Putin’s modern-day ‘Triumph of the Will’

Like Hitler, Putin wants a thousand-year state.

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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(Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)

Nearly three weeks ago, Vladimir Putin codified his fictional annexation of 18 percent of Ukraine, even as Ukrainian fighters continued to reclaim land forcibly taken by the Russians. With this invasion, Putin has repeatedly turned lies into reality — at least among his devoted citizens. In a war in which there are phantom Nazis swarming Ukraine, and even the Jewish president himself, Volodymyr Zelensky, is accused of being a Nazi by Russian leaders, propaganda has become the true law of Putin’s land. And it is reaching terrifying, nonsensical heights.

To be clear, the Russian lies about Nazis has nothing to do with saving Jews. Russia has a long history of anti-Semitism, which is part of today’s twisted governmental rhetoric. For example, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said on an Italian TV news program in May: “So what if Zelensky is Jewish? The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.” (He did not.)

From here, things get even weirder. If you look closely, you’ll see that Putin is simply deflecting the warped funhouse mirror that reveals him to be the Hitler-like figure, from the larger-than-life imagery used to depict him to the style of rhetoric he and his acolytes spew.

During a Sept. 30 celebration of his made-up Ukrainian land acquisitions, Putin used Moscow’s Red Square as a patriotic backdrop in what was a cross between a Trump-style fete of himself (complete with dubbed-in cheers) and a 2022 version of “Triumph of the Will” — the 1935 Leni Riefenstahl film that lionized Hitler.

Just as Hitler promised in the film to restore Germany to its former glory, Putin referenced Russia’s triumphant past and permanent grandeur repeatedly: “The battlefield to which fate and history have called us is the battlefield for our people, for great historical Russia, for future generations, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” Putin said to the crowd. Hitler also constantly referred to the perseverance of the Reich, and said in his 1934 speech at Nuremberg depicted in the film: “It is our wish and intent that this state and this Reich shall endure through the millennia ahead. We can rejoice in the knowledge that the future belongs totally to us.”

Putin’s rally reached a fevered madness when Russian actor and director Ivan Okhlobystin hit the stage. Taking the euphemistic name for the war in Ukraine (the “special military operation”) to new heights, Okhlobystin shouted, “Some say it will be a ‘patriotic war.’ But I think even that is not enough. The correct name should be ‘the holy war.’” He warned his listeners to “be afraid” that the “old world” will be “stripped of its true beauty, of the true faith, of the true wisdom — ruled by the insane, the perverts, the satanists.”

He went on to maniacally scream “Goida!” a horrific sort of goading “Let’s go!” — “goida” was the battle cry of 16th-century Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s forces.

Putin too referred to satanists in his bizarro world of reasoning to take back what he considers historically Russian land, saying that “the suppression of freedom itself has taken on the features of a religion: outright Satanism.”

His language is very much about making the war in Ukraine a fight of good against evil, the righteous against the perverse — just like Hitler made his.

“What they did was hooking an entire nation on drugs, deliberately exterminate entire ethnic groups,” Putin said of the West. “For the sake of land and resources, they hunted people like animals. This is contrary to the very nature of man, truth, freedom and justice.”

Also in his distorted mirror, Putin has been urging his countrymen to consider Ukrainians as animals, as less than human. Russians have spent years calling the Ukrainians “inferior,” or simply “pigs.” Such dehumanization of Ukrainians is a necessary step toward programming young soldiers into committing inhuman acts like waterboarding and electrocution.

This kind of propaganda against a whole people has terrifying historical roots in genocide, which every single person investigating war crimes I met in Ukraine over the summer said is their ultimate focus.

Historically, dehumanization works. Whether it was the Hutus calling the Tutsis “cockroaches” in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, or Nazis in World Word II calling Jews “vermin,” it is an effective propaganda tool that allows killers to not see a person in front of them suffering. For the majority of people, it’s easier to murder a creature like a rat than a human being.

In this war, the Russian government and soldiers have also been using terms that erase the Ukrainian identity entirely and subsume it as Russian — always and forever. For instance, I met a woman from Bucha who said the Russians who’d captured her town had referred to Ukraine as “Kievan Rus,” which is what the country was called from the 9th to the 14th centuries, when it was considered to be part of Russia. Using the term is a way for the soldiers to assert their right to be on Ukrainian soil.

While in Kyiv, I spoke to Tetiana Pechonchyk from human rights organization Zmina about genocide, and she brought up the concept of rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing. She said she’s heard about cases of women being told by Russian soldiers, “We will rape you until you won’t want to see men anymore.” In Rwanda, rape was often accompanied by mutilation — a way to forcibly sterilize the “less-than-human” enemy. Sexualized violence has been used historically in genocide to wipe out the possibility of a future generation of the enemy.

More than 500 Ukrainian cultural sites have been destroyed by the Russians, men with patriotic tattoos have been tortured and executed, and what some investigators say is hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly sent to Russia to be “Russified.” All of these things make up the puzzle pieces that investigators are looking at when considering whether genocide is being committed in Ukraine.

President Zelensky and his wife certainly think it is. Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, called the cultural destruction “a war against our identity”: “This is a war against Ukrainian culture,” she said. “Past, present and future.” 

Putin’s rhetoric at the annexation ceremony referred again and again to the West as plunderers, greedy — just as Hitler portrayed the Jews. But as with all propaganda in this war, Putin’s lies have convinced many Russians that his “special military operation” is right and just. That he is “liberating” Ukrainians under threat from the West and its perverts and satanists. And as he tends to do from deep down in his rabbit hole, Putin tried at one remarkable moment in his speech to turn that funhouse mirror back toward Ukraine and his true enemy, the West:

“They drowned the truth in an ocean of myths, illusions and fakes, using extremely aggressive propaganda, lying recklessly, like Goebbels. The more incredible the lie, the faster they will believe in it — that’s how they act, according to this principle.”

He is a masterful manipulator, Putin. If the consequences weren’t so deadly, his word games would sound juvenile, the subtext a typical schoolchild taunt: “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”

But Ukrainians are being murdered by the thousands, and the madman in Russia is doing everything he can to convince his people that this, somehow, makes sense, and must be done to preserve his version of Russia, like Hitler’s version of Germany — for millennia.

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