Putin Isn’t the Only Autocrat Misusing History
Sitting in the basement of a community center in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, listening to shells being dropped all around us, I watched as a young woman sought to explain the violence to her son. “Who is bombing us?” she asked in Russian, before prompting, “Is it fascists?” The 4-year-old nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Yes, it is fascists.”
It was January 2015. Russian-backed separatists had taken control of the city nine months earlier, declaring it the capital of their new Donetsk People’s Republic. Yet fighting continued and the truth is, when we were in that basement, none of us knew who was responsible for the shelling: The Ukrainian army was dug in on the city’s outskirts, and separatists were firing from positions close to us.
None, that is, but for the mother I saw speaking with her boy. By “fascists,” she later told me, she was referring to Ukrainian government forces.
If you got your news from , which many people in that predominantly Russian-speaking city and about 90 percent of Vladimir Putin’s domestic audience did, there was
