Theoretical Framework: Ontological Security, Identity Narratives, and National Memories

Originally coined by a psychiatrist R.D. Laing (Reference Laing1960) in his work on schizophrenia, the concept of ontological security was employed by Anthony Giddens’ (1991) analysis of the dynamics of self-identity in late modern societies. To be ontologically secure, according to Giddens, “is to possess […] ‘answers’ to fundamental existential questions which all human life in some way addresses” (1991, 47). One of these is the question of self-identity. The feeling of ontological security is sustained in everyday interactions and as long as the conventions of these interactions are observed.

Scholars of international relations often turn to Giddens’ conceptualization of ontological security to explain states’ behavior. Thus, Jennifer Mitzen (Reference Mitzen2006) suggests that states, essentially collections of individuals, seek ontological security in addition to physical security. Defining ontological security as “security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice,” Mitzen stresses that it is achieved through routinization of relations with significant others (2006, 344). Filip Ejdus (Reference Ejdus2018) adds that, when critical situations rupture states’ routines, they become ontologically vulnerable.

Importantly, identity is not a thing but a project. While reflexivity – “the chronic entry of knowledge into the circumstances of action it analyses or describes” – is a critical characteristic of late modernity as such, self-identity in late modernity is a reflexive project of an individual (Giddens Reference Giddens1991, 28). It has to be routinely sustained through ongoing reflection. Subject to chronic revision, it presumes self-awareness. It “is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual” but a capacity “to integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self” (Giddens Reference Giddens1991, 53–54). Ultimately, maintaining self-identity implies keeping a narrative about oneself and one’s life going.

Like individuals, states create and sustain their autobiographical identity narratives. It is through these narratives that they create meaning for their actions even when such actions violate existing international norms and principles (Innes and Steele Reference Innes, Steele, Resende and Budryte2014). In turn, scholars of international relations often turn to the analysis of state identity narratives to make sense of state actions. Thus, many have looked into Russia’s identity narratives to explain its policies towards Ukraine (Clunan Reference Clunan2014; Hopf Reference Hopf2016; Tsygankov Reference Tsygankov2015; Grigas Reference Grigas2016; Kordan Reference Kordan2022).

Memory is critical for identity as reflexive project. It is memory that enables us to create and sustain identities, whether on individual or collective levels. As Jens Bartelson put it, “collective identities are produced out of collective memories as much as individual memories and identities are dependent on each other” (Reference Bartelson2006, 37). Thus, collective memories are a major source for and carrier of group identities.

In the world of nation-states, state identities rely upon national memories. As Anthony D. Smith famously put it, “no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation” (Reference Smith1999, 9). Given that nationhood is “a tacit premise in almost all contemporary political thinking” (Canovan Reference Canovan1996, 1) and nationalism is a rhetoric in which the legitimacy of modern state is debated (Calhoun Reference Calhoun1997), no nation, no state, one might add. Shaping their identities, national memories, thus, are tied to ontological security of contemporary states. If ontological security is the security of being (Steele Reference Steele2008), national memories provide states with what Kathrin Bachleitner (Reference Bachleitner2021) calls the security of “being-in-time.”

As Jelena Subotic (Reference Subotić2018) argues, while national memories can be used to resolve states’ ontological insecurity, they often also become sources of such insecurity. She focuses on memories of past violence perpetrated by the nation. Subotic contends that memories in which the nation appears as a villain undermine its positive sense of self and thus destabilize state identity. I suggest that discontinuity in national memory pose an equally significant threat to states’ ontological security.

Indeed, identity implies continuity despite constant change. This is precisely what national memory allows for – sustaining continuous autobiographical narratives foundational to state identities. Craig Calhoun calls it “temporal depth” – “a notion of the nation as such existing through time, including past and future generations, and having a history” which invests it “with moral and political authenticity” (1997, 5). Discontinuity in national memory – disrupting state identity narratives – become a source of their ontological insecurity.

As Ana Maria Alonso explains (1988), time is only one axis of national imagination, with space being the other. Nations are not only imagined “within the limits of a national territory and across the bounds of a national time,” but their historical right to territory and territorial right to history are mutually reinforcing (Alonso Reference Alonso1988, 40). Thus, while the alignment between national time and space enables coherent state identity narratives, a lack thereof, conversely, disrupts them. In other words, not only discontinuity in national memory, but also dislocation between national memory and territory can become sources of state ontological insecurity.Footnote ³

It would be a mistake to assume that state identity narratives mechanically determine state behavior. First, narratives are plural and coexist in competition with one another, just as different versions of state identities do. For instance, Ted Hopf (Reference Hopf2005) identified three versions of Russian identity in the 1990s – a liberal, a conservative, and a centrist one – each competing to control the Russian state. Memories are plural, too. While state autobiographical narratives tend to be unilinear and homogenous, memories are diverse and heterogenous. It is from this diversity and heterogeneity of memories that monolithic state narratives are constructed, whether in democratic or authoritarian regimes (Confino Reference Confino1997). Furthermore, regardless of regime type, memories are always contested (Hodgkin and Radstone Reference Hodgkin and Radstone2003). As a result of these contestations, some memories are publicly articulated and recognized while others are silenced or repressed. Likewise, certain identity narratives are granted official status, while others are marginalized or suppressed.

