Putin’s “Memory Politics” to Target Japan: Russian Revisionism Distorts World War II History

Controlling the Historical Narrative

In the past quarter century, Russia’s historical narratives have been converging toward a single, officially sanctioned interpretation of the past. This marks a major departure from history education as it was taught during the previous two decades. Under the reformist regime of General Secretary Mikhai Gorbachev (during the waning years of the Soviet Union) and the liberal administration of President Boris Yeltsin (in the first decade of the Russian Federation), history education stressed critical thinking and the ability to analyze source materials independently, on the understanding that historical events were subject to a various interpretation. However, as President Vladimir Putin has consolidated his power, the range of historical interpretations has narrowed dramatically.

The initial impetus for this change in policy was the series of “color revolutions” that broke out in such post-Soviet states as Georgia and Ukraine in the early years of the twenty-first century. Spearheaded mainly by students, these protest movements sought to dislodge an entrenched and corrupt power structure and usher in Western-style liberal democracy. President Putin, anxious to protect his own regime from such a public uprising, adopted a policy aimed at fostering patriotism among the populace, especially young people. Central to this drive was the revision of history textbooks to instill in the young a single “correct understanding” of history.

Putin’s campaign to impose a uniformly conservative slant on history and manipulate collective memory for political purposes intensified conspicuously after he launched the military invasion of Ukraine.

On March 4, 2022, Moscow enacted a package of censorship laws under which the dissemination of “unreliable information” about the armed forces and the “special military operation” (against Ukraine) could be punished with up to 15 years’ imprisonment. In effect, the laws made it a crime to contradict or even question official accounts of the war’s progress.

On June 20, 2023, the Duma renamed Russia’s annual September 3 victory day the Day of Victory over Militaristic Japan and the End of World War II. This was Moscow’s way of striking back at Japan for joining with the West in supporting Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.

The following September, Russia adopted its first government-approved national history textbooks, intended for tenth- and eleventh-grade students. On November 2, Putin signed a decree creating the National Center of Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation. The institution, which has attracted surprisingly little notice outside of Russia, is supporting Putin in his political manipulation of historical memory by fostering a “correct understanding of history.” This includes the publication of propaganda justifying the “special military action,” along with historical materials aimed at highlighting German aggression during World War II and bolstering the claim that Japan had aggressive designs on the Soviet Union.

Shifting Blame to the West

In this way, the Putin regime is working to disseminate a distinctively Russian, pro-Soviet narrative of the events surrounding World War II. Let us examine the key features of this narrative, focusing first on Europe.

Most European, Japanese, and American historians date the beginning of World War II to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. A week earlier, Germany and the Soviet Union had prepared the groundwork for that action by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a mutual nonaggression treaty with a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into two “spheres of influence.”

The Kremlin’s narrative, by contrast, traces the start of the war to the September 1938 Munich Agreement. Signed by Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, the agreement allowed Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly German-speaking population. While most historians view this as a misguided policy of appeasement intended to satisfy Adolph Hitler’s lust for expansion and avert a wider war, the Russian narrative insists that the intent of Britain and France was to deflect Germany’s expansionist impulses eastward, toward the Soviet Union. This interpretation is clearly articulated in Russia’s first standard state-approved history textbooks.

New Light on the Nonaggression Pact

The Russian account also portrays the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a diplomatic victory for the Soviet Union. But here the Russian historians may be on firmer ground.

Concerned that Germany intended to continue its eastward expansion, Moscow had approached Britain and France on April 17, 1939, in hopes of forging a military alliance, but little had come of it. The British, it is said, were particularly reluctant to respond owing to their hostility toward communism. On August 10, British and French military missions finally arrived in Moscow, but recent studies have revealed that the British emissary was not even equipped with diplomatic credentials and therefore was not authorized to negotiate on behalf of the government.

In the aftermath of the Munich Agreement, Josef Stalin had grown increasingly distrustful of Britain and France. He was also concerned about the possible expansion of the border conflict that had broken out between Japanese-controlled Manchukuo and Soviet-allied Mongolia (known in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident). For the Soviet Union, a war on two fronts, East and West, was to be avoided at all costs. It is thought that Stalin decided to conclude a nonaggression pact with Germany in order to eliminate the threat from the West so that he could focus his resources on the conflict along the Mongolian border.

