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History as a Weapon: Historical Revisionism as a Tool of Russian Psychological Aggression in Social Media

Illustration of the historical evolution of Russian psychological influence in mass media (top: artwork by Y. Scheglov; bottom: author’s screenshot from YouTube)

by Olesia Zvezdova

Is it possible to change the past? Not in the sense of speculative fiction, nor as an attempt to correct individual mistakes, but as a strategy aimed at securing advantage in large-scale geopolitical competition. To what extent can collective memory of historical events be instrumentalized as a weapon against political adversaries? Is it possible to rewrite the pages of history textbooks and shape a new generation that will sincerely believe in a newly constructed truth? These questions have repeatedly arisen in my research on the key mechanisms of psychological influence employed by the Russian Federation, both with regard to its domestic population and to audiences in European countries. Among the dominant narratives disseminated through Russian and pro-Russian media channels, the manipulation of historical events and historical figures occupies a central place. Therefore, during my fellowship at the IEG DH Lab, I focused my research on historical revisionism in social media as a method of Russian psychological aggression.

We can consider psychological warfare to be a form of information warfare, given that natural and artificially created information influences a person’s mental state, as evidenced by their thoughts, actions and behaviour (Renz 2016). Just as a person navigates the external world, they also navigate their internal world of mental phenomena. However, this inner world is often altered by external informational factors. Attitudes towards historical facts and events can shape stereotypes and influence the behaviour of population groups, thereby also affecting perceptions of contemporary situations.

Anyone who actively uses social media will be familiar with the Russian Federation’s dominant historical narratives, such as “Ukraine was created by Lenin”, “Ukrainians and Russians are the same nation”, “Ukraine has no history without Russia.” In addition, nostalgic references to the Soviet Union are frequently mobilised, and the ongoing war is often framed through analogies with the “Great Patriotic War,” thereby invoking emotionally charged historical memory to legitimise contemporary aggression. Widely disseminated across multiple digital platforms, these claims represent a form of historical revisionism mobilised to shape and influence public perception.

The most important channel for disseminating this information is social media, as it enables the Russian state and its affiliates to reach a wide range of population groups. Through platforms such as Facebook, Telegram, YouTube, and Twitter, historical narratives, revisionist claims, and emotionally charged messaging can be rapidly circulated to maximise influence and impact. Social media thus serves as a key tool in Russia’s psychological operations. Given the psychological impact of historical narratives, it is crucial to assess the role of historical revisionism in Russian psychological operations on social media.

Historical revisionism is considered as a contested and multifaceted phenomenon in modern political science. The positive effects and even the necessity of historical revisionism are often emphasized by different scholars. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Robert Clark emphasised that history should be revised in order to correct the mistakes of previous generations of researchers following the discovery of new facts (Clark 1932). Jason Morgan argues that historical revisionism is an inherent part of modern scholarship, as much historical writing is produced by members of dominant social groups. He considers historical revisionism as “… a rewriting of history to bring into historiographical focus, either better or perhaps for the first time, past traumas that have been insufficiently examined in historical records and writing.” (Morgan 2025).

From another perspective, historical revisionism can undermine the integrity of historical understanding and contribute to societal division and disinformation. Such historical disinformation is often created and disseminated intentionally, distorting or misinterpreting past events in order to serve various agendas, including political, ideological, or economic objectives (Singh and Kumar 2024). Antoon De Baets proposes the concept of “historical abuse” in such cases and emphasises three levels of this phenomenon:

  • archives (at the heuristic level),
  • genocide denial (at the epistemological level),
  • commissioned histories (at the pragmatic level) (De Baets 2021).

It reflects the core features of Russian revisionism of Ukrainian history, namely the suppression of unwelcome narratives (genocide denial) in combination with imperial ambitions (commissioned histories). The advent of digital technologies has revolutionised the ways in which information is produced, shared, and consumed (Ejaz and Felix 2025).

Among the most consequential means of information dissemination are social media platforms, which not only enable outreach to broad segments of the population with targeted historical narratives but also facilitate the distortion of public perception and the reframing of historical events to serve specific ideological or political agendas. And it becomes increasingly crucial to verify sources to prevent the dissemination of false narratives.

While historical revisionism is produced and legitimized within official political and educational frameworks in Russia (Putin 2021), social media serve as the primary channel through which these narratives are disseminated to and internalized by the broader population. Accordingly, the primary gap in the existing literature lies in the insufficient analysis of Russian historical revisionism in social media and its impact on the formation of public opinion.

Social media platforms are strategic communication spaces where historical narratives can be amplified, contested, or weaponized to influence public opinion. The platforms could be classified according to their primary mode of content creation and interaction. A widely used framework distinguishes platforms into three categories (Table 1):

Table 1. Classification of social media.

Category Definition Examples
Content-sharing platforms platforms where the focus is on sharing multimedia content such as videos, images, or music. Users primarily consume and distribute content rather than engage in extended textual interactions. YouTube, RuTube
Networking platforms platforms primarily designed for social connections and community building, emphasizing user interaction, discussion, and sharing of diverse content types (text, images, videos, links). Facebook, VKontakte
Micro-blogging platforms platforms that focus on short, real-time textual updates and rapid information dissemination, often emphasizing speed over depth of content. X/Twitter, Telegram

I focus on the role of YouTube and Facebook due to their widespread use, diverse content formats, and significant influence on public discourse. Russian domestic platforms, such as RuTube and VKontakte, were excluded because they are inaccessible in Ukraine, while microblogging platforms were excluded due to their focus on short-form content, which lacks the depth required for analyzing historical narratives. By concentrating on YouTube and Facebook, the study captures both video-centric content dissemination and network-based discussion and engagement, enabling a comparative analysis of how historical revisionist narratives are produced, circulated, and received in different digital environments.
My study employs a qualitative-quantitative mixed-methods approach to examine the dissemination of Russian historical revisionism in social media and its influence on public opinion. The methodological framework combines content analysis and elements of digital ethnography in order to capture both the production of revisionist narratives and the mechanisms of their circulation and reception in online environments.

