Merging the Great Patriotic War and Russian warfare in Ukraine. A case-study of Russian military patriotic clubs in 2022

Abstract

This article examines the exploitation of political war myths within military patriotic youth clubs in Russia, predominantly based on content from social media accounts. These clubs frequently propped up the ongoing warfare in Ukraine with narratives and symbols, visual imagery, and reproduced slogans – all originating in the Second World War. The article coins the term ‘war merging’ to conceptualize the phenomenon and discusses its characteristics and implications. Only occasionally referring to actual historical events, this form of myth exploitation makes blatant appeals to learned symbolic attachments and dominating narrative templates of Russia at war. The practice seeks to legitimate the current warfare in Ukraine among the Russian youth, but also serves to guide the plotting of new memories for how this war will be remembered in the future. By merging these wars symbolically, the invasion of Ukraine is inscribed into Russian collective memory as just, defensive, and heroic – as a continuation of the mythologized ‘eternal war’ in Russian hegemonic culture.