I was talking with someone recently and the topic of Ukraine came up. This person said it would be good when Putin was gone, and while I agreed with that, I also said that it probably wouldn’t end the war. Yes, Putin is a despot and has driven a cult of personality in Russia for years, but the ideology driving the war is not strictly his. For years, media organizations have been driven out of business unless they toed the party line. As a result, there are few dissenting Russian news organizations, and none of them operate from within Russia anymore. Citizens — no matter which channel they watch or newspaper they read — are getting a single, Kremlin-approved narrative about the world.

If you hear the same things over and over from everywhere you look, for years, that’s going to be what you think. It’s brainwashing on a massive scale. There are still some people that feel or know that what’s happening in Ukraine is wrong — after all, there is some cognitive dissonance in saying Ukrainians are your brothers one day and then saying that they need to be wiped off the face of the earth the next — but with the authoritarian crackdown on any sort of protest or dissent, those people who might think that something should change are silenced or suppressed.

In order to keep some sort of historical semblance of cohesiveness to Russia’s view of its own greatness and everyone else’s evilness, a bi of selective editing of the past is needed now and then. A lot of Russian ego today is driven by events of the past, in particular WWII. For them, it was the Great Patriotic War (really, that’s what it’s called) and the Soviet actions and efforts are venerated to the point of it being a state religion. Well, not a religion, then at least sacred dogma. But there are some uncomfortable truths about WWII that seem to be interfering with narratives about Ukraine today. No problem, just edit the past!

Here’s a transcript of the translation from Anton Gerashchenko (who has been doing a fantastic job of translating all sort of things coming out of Russia for the past year) for those who don’t want or like to read subtitles:

Russia cannot be defeated. It is governed by an unknown power. God must be running it. Because it seemed impossible for us to win the Second World War. I mean that such a huge force was against us, the whole united West, which unfortunately is not often talked about. I do not know what is the school history program now, but in our time it was not stressed that America, England were on the side of Germany.

So, as I was saying at the outset, I don’t think it will be enough to just remove Putin from power. There are millions of people in Russia who have suffered decades of lies and distortions without any pushback. For them, the truth is what the State tells them. It’s not only Putin, it’s the whole operation that surrounds him, and there are dozens of people waiting in the wings to take up that authoritarian power once Putin leaves the scene. Unfortunately, this probably means that Russia will have to be defeated on the battlefield and have their economy crash before the ideology of Russian greatness cracks and people start to see that perhaps the stories they’ve been told for so many years weren’t all real.