was not ISIS, which had taken responsibility, but “the Zionists.” The attack could have been “Zionists’ revenge” for Russia’s position on Gaza, he wrote, urging his 61,000 followers to look for the fingerprints of the Mossad, whose “close relations with ISIS” are supposedly well-known.

To most people, the idea that Israel is in cahoots with ISIS sounds like a kooky conspiracy theory, and it is. Eliminationist hatred of Israel and Jews is the 

 of the group’s extremist ideology. But those who follow the ebbs, flows, and transformations of global antisemitism know that this variation on classic antisemitic conspiracy theory fits seamlessly with other paranoid fantasies about Jewish power and perfidy. During the Cold War, Soviet anti-Israel propaganda accused Zionists—a term it redefined to match the Judeophobic delusions of that notorious Russian contribution to humanity, the 

 with Hitler in the genocide of their fellow Jews. The more Jews killed, the sooner Zionists would get their own state, Soviet propagandists explained. This itself was a variation on the Nazi apologists’ conspiracy theory about Jews having perpetrated the Holocaust on themselves. As a variation on the fantasy theme of the Holocaust as a Jew-on-Jew event, some claimed that Hitler had Jewish blood. This too 

Antisemitism is not just prejudice, it is also a highly effective political tool, particularly in times of crisis. 

The myth of the Mossad joining hands with ISIS has been around for as long as ISIS—and the notion that Jews were to blame for the Crocus City attack popped 

 on conspiracy theorist sites worldwide almost immediately. In this sense, Dugin’s remark did not reveal anything original. What it did do was confirm that antisemitic conspiracy theory is an inextricable part of Russian public discourse. What’s more, antisemitic speech is now an integral part of Russia’s domestic and global messaging.

One way this expresses itself is in incessant defamatory references to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish identity, which are not only acceptable, but practically de rigueur among Russian political and media elites. Following the Crocus City Hall attack, Margarita Simonyan, editor of Russian propaganda channel Russia Today and broadly viewed as Russia’s propagandist-in-chief, 

 a post on Telegram that blamed Zelensky for the attack and referred to him with a revolting antisemitic slur.

Simonyan follows signals from the very top. Last June, Putin 

 the St. Petersburg Economic Forum that Zelensky wasn’t a “good Jew” and quoted unidentified Jewish friends who supposedly said that “Zelensky is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” (The subtext was that he is presiding over what Russian propaganda refers to as Kyiv’s Nazi regime.) In May 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov 

 an Italian broadcaster that there wasn’t a contradiction between Zelensky’s Jewishness and his imaginary Nazi views. To bring the point home, he invoked the conspiracy myth about Hitler’s Jewish blood.

 of Russian and Soviet political leaders manipulating the “Jewish issue” for political gain. The KGB, Putin’s alma mater, viewed Jewish identity through the lens of state security, weaponizing it for political purposes with the help of propaganda and active measures. The state persecuted dissident Jews who condemned Soviet antisemitism and demanded the right to emigrate, while turning others into props in its propaganda efforts meant to convince the world that antisemitism in the USSR did not exist. In the last 25 years of the Cold War, antisemitism—framed as vicious anti-Israel and anti-Zionist demonization—became the USSR’s 

, ultimately pushing the vast majority of Soviet Jews out of the country.

By injecting conspiracy theory into public discourse, politically weaponized antisemitism undermines citizens’ trust in democracy and democratic institutions, stokes rage, and invites extremist illiberal ideologies into the political mainstream. 

, the KGB worked to sow discord between American Jews and Blacks (

), while the long-serving Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, was tasked with 

 American political elites that pro-Israel Jews were undermining American interests, Jewish disloyalty a common antisemitic trope. In 1973, the Soviet embassy in Paris became the target of a 

, proving it published and disseminated antisemitic propaganda. In 1975, the USSR succeeded at inducing the UN General Assembly to pass the infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former US Ambassador to the UN, viewed the UN’s attack on the Jewish national liberation movement as antisemitic and an “ideological assault on Western values, American power, and liberal democracy everywhere,” wrote historian Gil Troy in his book 

Putin’s own views on Jews have long been a subject of speculation, with conventional wisdom coalescing around the idea that he isn’t antisemitic. True or not, Putin’s personal feelings are ultimately irrelevant: Antisemitism is not just prejudice, it is also a highly effective political tool, particularly in times of crisis. No one knows that better than people like Putin and Lavrov, who came out of a system that perfected its use as such. It would have been almost astonishing if the Kremlin failed to reach for it at a time when Russia’s disastrous war in Ukraine is taking a massive toll on the country, antisemitic incitement related to the Israel-Hamas war is flooding global social media, American university campuses are overcome with protests, and polarization seems to be pulling Western democracies apart at the seams.

Threat to Democracy and National Stability

In recent months, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism (and a renowned Holocaust scholar), has been speaking with growing urgency of antisemitism as a “threat to democracy and national stability.”