Among the mnemonic actors – “political forces that are interested in a specific interpretation of the past” (Kubik and Bernhard Reference Kubik and Bernhard2014, 4) – political elites play a particularly significant role in the contestations over national memories and state identities. Moreover, while elites vying for power often face formidable challenges in promoting their preferred identity narratives, for those already in power, this task becomes almost routine (Coakley Reference Coakley2004). Ultimately, ruling elites in all political contexts – and even more so in authoritarian regimes – play an outsized role in sustaining the autobiographical narratives that underpin state identities.

Yet, as Jeffrey Olick (Reference Olick1998) argues, the relationship between politics and memory is far from straightforward: while politicians (attempt to) shape national memories, they are also shaped by them. To explain this dynamic, Eviatar Zerubavel’s (Reference Zerubavel1996) concept of mnemonic socialization is particularly useful. It captures the process through which individuals learn what and how they should remember within a given society – as well as what they must forget. While family plays a crucial role in mnemonic socialization, the process continues well beyond it and is most commonly manifested in school history classes. As surprising as it may seem, politicians were once children too – students who attended history classes where they learned which parts of the national past should be remembered and how. These memoires, internalized through mnemonic socialization and shaped by specific mnemonic traditions, are what they later rely on to create and sustain identity narratives critical to states’ ontological security.

Mnemonic socialization entails the continuous reinterpretation of personal recollections as individuals enter new communities and internalize their mnemonic traditions. A key aspect of such traditions is that they set “historical horizons beyond which past events are basically regarded as irrelevant and, as such, often forgotten altogether” (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel1996, 286). To put it differently, beginnings are both essential and arbitrary elements of narratives (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel1993b; 1993a).

As just one manifestation of a society’s tendency to delimit relevance, beginnings are pivotal in articulating identities at both individual and collective levels. Individual identity presupposes “some existential horizons that help delineate the limits of our selfhood” (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel1993a, 411). Similarly, collective identity implies boundaries between those who are included in the group and “the rest.” Both personal and collective identity narratives necessarily include a beginning – a moment in time when an individual or group was born. Thus, Zerubavel (Reference Zerubavel1993b, 459) asserts: “[I]f we are to fully understand how individuals and groups perceive themselves, we must know where they think their “story” begins.”

At the same time, beginnings are often contested – a fact that, according to Zerubavel (Reference Zerubavel1993b), underscores their conventional nature. Everything that precedes a chosen beginning – whenever that beginning is set within a narrative – is deemed irrelevant, something that can (or must) be forgotten. Thus, separating a group’s “official history” from its “prehistory,” beginnings determine how far back its collective memory is stretched (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel1993a).

Nations are groups that stretch their memories as far back as possible. As Eric Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983, 14) notes, while nations are modern inventions, they “generally claim to be […] rooted in the remotest of antiquity.” Echoing this, Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1991, 5) highlights one of the primary paradoxes of nationalism: “[t]he objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists.” Anthony D. Smith (Reference Smith, Hosking and Schöpflin1997) explains why claiming antiquity is crucial for the formation of nations. First, it satisfies the nation’s quest for authenticity, allowing to define both its origin and boundaries. It also reminds members of a nation of past greatness and points to a future one. More importantly for this discussion, it establishes a sense of continuity between the generations, linking the national past with the present and future. It is hardly surprising, then, that national memories of distant pasts are critical to state identity narratives, as seen in the memory of the Siege of Masada for Israel (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel1994) and the Kosovo Battle for Serbia (Subotić Reference Subotić2016).

Importantly, narratives are shaped by what James Wertsch (Reference Wertsch2000, 529), who emphasizes their dialogical nature, calls “dialogic responses.” The international community, understood as the broader social environment in which states exist, plays a central role in shaping state identity narratives. As Ayşe Zarakol (Reference Zarakol2010, 6) highlights, “ontological security first and foremost entails having a consistent sense of self and having that sense affirmed by others.” Conversely, when a state’s identity narrative is challenged by other members of the international community, it becomes a source of ontological insecurity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dynamic between ontological security and national memory has been particularly evident in Russia – Ukraine relations.

