Policing Memory: Historical Truth and Human Rights in Post-Soviet Russia

Author: Adia May

October 6, 2026

Russian textbooks delivered by the occupying authorities to a school in Borova, in Ukraine's Kharkivska region. [Image credit: Human Rights Watch]

Introduction 

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia inherited more than just a fractured state. It had to find an answer to the unresolved question of national identity: what narrative would explain who Russians were and what their state had done. Malinova (2018) coined this as a search for a “usable past”—a coherent, respected story that aimed to replace the trampled Soviet one. Three decades on, that answer has emerged under Vladimir Putin. His response is not a shared, debated, plural, or contested account of historical culture, but a state-crafted memory regime revolving around the Great Patriotic War (the Russian term for the Soviet war against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945), national pride, Western animosity, and the careful distortion of global affairs. This article contends that in contemporary Russia, history functions less as an account of the past than as a vehicle for legitimizing governance: the ultimate means of increasing regime power and narrowing the spaces where citizens, journalists, and scholars can discuss the past and the present (Chatterje-Doody and Tolz, 2019).

The central claim developed here is that “historic truth,” meaning the state's claim that certain narratives of Russia's past should be protected from contradiction, is no longer confined to commemoration in Russia. It has become a component of governance through which the state can exercise authority over the recognition and interpretation of historical events. By disposition, history is tangible across education, propaganda, and the purposes of war-making. What began as selective remembrance—prioritizing wartime pride over the memory of repression and state violence—has developed into a ruthless regime that criminalizes historic interpretations, hardens taught obedience in schools, modernizes Soviet-style propaganda for the modern audience, and pushes a fixed moral discourse regarding the war in Ukraine (Kolesnik and Rusanov, 2025). Understanding this progression exposes how memory politics is not solely a force of soft, cautious manipulation, but a tactic with swift and serious consequences for freedom of expression, human rights, academic liberty, and the protection of citizens involved in armed conflicts. 

This article treats memory politics as a human rights issue because control over historical narrative impacts more than just public opinion. It entangles national identity, global perception, academia, and the ethics of distorting historical facts. Under international human rights law, freedom of expression includes the right to seek, receive, and share information and ideas. In contrast, freedom of association preserves the ability of societal collectives to organize and document abuses (ICCPR, Articles 19 and 22). Academic freedom, alongside cultural rights, are also impeded when teachers, historians, students, and journalists are restricted from researching or preserving contested history. In this context, policing of memory in Russia matters as it directly undermines human rights laws and reflects efforts of the state to actively warp public perception of Soviet-era violence, present war aggressions, propaganda, and the ability to participate meaningfully in public life. 

Making a Usable Past

The post-Soviet Russian state faced an acute legitimacy dilemma. The state had experienced a catastrophic loss of reputation. Without an uncontested account of the Soviet experience and no natural successor ideology, the new Russian Federation had not formed a ready-made narrative to anchor the recent shift of power (Malinova, 2018). The 1990s were, comparatively, an era of critical openness, in which liberal and nationalist discussions over Soviet Russia competed for the spotlight. However, this free discourse did not survive the centralization of power under Putin. Permitted historical thought was pushed toward strengthening state authority and achievement, rather than supporting self-critical reflection (Chatterje-Doody and Tolz, 2019; Nelson, 2015).

A final narrative culmination drew its emotional and moral consensus from the Great Patriotic War. The triumph over Nazi Germany became a singular, celebrated experience that united citizens and represented a universal point of Russian identity. It was a past that could mobilize the nation across all generations, regardless of political conflict and regional differences, one that cast the state as a victor in war and a heroic martyr (Kolesnik and Rusanov, 2025). The narrative, therefore, is a highly selective construction: Stalinist oppression, the Gulag operations, and Soviet violence are softened and reframed as unfortunate but necessary costs of a purportedly justified project (Golovashina, 2024).

