The Cult of the "Great Victory"

Victory as a quasi-religion

History politics is the use of the past by the state: to mobilize voters, to justify foreign policy, to settle “historical scores.” Since 2014, history has become a hot topic of international politics, and Putin actively appeals to it to justify Russia’s imperial expansion^[1].

The most vivid example is the Russian cult of Victory. Prymachenko describes it as a militarist quasi-religion: the main cathedral of the Russian armed forces, built in 2020, bears, in place of a biblical quotation, Suvorov’s line “God is Victory,” and even priests objected to its consecration^[2]. The logic of the cult is simple: after the Second World War, Stalin became the “god” of the Soviet pantheon; when he died and Khrushchev declined to take that place, the vacancy was filled by the “Great Victory” — a new deity.

How the holiday itself was constructed

That the cult of Victory was constructed, rather than arising naturally, is evident from the very history of the holiday. In Soviet times, until 1965, May 9 was not even a day off and was not marked by parades — it was an ordinary working day^[16]. As Vitaliy Dribnytsia notes, the central Soviet holiday at the time was November 7 (the day of the “October Revolution”), but it was gradually losing popularity — and the state needed a substitute. The living memory of veterans, who had even before gathered informally on May 9, became a convenient foundation: under Brezhnev, in 1965, official parades appeared on Red Square, and the day was made a non-working one^[17]. In other words, the popular “nationwide” holiday is a product of late-Soviet history politics, not an unbroken tradition from 1945.

To this belongs the modern “Immortal Regiment” campaign as well. Dribnytsia stresses that it did not appear by accident^[18] — and this is indeed true, though the specific attribution in the video is imprecise: the “Immortal Regiment” is not a Brezhnev-era invention but an initiative of Tomsk journalists in 2012, which the state co-opted and turned into a large managed campaign as early as 2015. The essence does not change: both the parades and the “regiment” are constructed instruments, not organic national memory.

And as for why present-day Russia clings so tightly to May 9, Dribnytsia explains this through nation-building. The formation of a nation usually proceeds around unifying myths (the Ukrainian nation, for instance, coalesces around the myth of Cossackdom). The Russian nation, by his observation, is still not formed as a political one — it took shape as an imperial one, without a distinct national core, and is therefore forced to cling to external myths, and such a myth became May 9. A second function is preparation for aggression: having taken on the role of “victors,” Russia derives from it a supposed right to do whatever it wishes with neighboring peoples^[19].

Putin needs “Nazis”

From here there is a direct line to war. Putin aspires to become the “new Stalin,” but to ascend that Olympus he must defeat “mythical Nazis.” Where to get them? They were “found” in Ukraine — and thus a justification for the invasion appeared^[3].

The nature of this cult also matters. It is a cult of death, built around mass graves: in Russia the human being is a resource, like oil or gas, which the state mobilizes for its needs. A telling contrast: the Germans identified and buried their fallen by name, while the Soviet tradition left anonymous mass graves^[3]. The same attitude toward its own soldiers is visible in the current war as well.

The myth of an undefeated state

The cult of 1945 operates inside a broader narrative: Russia supposedly never loses wars. The historical record punctures that formula without speculation: the Tsardom of Muscovy lost the Livonian War, the Russian Empire lost the Crimean and Russo-Japanese wars, and Bolshevik Russia exited World War I through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk^[23]. The image of a “nation of victors” rests not on the full record but on selecting only convenient wars and convenient endings.

Prokhorovka: the “largest battle” that never was

The same cult of victors is stitched together from smaller myths, and one of them concerns the central symbol of the “victorious” year 1943 — the tank battle at Prokhorovka (12 July 1943, part of the Battle of Kursk). Soviet, and after it Russian, historiography present it as the largest tank battle of World War II and a model triumph over the “Tigers.” In the street debate the interlocutor defends exactly this version; Dribnytsya answers briefly — no — and points to a different battle, far larger in the number of tanks^[33].

