Spencer’s guest this time has fascinating, important insights about Vladimir Putin’s “memory war:” a campaign to rewrite history with Russia at the center of the world stage. That campaign is being enacted with horrific violence in Ukraine, but is pursued in different ways around the world, including in the United States.
Dr. Jade McGlynn is a senior researcher with the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at MIIS, a former lecturer in Russian at Oxford University, and a contributor to Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, The Spectator, and others. She’s the author of The Kremlin’s Memory Makers, coming soon from Bloomsbury, and is currently writing a second book, Putin’s Unreality.
Spencer speaks with Jade about how Putin is mythologizing more than a thousand years of Russian history, with a special emphasis on Russia’s role in World War 2, or the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call it. In that mythology, Russia is both the world’s savior and its sacrificial victim.
As Jade writes in a recent article for Foreign Policy magazine, Russia is exporting its narrative to the world, to “bolster the Kremlin’s influence abroad and its legitimacy at home.” We’ve seen the success of that effort in the willingness of so many Russians to believe fantastical state propaganda about the Ukraine War, in the dramatic recent rise in American and European support for Putin’s corrupt and violent regime, and in the admiration for Putin shown by some Western leaders and media figures, including the former US president.
To be better prepared the future, we have to understand how history is being used to shape it. Listening to Jade McGlynn’s fascinating insights is a great place to start.
Jade McGlynn
From Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey:
Dr. Jade McGlynn is a Senior Researcher at the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies, where she is also the co-director of the Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia and director of the Monterey Trialogue Initiative. She holds a DPhil in Russian from the University of Oxford, where she worked as a Lecturer from 2018-2020. Her research focusses on Russian state media discourse and political uses of history in Russia and the wider eastern European region.
Her work often appears in the media (Foreign Policy, The Spectator, The Telegraph) and leading academic journals (Nationalities Papers, Memory Studies). She is the author of a forthcoming book on the politics of memory in contemporary Russia, ‘The Kremlin’s Memory Makers’, due out with Bloomsbury in 2022 and is currently writing a second book, Putin’s Unreality, outlining how the Kremlin came to believe its own propaganda about Ukraine, culminating in the invasion.
Dr. McGlynn is frequently called upon to contribute her expertise on Russian political culture and foreign policy, as well as soft power and public diplomacy, by government institutions (FCDO, MOD), think tanks and NGOs (CSIS, Instituto Real Elcano, British Council) and the media (BBC Russian Service, MSNBC, Times Radio, The Telegraph). Her work is informed by her experiences living and working in and across Russia for five years. She speaks fluent Russian and Spanish and is proficient in Ukrainian, French and Serbian.
You can follow her at @DrJadeMcGlynn.
Links
“Moscow Is Using Memory Diplomacy to Export Its Narrative to the World,” by Jade McGlynn, Foreign Policy, June 25, 2021
“Why Putin Keeps Talking About Kosovo,” by Jade McGlynn, Foreign Policy, March 3, 2022
“We must take Putin’s nuclear threat seriously,” by Jade McGlynn,The Telegraph, April 30, 2022
Prof. Vladislav Zubok, London School of Economics
Prof. Mary Sarotte, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
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