Soviet flags keep rising over Russian-occupied Ukraine

But Russia now controls large swaths of Ukrainian territory in the country’s east and south and appears intent on consolidating its hold in these areas. Some analysts suggest Moscow’s goal is to build a coastal corridor from Ukraine’s separatist east to the major city of Odessa in the west and to the border of Transnistria, the breakaway post-Soviet republic in Moldova that is Russia-aligned. While Russia found it impossible to turn off Ukraine’s access to the Internet and the outside world in the early stages of its invasion, it is steadily doing so in these new areas under its control.

My colleagues reported over the weekend that local pro-Russian authorities in the Kherson region, which abuts Russian-annexed Crimea, imposed an Internet blackout. In some places, Russian forces have cut fiber-optic cables and turned off power at base stations to interrupt cellphone and Internet service from Ukrainian providers. Other reports suggest that, throughout the area’s towns and ports, independent news outlets have been shuttered, while Ukrainian television has been taken off air and replaced by Russian propaganda channels broadcasting from Crimea.

Moreover, plans seem to be in motion for Russian currency to replace Ukrainian tender in these areas. “Speaking to Russian state television, Kirill Stremousov, a pro-Moscow politician installed [in Kherson] after the city fell, said there would be a four-to-five-month transition away from the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia, which has been in use since 1996,” reported my colleagues. “Ukraine’s currency was expected to circulate alongside the ruble for those months.”

Alongside these steps, a much more symbolic, ideological exercise is being unfurled. In captured city after city, Russian authorities or their local proxies are removing Ukrainian flags and hoisting Soviet victory flags. In their view, and certainly that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, their presence in Ukraine is the revenge of history and the restoration of a union with Moscow sundered by the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the emergence of an independent Ukraine whose very existence the Kremlin struggles to accept.

Now, Russian occupation authorities are trying to almost rewind the clock. They “have started returning to central squares the monuments to [Vladimir] Lenin that were dismantled by Kyiv after 2014,” reported Yaroslav Trofimov in the Wall Street Journal. “They have also removed and repainted Ukrainian symbols, flying Soviet flags alongside the Russian banner on public buildings.”

These efforts, Trofimov added, come on top of other measures taken to integrate “these areas into Russia, appointing collaborationist administrations and introducing Russian documents, education programs and currency.”

“The pressure on people has become systemic in recent weeks,” said the Ukrainian governor of Zaporizhzhia region, Oleksandr Starukh, to the Journal. “It really is like the Soviet Union is back over there, and people are forced to live in fear.”

The war in Ukraine and a ‘turning point in history’

Putin cloaks himself as the bearer of all sorts of mythic, historical legacies that stretch back beyond the Soviet era. As Fiona Hill, former White House staffer on Russia for the Trump administration, detailed in a recent New York Times podcast, he sees himself in continuum with tsarist figures like Catherine the Great — who expanded Russian imperial dominions to the Black Sea and captured Crimea from the Ottomans — or Nicholas I, the mid-19th century emperor who played a major geopolitical role in helping suppress liberal revolutions all over Europe.

For Putin, the Soviet era is most important for the memory of triumph and sacrifice in World War II, which he and his allies revive constantly in their rhetoric. That’s why according to Putin, the Ukrainians, including their Jewish president, must be “Nazis.”

“Putin has elevated the memory of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is referred to in Russia, to the status of a national religion and positioned himself as the heir to that legacy, and the tireless defender of Russia and Russians everywhere against their contemporary threats,” wrote Katie Stallard, author of a new book on how despots in Russia, China and North Korea manipulate history. “He calls the Ukrainian leadership ‘fascists’ to remind his compatriots of the enemy they faced, insisting that they are confronting a resurgent menace.”

The steady drumbeat of this messaging has real effects: In 2021, Oxford researchers found that almost 50 percent of Russians they surveyed identified more with the Soviet Union than the Russian Federation. That marked an increase in such sentiment over the preceding decade.

Right-wing nationalists are marching into the future by rewriting the past

Putin is fighting against the tide in more ways than one. He presides over a nation in the grips of a long-term demographic crisis — an aging, shrinking population that’s also seeing a major brain drain of its best and brightest.

“Putin is flailing against the history of modern economic development,” noted political economist Nicholas Eberstadt in the opinion pages of The Washington Post. “The wealth of modern nations is overwhelmingly generated by human beings and their capabilities. Natural resources (land, energy and all the rest) have accounted for a shrinking share of global output for the past two centuries, with no end in sight.”

The Russian president’s warmongering and “nuclear saber-rattling is the tactic of a leader playing a weakening hand,” Eberstadt contended.

Another Soviet legacy hangs over Putin’s gambit in Ukraine. The longer the war drags out — and the more difficult it becomes to obscure the failure and tragedy of it from the Russian public — the more likely that many Russians will begin to doubt the wisdom and competence of their government’s actions.

“Something similar happened in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s,” wrote Peter Pomerantsev in the Atlantic. “The system seized up as people gave up on it, leading to elites changing course. Back then, a senseless war in Afghanistan catalyzed despondency. Today, Ukraine could play an analogous role.”