And he is right. The largest tank battle by the number of machines committed was the fighting of 23–30 June 1941 in the Lutsk–Brody–Dubno triangle (Dribnytsya names Lutsk, Rivne, and Dubno and gives the frame “23–26 June”). Here five mechanized corps of the Soviet Southwestern Front collided with the Wehrmacht’s 1st Panzer Group: by various estimates the USSR threw in around 2,500–3,500 tanks (some counts reach ~5,000 machines across the corps), while the Germans had roughly 800 tanks. That is several times more than at Prokhorovka, where, by modern counts, fewer than a thousand machines took part on both sides (about 670 Soviet against ~300 German). One correction to the video is due: at Dubno the “thousands of tanks” were above all on the Soviet side — the German group numbered not thousands but hundreds; it is precisely the stark superiority in equipment that makes the 1941 rout all the more telling.

And the very “gold standard” of Prokhorovka is directly debunked by modern historiography. The British historian Ben Wheatley, drawing on Luftwaffe aerial photographs found in an American archive, showed that the Soviet figures of “300–400 destroyed German tanks” (including 55 “Tigers”) were an inflated report by the 5th Guards Tank Army: the real irrecoverable losses of German armor at Prokhorovka amounted to a handful of machines. The battle was an operational success bought at a heavy price, but no “greatest defeat of Hitler” took place — it did not destroy the German armored fist. In other words, the cult image of “Prokhorovka” rests on the same mechanism as the rest of the cult: an unbeatable figure taken from a Soviet report rather than from verified sources — while the genuinely largest tank battle, lost in 1941, is one the same cult prefers not to recall.

”Genocide of the Russian people”: a fabricated narrative

The same cult feeds not only on the image of “victors” but also on the mirror image of “the greatest victim.” In a street conversation, Dribnytsya’s interlocutor defends a narrative that persists to this day: that a genocide of the Russian people is being “scientifically proven” — just as the Armenian or the Jewish genocide has been recognized. As proof he cites the book “War of Extermination. The Third Reich and the Genocide of the Soviet People” (he mistakenly calls the author “Igor” — it is in fact the Russian publicist Yegor Yakovlev, and the edition he points to is the second, revised, of 2024)^[29].

The narrative falls apart against its own source. Dribnytsya points out the obvious: the very title of the book reads “the genocide of the Soviet people,” not “the Russian”^[29]. This is no play on words. The “Soviet people” means dozens of the peoples of the USSR, not ethnic Russians; the interlocutor swapped the term and built his “genocide of the Russian people” not even on a forgery but on a distortion of the very text he is citing. The irony runs deeper: Yakovlev’s book is part of a very real Kremlin campaign around the “genocide of the Soviet people,” which since 2020 has been pushed through Russian courts and “history politics”; the interlocutor has merely added one more storey of fiction on top of it.

Dribnytsya’s second correction is about the term itself. Genocide has a legal definition (the 1948 UN Convention, resting on the work of Raphael Lemkin): acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such^[30]. That is precisely why the Holocaust is genocide without qualification: the Nazis condemned every Jew to death on an ethnic basis. The extermination of the Slavs, monstrous as it was — Generalplan Ost envisaged the colonization, enslavement, and “reduction” of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, and Russians by tens of millions, and Soviet prisoners of war were starved to death in their millions — was not aimed at the total ethnic annihilation of ethnic Russians specifically as a people^[30]. Soviet losses fell upon all the peoples of the Union, not “upon Russians by blood.” An honest caveat is needed here: Nazi ideology did nonetheless class the Slavs as “subhumans” on a racial rather than a purely political basis, and certain components of the eastern war — the fate of prisoners of war, Generalplan Ost — do fall under the concept of genocide. What is false is not the acknowledgment of Nazi crimes but the specific substitution: “genocide of the Russian people” as supposedly equal to the Holocaust is a narrative that has neither a source nor a definition in its favor.

Why the cult needs this. “Genocide of the Russian people” gives Russia the same thing the Victory cult does — the status of an eternal victim, from which a right to any retribution is derived. It is the same mechanism of “victory frenzy,” only from the opposite side: not “we are the victors, so we are allowed anything,” but “we were being exterminated, so we are allowed anything.” Both narratives are instruments, not memory.