“Once you believe that the Jews control the banks… you’ve given up on democracy,” she 

 in a discussion with Hillary Clinton at the 2024 Munich Security Conference. Authoritarian governments love antisemitism because it serves as a “spoon with which to stir up the pot,” Lipstadt continued. By injecting conspiracy theory into public discourse, politically weaponized antisemitism undermines citizens’ trust in democracy and democratic institutions, stokes rage, and invites extremist illiberal ideologies into the political mainstream. By demonizing one group, it facilitates the demonization of others, pitting racial and religious minorities against each other. To be sure, Lipstadt underscored, authoritarians can’t create problems where none exist, “but they can add fuel to the fire.”

Russia’s example illuminates these dynamics. The endless disparaging references to Zelensky’s Jewishness serve as a dog whistle to audiences whose support the Kremlin values—from the 

 fighting on behalf of Russia to “denazify” Ukraine, to American and European neo-Nazis and white supremacists who have long 

 as the last bastion of white power. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who attended two neo-Nazi conferences in Russia in the early 2000s, 

 as “the key to white survival.” Richard Spencer, an American neo-Nazi and key promoter of the alt-right ideology, 

 Russia as the “sole white power in the world.”

While China is new to instrumentalizing antisemitism, state actors such as Iran and Qatar have been at it for a while.

The Kremlin has exploited this interest and has worked proactively to “cultivate neo-Nazism in the West” as part of its “broader project to sow discord in Western democracies,” 

 scholars Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault and Joseph Stabile in 2020. Its support for “right-wing violence in the West,” they observed, should be viewed as an element of Putin’s “broader destabilization campaign” against Western societies. And by vilifying and discrediting Zelensky, Russia helps cultivate support among the isolationist portions of the American right and thus diminish the US’s backing of Ukraine.

A parallel trend is also evident on the opposite side of the political spectrum, where the hard left admires Russia for its anti-Western stance. This connection was strengthened further in the wake of the vicious Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, when the Kremlin assumed a de facto 

 posture reminiscent of its Cold War-era stance, 

 that of the anti-Israel left in the West. Russia’s posture also helps Russia 

 its strategic relationship with Iran, which positions the elimination of Israel at the heart of its foreign policy and has emerged as a key 

 for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Iran also appears to be helping Russia to 

. Russia, in turn, has proved its loyalty not only by failing to condemn Iran’s unprecedented attack against Israel, but, reportedly, by committing to 

 with new fighter jets and advanced anti-aircraft systems in the wake of Israel’s retaliation. Meanwhile, Russia’s UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzya continues to demonize Israel and lambast the US at the UN, as he has since October 7.

There is no sight dearer to the Kremlin than Western democracies tearing themselves apart over the Israel-Hamas war while antisemitism 

. The more they remain focused on these issues, the less bandwidth they will have for Putin’s war in Ukraine. Having taken advantage of the October 7 catastrophe to 

, Russia is now positioning itself at the helm of the expanding and increasingly anti-Western BRICS intergovernmental pact, where anti-Israel sentiments seem to be as much of a litmus test for belonging as anti-American ones. Stirring the antisemitism pot, coupled with assuming an overt anti-Israel stance, is paying off for Russia in multiple ways.

Russia is not the only country taking advantage of the authoritarian regimes’ favorite scheme today. In the wake of October 7, China has also 

 antisemitism “as a tool of its anti-US and anti-Western diplomacy,” wrote Josh Rogin in the 

Lipstadt’s deputy Aaron Keyak told Rogin there’s been a dramatic rise of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel content on Chinese social media, reflecting China’s view of Israel as a Western ally. Sowing distrust in Western democracy around the globe is “a core pillar” of China’s international diplomacy and “a tool of promoting their national interests.” At the same time, portraying Western democracies as being run by a “small cabal of Jews” helps convince China’s citizens that its system is superior to that of the West.

While China is new to instrumentalizing antisemitism for these purposes, state actors such as Iran and Qatar have been at it for a while.

“In the 45 years since the Islamic revolution, Iran has been saying the same thing about both the United States and Israel,” said Yehudit Barsky, research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) and an expert on Middle East counterterrorism. “All the tropes dovetail into one consistent, coherent, anti-Western message,” which alternatively casts Israel as a lackey of American imperialism and the orchestrator of American foreign policy. Like Russia, Iran seeks to sow chaos and undermine belief in democratic societies. Writing for the 

, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute Steven Stalinsky 

 that Iran’s terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, are “grooming” activists in the US and fomenting anti-Israel and anti-American sentiments at American universities.

For its part, Qatar has drawn recent attention for its 

The Corruption of the American Mind: How Concealed Foreign Funding of Higher Education in the United States Predicts the Erosion of Democratic Values and Antisemitic Sentiments on Campus

 reports that at least 100 American institutions of higher learning have received $13 billion in “undocumented contributions from foreign governments” over the last decade. Many of these regimes, it notes, are authoritarian, with Qatar being the largest donor.