The result is a memory regime with two simultaneous objectives. Domestically, it offers citizens a source of heightened patriotic sentiment and a continuity that substitutes for the troubled task of reckoning with the Soviet violence inflicted during its reign. Internationally, it paints a picture in which the West, referring to NATO involvement, liberal internationalism, and “color revolutions” in particular, is portrayed as a historically relentless antagonist, upholding contemporary Russia as a righteous successor to the assailed yet victorious nation (Malinova, 2018; Chatterje-Doody and Tolz, 2020; Finkel and Brudny, 2012). These binary functions elevate memory policing beyond academic curiosity and cement the tactic as an established method of legitimizing authoritarian rule in contemporary Russia. It not only formulates conditioned narratives about the nation’s past but prioritizes specific forms of loyalty and delegitimizes specific criticisms of the present. 

The human right being directly impeded here is access to information: citizens are fed a single account of their nation’s history and denied access to the raw material from which independent interpretations could be formed. This matters because an incomplete or warped historical account not only affects perception of the past but also shapes how citizens understand state aggression, foreign policy, and their own national identity in the present.

Historical Truth

If the 1990s and 2000s established a preferred narrative, the period of 2014, following Russia's annexation of Crimea and the deepening conflict with Ukraine, marked the point at which this account became law. Russia has extended the meaning of “memory legislation” to encompass criminalization of the so-called “rehabilitation of Nazism,” protecting the chosen sentiments of the Great Patriotic War from public criticism and establishing legal sanctions for interpretations that differ from the state-verified account (Ivangorodsky, 2023; Cocetti, 2022). Article 354.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, commonly associated with the “rehabilitation of Nazism,” is the clearest example, demonstrating how disputes over historical accounts can become potential criminal offences, effectively filtering free discourse among journalists, historians, teachers, and ordinary citizens. 

This juridification reached a further peak with the 2020 constitutional changes. Article 67.1, the constitutional provision stating that the Russian Federation protects historical truths, transformed the “protection of historical truth” into a governmental and national moral value, grouping memory directly into the vocabulary of state sovereignty and national security (Arribas, 2023; Bagandova, 2025).  What had previously operated through administrative pressure and general governmental accord now held the burden of constitutional law. In practice, this translates historical expression as political action; thus, to challenge the perpetuated lineage of history, Soviet rule, or the increasing tensions with Ukraine is potentially framed as a violation of constitutional principles and a threat to governmental order (Vorobiova, 2026).

The reach of this legal mechanism cannot be seen only in formal law but also in cyberspaces where online commentary, relevant posts, and digital archives are treated with the same discretion as print and broadcast media (Golovashina, 2024). The cumulative effect is a move from memory law as an imaginative blockade, shielding the dignity of war victims, for example, to a law that reasserts state control over which versions of the past may be debated, published, or believed (Nuzov, 2022).

Skorobogatov (2026) injects an important qualification to this legal construction. The execution and enforcement of memory law is purposefully uneven rather than uniform. Prosecutions under Article 354.1 and related statutes cluster around visible or organizationally significant targets, such as journalists, historians, and non-governmental organization (NGO) staff. At the same time, the great majority of informal historical disputes go technically unprosecuted. This specific regime of criminalizing specific channels of historical discussion, Skorobogatov argues, is what makes the law effective, as it creates uncertainty over who will be targeted next. Such skepticism generates a mechanism that surpasses the aforementioned channels, encouraging self-censorship amongst teachers, citizens, and commentators who may not be indicted in the first place. 

The central human right being targeted, in this respect, is freedom of expression. Enforcing a legal protection over one narrative essentially jeopardizes the perceived authenticity of all others, whether voiced in a classroom, a courtroom, or online. The impact is not limited to those who are formally penalized by the state. Memory law also encourages individuals to perform self-censorship because historians, teachers, journalists, and ordinary people may avoid plural discussion when they cannot predict which lines of thought will be treated as unlawful. This restriction narrows the range of historical perspectives that can spread naturally. In practical terms, freedom of expression becomes conditional. It is entirely dependent on whether speech confirms the state’s preferred version of history. 