The machine of history politics — and honesty toward one’s own myths

History politics operates on three levels: the public (museums), the didactic (school textbooks), and the analytical (scholarly history). The first two are direct instruments of the state^[4].

Here it is worth stressing a matter of principle: a true historian refutes myths regardless of their origin. Russian myths deny the very existence of Ukrainian identity, language, and history. But Prymachenko honestly notes that there are also national Ukrainian myths — for example, the legend of the “executed kobzars,” which has no archival confirmation, even though it lives in folklore as a response to the real terror of the Holodomor^[5]. Refuting myths is a craft, not a selective weapon.

Dogmas, rituals, icons

What this cult looks like up close is shown in detail by historian Ihor Shchupak. Like any religion, the “Great Patriotic War” rests on dogmas — “facts” taken on faith, with any attempt to challenge them meeting aggression. Among them are Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the pioneer-heroes, and the textbook “28 Panfilov men”: the myth of 28 heroes who supposedly stopped German tanks near Moscow is historically just as fabricated as the mythologized “battles” of Alexander Nevsky^[7].

The dogmas accrue rituals-fetishes. The St. George ribbon (in reality the Soviet Guards ribbon) is used no longer for remembrance but for the propaganda of a new war — it is stuck onto vodka, candy, manicures, even a German Mercedes. The “Immortal Regiment” too is done cynically: portraits are bought at the supermarket on the eve of May 9 and thrown away after the event^[8].

And the religious imagery of the cult is literal: an icon for the oath of Russian paratroopers depicts Stalin in the role of Jesus surrounded by “apostles.” This “pobedobesie” (“victory-frenzy”) penetrated Ukraine as well: in 2016, already after the start of the war, in the Kyiv metro station “Arsenalna” a woman in Soviet uniform with such an icon propagandized the “Russian world”^[9].

”Great Patriotic”: a term that hides 1939

The cult itself rests on a substitution of the name. The author of the Vox Veritatis project, Vitaliy Dribnytsia, in a radio interview singles out three overarching Russian myths about the war: that the “Great Patriotic War” is a separate war from the Second World War; that in 1939–1941 the USSR committed no aggression in Eastern Europe; and that only the USSR won the Second World War^[10]. The first myth exists for a reason: counting from June 22, 1941, masks the fact that the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with Germany’s attack on Poland — and on September 17 the Red Army too entered Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany as early as September 3, 1939: the “Great Patriotic War” brackets out nearly two years during which the USSR was not a victim but an accomplice in the partition of Europe^[11].

This is not a metaphor. The USSR and the Third Reich jointly partitioned Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, held a joint parade in Brest (on the Soviet side, brigade commander Semyon Krivoshein), and Stalin, in a telegram to Hitler at the end of September 1939, wrote of “friendship sealed in blood.” Then came Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the annexation of the Baltic states — what Dribnytsia calls “an ordinary partition of Europe between two predators”^[12]. The term “Great Patriotic” is needed by the cult precisely because it erases this period and turns the aggressor into a liberator — for more detail on the pact itself, see “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”.

That this is not a chance turn of phrase but a constructed concept is evident from how differently the name developed on the two sides of the border. In an interview with the channel “Inter,” Dribnytsia, who himself taught history from 1991, traces the evolution of Ukrainian textbooks: at first, until the first genuinely Ukrainian editions of 1992–95, they used Soviet ones, in which the “Great Patriotic War” prevailed; then they gradually moved to the concept of the Second World War, in which the “Great Patriotic” is only a part; there were attempts to call it the “German-Soviet war”; and now the European view of the Second World War as a whole has become established^[20]. In Russia the opposite happened: the attempts of the 1990s to move away from the Soviet concept came to nothing, and there they returned to the version that the “Great Patriotic” is a separate war in which the USSR was merely defending itself, while the occupation of Eastern Europe in 1939–41 is entirely justified^[21]. The very concept, Dribnytsia stresses, was from the outset invented precisely in order to drown out, in the mass consciousness, the fact of the shared start of the war with Hitler.