The researchers have concluded that institutions receiving “undocumented money” from such foreign regimes report higher incidents of antisemitism and that this relationship was stronger when the undocumented donors were Middle Eastern regimes. Such campuses also experienced higher incidents of the suppression of free speech and an exacerbation of “intergroup conflict.” The report also found that “campus-level antisemitic incidents forward predict country-level antisemitic incidents.”

For liberal democracies, fighting antisemitic propaganda and disinformation by authoritarian state actors is notoriously difficult. State actors take advantage of what they perceive as open societies’ weaknesses—in particular, freedom of speech—while taking full advantage of recent technological advances. It is now easier than ever to produce and disseminate antisemitic content to billions of people.

Rethinking funding and structure of educational curricula might be a good place for Western societies to start gaining ground in this fight.

“I can generate 10 short antisemitic articles with artificial intelligence within 10 minutes,” said Lev Topor, a scholar of antisemitism and cybersecurity, and author of three books, including 

: Conspiracies, Anonymous Communications and White Supremacy Networks on the Dark Web

. Slick new websites peddling antisemitic content in multiple languages pop up after high-profile events involving Israel and Hamas, boasting top-notch graphics, making it easy for users to engage with, download, and share content. Some promote a specific foreign policy issue, such as disrupting the Arab-Israel normalization—a telltale sign of a state actor’s involvement.

“We haven’t thought about our educational system as a strategic asset, but it is,” said Barsky about the US. “When we fail to think of it that way, other people take advantage of our failure and exploit it.” Barsky, whose family fled the USSR prior to the Cold War, also believes that America’s educational system needs to present a more balanced picture of the US, including its role in the confrontation with the USSR.

“Our educational institutions don’t explain to students how the US won the cause for freedom and why it’s worth defending it,” Barsky said.

One immediate step to take is to encourage more institutions and government agencies 

 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. This legally non-binding and widely adopted definition has proven to be a crucial educational tool in helping identify and combat antisemitism.

The first step, however, is recognizing the problem. Acknowledging that we are facing hostile state actors—cynically weaponizing a toxic mix of antisemitic and anti-Western propaganda and disinformation to undermine the stability and security of our society—will ultimately point us to solutions to thwart that effort, without abandoning the principles and values that uphold our democracy.

senior advisor at the Kennan Institute where she oversees its regional partnerships and programming, independent journalism initiatives, and the 

. She manages the Kennan Institute’s 

. Tabarovsky has coordinated Kennan’s 

US-Israel working group on Russia in the Middle East

, Kennan Institute alumni conferences, and other initiatives and events. Her research expertise includes the politics of historical memory, Russia's independent media, the Holocaust, Stalin’s repressions, and Soviet and contemporary left antisemitism. 

Cover photo: In this photo released by the official website of the office of the Iranian Presidency, Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi, walk at the presidency palace in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, July 19, 2022. (Iranian Presidency Office via AP)

This piece explores Russia’s long history of antisemitism, alongside its current antisemitic disinformation and propaganda campaign targeting American youth. Tabarovsky also looks at Russia’s likeminded partners, and the implications for US national security.  

Russia’s long history of exploiting antisemitism for political purposes is benefiting its larger strategy to destabilize democratic societies—and the West.

Somewhere in the recesses of my memory, there is an image. Is it from a movie? A picture seen in childhood?

It was a picture of a man in a Soviet standard-issue gray 

 and a cocked ear-flapped hat sitting awkwardly on a low, rough-hewn wooden platform held up, not by wheels, but by four ball-bearings – a primitive skateboard of sorts. He has no legs, and his trousers are fully turned in. In each hand, he holds a thick, rounded block of wood to propel himself forward.  

This image of a severely disabled veteran of the 1941-1945 Soviet-German War, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, has stayed with me. It is pertinent now. Earlier this year, the Soviet Union marked the 75th anniversary of its victory in the war against Nazi Germany. 

Others are recalling these veterans now as well. In an essay titled 

“The Invalid. Victory Day. A Postscript,”

 Lyudmila Ulitskaya, one of contemporary Russia’s most celebrated writers, revisits how thousands of veterans, disfigured by war, flooded the streets of Soviet cities in the post-war years. 

Ulitskaya observes that there were millions of them, adding in 

 that “this is not an exaggeration: it’s an understatement.” She continued: 

According to the data of the Military-Medical Museum in St. Petersburg, 46 million, 250 thousand Soviet citizens were wounded in the course of the Great Patriotic War. Of these, 10 million returned from the front with various forms of physical disability. Among these: 775,000 with head wounds; 155,000 with one eye; 54,000 blind… With one arm: 3 million 147 thousand. With one leg: 3 million 255 thousand. Without both legs: one million 121 thousand… With partially torn off arms and legs: 418,905.

