Putin’s Retrotopia | Canva / Generated by Magic Media AI Image Generator
In September 2024, the United Nations convened for the Summit of the Future. In it, diverse global communities came together to dream of the utopia tomorrow might offer. Yet as the Russian state declares its desire to restore the territorial holdings of the old Russian empire, these same global communities face a difficult quandary: Why is the past more tantalizing than the future?
The term retrotopia generally refers to an idealized and sought-after past, and the Kremlin’s contemporary political program illustrates how historical memory can be deployed as an ideological tool by framing discussions on collective memory as a matter of national security, and by using legislation and media to regulate and bolster state-sponsored interpretations of history. Collective memory is useful as a foundation through which the Russian state can manipulate information and narratives to flex its “ethical superiority” over its strategic enemies in the eyes of its subjects.
The evolution of Russia’s official state position on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is an important case study of this. Until 1989, the contextual significance of this document was not publicly acknowledged by the Russian government. Then Mikhail Gorbachev’s government conceded, with a note of regret, that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a pre-war plan made by the Nazis and the Soviet Union to secretly divide Eastern Europe into spheres of influence for each party to control. This move must have irked Putin—a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) foreign intelligence officer at the time—whose vision of historical memory is one in which Russia is being unfairly maligned by the international community—specifically, the “decadent West.” While prime minister of Russia (in between official presidential stints), Putin wrote in a 2009 article in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that he would only agree to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact if Western states agreed to condemn evidence of their collaboration with the Nazi party.
The orientation of Russia’s official memory as a counter-movement against “defamatory” Western rivals is driving towards a specific end, and its political advocates know that this end cannot be realized without popular support. Retrotopia—which taps into the kind of theological fascinations and nostalgia for “paradise” that far-right Romanian theologian Nichifor Crainic identified with this desire to regain lost power—is an easy means of attaining such support. The Russian government’s courtship with its historical memory is a reflection of how patronal autocracies need “ideological covers” to function.
The war of Russian aggression in Ukraine brings this into clearer view. Putin’s strategic deployment of the term “denazification” intentionally frames this conflict as a continuation of Russia’s struggle in World War II. Russian popular interest in the conquest of Ukraine is also being framed as a rightful return of the lands first conquered by Kyivan Rus in the ninth century. Putin touted the latter principle when he claimed the following parallel between himself and Tsar Peter the Great: “Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned [what was Russia’s].”
The effect of Putin’s war in Ukraine on Russian governance was stark, with some commentators marking a turn from authoritarianism into hybrid totalitarianism; Carnegie Senior Fellow Andrei Kolesnikov described it as an “anti-utopian delusion.” Researchers Yurii Latysh and Olena Kondratiuk, meanwhile, argued that Russia’s vision of retrotopia could be traced to its pre-Soviet imperial history. In this sense, Putin’s comparison between himself and Peter the Great was an “aha” moment for the two scholars in reinscribing the preeminence of the “Russian imperial memory model.”
Latysh and Kondratiuk would argue that, while Lenin and Stalin saw the Bolshevik revolutionaries as liberators who ended the oppressive tsardom and brought equality to the proletariat, Putin saw the Bolsheviks as the destroyers of the Russian empire who precipitated the defeat in World War I and subsequent fragmentation of Novorossiya. Moreover, Stalin’s decision to support Ukraine’s admission to the United Nations as a member state in 1945 (this was originally intended as a strategic move to buy the Soviet Union an extra vote in the General Assembly) was also a lamentable mistake to Putin, who insists that Ukraine is “not a nation.”
This dissonance between Putinism and Leninism-Stalinism is important precisely because of the centrality of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine to the Kremlin’s retrotopian vision. Russia’s attempts to actualize this vision through military campaigns cause deep security concerns for other nations in the former Eastern Bloc, as well as for other states to whom Russia is a strategic rival. While the eyes of the global community writ large are fixed on the future, far-right internationalist movements such as that in Russia are preoccupied with the past—a contestation that continues to disrupt rules-based international order, diplomacy, and peacekeeping.
The victory condition in this contest is not victory as such, per se, but rather a restoration of the grassroots knowledge dissemination that animates anti-totalitarian resistance, as Elzbieta Matynia has written: “Exchanged stories … set in motion a gradual abstraction from personal desires, aims, lenses, and filters, and lead the people exchanging the stories to recognize interests that we share, matters that we have in common.”
Popular authoritarian programs like Putin’s depend on the social and discursive underpinnings of democratic erosion from the grassroots up. It is the same recognition that prompted anti-Soviet solidarity between trade union activists in Poland, who sought redress against this type of erosion in the 1980s by advocating for a shift in dialogue—not to address the totalitarian power directly but to solidify and mobilize an independent public. Historical memory isn’t fixed, after all, but a collective work in progress.