A Vlasovite ribbon under the banner of Victory

The same logic of “joining the unjoinable” surfaces in the cult’s principal fetish — the St. George ribbon. Besides passing itself off as an old imperial ribbon (when it is in fact the Soviet Guards ribbon), Dribnytsia points to an even sharper contradiction: the black-and-orange ribbon was a symbol of Vlasov’s army — collaborationist formations that fought on the side of the Wehrmacht, and whom the Soviet army tried not even to take prisoner but to destroy as traitors. As a result, present-day Russia has combined in one ritual the cult of the red banner of Victory with the symbolism of the very collaborators it supposedly fought^[22]. When this is pointed out to Russians, Dribnytsia notes, they stubbornly refuse even to hear it and convince themselves that the ribbon is “from the First World War.” This joining of the incompatible is a characteristic feature of present-day ruscism: the cult of victory over Nazism coexists peaceably with the revival of collaborationist symbolism.

Dribnytsia offers a sharp paradox from that same Vlasovite story in another debate: Prague in May 1945 was liberated not by the Red Army but by the 1st ROA Division — those very Vlasovite collaborators^[28]. And this is indeed a documented fact, though the spoken version needs a correction. When an anti-German uprising broke out in Prague on May 5, 1945, the 1st Infantry Division of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR) under General Sergei Bunyachenko — formed by the Germans from former Soviet prisoners — unexpectedly went over to the insurgents’ side. On May 6–7 its regiments helped the rebels drive German units out of the city. But the very next day, because of the communist majority in the Czech National Council, which wanted nothing to do with collaborators, the division had to leave Prague and marched west to surrender to the Americans. So in the details the video oversimplifies (the Czechs did not “hand the division over as prisoners at once” — it withdrew on its own); yet the substance is correct: Bunyachenko was later handed over to the Soviets and in 1946 hanged in Moscow together with Vlasov. The Prague Uprising, in whose military phase Vlasovite collaborators played the decisive role, was unconditionally credited by the Soviet myth to the Red Army — one more instance of the “joining of the unjoinable” on which the cult of Victory rests.

”The Second Front”: another Soviet frame

The same principle — a name that rewrites reality — operates in the myth of the “Second Front.” In Soviet (and present-day Russian) historiography, the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, is called the “second,” as though before it the West had not been fighting. Yet Great Britain was a participant in the war from September 1939, and in no Anglo-American historiography is Normandy called the “second front”: this is a purely Soviet term^[13]. The logic is simple: following Stalin, only the Soviet-German front was considered the “first,” while the fighting in North Africa, Italy, the Pacific, and the Atlantic were not fronts for Stalin — so the opening of Normandy was presented as his personal achievement, that he had finally “pressed” the Allies into it^[14].

The scale of the Western operations refutes this. The landing in Sicily (Operation Husky, July 10, 1943) was even larger than Normandy in the size of the first day’s landing force — about 180,000 against 156,000 (Dribnytsia cautiously estimates the Sicilian landing at roughly 150,000). The Italian campaign removed Mussolini’s regime and pulled German divisions away from other theaters^[15]. The historian’s conclusion is blunt: the Second World War was won by the anti-Hitler coalition, not by “the USSR alone” — and this fact directly destroys the cornerstone of the cult of the “Great Victory.” The context of the war itself is in the article “The Second World War”.

Historiography rewritten to fit the general secretary

That the Soviet-Russian “history of the war” is managed politics rather than a craft is already evident from how it was written and rewritten. Dribnytsia recalls the mechanics: under Stalin, a single-volume “History of the Great Patriotic War” appeared; under Khrushchev, a multivolume one, from which every mention of Stalin was thrown out; under Brezhnev, a broader one still, into which Stalin was returned while Khrushchev was removed^[24]. This is not a refinement of facts from edition to edition but a reshuffling of figures to fit the Kremlin’s current line — the same “history politics,” only now at the level of academic volumes.