Thousands of veterans, disfigured by war, flooded the streets of Soviet cities in the post-war years. 

In the totalitarian society of the late 1940s USSR, there was little kindness toward these newly-helpless warriors. They were given insulting nicknames. “Scooters” were legless veterans, while “kangaroos” hopped on their remaining leg.  The partial limbs of men called “turtles” looked like flippers. “Flounders” looked out at the world with one eye. Perhaps the most heartbreakingly cynical nickname was given to men who lost their arms and their legs: “samovars.” There were 85,942 such limbless survivors in the post-war USSR. 

The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder did not exist then. And, in any case, the usual form of psychiatry practiced by the Soviet state was punitive. Many veterans had no one to come back to after the war. Others feared going back and becoming a burden and stayed away; their families believed them to be missing-in-action. The ones who did return exhibited many of the symptoms of untreated post-traumatic stress: explosions of anger and physical violence; binge-drinking and panhandling; an inability to maintain intimate relationships and hold down a job; indigence and homelessness. They gained a reputation for being unbalanced, which pushed them further to the margins of  society. 

In the eyes of the authorities, the men and women who returned from the war with such severe disabilities spoiled the picture of post-war Soviet cities. At some point in the late 1940s (apparently, in the run-up to Joseph Stalin’s 70th birthday), the authorities gave orders to clear them off the streets – first in Moscow, and then in other cities. The campaign of erasure gathered speed under Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. Veterans who could live independent lives received state benefits (including specialized medical care and access to Black Sea resorts), but the challenges faced by maimed veterans led to homelessness and charges of “parasitism” (a refusal to engage in socially productive labor). Both conditions were deemed anti-social behavior, 

, and provided the authorities with a legal excuse to ship these veterans to “Invalids’ Homes” in distant regions. 

Many of these facilities were established in abandoned rural monasteries, and poorly financed. Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel V. Romanov of Russia’s Higher School of Economics 

“the treatment of the residents was in many cases inhumane, and their forcible removal there was tantamount not even to exile but to ‘warehousing.’” The men and women sent to these facilities found it  “hard to live but easy to die – forgotten by their loved ones and the country, which they defended and for which they gave their health.” 

Another key factor in their treatment was Stalin’s reported fear of the social power wielded by veterans as a group. Having paid for victory with their blood, they came back with a moral authority that must have felt threatening to the dictator. Those who had made it all the way to Berlin would have seemed especially dangerous. They had witnessed life where there was no communist party. Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov observe that 

severely disabled veterans formed their own special category of the politically unreliable

. The secret services watched them like a hawk, suspecting these men of espionage, anti-kolkhoz and anti-Soviet propaganda, sabotage, and subversion. 

The fate of these injured veterans illustrates the profound gaps of memory about the war that exist in Russia today. Anyone who grew up in the post-war years saw these abandoned veterans, but their story has not been incorporated into Russia’s official memory of the war. As the heir to the Great Victory, the Russian state deploys national memory of the war as a tool to foster patriotism, pride, and loyalty toward itself. It also discards whatever undermines the triumphalism of the official narrative – including any notion that Stalin’s regime and its conduct of the war contributed heavily to the unimaginably high price of victory. 

The erasure is clearest in the notable lack of photographic images of these wounded veterans in public space. Given their ubiquity in Soviet cities, and the close attention of the secret services, this virtually complete absence of any such record is extraordinary. 

Censorship was likely the primary reason. A 

memo sent by state security services to local war censorship departments in January 1945

 ordered these officials to examine letters sent home from the front – and remove any photos depicting individuals or groups with “amputated limbs, disfigured faces, or blind[ness].” The security services argued that such images might be enemy provocations aimed at damaging  morale. They may also have anticipated the war’s end, and the likelihood that citizens’ attention would turn from defeating the enemy to welcoming loved ones home to rebuild their lives together. Seeing their loved ones disabled might provoke subversive sentiments. 

In the absence of photographs, drawings such as those made by Soviet artist 

help facilitate essential memory work. Dobrov first explored the lives of veterans in the Invalids’ Homes in the mid-1970s, taking a job as a medical attendant at Valaam – an island in Russia’s north whose former monastery housed one of most famous, or infamous, of these facilities. Dobrov used his spare time to furtively sketch men and women he encountered at Valaam and elsewhere. 

Among the most heart-rending drawings is 

a series entitled “War’s Autographs.”

 It depicts a youngish-looking man, carefully swaddled in a blanket. His body is tiny, and one must look for  a few moments to realize that the man  has no limbs. His facial expression is tense, and his eyes are fixed at a point in space beyond both  artist and viewer. (Dobrov adds that this man had also lost both his speech and hearing.) 

Those who worked at Valaam might have seen this veteran as a man with no name and no history. Yet when Dobrov’s drawings finally saw the light of day in the time of Perestroika, a man claimed to recognize the subject of the sketch as his own father. He came to Valaam and erected a modest tombstone for him in that place. Few others who died in that facility received such a tribute. 

