“The Kremlin openly talks about using history as a weapon and we’re really talking about the intrumentalisation of historical narratives. This is not about justice for the past. For Russia, this is like how can we find the underbelly of the countries around us and mess with them.”
Peter Pomerantsev is senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.
In this podcast with New Lines‘ Faisal Al Yafai and Idrees Ahmad, he discusses “Memory Wars”, the attempt to rewrite history to fit current political objectives, why that attempt is as relevant in Ukraine and Russia as it is in Syria and the United States, where he stands on the removal of statues – and why Russia seeks to manipulate sensitive topics like race in America.