“The Greatest Geopolitical Catastrophe of the 20^th Century”: The Collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s Identity Crisis

Piotr Sztompka (Reference Sztompka, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004), famously, conceptualized the collapse of the communist system as a cultural trauma. Involving sudden, rapid, and systemic change that embraced politics, economics, culture, and everyday life, it affected the whole population of former communist societies. Even if “almost universally judged as beneficial and progressive” (Sztompka Reference Sztompka, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004, 171), it led to a period of cultural disorganization and disorientation. While Sztompka focused primarily on East-Central Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union similarly upended the lives of millions of Soviet citizens, disrupting economic, political, and social routines and triggering a prolonged polycrisis. Catarina Kinnvall (Reference Kinnvall2004) argues that in times of trauma, autobiographical identity narratives can provide comfort and relief. Yet, the Soviet collapse – a “critical situation” par excellence (Ejdus Reference Ejdus2018) – shattered those narratives, bringing to the fore the questions of self-identities in the newly-independent post-Soviet states. Their ruling elites, thus, faced the challenge of sustaining – or rather, forging – autobiographical identity narratives that could ground their ontological security. In Russia, a country whose profound identity crisis (Urban Reference Urban1994) was reflected in acute debates over the meaning of the Russian nation and the content of its national memory (Tolz Reference Tolz1998b), this challenge was formidable.

Importantly, for the new Russia, memory was a source of ontological insecurity rather than security. First, the difficult memory of the darkest pages of the Soviet past, uncovered by Mikhail Gorbachev and his team to gain public support for their program of economic and political reforms (Davies Reference Davies1989; Reference Davies1997; Sherlock Reference Sherlock2007) undermined Russia’s positive sense of self. At the same time, the memory of victory in the GPW, critical to the positive Soviet identity, was compromised by the revelations of the Perestroika era (Tumarkin Reference Tumarkin1994). More importantly for this discussion, the emergence of independent Russia from the ashes of the Soviet Union marked a profound discontinuity in its national memory. With the narrative foundational to Russia’s identity disrupted, its ontological security was shattered. To restore it, the ruling elite needed to reassert continuity in national memory. Yet, initially, Boris Yeltsin and his team chose a different path, beginning to promote the idea of a “new democratic Russia” (Malinova Reference Malinova2015).

Russians were envisioned as a nation that, having rejected its totalitarian past, was born anew in 1991. As “Russia’s democratic choice” was emphasized, the collapse of the Soviet Union was framed as the founding event of the Russian nation. This was reflected in the establishment of a new national holiday, the Independence Day of the Russian Federation. Introduced in 1992, it was to be celebrated annually on June 12, the day the first Congress of People’s Deputies of the RSFSR voted for Declaration No. 22-1b on State Sovereignty.Footnote ⁴ Ironically, Yeltsin followed in the footsteps of the Bolsheviks who, in forging the mythology of the 1917 October Revolution, emphasized a rupture with Russia’s pre-revolutionary past to legitimize their rule (Corney Reference Corney2004; Gill Reference Gill2011).

A decisive break with the Soviet past was critical to the idea of a “new Russia.” To sustain it, the memories of Soviet-era atrocities – political repression, collectivization, and forced deportations – were instrumentalized. Yeltsin invoked these memories throughout the political struggles of his two presidential terms, including the fight against the August 1991 Putsch, the October 1993 confrontation with the Supreme Soviet, and the 1996 reelection battle against the Communist Party leader Gennadii Zyuganov (Smith Reference Smith2002; Miller Reference Miller, Borejsza, Ziemer and Hulas2006).

One might expect that breaking with the Soviet past would be accompanied by an effort to establish a link with the pre-Soviet one. Public sentiment, best captured in Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1992 documentary Russia that We Lost (Rossiya kotoruyu my poteryali), which portrayed the Romanov Empire as Russia’s golden age, seemed to support such a development. Yet Yeltsin failed to capitalize on this sentiment. On several occasions, he attempted to present the new democratic Russia as the successor to the Romanov Empire, framing the reforms of the 1990s as “restoring the continuity of times” interrupted by the 1917 Revolutions (quoted in Malinova Reference Malinova2016, 145). However, even more frequently, he criticized imperial Russia, portraying its shortcomings as the root of many problems the country faced during its post-Soviet transition (Malinova Reference Malinova2011, 110–11).

All in all, having broken with the Soviet past, Yeltsin and his team failed to build a meaningful connection with the pre-Soviet one. Instead of reasserting continuity in Russia’s national memory, they repeatedly undermined the link between past, present, and future generations essential to the very idea of the nation. As a result, rather than resolving the identity crisis triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union, they exacerbated it. Ultimately, they missed the mark in building an autobiographical narrative capable of grounding Russia’s ontological security. Upon coming to power, Vladimir Putin sought to succeed where Yeltsin had fallen short.