Dobrov’s drawings also give us a rare and invaluable glimpse of the special tragedy of disabled female veterans. In the post-war Soviet society, 

there were 641 men for every one thousand women

, and badly-injured male veterans could still find a marriage partner. Severely disabled women veterans’ chances of  marriage were close to zero.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first Victory Parade in Red Square on June 24, 1945, Russia’s Ministry of Defense unveiled a new section on its website: 

“The Triumph of a Victorious People.”

 are a critical part of Russia’s collective historical memory. Among the most iconic images from that day are those of  Red Army soldiers carrying trophy Nazi standards pointed toward the earth, and then throwing them at the feet of the Lenin Mausoleum. In another memorable image, 

Marshal Georgy Zhukov rides into the Red Square

 on a stunning white stallion to review the parade. 

The perfectly-choreographed spectacle hypnotizes to this day. The men marching in it had fought in the hellish landscape of  World War II just weeks before. They faced unimaginable horrors, fought with extraordinary and incomprehensible valor, and survived long odds to return home victorious. 

Yet authenticity fuses tightly with propaganda in these images. The state was meticulous in  creating this triumphal picture. Senior officer corps aside, all those who marched that day in the parade were men under 30 years of age and at least 176 centimeters tall. New uniforms were ordered and special banners were produced. Veterans chosen for the spectacle drilled for days to perfect their marching.

 observed that the USSR made a priority of showing its wartime allies watching the parade that the “war had not exhausted and bled the USSR dry: that, on the contrary, it had acquired the most powerful weapon – the psychology of victors… An army consisting of such people can be a terrifying enemy and an effective ally.” 

Of course, there was no room for the injured and the disabled in that parade. Nor was there room for women, despite the fact that at least half a million of them served 

 as fighter pilots, anti-aircraft machine-gunners, drivers, airplane mechanics, members of tank crews, frontline doctors, nurses, and wherever else they were needed. Millions more volunteered. Some 150,000 came back from the war highly decorated. Yet the only place we see women in the images of that first Victory Parade is among the crowds watching it. 

Compare this official visual narrative of the war to the narrative conveyed in Ulitskaya’s essay on disabled veterans. Her piece begins with personal recollections, and evokes the memory of men and women unseen and unremembered in the nation’s official narrative. The juxtaposition of images from that 1945 parade with those presented by Ulitskaya reveals the sharp dichotomy at the core of Russia’s remembrance of the war. 

There was no room for the injured and the disabled.... Nor was there room for women, despite the fact that at least half a million of them served in regular Red Army fighting units.

“Our Victory has two faces—one beautiful and the other terrible, all scars, unbearable to look at,” wrote the Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich in her book, 

. One face turns to the human beings disfigured by war, powerless and abandoned by their country; the other face projects only strength, masculinity, and military glory. 

In contemporary Russia, nothing illustrates this persistent duality in war memory better than the story of the Immortal Regiment – the commemorative act of walking through the streets on Victory Day, bearing photos of loved ones who fought in the war. 

The concept was created in 2012 by three Tomsk journalists from the independent TV channel TV2. One of the three journalists, Igor Dmitriyev, recalled that the passing of his grandfather – who was a veteran of the war – left him longing for an authentic and personal connection to the annual commemoration. This feeling was so powerful that Dmitriyev and his young daughter would find an elderly veteran in the crowd each May 9 and spend time talking with him. 

By creating images of their vanished relatives, Dmitriyev and his Immortal Regiment co-founders imagined that they could 

bring their grandparents back to march with them

 – "even if they were [only] in our arms.” Their idea spread like wildfire, shining a spotlight on a popular hunger for an antidote to the increasingly soulless state-driven commemorations. Within two years, citizens in hundreds of Russian towns and villages had organized their own Immortal Regiment processions. 

The explosive growth of this grassroots movement led Russian authorities to immediately seek to coopt it. The loosely-structured nature of the Immortal Regiment initiative allowed officials to pour money into a state-driven version that served their objectives. Soon, dozens of new Immortal Regiment chapters popped up throughout the country, and millions participated in the processions. Kremlin-friendly “cultural exchange” NGOs, working in tandem with Russian embassies and consulates, organized similar processions all over the world, from 

The initiative undoubtedly breathed new life into May 9 commemorations, shifting public energies from passive viewing of military parades and personal remembrance to large-scale commemorative action. Yet state involvement transformed the initiative’s original intention. The founders saw it as an independent, bottom-up, and explicitly apolitical movement, which sought to help families “remember their members who endured the war” and tell 

  These recollections might be entirely unheroic, but deeply relatable on a human level. Carrying photos of  loved ones was the central part of their vision. 

The Immortal Regiment idea spread like wildfire, shining a spotlight on a popular hunger for an antidote to the increasingly soulless state-driven commemorations. 