Pedagogy of War: Education and Patriotic Socialization

If law criminalizes questioning over historical truth, education manufactures consent for the official version before dissent can happen. Nelson’s (2015) analysis of Russian secondary school textbooks discovered a repeated pattern: Soviet-era achievements and wartime merits are foregrounded, while Stalinist oppression is minimized and repackaged as an unfortunate byproduct of establishing the nation. The drives behind this approach are not powered by selective storytelling. However, they display an implicit attempt to centralize state power in the present by shaping the minds of young and impressionable students. This can be seen throughout textbooks that consistently frame strong, unaccountable leadership as a condition of national survival.

This pattern grew more visible after 2020, when the state consolidated national textbooks, introduced compulsory war-centered curricula, and further militarized school life (Iashchenko, 2023; Kolesnik and Rusanov, 2025). A concrete example is the introduction of the weekly “Important Conversations” (Razgovory o vazhnom), a patriotic lesson program rolled out across Russian schools from September 2022 that combines current wartime messaging into the same classroom hour as history, pairing imagery of the Great Patriotic War with the invasion of Ukraine (Mediazona, 2022). Kurbak (2023) shows how much material directly references current sacrifice to earlier examples of “heroic” conflicts and works to frame Russia as defending itself against the imminent Western threat, closing the distance between the 1941 conflict and the one at present. 

This pedagogical project gains a sharper geopolitical angle in material expressly concerning Ukraine. Gudz (2023) documents Russian textbooks that discard the historical legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood, projecting the country as intrinsically belonging to Russia and pushing the claim that Ukrainian national identity is artificial. This claim is reaffirmed in state-published textbooks after 2022, which depict Ukraine’s post-1991 borders as a result of Soviet bureaucratic mistakes rather than a negotiated settlement. Paired together, the education literature reaffirms that patriotic socialization is not accidental or slight; it is a central pillar of Russia’s memory regime. 

Beyond textbook content itself, Kolesnik and Rusanov (2025) highlight a parallel institutional mechanism: the standardization of teacher training around a single, state-approved historical perspective, whereby deviation can risk dismissal and reprimand. Iashchenko (2023) extends this point by noting that the same standardization has begun reaching extracurricular life in places such as youth clubs and school functions. This is so the narrative can be further planted beyond the formal school setting as well as within it, closing off informal spaces in which otherwise plural perspectives may have been harbored and circulated among students. 

The central right compromised through the induction of state messaging within education represents academic and educational freedom—the right of students and teachers to encounter pluralistic historical interpretations over a narrow compulsory narrative—and, by extension, the right of neighboring communities to have their history acknowledged accurately rather than being undermined or erased. This matters because education is one of the main institutions where young people learn how to think critically, identify political motivations, and understand the rights of others. When history teaching is limited to delivering patriotic content and state-approved narratives, students are denied not just factual balance but also the chance to develop their own interpretations of historical events. Where Ukrainian history is erased or perpetuated as illegitimate, the harm created extends beyond Russian classrooms because it normalizes the denial of other peoples’ culture, experiences, liberation, and political existence. 

The Propaganda State: Soviet Continuities

The repetitive theme across studies of the Russian state’s control mechanisms is the continuation of Soviet-era methods. Contemporary Russian propaganda is most accurately described as a modernization of Soviet informational control, not a modernized system (Fedchenko, 2024). Centralized coordination between state media and security-linked institutions, the purposeful fabrication of false stories, and the subordination of information strategy to foreign policy and military objectives are all reminiscent of authority mechanisms in the Soviet era. The modern difference is the delivery; the same exercises of forgery and disinformation once hosted by broadcast and print media now travel through television, social media platforms, and increasingly synthetic media channels (Zhang, 2025; Fedchenko, 2024).