Restoring the Shattered: Vladimir Putin and a Thousand Years of Russian Statehood

That Russia’s new president had a very different approach to national memory became clear soon after his election. Less than a year into his first presidential term, on December 25, 2000, Putin signed three Federal Constitutional Laws adopting Russia’s national flag,Footnote ⁵ coat-of-arms,Footnote ⁶ and anthem.Footnote ⁷ Introduced by Peter the Great as a flag for the Russian merchant fleet, by 2000, the tricolor – comprising three equal horizontal fields: white on top, blue in the middle, and red at the bottom – had become firmly associated with Russia’s democratic forces. The double-headed eagle, known since the 17^th century, evoked the grandeur of the Romanov Empire. The anthem, originally composed by Alexander Alexandrov in 1938 as the “Anthem of the Bolshevik Party” and later adopted as the anthem of the USSR, with lyrics by Sergei Mikhalkov—who authored both the 1943 version glorifying Joseph Stalin and the 1977 version praising the Communist Party of the USSR—was a part of the Soviet legacy.

The adoption of the national symbols – that appeared a random concoction rather than a coherent set – is often interpreted as the result of Putin’s political compromise with the communists on the one hand and the democrats on the other (see for instance Malinova Reference Malinova, Bernsand and Törnquist-Plewa2018). And indeed, it was. It was also one of the first moves of the ruling elite under Putin to reassert continuity in Russia’s national memory and thus restore its ontological security shattered in 1991. Taken together, the anthem, flag, and coat-of-arms fused the Soviet and pre-Soviet periods of Russia’s past with its post-Soviet present, forging an unbroken line of succession spanning centuries.

When explaining his choice of national symbols, Putin emphasized the importance of focusing on “the achievements of our people throughout the centuries” (quoted in Malinova Reference Malinova2016, 147). With the Soviet recoded as Russian – stripped of its “historical specificity as an ideological or social project or as a political and economic alternative to capitalism” and reinterpreted as “an organic part of the historical past of Russian statehood and national tradition” (Kalinin Reference Kalinin2011, 157–58) – the identity narrative promoted by Putin’s regime linked the Baptism of Rus by Saint Prince Vladimir the Great with Yuri Gagarin’s journey into space, the military successes of the Romanov Empire with the Soviet victory in the GPW, Alexander Pushkin with Kazimir Malevich. Centred on the positive aspects of Russia’s past, this was the narrative of the radical continuity of Russian statehood.Footnote ⁸ Repeatedly invoked by Putin and other members of Russia’s ruling elite, the trope of “a thousand years of Russian history” encapsulated the essence of this narrative. Simple arithmetic underscores Kiev’s critical importance to it: it is in Kiev that this narrative begins.

By linking the Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Romanov Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation into a single tradition of statehood, the radical continuity narrative was meant to restore Russia’s ontological security. Yet this remedy came with a significant side effect – it placed the origin of Russian statehood in independent Ukraine. While mending the discontinuity in national memory, this narrative produced a dislocation between the two axes of national imagination (Alonso Reference Alonso1988): memory and territory. As a result, it was inherently precarious – a fact made abundantly visible by the Kremlin’s increasingly strenuous efforts to shore it up.

Holiday, Ribbon, Constitution: Shoring Up the Radical Continuity Narrative

Indeed, Russia’s ruling elite under Putin never shifted away from this narrative. Instead, it invested considerable resources in promoting it. In other words, it engaged in “strategic use of political memory” (Subotić Reference Subotić2018, 297) in an effort to shore it up and thus restore Russia’s ontological security. The Day of People’s Unity, a national holiday introduced by Putin in 2004,Footnote ⁹ became crucial in this regard.

The Day of People’s Unity commemorates the expulsion of Polish troops from Moscow in 1612 by a militia led by merchant Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky.Footnote ¹⁰ On November 4, 2005, in a speechFootnote ¹¹ marking the holiday, Putin explained why the events of the 17^th century still mattered for Russia. In 1612, he stated, Russia’s “patriotic forces” ended the “internal feud and strife” and “the decay related to it.” This, he argued, signified “the victory of the tendency towards strengthening the state as a result of unification, centralization, and the joining of efforts.” It was then that “the spiritual revival of the Fatherland” and “the making of the great and sovereign state [stanovlenije derzhavy]” began.

The holiday serves as a reminder of the dangers of national discord, which inevitably leads to disastrous consequences. It heroizes the Russian people, who overcame their divisions and came together to rescue their state from an existential threat. At the same time, it valorizes the strong, centralized state that emerged from devastation to achieve grandeur through the sacrifice of its people. It also glorifies the re-establishment of the continuity of Russian statehood, which had been interrupted by Smuta – the profound political, social, and economic crisis that followed the death of the last Rurikid, Feodor Ioannovich. Immediately celebrating the end of the 17^th century Smuta, the Day of People’s Unity harks back to the 1917 RevolutionsFootnote ¹² and the collapse of the Soviet Union – other times of trouble when the continuity of Russian statehood was under threat. Ultimately, the holiday evokes a link between Putin’s Russian Federation and a thousand years of Russian history, connecting present-day Russians to generation of their ancestors.