By contrast, participants in state-driven Immortal Regiment processions 

 handed to them by organizers. Many of these photos are simply discarded after the march. The notions of family history, and reflections on personal grief and loss, disappear. The jingoistic spirit that often characterizes Victory Day commemorations is also directly antithetical to the intentions of the Immortal Regiment’s founders. (

“Immortal Regiment reached Washington”

 blared one headline, echoing  wartime dispatches that announced the Red Army’s conquest of Berlin.) 

The transformation of the Immortal Regiment is testimony to the strange interplay between grassroots and state memory of the war in Russia. The state ignores complex grassroots memory – until the grassroots has something useful to offer. In this case, Russian authorities saw a way to scale up and replicate authentic expressions of meaning on a mass level, without challenging its own grand black-and-white narrative. Yet, in that process, the original conception of the Immortal Regiment was lost. 

Another image from the 1945 Victory Day parade holds one of the deepest paradoxes of Russia’s historical memory about the war. As Marshal Zhukov rides into the Red Square on his white stallion, he is met by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the commander of the parade, who rides a black horse. Rokossovsky was one of the engineers of Nazi Germany’s military defeat, and a decorated war hero who commanded Soviet troops in crucial battles. 

Yet just eight years earlier, Rokossovsky was a victim of Stalin’s purges. Falsely accused of being a spy, he withstood 

two years of interrogations and brutal torture

, including two mock executions. His NKVD interrogators broke his ribs, kicked out his teeth, and drove needles under his nails. He steadfastly refused to sign a false confession. 

Rokossovsky was luckier than his peers. Stalin purged the Red Army officer corps in the years before the war, 

destroying some 80 percent of officers of all ranks

, from majors to generals. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet defense minister after Stalin’s death, later estimated that Stalin’s onslaught resulted in a total of 82,000 executions. But Rokossovsky survived long enough to get a second chance at life. 

Soviet leaders released him from prison in March 1940, following the disastrous Soviet attempt to take over Finland. That catastrophe brought home to Soviet leaders that the Red Army needed skilled commanders. Rokossovsky proved himself to be such a leader when Nazi Germany attacked fifteen months later.  

In 1956, in his famous “secret speech” about Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev acknowledged that Rokossovsky had been innocent all along, and 

 as one of the “excellent” and “unquestionably loyal” military cadres of the pre-war USSR: “Those of them who managed to survive, despite severe tortures to which they were subjected in the prisons, have from the first war days shown themselves real patriots and heroically fought for the glory of the Fatherland.”  

It is impossible to fully appreciate the extent of Soviet people’s sacrifice in the war – and the true price of their victory – without taking Stalin’s repressions into account. The demolition of the Red Army in purges encouraged Hitler, and also led directly to the catastrophes of the first months of the war, when millions of Soviet soldiers were captured or left to die, unburied, on the battlefields. The meeting of Zhukov and Rokossovsky in Red Square in 1945, under Stalin’s watchful eye, reminds us of this history. 

Stalin purged the Red Army officer corps in the years before the war, destroying some 80 percent of officers of all ranks, from majors to generals. 

That powerful image also raises a crucial question: How did a people who were, in the words of Svetlana Alexievich, “humiliated, trampled upon, insulted – having gone through Stalin’s camps and treachery”– find the surge of patriotism and self-sacrifice that led them to victory?

One wartime servicewoman interviewed by Alexievich in 

, offers a glimpse of an answer. As the war began, she was a young woman whose beloved uncle was in Stalin’s camps. But she recalled hearing 

, calling on the Soviet people to rise up against the enemy, and remembered her mother saying: “We’ll defend the Motherland and sort it out later.” The woman’s personal response was swift: “Everybody loved the Motherland. I ran to the recruiting office at once.” 

Some believed war might change things for the better. Perhaps Stalin finally “would trust his people.” Some found that the outbreak of the war provided a release from the terror-drenched prewar years, during which people 

war offered the only "hope of salvation."

 But Stalin’s repressions continued, both during and after the war. As another one of Alexievich’s witnesses puts it: “After the Victory everybody became silent. Silent and afraid, as before the war.”

Stalin’s repressions are no secret in Russia; nor does the state pretend these events didn’t happen. In 2017, Vladimir Putin unveiled 

 – a state memorial to the victims of political repressions. 

Yet, conversations about the war and political repressions rarely happen in the same breath.  The main reason: Stalin’s purges – before, during, and after the war – immeasurably complicate the state’s official narrative. 

“How to combine the story of us as a victorious country with that tragic, ugly, betrayal-filled memory… the memory of the crimes?” asked Elena Zhemkova, the executive director of Memorial, a Russian NGO that leads the fight to preserve the memory of the victims of political repressions, 

The complexity of memory about the war in Russia may be why those who shape its official narratives today have followed their Soviet predecessors in focusing on the memories of victory, and not the war itself. War is messy. Victory is more straightforward, and makes finding unity easier.  

