The world discovered his face at the negotiating table between Russia and Ukraine. Looking serious, Vladimir Medinski, balding brown hair and small glasses, has been leading the Russian delegation’s talks with Kiev since Monday, February 28. Although he is well known in his country, this 51-year-old man had not particularly distinguished himself on the international scene until now. And for good reason. Vladimir Medinski was Minister of Culture from 2012 to 2020, before joining Vladimir Putin’s circle of advisers.
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Why send him to the diplomatic front ? Some elements of his CV tend to justify it. This former member of the Duma, a member of the Putinian United Russia party, is a graduate of the famous State Institute of International Relations in Moscow, the Mgimo, which trains most Russian diplomats. He worked in his early years with the Russian Embassy in the United States, before branching out into public relations and communication in the 1990s.
In France, some historians, like Alain Blum, see it rather in entrusting Vladimir Medinsky the reins of the negotiations a double message from the autrocratic Russian president: to show a certain contempt for these talks by choosing a second-rate figure instead of a figure like Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs. And at the same time, dispatch an eminence who embodies the nationalist ideology of Moscow. Because Vladimir Medinsky has long been considered “Minister of Patriotic Propaganda”, recalls the specialist, who directed the Center for Studies of the Russian, Caucasian and Central European Worlds. So much so that Vladimir Medinsky was nicknamed “Propagandon” in Russian opposition circles, as pointed out The Crier’s Review in an article on the Kremlin’s stranglehold on arts and culture.
Married to Marina Medinskaya, who made a fortune in real estate, advertising and beauty salons, Vladimir Medinski distinguished himself by his passion for Russian history. “When he was still in the Duma, he was part of the commission against the falsification of history, created by Dmitry Medvedev”, then president, explains Emilia Koustova, a specialist in Russian and Soviet history and civilization. Since 2006, Vladimir Medinsky has been the author of a series of successful books on “The Myths of Russia” (not translated). In these works printed in several hundreds of thousands of copies, he applies himself to deconstructing supposed clichés such as “Russian drunkenness, laziness and cruelty”, “dirtiness” Where “the prison of nations”.
“He sees himself as a kind of knight of Holy and Great Russia who he says would always have been denigrated and attacked by Westerners.”
Emilia Kustova, historianat franceinfo
In his thesis defended in 2011 and entitled “Lacks of objectivity of foreign scholars in the study of Russian history of the 15th-17th centuries”, he relies on the accounts of Western travelers to demonstrate that they sought to tarnish the image of Russia. Problem, this work is full of approximations, according to European and Russian historians and university professors who had asked in 2016 for the withdrawal of his title of doctor. Vladimir Medinski, who finally kept his diploma thanks to the support of the Ministry of Education, assumes to compose a national novel in the service “interests of Russia”as he writes in the introductory pages of this thesis.
Vladimir Putin thus entrusted him with the presidency of the Russian Society of Military History. According to Emilia Koustova, this organization founded in 2012 sets the regime’s memorial policy to music and revisits parts of history, such as the Soviet era and the Second World War. The latter occupies a central place in the rhetoric of the Kremlin, as illustrated by the Russian president’s declaration of war speech on Thursday 24 February. “To hear him, it’s as if Russia is once again saving Europe by putting in its place what he calls Ukrainian ‘Nazism'”analyzes Alexis Berelowitch, lecturer at the Sorbonne, co-author of Russians from below. Survey of post-communist Russia (Ed. du Seuil, 1996).
In an interview at Figaroin early 2020, Vladimir Medinsky insisted on “the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the war effort against Nazism”. For him, culture is above all at the service of patriotism. And gare to those who dare to question this glorification of “the great patriotic war”, an expression which designates in Russia the conflict with Nazi Germany. In office for twenty years, the director of the Russian State archives, Sergei Mironenko, had to resign from his post in 2016 after describing “myth” the exploits of a group of Red Army soldiers in the Battle of Moscow in 1941, subject of the film Panfilov’s 28 men, co-funded by the Ministry of Culture. Historians “try to shatter the foundations of our faith in sacred things that are set in stone”lambasted Vladimir Medinsky on television.
The rehabilitation of the figure of Stalin is another of its missions. Busts of the communist dictator have been erected in several cities across Russia in recent years. And he figures prominently in an aisle of statues of Russia’s leaders in Moscow, from Prince Riourik to Vladimir Putin, including the tsars. For Alexis Berelowitch, this approach “symbolizes the desire to restore the continuity of the Russian state. The regime is not Stalinist, it is above all for the greatness of Russia”. “The idea is to arrive at a vision of the history of the 20th century that has a ‘globally positive’ balance sheet”, confirm in The world historian Nicholas Werth.
“The shift was accentuated after the annexation of Crimea [péninsule ukrainienne annexée par Moscou en 2014]with an increasingly marked desire to distance themselves from the West.”
Nicolas Werth, historianin the world”
Since his ministry, Vladimir Medinski has also contributed to spreading the idea, within the Russian political elites, that Europe was experiencing a moral decline. “Perhaps we will see Russia in the role of guardian of European culture, Christian values and genuinely European civilizationhe hammered in 2014 in the newspaper Kommersant. He believed that the country had a duty to defend itself culturally against “this ‘anti-Europe’ so that at least in our country a Shakespeare without pedophilia and a Little Prince without homosexual ‘plastic'”.
Many cultural actors have paid the price for his very conservative positions. In March 2015, the director of a theater in Siberia who staged an erotic version of an opera by Richard Wagner was sacked. In the same year, director Andrey Zvyagintsev saw his film Leviathan come out in a censored version. In question, the adoption of a law prohibiting swearing in public works. In June 2020, Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, known for his daring creations, his support for LGBT+ people and his criticism of authoritarianism, was given a three-year suspended prison sentence for embezzlement of public funds.
This strict shift is part of the obsession to preserve the traditional values of an idealized Russian empire. Emilia Koustova sees in it a way of filling the absence of post-Soviet doctrine. The Russian Constitution guarantees that“no ideology can establish itself as a state or compulsory ideology”. “Russia found itself in a middle ground, between communist heritage and neoliberalism, observes the researcher. For lack of traditional attachment to the left or the right, they have taken historical memory as their ideology. For Alexis Berelowitch, this nationalist movement was in fact already “in germ inside the Communist Party and has since triumphed”.
“With the end of the USSR, the scraps of socialist ideology disappear and, after a brief moment when we think that Russia will have liberal ideas, we strengthen, we widen the nationalist discourses.”
Alexis Berelowitch, historianat franceinfo
Finally removed from the Ministry of Culture at the start of 2020 during a reshuffle, the maligned Vladimir Medinski nevertheless seems to retain all of Vladimir Putin’s confidence to rewrite history by his side and carry Moscow’s demands to end the war: the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, the “denazification” as well as “demilitarization” of the Ukrainian state. What amounts, for the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “erase our history, erase our country, erase us all”.