The Kremlin sought to popularize the Day of People’s Unity (Omelicheva Reference Omelicheva2017). Various events such as concerts, open-air exhibitions, performances, and festivals were funded. Schools were instructed to teach students about the significance of the events of 1612, while TV networks aired feature films and documentaries. Public rallies and demonstrations were organized across Russia. Over time, an official ritual of celebration took shape, involving members of Russia’s political, cultural, and economic elites, as well as the heads of “traditional religions.” Annual commemorations on November 4 begin with Putin laying flowers at the monument to Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky on Red Square in Moscow. In the evening, a state reception is held at the Kremlin, culminating in a ceremony where state decorations are presented and honorary titles are conferred.

In 2016, the celebrations took an unusual turn. That year, Putin inaugurated a monument to Saint Prince Vladimir the Great, the Baptizer of Rus, on Borovitskaya Square in Moscow.Footnote ¹³ The monument – created by Salavat Scherbakov and closely resembling the nineteenth-century monument to Saint Volodymyr in Kyiv – connected the Day of People’s Unity explicitly to Kievan Rus. In his speech, Putin underscored this connection.

He portrayed Prince Vladimir as “a gatherer and defender of the Russian lands, a farsighted politician who laid the foundations of a strong, consolidated, [and] centralized state that united peoples, languages, cultures, and religions as equals into one immense family.” He emphasized that Vladimir’s greatest achievement was the Baptism of Rus, which “became a shared spiritual source for the peoples of Russia, Belarus, [and] Ukraine.” He concluded by asserting that “today, it is our duty to confront current challenges and threats together, moving forward by drawing upon [our] spiritual legacy, the cherished traditions of unity and cohesion, and ensuring the continuity of a thousand years of our history.”

Patriarch Kirill,Footnote ¹⁴ along with the leaders of Russia’s “traditional religions,” participated in the ceremony. However, he was the only one to address the audience. If not for the Baptism, “there would be no Rus, no Russia, no Russian Orthodox state, no Russian Empire, no present-day Russia,” the Patriarch declared, thus tying the very existence of contemporary Russian statehood to Orthodox Christianity and to the medieval princedom of Kiev. Following his speech, Patriarch Kirill consecrated the monument.

The inauguration ceremony, like the monument itself, emphasized that the thousand-year tradition of statehood inherited by present-day Russia originated in Kiev. At the same time, it highlighted another reason why Kiev is central to Russia’s state identity narrative – Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, relations between religion and nationalism are complex (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2012), with religious concepts, myths, symbols, and metaphors serving as fundamental building blocks for national imaginaries (Marsh Reference Marsh, Herb and Kaplan2008) Moreover, national and religious identities are particularly potent, often providing answers to ontological insecurities (Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall2004).

In Russia, national identity has long been inseparable from Orthodox Christianity (Hosking Reference Hosking, Hosking and Schöpflin1997). Vladimir the Great, a prince of Rus and one of the venerated military saints in Russia’s pantheon, embodies this fusion of national and Orthodox Christian symbolism. More significantly for this discussion, the notion of a thousand years of Russian history is inextricably entangled with the concept of a thousand years of Orthodox Christianity (Mjør Reference Mjør, Suslov and Uzlaner2019; see also Griffin Reference Griffin2021). Speaking at the monument to Saint Prince Vladimir the Great in Moscow on the occasion of 1030^th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus on July 28, 2018, Putin articulated this entanglement: “Baptism [was] the starting point of the formation and development of Russian statehood.”Footnote ¹⁵ Kiev, of course, occupies the point of origin for both Russian Orthodoxy and Russian statehood, which underscores its importance as a component of the state identity narrative meant to ground Russia’s ontological security.

Much of the scholarship on Putin’s politicization of national memory focuses on the instrumentalization of the GPW. But the May 9 celebrations also serve another purpose: they buttress the inherently precarious narrative of the radical continuity of Russian statehood.

In 2005, a commemorative symbol was introduced that enables anyone to identify with the Soviet victory over Nazism – the St. George Ribbon. A narrow black ribbon with orange stripes, it has become strongly associated with the Kremlin’s GPW memory (Kolstø Reference Kolstø2016). The ribbon’s official history is outlined is Rossijskaya Gazeta, the mouthpiece of the Russian government.Footnote ¹⁶ It dates back to 1769, when Catherine the Great established the Order of St. George as the highest military award of the Romanov Empire. The Bolsheviks abolished the order in 1917, but in 1942, Stalin reinstated the ribbon as a part of the Order of the Guard, modifying its design by replacing the original yellow stripes with orange. The present-day version of the ribbon merges the tsarist-era name with Soviet-era coloring, fusing the Romanov Empire and the Soviet Union while connecting both to Putin’s Russian Federation.Footnote ¹⁷

The St. George Ribbon exemplifies the aesthetics of what Mikhail Gabowitsch (Reference Gabowitsch2016) terms “panhistorical militarism.” Representing the country’s past as a series of military exploits while disregarding the social, political, and ideological differences between the wars Russia has fought and the soldiers who fought in them, panhistorical militarism links unproblematically the current Russian state to its predecessors. Thus, the St. George Ribbon serves to reassert the radical continuity of Russian statehood, turning military glory into a bolster for the state identity narrative meant to ground Russia’s ontological security. In dark irony, since 2022, the St. George Ribbon has become a symbol of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. An emblem of the radical continuity narrative, the ribbon now also marks the war through which the Kremlin seeks to eliminate the sources of that narrative’s inherent precarity – and the ontological vulnerability that flows from it.