This gamble has paid off. The popularity of May 9 grows with each passing year. Victory Day is “the least controversial national holiday and a unifying rather than a dividing force for Russian society,” 

Yet how long will May 9 continue to serve this purpose? The unity it engenders rests on two pillars: a national memory built around scrubbed narratives of heroism and victimhood, and  a grassroots memory built around individual and family stories. 

The commemorations created by the official narrative alone can feel like noisy, superficial jubilations, veering uncomfortably close to the grotesque. The contemporary customs of 

dressing up toddlers in Soviet wartime uniforms

 all feed into what many in Russia describe derisively as 

a recent coinage that combines the word “victory” with a word whose root communicates something between “running amok,” “becoming rabid,” and “foaming at the mouth.” 

 and the simpler commemorative events of the early post-war years is stark. These events were anchored in grief and loss, and a heartfelt desire to never let such horror happen again. As the wartime generation departs the stage, such meaningful connections to the war will become harder and harder to maintain . 

“How to combine the story of us as a victorious country with that tragic, ugly, betrayal-filled memory… the memory of the crimes?” 

Perhaps one way to preserve this crucially important and personal aspect of war commemoration is to weave lost stories into the national memory. They are the stories of the disabled and the repressed, the stories of the forgotten that the state has erased from the official narrative for decades for ideological reasons. 

I think of those countless photos of injured soldiers that  Soviet wartime censors snatched from their letters home. Where are they now? It’s time they were located and declassified, and made available at last for public viewing. Doing so would make for a powerful contribution to Russia’s national memory of the war and the victory won by its people. 

Izabella Tabarovsky is a senior program associate with the Kennan Institute and a contributing writer with 

Cover photograph: Residents of St. Petersburg, Russia, carry portraits of family members who served in World War Two on Victory Day in  2014 as part of an "Immortal Regiment" march. (Dmitry Lovetsky / ​AP / ​Shutterstock

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The official narrative of Soviet victory in World War II erases uncomfortable truths. Can Russians reclaim the forgotten human stories of those who defeated Nazi Germany?

Russia's Lost War 

In my Siberian hometown of Novosibirsk, the chances of walking out onto the street in 1977 and running into a living, breathing American were virtually nil. The Soviet Union, which would start to unravel a short eight years later, seemed as solid as ever. Barely a generation separated the country from the peak of an orgy of mass repressions. While society was starting to open up, fear still hung in the air.

And yet, a group of some thirty Americans came to my hometown that summer. They were 

 put together by the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the decades after the 1958 Lacy-Zarubin Agreement on exchanges in culture, science, and education between the United States and the USSR. For a full five weeks, they walked the streets of the city in the open, and they could be touched and talked to. It was even possible to invite them over to dinner at your apartment, and if you did, they would likely have accepted the invitation.

Undoubtedly, the exhibit had much to offer. Inside the giant geodesic dome that the Americans had set up in the center of the city were more than 400 prints by some of the most influential American photographers of the day, from 

. The Polaroid Corporation set up a stand where American photographers could photograph Soviet visitors and produce prints in seconds. They even built a darkroom with a special glass wall that allowed visitors to watch the American staff develop the photographs.

In the visually austere Soviet environment, the images lining the walls aimed to fascinate and impress. The latest achievements in American photographic technology were on display, as well as a variety of subjects, including underwater fashion photography, time-delayed shots of a flying bullet, and artistic semi-nudes that would have raised the hackles of a Soviet censor.

No question was off limits, from the most innocently ignorant (“Do American cows have false teeth?” “Is it true that American women can have a child in five months?”) to the utterly hostile (“Why are you bombing our sailors in Vietnam?” “Why do you kill black people?”).

Still, none of these compared to the most fascinating exhibit of all: the guides who accompanied the show. It was these young, friendly, outgoing Americans, who day in and day out demonstrated the equipment and answered Soviet visitors’ eager questions, who were the primary attraction. No question was off limits, from the most innocently ignorant (“Do American cows have false teeth?” “Is it true that American women can have a child in five months?”) to the utterly hostile (“Why are you bombing our sailors in Vietnam?” “Why do you kill black people?”).

By the time Photography USA arrived in Novosibirsk

, USIA had been sending exhibits to the Soviet Union for nearly 20 years. The first exhibit coincided with Nixon’s 1959 visit to Moscow. It was here, at the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki, that the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate took place. It was then that the USIA officials took note just how wildly popular the Russian-speaking American guides were.

The exhibit program that developed over the years was elaborate, well-organized, and well-funded. From 1959 to 1989, USIA put together 19 exhibits that touched on a wide range of topics, from American leisure to education, from architecture and design to American technology in the home. 

The exhibits traveled to two dozen Soviet cities in total.