Additionally, the emotional element of such propaganda is an important contention. Russian state narratives position the nation as a victim yet simultaneously as a heroic superpower, constantly threatened by the hostile West. In spite of these conflicts, the consensus made among them is that Russia is superior in every regard and is destined to prevail against any challenger (Khlebniuk et al., 2024). Factual distortions are littered within contested facts and historical accounts, so that even demonstrably false claims still harbor the perceived authority of inherited national memory (Tolz and Hutchings, 2023). The coinciding vocabulary, “denazification,” “Russophobia,” and consistent anti-Western messaging are frequently spread through multiple state media platforms, official discourse, and educational material, pushing the same sentiment through multiple mediums to maximize naturalization (Khlevniuk, 2024).

Horbyk et al. (2023) add another media dimension to this control, tracing the ideological trail from Soviet “active measures,” meaning covert or deceptive influence operations such as propaganda, forgery, and disinformation, to contemporary information architectures, saying that the underlying assumption that information itself is the instigator of international unrest, rather than a domain to be separated from it, has never been abandoned by the modern Russian state. Instead, it has been rebranded and packaged for a digital environment. Horbyk et al. (2023) focus on the convergence of the state and independent media after 2014, showing how private outlets were forced to conglomerate with the state, forming a huge single coordinated messaging technology. This was accomplished through ownership transfers, advertising pressure, and licensing threats. The final result: a network that presents as a pluralistic chain of media channels, while being severely restricted in reporting capabilities and deeply influenced by the state.

A completely novel disinformation mechanism may be fractured or unpersuasive. What the Russian state has crafted is one that repurposes deeply socialized historical stories, reaffirms them through educational institutions, and reinforces them through wartime commemoration. This structure is far harder to deconstruct and is efficient in manufacturing public toleration for aggression domestically and abroad. The right disrupted here is access to accurate information and freedom of the media. Currently, the population is fed a constructed account of historical events, one permitted to be memorialized by the state, and is denied the opportunity to independently assess the reliability of its government’s claims publicly, as well as those made about the war in Ukraine. 

Propaganda becomes a human rights issue once citizens are not only subject to state narratives but also denied the ability to test those narratives against independent journalism and other archives. Without access to competing sources of information, people are less equipped to evaluate claims about war and national security. The consequence is a public sphere in which accountability is never an option for discussion because the state controls political events and the discourse allowed to describe them. 

Ukraine is a Memory-War Case

The war in Ukraine is the most relevant instance in which Russian memory politics moves from symbolic legitimation to explicit justification for modern military violence. When Putin announced the invasion in February 2022, he talked about it like a required mission to “denazify” Ukraine, meaning to frame Ukraine as a fascist threat requiring Russian intervention, not a territorial conquest. The language he used deliberately drew on the nationally treasured moral successes of the Great Patriotic War to present the invasion as a linear, righteous defense attempt and not unwarranted aggression (Bekus, 2022; Nuzov, 2022). Russian State media made an effort to depict the Ukrainian establishment as a supposedly fascist, Western puppet nation, closing the distance between 1945 and the present, formally casting Russian soldiers as modern-day liberators (Khlevniuk et al., 2024). 

The Ukrainian war narrative is inseparable from a deeper institutionally Russian denial of Ukrainian legitimacy. Russian disinformation channels consistently portray Ukraine as an illegitimate state, one that is inextricably linked with Russia and a territory that was unnaturally separated by external actors (Arribas et al., 2023; Gudz, 2023). This is not a reactionary claim incidental to the war; instead, this perspective bears the burden of state-approved history, and ultimately forms the main excuse for invasion. These statements specifically undermine concrete violations of territorial sovereignty, cultural rights in occupied areas, suppression of the Ukrainian language, and heritage in occupied Crimea. Most importantly, Putin’s move directly ignores the protections owed to civilian populations under international humanitarian law (Gridina et al., 2025; Sirinyok-Dolgaryova, 2025).  