Ultimately, the radical continuity narrative was enshrined in the Russian Constitution.Footnote ¹⁸ In 2020, through a multi-step process labeled in Russian media as operatsija obnulenije, 206 constitutional amendments were adopted.Footnote ¹⁹ While some were designed to reset Putin’s presidential terms – allowing him to legally remain in office for two additional six-year terms, until 2036 – others formed a so-called “ideological block” (Blackburn and Petersson Reference Blackburn and Petersson2022). Article 67.1 introduced provisions emphasizing a “thousand-year history” that the Russian Federation is united by, the “memory of the ancestors” that it has the duty to preserve, and the “continuity in the development of the Russian state” that it recognizes.Footnote ²⁰

The reform turned the Constitution into a document that attempted to restore Russia’s security of “being-in-time” (Bachleitner Reference Bachleitner2021) and thus its “security of being” (Steele Reference Steele2008). This move underscored both the central importance and the precarity of the narrative of radical continuity which, thirty years after the Soviet collapse, still required constitutional reinforcement. Importantly, this precarity had been laid bare repeatedly over the years as Ukraine’s ruling elite claimed Kyiv as the birthplace of Ukrainian nation- and statehood.

Kiev or Kyiv? Contested Narratives and Withheld Affirmations

As early as Putin’s first term, relations between Russia and its Eastern European neighbors were marked by memory wars, particularly over the GPW and Soviet repressions (Torbakov Reference Torbakov2011; Siddi Reference Siddi2017; Koposov Reference Koposov2018; Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2021; Episkopos Reference Episkopos2023). In Russia – Ukraine relations, disputes over the memory of Kievan / Kyivan Rus became an additional source of tension.

Taras Kuzio (Reference Kuzio2006) distinguishes between different schools in Ukrainian historiography. While the Russophile and the Sovietophile recognize the continuity between Kyivan Rus and the Romanov Empire, the Ukrainophile refutes it, asserting Ukraine’s unequivocal claim to Kyivan Rus heritage. Since 1990s, according to Kuzio, the country’s ruling elite have drawn on the latter school as part of an effort to create Ukraine’s own state identity narrative. Furthermore, as Lina Klymenko (Reference Klymenko, Klymenko and Siddi2022) points out, since 2014, they have leveraged this narrative to propagate Ukraine’s European identity and emphasize its distinctiveness from Russia.

Tracing the origins of Ukrainian statehood to Kyivan Rus, Ukraine’s identity narrative links the Galician-Volhynian Principality, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossack Hetmanate, the 19^th century national revival, and the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921 to post-Soviet independent Ukraine, thus establishing its continuity (Kasianov Reference Kasianov2022; Reference Kasianov2025). It portrays present-day Ukraine as the primary – if not the sole – heir to Kyivan Rus. It also frames the Baptism of Rus by Saint Prince Volodymyr the Great as evidence of Ukraine’s civilizational proximity to Europe.

In advancing this narrative, Ukraine’s ruling elite exposed the dislocation between Russia’s national memory and territory, thereby undermining the radical continuity narrative meant to ground its ontological security. In other words, they refused Russia the affirmation that, as Ayşe Zarakol (2006) argues, would have been necessary to restore the ontological security shattered by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Rarely is this dynamic more evident than on July 28, when both Russia and Ukraine celebrate the Feast Day of Saint Prince Vladimir / Volodymyr the Great.Footnote ²¹ On July 28, 2001, a year into his first presidential term, Putin visited Saint Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Chersonesus, allegedly built on the site of the prince’s baptism.Footnote ²² Together with Ukraine’s president, Leonid Kuchma, Putin participated in the ceremony of mounting a cross on the cathedral’s cupola. The ceremony was a highlight of Putin’s visit to Crimea, which also included a stop at the Artek Youth Camp and a joint parade of Ukrainian and Russian Black See Fleets.Footnote ²³ Addressing the participants, Putin referred to Ukrainians and Russians as “brotherly nations” and emphasized that the “imperishable and enduring principles” of Orthodox Christianity were the “spiritual roots” underpinning the “unity of the peoples of Russia and Ukraine.”