Given the predicament facing the Soviet Union at the time, this could be seen as an eminently pragmatic move rooted in a realistic view of international relations—and indeed, scholars of various nationalities have made that very point in recent years. For this reason, it is probably unfair simply to dismiss Russia’s positive portrayal of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as propagandist pseudo-history.

A much bigger problem with Russia’s revisionist narrative is that it insists on portraying the Soviet forces as liberators, turning a blind eye to their brutality against the people of countries forcibly incorporated into the Soviet “sphere of influence.” In a blatant falsification, for example, one of the new history texts asserts that the establishment of Soviet bases and the installation of communist governments in the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were the result of free and fair democratic elections, and that the three countries voluntarily joined the Soviet Union.

Japan as Archvillain

One of the distinctive features of Russian historiography, from the Soviet era to the present, is its persistent citation of the so-called Tanaka Memorial as evidence of Japan’s sweeping plans for the conquest of Eurasia. The Tanaka Memorial is a memorandum that Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi was alleged to have submitted to the Emperor Shōwa on July 25, 1927, following the Far East Conference (June 27–July 7) convened by the Tanaka cabinet to deliberate China policy. The document insisted that Japan needed to take control of Manchuria and Mongolia in order to complete the conquest of China, which was vital to its plan to dominate the world. It also stated that a clash with the Soviet Union in northern Manchuria was inevitable.

The Tanaka Memorial first appeared, in Chinese, in a Nationalist Chinese publication in 1929. Despite the Allies’ best efforts after the war, no one was ever able to find a Japanese original or draft of the memorandum. That and a number of historical inaccuracies in the document have led most Japanese and Western scholars to the conclusion that the Tanaka Memorial is a fake. Nonetheless, the Russians continue to cite the document in support of their view that Japan’s foreign policy prior to and during World War II was driven by some grand plan for continental and global domination. The Tanaka Memorial is presented as an authentic historical document in the six-volume History of Russian Foreign Intelligence, edited by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941–1945, published by the Ministry of Defense, and the state-approved high school textbook on world history from 1914 to 1945, adopted in September 2023. In the historical narrative propagated by Putin’s government, Japan is portrayed as a ruthlessly aggressive archvillain conspiring for world domination.

Another distinguishing feature of the Russian narrative is that it distorts the nature of Japan’s relationship with Germany during World War II, concluding that Tokyo collaborated with Berlin with the aim of attacking the Soviet Union. It is true that after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop urged Japan to join the fight against the Soviets, with whom the Japanese had signed a neutrality pact in 1941. But such a military alliance never materialized. What Hitler wanted from Japan was to hobble Britain and the United States through its actions in the Pacific. Tokyo and Berlin did exchange intelligence on the Soviet Union in accordance with the Anti-Comintern Pact, but there was never any joint military planning targeting the Soviet Union. The current Russian historical narrative ignores this fact.

A Joint Historical Offensive?

On May 16, 2024, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a joint statement on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between their two countries. In it, the leaders vowed “never to permit the desecration or destruction of the correct historical memory of the fight against fascism in World War II.” This raised concerns that the two countries meant to treat the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II as an opportunity for a new offensive in the history wars. At a Russian Foreign Ministry press briefing on January 31 this year, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that the ministry wanted to return to “the theme of shedding light on the historical crimes of Japanese militarism,” making it clear that Moscow intends to ramp up its historical attacks against Japan.

It is no stretch to imagine that Moscow means to extend its strategic partnership with China and North Korea into the realm of history and collaborate with those partners in a massive campaign to disseminate their own “correct historical understanding.” Where Japan is concerned, this will probably involve the publication of historical materials and studies designed to convince people at home and abroad of Japan’s belligerent intentions toward the Soviet Union during World War II. Moscow is also expected to hold events featuring authorities from countries that share its outlook on history.

We will need to stand firm in the face of such propaganda, rejecting all accusations that run counter to fact and resolutely condemning the political manipulation of historical memory.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at last year’s Victory Day military parade celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany, Moscow, May 9, 2024. © Sputnik/Kyōdō.)