Sirinyok-Dolgaryova (2025) documents how this memory-war logic extends into the information environment of occupied Ukrainian territory itself: Ukrainian-language media outlets have been closed and replaced by Russian state broadcasting. In addition, local journalists have faced penalties or forced relocation for continuing to report independently. Kaye (2022), writing from a freedom-of-expression viewpoint, situates this alongside the domestic prosecutions described below, suggesting that Russia’s wartime information policy should be read as a single, integrated system and not two separate phenomena: one that treats control over historical and current narrative, whether inside Russia or in occupied Ukraine, as inseparable from the events of the war itself. 

Crucially, this externally directed memory-war is mirrored by the intensifying repression at home. Russia saw the "denazification" rhetoric that mobilized invasions abroad be brought home under new laws criminalizing even calling the invasion a "war" rather than a "special military operation,” the official Russian term used to avoid describing the invasion as a war. Furthermore, the expanded prosecution of anti-war speech under Russia's "military discrediting" statute, which penalizes public criticism or alleged discrediting of Russian armed forces, has been exercised against protesters, journalists, and even people holding blank placards or repeating pre-2022 casualty figures (Nuzov, 2022; Kaye, 2022). In the Ukraine case, the deeper intentions of the memory regime are to distort current conflicts and deliver an official narrative, established in law, reinforced through education, amplified through propaganda, and deployed to justify repression abroad and at home. Two rights are relevant here: the cultural and sovereignty rights of Ukrainians subjected to previous erasure and occupation, and the free-expression rights of Russians prosecuted at home for refusing the state's vocabulary for that same war.

Civil Society, Memorial, and Academic Freedom

The human costs of this regime are most visible in the treatment of institutions that have made efforts to preserve a plural historical record. Memorial is the most important case, Russia's best-known human rights and historical memory organization. The organization is one of the most significant non-governmental actors, particularly dedicated to conserving evidence of Soviet-era terror, opening archives, collecting survivor testimony, and linking historical truth-recovery to contemporary human rights debate (Haskins, 2023; Tchouikina, 2022). Memorial’s main claim is that state terror was constitutive of Soviet history rather than an unfortunate deviation from it. Therefore, its position sits in direct opposition to the state's preferred narrative of victory and achievement.

That opposition can be understood as a sustained campaign of pressure, including “foreign agent laws,” a set of Russian laws used to stigmatize organizations accused of foreign influence, repeated inspections, and financial penalties (Ščerbakova, 2020). That pressure came to a head in December 2021, when Russia's Supreme Court demanded the dissolution of the institution, Memorial International, which was followed shortly after by the closure of the Memorial Human Rights Center. This marked the disbandment of the country's central institution for documenting Soviet-era violence and repression. Consequently, this was timed mere weeks before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This case is not a standalone display of silencing from the Russian state but one of many independent, critical civil society organizations that have been systematically removed from public life and replaced with state-aligned organizations that aim to dissolve independent interrogation of Russian memory and human rights (Gilbert, 2016).

Konstantinov (2025) presents a useful interpretation of why Memorial was so threatening to the state. This was because the organization treated terror as a symptom of the Soviet era, not an incidental occurrence within it. Durdiyeva (2023) adds that Memorial's methodology, by prioritizing the collection of individual testimony instead of solely valuing perspectives from state archives, makes citizen accounts of the past especially difficult to reframe via formal channels, since they are based on lived experience, not documents the state could selectively declassify or withhold.

A mirror dynamic is visible in universities. Since 2014, historical memory has been targeted inside academic institutions. History departments face pressure from the state, with politically sensitive topics subjected to growing censorship, and departments sometimes enforcing self-censorship for fear of professors being pressured to leave the profession or the country entirely (Cocetti, 2022; Yatluk and Khukalenko, 2025). Oleksiyenko (2020) situates this within a larger post-Soviet pattern of eroding academic freedom, remarking that Russia's case draws close parallels to the methods used in its history. The rights foreclosed in this section are freedom of association and academic freedom: the liquidation of Memorial removed the institutional home of independent memory work in Russia, and the same pressures are now pushed directly towards the individual scholars who might otherwise have continued that work inside the university.