Rather strikingly, Putin’s speech acknowledged that Russia’s “brotherly” connection to Ukraine was foundational to its very sense of self. However, this is hardly surprising: this connection both stems from the radical continuity narrative and anchors it. Ultimately, this narrative is unsustainable without such a connection. The speech was therefore an attempt to shore up the narrative meant to ground Russia’s ontological security and, simultaneously, to elicit its affirmation from Ukraine’s president. Yet Kuchma tacitly withheld it. Instead, he described Volodymyr’s baptism as “a pivotal moment in the history of Ukraine and the Orthodox Church,” adding that it was “relevant to all the peoples, whose destinies were deeply and forever affected by the Baptism of Rus.”Footnote ²⁴

The tension revealed in 2001 did not dissipate over the years. On the contrary, it grew as the Kremlin’s strategic use of memory to restore ontological security became increasingly strenuous. It surfaced again in 2021, when Putin published his article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”Footnote ²⁵ In it, he expanded on – and even strengthened – the points he had articulated in Chersoneses almost exactly twenty years earlier and reiterated repeatedly since. Russia and Ukraine, he claimed, belonged to “essentially the same historical and spiritual space.” The “spiritual choice made by Saint Vladimir,” Putin wrote, predetermined the affinity of Russians and Ukrainians as “one people – a single whole.” Emphasizing Kiev’s role as the origin of Russian statehood, he asserted that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians “were all descendants of Ancient Rus.”

And again – this time explicitly – Ukraine’s president refused to affirm Putin’s narrative. On July 28, 2021, Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the nation on the occasion of the Day of Baptism of Kyivan Rus – Ukraine.Footnote ²⁶ “Ukraine is the successor of one of the most powerful states in medieval Europe,” he declared, stressing that “[i]n its capital, which is the capital of modern Ukraine, the history of Christianity in Eastern Europe began.” He went on: “This is not part of our history, this is our history itself. We do not need to prove it with historical treatises, works, or articles. Because our evidence is not on paper, it is in metal and stone. Not in myths and legends, but in our cities and on our streets.” Zelensky concluded by asserting the “historical unity of all Ukrainians.”

Emphasizing that – unlike Russia’s – Ukraine’s national territory and memory are tightly aligned, Zelensky exposed, in strikingly direct terms, the dislocation between the temporal and spatial axes of Russia’s national imagination. In doing so, he targeted the very core of the radical continuity narrative’s precarity, revealing the ontological vulnerability that flows from it.

While Zelensky’s address directly challenged each of the key premises in Putin’s article, the presidential decreeFootnote ²⁷ he signed two months later, on August 24, 2021, bore a striking rhetorical resemblance to Article 67.1 of the Russian Constitution. Introducing a new national holiday to be celebrated on July 28Footnote ²⁸ – the Day of Ukrainian Statehood – the decree emphasized the “continuity of Ukrainian statehood,” tracing its origins to “the times when the city of Kyiv was founded.” It further highlighted the “civilizational choice of Kyivan Rus” reflected in its baptism. “We are a young country with a thousand-year history,” Zelensky proclaimed in his address to the nation.Footnote ²⁹ This indirect exchange between Putin and Zelensky – tellingly occurring just six months before the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion – highlights the efforts of both states’ ruling elites to sustain their respective identity narratives amid mounting contestation. Both narratives assert the continuity of their traditions of statehood. Both trace their origins to antiquity. And both rely heavily on the nationalized memory of Kievan / Kyivan Rus. As a result, Russia’s and Ukraine’s identity narratives directly contradict one another. More importantly for this argument, the latter exposes the dislocation between memory and territory – and thus the precarity inherent in the former.Footnote ³⁰

Mother of Russian Cities: Kiev, Ukraine, and Russia’s Mnemonic Tradition

Importantly, the contestation over the memory of Kievan / Kyivan Rus between Russia and Ukraine is hardly a recent development; it stretches back nearly nine hundred years. Jaroslaw Pelenski (Reference Pelenski1998) traces it in detail. Thus, starting in the second half of 18^th century and into 1840s-1860s, Vasily Tatishchev, Nikolay Karamzin, Vladimir Solovyev, Nikolay Ustryalov, and Vasily Klyuchevsky laid exclusive claim to Kievan Rus heritage (Halperin Reference Halperin1980; Pelenski Reference Pelenski1998; Usachev Reference Usachev2012). In doing so, they relied on a combination of religious and secular arguments developed in Muscovy from 1330s to 1560s to. Importantly, Kiev was regarded as the origin of Russian statehood in Russian historical writing throughout the modern area, whether it was in the works of the “statist” school of historiography represented by Karamzin and Solovyov or in the “nationalist” one advanced by Ustryalov and Klyuchevsky (Miller Reference Miller2008; Mjør Reference Mjør, Holm, Lagreid and Skorgen2014).

While Russian historians advanced the theory of uninterrupted succession of states from Kievan Rus through Vladimir-Suzdal to Muscovy and finally the Romanov Empire, their Ukrainian counterparts, most importantly – Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, employed linguistic, territorial, demographic, and socio-political arguments to establish continuity from Kyivan Rus through Galicia-Volhynia, Lithuania-Ruthenia and Cossack Hetmanate to modern Ukraine (Plokhy Reference Plokhy2005; see also Tolochko Reference Tolochko2012). Both sides of the debate attempted “to develop streamlined conceptions of national history and culture and root them, if possible, in the earlies antiquity” (Pelenski Reference Pelenski1998, 218).