First, official texts produced by Russian political actors, including policy documents, state-approved educational materials, and public speeches, produce dominant historical narratives in line with contemporary political objectives. Qualitative and quantitative content analysis is used to examine social media materials that reproduce, adapt, or amplify these revisionist narratives. The analysis focuses on posts, visual materials, and hashtags disseminated through major platforms. Quantitative indicators (frequency, engagement metrics, repost networks) are combined with qualitative coding to assess narrative persistence, emotional framing, and patterns of normalization.

Second, elements of digital ethnography are employed to contextualize how users interact with revisionist content. This includes observing comment sections and discussion threads in order to understand how historical narratives are interpreted, contested, or internalized by different audiences. Finally, a comparative approach is employed to examine and contrast the dominant historical narratives disseminated on different platforms, with attention to platform specific affordances and modes of audience engagement.

I focus on the following domains where Russian psychological operations employ historical revisionism, each with its own set of narratives.

Educational domain – the dissemination of historical disinformation that distorts historical events and portrays Ukrainian historical leaders in a negative light. It is aimed at constructing a distorted understanding of the past not only among the Ukrainian population but also within the broader European audience. The introduction of historical disinformation into educational channels enables broad audience reach, particularly among individuals with an interest in historical content. The dominant narratives within this domain focus on the activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the Second World War, the figure of Stepan Bandera, and the portrayal of Ukraine as having an inherently Nazi past.

Social domain – the propagation of narratives asserting that the Ukrainian population has historically constituted an integral part of the Russian people, thereby undermining Ukrainian national identity. The dominant narratives focus on the issue of the establishment of Ukrainian statehood, which is artificially presented as being exclusively dependent on the political will of Russian political elites (mainly, Vladimir Lenin and Josif Stalin). These narratives target pupils and students, who represent a particularly vulnerable audience due to their formative stage of identity and historical understanding.

Military domain – the systematic circulation of fabricated or exaggerated reports of military success intended to reinforce the perception that resistance against Russia is futile. The symbolic instrumentalization of “Victory Day” in the Second World War functions as a recurring marker of Russian military power and historical inevitability (Juurvee et al. 2021). The image of Great Patriotic War is used not only to emphasize the narrative of sacrifice associated with the Russian army but also to underscore a purported common historical past shared by Russia and Ukraine.

Interpersonal communication domain – the use of so-called informational “intrusions” within social networks. Historical revisionist narratives (such as denying Holodomor 1932-1933, Stalins repression, or nostalgia for common Soviet past) designed to activate contested historical memories. These intrusions increase psychological polarization, contribute to social fragmentation rather than social cohesion.

This multi-domain strategy demonstrates how historical narratives can be instrumentalized as tools of psychological operations and information warfare, with significant implications for both domestic and international audiences.

To end this brief report, psychological warfare constitutes an integral component of Russia’s broader strategy in areas where it perceives its national interests to be at stake, with historical revisionism serving as a key instrument. Within this framework, historical revisionism functions as a manipulative tool that supports authoritarian governance and advances the Russian Federation’s revisionist foreign policy objectives (Arribas et al. 2023). It is employed to undermine societal resilience, deny Ukraine’s national identity, and legitimise the war of aggression.

References:

  • Arribas, Cristina M., Rubén Arcos, Manuel Gértrudix, Kamil Mikulski, Pablo Hernández-Escayola, Mihaela Teodor, Elena Novăcescu, et al. 2023. “Information Manipulation and Historical Revisionism: Russian Disinformation and Foreign Interference through Manipulated History-Based Narratives.” Open Research Europe 3: 121. doi: https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.16087.1.
  • Clark, Robert Carlton. 1932. “Why History Needs to Be Rewritten.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 33(4): 295–310.
  • De Baets, Antoon. 2021. “The Abuse of History.” doi: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350970854.051.
  • Ejaz, Umair, and Peter Felix. 2025. “Fake Images and Historical Revisionism in the Digital Age.”
  • Juurvee, I., V. Sazonov, K. Parppei, I. Palasz, M. Zawadska, and E. Engīzers. 2021. Falsification of History as a Tool of Influence. Riga: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. https://stratcomcoe.org/pdfjs/?file=/publications/download/abuse_of_history_report_27-01-2020_reduced_file_size.pdf?zoom=page-fit (September 17, 2025).
  • Morgan, Jason. 2025. “Historical Revisionism as Trauma Revisited: And, Why Historical Revisionism Is Necessary Anyway.” Humanities Bulletin 8(1): 109–18.
  • Putin, Vladimir. 2021. “Article by Vladimir Putin ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“.” President of Russia. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 (January 14, 2026).
  • Renz, Bettina. 2016. “Russia and ‘Hybrid Warfare.’” Contemporary Politics 22(3): 283–300. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2016.1201316.
  • Singh, Kawaljit, and Dr Harish Kumar. 2024. “Phenomena Of Pseudohistorical News Information In The Post-Truth Era.” Educational Administration: Theory and Practice 30(5): 7050–56. doi: https://doi.org/10.53555/kuey.v30i5.4091.

Featured Image: Illustration of the historical evolution
of Russian psychological influence in mass media (top: artwork by Y. Scheglov; bottom: author’s screenshot from YouTube)

Olesia Zvezdova
Olesia Zvezdova

Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Olesia Zvezdova (24. April 2026). History as a Weapon: Historical Revisionism as a Tool of Russian Psychological Aggression in Social Media. DH Lab. Abgerufen am 5. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/164q8


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