The consequence is institutional as well as individual. When organizations like Memorial are closed, it is not just one NGO that is lost but an institution of protecting memory: archives, testimony, and legal documentation. Freedom of association is about citizens being denied and actively prevented from accessing organized spaces through which they can preserve evidence and challenge the state narrative. It also undermines academic freedom because the scholars who have developed careers and contributions to this sector face pressure to avoid politically sensitive history, which greatly compromises their work. 

Conclusion

International institutions are aware of these harms, but accountability is scarce. Condemnations of Russia's aggression and investigations into war and human rights crimes challenge the state’s attempt to present violence as a historical reclaiming or a defensive necessity. However, these responses have not yielded any mass results, and the continuation of censorship, propaganda, cultural erasure, and repression inside Russia continues. Moreover, Ukrainian territories are still being occupied by Russia four years after the war began. The gap between condemnation and practical enforcement displays why policing of memory is incredibly dangerous: a powerful state can repeatedly justify its own aggression as defense while stifling its own citizens, journalists, and victims from contesting that narrative. 

Russian memory politics has transformed from selective legitimation to a legal and security regime that actively governs most social institutions and, ultimately, beliefs about war. What started as choosing a national and historical story of the Soviet past, a solution to the post-Soviet identity crisis described by Malinova (2018), has been slowly integrated into constitutional laws, begun criminalizing expression, embedding specific ideologies in classrooms, spreading digital propaganda, and justifying aggression against Ukraine while penalizing discussion at home. At each stage, human rights have been violated, which can be seen with alarming disregard from the Russian State. 

The policing of memory in Russia is therefore not a mere struggle over reconciling the nation’s past. It is a struggle over who can speak, research, organize, mourn, and claim political truth in the present.

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Glossary

Academic Freedom: The freedom of scholars, teachers, and students to research, teach, learn, and discuss ideas without improper interference.

Access to Information: The ability and right to seek, receive, and use information, especially where it affects public life and democratic participation.

Colour Revolutions: Popular protest movements in post-communist Europe and Central Asia, often linked to disputed elections, democratic reform, and challenges to entrenched governments.

Denazification: In this article, the Russian state’s rhetorical framing of the invasion of Ukraine as an anti-fascist mission.

Disinformation: False or misleading information deliberately created or shared to deceive or manipulate people.

Freedom of Association: The right to form, join, and participate in organizations, including civil society groups.

Freedom of Expression: The right to hold opinions and to seek, receive, and share information and ideas.

Great Patriotic War: The Russian and Soviet term for the Eastern Front of the Second World War, especially the period from 1941 to 1945.

Historical Memory: The shared way a society remembers, interprets, and gives public meaning to the past.

Historical Truth: In the Russian constitutional context, an official account of the past that the state claims responsibility for protecting.

International Humanitarian Law: The body of law that regulates armed conflict and protects civilians, prisoners, and other people not taking part in fighting.

Juridification: The process by which political or social issues become regulated through legal categories and legal enforcement.

Memorial: A Russian human rights organization known for documenting Soviet repression and contemporary abuses.

Memory Law: A law that regulates, protects, restricts, or punishes public interpretations of historical events.

Memory Politics: The political use of historical narratives to shape identity, legitimacy, and public debate.

Patriotic Socialization: The process by which education, commemoration, and public institutions teach loyalty to the nation or state through selective historical narratives.

Propaganda: Information, often biased or misleading, used to promote a political cause, ideology, or point of view.

Russophobia: A term used in Russian state discourse to frame criticism of Russian state policy as hostility toward Russia or Russians.

Sovereignty: The authority of a state to govern itself and control its territory without external domination.

Usable Past: A selective version of history used to support present political identity, legitimacy, or state authority.

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