This clash between Russian and Ukrainian historians over the memory of Kievan / Kyivan Rus was only a part of a much broader contest between the Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects. When the Romanov Empire – like other European empires at the time – was challenged by nationalism, it responded by attempting to nationalize the imperial core (Miller Reference Miller2003; Reference Miller, Berger and Miller2015). The goal was to build an all-Russian nation, uniting Great (ethnic) Russians, Little Russian (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belarusians) into a single entity. These three branches of the all-Russian nation were seen as having originated in Kievan Rus, later dispersed under pressure from the Golden Horde in the East and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the West, and eventually reunited within the Romanov Empire. The incorporation of the territories of present-day Ukraine and Belarus into the empire was framed as “the gathering of the Russian lands.”Footnote ³¹

The all-Russian nation-building project simultaneously “drew a sharp distinction between Russians and other peoples of the empire” and “denied the qualitative character of the differences” between Great, Little, and White Russians (Miller Reference Miller2003, 26). Ukrainian nationalism threatened this project, contesting its claims over population, territory, and – most importantly for this discussion – history. It challenged the notion of Kiev as “the mother of Russian cities,” where the Russian statehood and Eastern Slav’s Orthodox Christianity were born. Unsurprisingly, it “was soon identified as the most important challenge to the Russian nation-building project, as it was undermining its key element: the concept of unity among Great, Little, and White Russians” (Miller Reference Miller, Berger and Miller2015, 330).

During the Soviet period, the centuries-old mnemonic tradition of drawing a linear narrative of continuous Russian statehood originating in Kiev was maintained. In the Soviet Union, Ukrainians were recognized as a separate – though brotherly – nation. Yet, the old pre-Soviet idea of the triunity of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians was preserved. This was reflected, for instance, in the framing of the Pereyaslalv Treaty as the reunification of Russians and Ukrainians (Plokhy Reference Plokhy2001).Footnote ³² Furthermore, beginning in the mid-1930s, Soviet historiography adopted a “thousand-year narrative on the prerevolutionary origins of Soviet statehood” (Brandenberger Reference Brandenberger2025). This turn was a part of a broader ideological shift among the Soviet ruling elite toward state-building and fostering group identity, driven by the need to popularize Marxist-Leninist ideology, foster popular loyalty to the regime, and reinforce its legitimacy (Brandenberger Reference Brandenberger2002). At the same time, it can be understood as an attempt by the Soviet ruling elite to mend the discontinuity in memory caused by the 1917 Revolutions and to anchor Soviet identity in remote antiquity.

Thus, Soviet historiography moved away rather dramatically from the 1920s canon epitomized by the works of Mikhail Pokrovsky, which interpreted history through the lens of historical materialism, portrayed Imperial Russia as “the prison of the peoples,” and criticized “Great Russian chauvinism.” While party propaganda and mass culture relied more and more on Russian national heroes, imagery, and myths (Brandenberger Reference Brandenberger2002), the debate over the relative importance of class and nation in narrating the past – a hallmark of the early Soviet years – was overshadowed by a newly surfaced contradiction “between Russian and Ukrainian patriotic national histories” (Yekelchyk Reference Yekelchyk2004, 10). As Serhy Yekelchyk (Reference Yekelchyk2004, 10) explains, “an unqualified condemnation of tsarist colonialism” was replaced by “an increasing identification with Russian imperial past.”Footnote ³³

In the new ideological project of “russocentric etatism” (Brandenberger Reference Brandenberger2025), Kievan Rus was cast as the place where Russian – and thus Soviet – statehood was rooted (Brandenberger Reference Brandenberger2024). Put simply, the Soviet state identity narrative, just like that of the Romanov Empire, began in Kievan Rus. Thus, when creating an autobiographical narrative for Russia, its post-Soviet ruling elite drew on a centuries-long mnemonic tradition reproduced through the process of mnemonic socialization.

Indeed, the linear narrative of a thousand-year Russian statehood originating in Kievan Rus was central to mnemonic socialization of generations of Soviet people. Putin, just like members of his inner circle, learned it during history lessons in Soviet schools in the 1960s. This helps explain why, when the need arose to forge a state identity narrative for Russia, they selected this one – among the many options fiercely debated in the early post-Soviet years. When the precarity of this narrative was exposed by Ukraine’s claim to Kyiv, Putin sought to eliminate its sources by establishing political – and, when that failed, military – control over Ukraine. His invasion, thus, functioned as an attempted “ontological self-help” (Ejdus Reference Ejdus2018): a bid to redress the dislocation between Russia’s national memory and territory, and thereby to restore the ontological security shattered by the collapse of the Soviet Union.