This post is part of the Monster Carnival 2022 – Why Early Modern History Matters Now. Clare Griffin is an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington and a historian of the early modern Russian empire in global context. You can find more of her work at www.claregriffin.org.
Clare Griffin
If you have been in a state of consciousness at any time since February ‘22, you may have noticed something is up with Russia and Ukraine. Depending on which news sources you read, you may or may not know how central early modern Russian history is to this twenty-first-century war. Yet it is. Russian propaganda justifying the war, and Ukraine’s responses to that, are heavily concerned with both medieval Kyiv and early modern Moscow and its empire.
Earlier this year, I was in the bizarre situation of having an interview for a Russian history job on the same day that Russia invaded Ukraine. I had a pitch all lined up for why early modern Russia is relevant, but when the leader of the country you study is justifying an invasion on the basis of what you study this all becomes a decidedly dark moot point.
So what is Putin’s version of premodern East Slavic history, and why is this important to the Kremlin’s propaganda machine?
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