And as for why a “truthful” history of the war still does not exist in Russia, the historian offers a concrete explanation: the military archives are kept near Moscow and are closed. It is therefore impossible either to count the real losses on either side or to verify whether barrier troops stood behind the infantry in a given battle. In Britain, France, the US, and Germany, by contrast, the fallen were counted to the last soldier, and excavations continue to this day^[25]. A closed archive is not a technical detail but a way of sustaining a myth: a figure that cannot be checked is convenient to adjust to fit the required narrative.

Dribnytsya also lays bare the mechanism of this secrecy. By his account, the Russian archives hold around 20 million filing units on the Second World War, of which roughly 17.5 million are classified “top secret,” and the bulk of them were sealed about ten years ago. Access is selective: only “regime” historians close to the authorities are let into the holdings (he names Aleksei Isaev) — and even they are handed only certain folders convenient to the state, while everyone else gets nothing^[31]. The exact figures should be treated with caution: officially, the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence at Podolsk holds around 20.2 million files in all, and only about 11 million of them pertain specifically to the Second World War — so “20 million on the war” is really the archive’s total volume, and the “17.5 million classified” is Dribnytsya’s own estimate, hard to verify independently. What stays constant is the essential point: the key holdings are inaccessible (and after 2022 access for independent and foreign researchers has been all but sealed off entirely).

That, Dribnytsya stresses, is exactly why independent historians reach different conclusions — because they rely on other, open archives. One example is Alexander Gogun, who works with the German Bundesarchiv: those holdings have long been open, with only individual intelligence documents kept secret, and on their basis the picture of the Soviet-German war comes out different from the one the closed Soviet archives permit^[32].

Zhukov: an “ordinary Stalin at the front”

This “arithmetic without accounting” surfaces most sharply in the figure of Marshal Zhukov. Dribnytsia’s interlocutor offers two examples. The first is the Battle of Rzhev, which ran parallel to Stalingrad: for it, he says, “millions” of people were also thrown away under Zhukov’s command^[26]. A correction of scale is needed here: the offensive operations on the Rzhev salient of 1942–1943 (in particular the failed Operation Mars under Zhukov’s direct command) cost the Red Army, by various estimates, from several hundred thousand irrecoverable losses to more than a million dead overall — figures still debated precisely because of the closed archives. The military historian David Glantz called Mars Zhukov’s greatest defeat, one that Soviet historiography deliberately erased.

The second example is the storming of Berlin. The city was indeed encircled, and by the interlocutor’s logic it would have been enough not to storm it but to wait two or three weeks until the garrison (several tens of thousands of troops, together with the Volkssturm) ran out of ammunition and food. Instead Zhukov hurled his forces at the Seelow Heights on April 16, 1945 — “because father Stalin said to take Berlin”^[26]. The frontal assault on the most fortified line of the German defense turned into heavy losses: as Antony Beevor’s reconstruction shows, Stalin deliberately pressed his commanders to take the Reich’s capital as fast as possible — ahead of the Allies — and it was this race, not military necessity, that dictated the tempo.

Hence Dribnytsia’s assessment: in that system, Zhukov was an “ordinary Stalin at the front” — he did the same as Stalin, “sending people to their deaths by the batch, without a second thought”^[27]. There are no unambiguous figures in history, but the legend of the “brilliant commander” rests on the cult rather than on professionalism: Zhukov had no higher military education — only short officer courses (hence his “three-month courses,” “taken straight from the plough”), whereas even the Soviet tradition acknowledged Rokossovsky as the more competent operator^[27]. In this system the “greatest hero” is the one who laid down the most of his own men — and it is exactly this logic that the cult of the “Great Victory” holds up as valor.

What this means

The cult of the “Great Victory” is not memory but a political technology: it turns the past into fuel for the present war. It is telling that in 2023 Ukraine abolished the Soviet “May 9” and returned to the European tradition — the Day of Remembrance on May 8^[6]: the rejection of the cult of victory in favor of remembrance of the victims is precisely the line between the instrumentalization of history and respect for it.