Well … for one, it isn’t new. It’s so believable because you can seemingly trace evidence to back it up throughout history. Be it about execution of Jews by Ukrainians during WWII, Yekaterina the Great [est Liar] creating Odesa and Mykolayiv, Khrushchev gifting Crimea to Ukraine as a mistake, Gorbachev setting the Republics free as an act of goodwill, or Putrid (I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to write his name any other way) leading a World Superpower…
Let’s break this all down. You are having a hard time digesting the idea that you are being fed lies because you think that as an educated society you would be able to tell if Russia was lying, after all you have studied history, and you know what’s right and wrong. There is a nuance here — Russia didn’t just start lying to you. It’s that you just found out.
So… when did they start lying to us!? 1991? nope. Stalin’s regime!? Nope. Lenin’s regime!? Wrong again. The creation of the Russian Empire? Bingo!
Peter the [not so] Great wanted you to believe that he was great — a ruler of a big empire with rich history. Upon studying the origins of his kingdom — Muscovy, he found out that there wasn’t much to study or even embellish on. Solution? Do what modern muscovites do best — steal. Kyiv Rus, or at that time known as Ukrayina Rus interchangeably, was in fact a great kingdom with rich history, whose rulers married with the rulers of large and prosperous empires of the time. Then and there Muscovy became the RUSsian Empire. Peter worked long and hard in fabricating connections, appropriating and rewriting history to draw himself and the newly-founded Russia into the Rus legacy. And that’s how based on lies and and deception the Great Russian Empire was born.
Yekaterina the [not so] Great continued in his footsteps, but for her simply using the white-out marker on the chapters in history that contradicted and challenged the narrative of her, now, queendom wasn’t enough. After all, there were living & breathing ancestors of Kyivan Rulers right around the corner — Ukrainian Cossacks… Solution? She did what modern muscovites do best as well — unleashed a genocide on them and continuously appropriated their legacy into the narrative that fit the legend of the grand old Russian empire…
Come Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet Union cronies with all of its “independent” republics, colonized and brought by force into the Russian rule, history became what you’d call a “melting pot”. Of course, to keep the ruling card in russia’s hand the idea of a great big empire had to be perpetuated. How do you do that now that all of these “independent” republics are technically free to express themselves and teach their people who they really are? Solution: Russification. Let me explain: teach history as one combined entity of accomplishments by Soviet Union, at the head with Russia; Erase the language, culture and identity of all republics; Prosecute and torture those, who don’t conform; oh, and make sure the world gets in on this history too, and only the versions you approve of. How do you make the people within though forget their individuality and get on board with your vision? Communism — it’s all shared now, history too.
The soviet communist propaganda of shared success (at the head with grand old Russia, of course) has run so deep that it seamlessly seeped into the world post 1991. Russia didn’t have to work that hard to convince you that it was the epicenter of the powerful Slavic culture as a whole, and all things great were, of course, conceived by Russian minds. That famous Russian writer Nikolai Gogol? Mykola Hohol (and even as i write this article now, the spell check suggests that I use the Russian version of him name, while it underlines his actual name in red) — born, raised and educated in Ukraine, sent to St. Petersburg as an ambassador of our culture, forced to write in Russian to be accepted and regarded. That famous Russian painter Kazimir Malevich? A Ukrainian Pole, Kazymyr Malevych, forced to work in Russia in order to gain success. The likelihood of any given “Russian” scholar, writer, poet, scientist that you google having “born in X city of Soviet Ukraine” or “born in X village of modern Ukraine, former Russian Empire” written under their bio is higher than you’d think. Go on … look up Kirill Razumovsky, for one. You’ll find that he is allegedly a “Russian Emperial state figure of Ukrainian Cossack descent”, but right on the next line you’ll see that he indeed isn’t just of some descent, he is the last Hetman (ruler) of the Cossack Sich Kyrylo Rozumovskyi. Which effectively means, he was a Ukrainian Cossack…
Now, you can do that on and on with many’a famous figures that contributed to your view of Russia as the world’s great superpower and that, in turn, contributed to their modern web of lies being much more digestible. In the Soviet times, when Russia needed a great shiny scientist to demonstrate to the world in race never-ending race for greatness with the US — they just imported one from a republic, say Ukraine, russified their last name, changed their nationality in their passport, and gave them an offer they [literally, under threat of persecution] couldn’t refuse to work in Moscow. You moved to work in Moscow because you had no other choice? Sweet, you are Russian now and so are all of your inventions and accomplishments. Modern Russia doesn’t bother importing bright minds and their inventions, they simply buy them from AliExpress, as we have witnessed with a military robot dog. Don’t have something to show for yourself? Solution: make it up, lie, steal, do whatever — just make it appear great!
And this is exactly why the West so easily still falls for Russian propaganda today. It’s hard to tell, because you still haven’t dissected all the lies and live in the world in which Russia only recently became this deceiving genocidal monster. For you it used to be a beacon of great rich Slavic culture all throughout history until this point in time. Alas, the truth is: Russia has always been a monster, you just looked the other way and judged the book only by its pretty cover. Had you looked into the table of contents, you would have known that russians aren’t Slavic, they come from Mongolian and Finno-Ugric tribes, and so does their language; that 70% of people in the country -you are used to thinking of as powerful and wealthy- have no access to gas, electricity and running water; that Russia, just like its many former names (Muscovy, Russian Empire, the USSR) is an evil Empire of deception built on nothing but a strong chokehold on resources of its neighbors and blood of those who tried to highlight truth.