 Toward the end of the program, one former USIA official estimated, it cost some $20 million to put an exhibit together, ship it overseas, and show it on a typical six-city tour.

In all, over 17 million Soviet people are estimated to have seen the exhibits, and the impressions of each lingered and reverberated. People held on to the brochures and pins from each one, passing them on to others. Some 30 years after his work as a guide with Photography USA, John Beyrle, who went on to become U.S. ambassador to Russia, discovered that some of the people who had attended the exhibit still had those brochures. Hundreds of people must have read each copy, he told me. Today, there are chat rooms on the Internet where Russians still 

 the impact the exhibit had on them. They can still remember and accurately describe the images they saw.

As much as technology and other display items served as a point of interest, it is fair to say that it was human contact that people craved the most and that left the deepest impression.  Isolated from the rest of the world, Soviet people wanted to know what life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain. With their questions, they tested every one of the assumptions, shaped by Soviet propaganda, that they held about the United States. But more than anything, they wanted to satisfy the basic human urge to get to know another person, to swap life stories with a stranger, to learn about others’ experiences, and make new friends.

As much as technology and other display items served as a point of interest, it is fair to say that it was human contact that people craved the most and that left the deepest impression.

What happens when you first meet a person whom you had always been told was your enemy? At what point do you realize that standing in front of you is simply another human being? Staring at each other across the symbolic divides of the exhibition space — Americans on platforms, the clamorous crowds surrounding them — each side had to set aside their stereotypes. Confronted with one another, both sides were forced to replace the propaganda images they carried with images of real life and 

In that encounter, there was mystery. Both sides saw the other as exotic and enchanting, though for entirely different reasons. Young Americans were fascinated by the austere environment of Soviet cities, where the only commercial signs on the buildings were the generic “Meat,” “Bread,” and “Fabrics.” Some were charmed by the decaying chic of the Moscow Metropol Hotel and the legendary poor service in Soviet restaurants. The red-lettered “exhortations” on the buildings urging Soviet citizens toward greater socialist achievements 

Many Soviets visitors to the exhibits, on the other hand, were fascinated by the fact that the female guides, most of whom were in their 20s, were not married and did not have children. In a country obsessed with the nationality question since the 1917 revolution, they endlessly probed the guides’ ethnic origins. Some guides recalled that saying they were American was not enough. Their interlocutors wanted to get to the roots of their heritage, to decipher the meaning of a guide’s dark curls or “oriental” facial features.

The crowds were not always friendly. Agitators abounded, rehearsing staples of Soviet propaganda regarding high medical costs, unemployment, and racial tensions in the United States and pushing the guides to the wall with hostile and unrelenting questioning. “Why does the United States support the racist regime of South Africa?” “Why do you have so much crime in America?” “Is it true that people are afraid to go outside at night?” “Why does your president say we don’t have human rights? What rights is he talking about?” “Why does the United States have military bases around the world? We don’t have any outside our own borders.” “You say Communists aren’t persecuted in the United States. What about Angela Davis?”  Some of the questioners were so relentless that they brought a number of guides to tears.

Thrown into this experience, and largely left to sink or swim, the guides quickly learned to work the crowds. “When you were on the ropes, when the agitators had the upper hand and were dominating the conversation, you would look around in the crowd for people who could be potential sympathetic voices,” John Beyrle told me. “You could almost feel, by looking at their faces, who was unhappy that you were being subjected to a grilling by these agitators. Maybe they wouldn’t jump to your defense, but if you appealed to them and said, ‘I’m a guest in your country! Is this how you treat your guests?’ — that was immediately an opening for someone else to say, ‘Enough of that, 

.’” Questions about life in America often followed, prompted by simple curiosity about family, education, and the cost of living in another country.

I, too, had a question that I posed repeatedly to the guides. I wanted to know whether they received some special training from intelligence services before they traveled to enemy territory. Did someone take them to some CIA bunker and brief them on how to handle conversations with the Soviets? Were they told what to say? Didn’t they at least have talking points: if they ask you this, you say that; if they ask you that, you pivot in this direction?

I eventually had to believe what the guides were telling me. To be sure, they were supposed to have conversational Russian skills and know basic facts about the United States to share with the visitors. What was far more important for USIA officials, though, was that the guides had good communication skills and could represent themselves. In USIA’s eyes, these young kids, with their individuality, their own political views (and lack of fear in expressing them), their own cultural preferences, and their own perspectives were America’s greatest product — one that stood in great contrast to the imposed uniformity of thought in the Soviet Union. 

This decision proved prescient. Most of the guides were young college graduates, largely liberal in their political views, and they did not hold back from strongly criticizing their government and its foreign policy — especially with respect to the Vietnam War. The fact that employees of the American government could do so and still be back at work the next day was a source of great surprise and confusion for the 

. In a country where conformity was a matter of survival, this freedom of expression told vastly more about America than anything else at the exhibit could.