Sergej Sumlenny, a political scientist focused on Eastern Europe and living in Berlin, posted a Twitter thread on the preparations Russian books made in advance of the Ukrainian war.
“One of the first indicators of Russia preparing for a full-scale turn to dictatorship and a global war,” Sumlenny says, “was the mass production of books about cool sides of Stalin and Stalinism and about upcoming war against the West.”
The secret police control the publishing industry, he says, so it wasn’t the free market bringing a surge of books with titles like “Be proud, not sorry! Truth about Stalin Age,” “Stalinist’s Handbook”, and “Stalin’s Repressions: A Great Lie” in 2010 and following. Bookstores followed the theme with vintage war paraphernalia.
To repeat from Twitter, Sumlenny writes, “Soon after, Kremlin has started to publish what they called ‘battle fantastic.’ Mass-produced low-quality books about Russian military superiority in all possible conflicts. The whole book series appeared. Here: ‘Battlefield Ukraine series’ ‘Ukraine on Fire.'” The series characterized Ukrainians as Nazis and proxies for the West, but Russia will kick in their teeth as a duty to righteousness.
Along with this, Russia is publishing history rewrites, describing the glory the motherland once had or could have had if the trusted had remained faithful. Sumlenny refers to the historic fantasy “Forward, Gardemarines!”
He carries on, because the history gets even more twisted with Russians saving the world through time-travel and Hitler being one of the good guys who tries to capture Churchill and charge him with war crimes. He suggests Western embassies ignored the threads in part because they didn’t want to see them.