Memory Makers is an engaging study of how pro-Kremlin media and related institutions politicized Russian history between 2012 and 2021 to promote the Putin administration’s geopolitical agenda. Completed before the start of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it focuses on official and quasi-official efforts to rally Russian society together to confront both domestic and foreign challenges to state authority. Inevitably, some of the propaganda dynamics the Jade McGlynn analyzes—particularly the connection of the Soviet past to the Russian present—have been superseded since 2022 by a new emphasis on Russian primordial and imperial claims to Ukrainian lands. That said, other aspects of what McGlynn describes remain as relevant today as when she put them to paper before the start of the war.

Memory Makers begins with a survey of the institutions that McGlynn credits with promoting this historical propaganda and crowding out other competing narratives. Although McGlynn probably overstates their ability to dominate the Russian public sphere between 2012 and 2021, her survey anticipates the near hegemony that these institutions have enjoyed since the outset of the “special military operation.”

Memory Makers then segues to examine the historical line itself with several interrelated chapters on the content analysis of pre-war mass media. Three case studies in Ch. 3, for instance, allow McGlynn to illustrate how history was used to manage major crises between 2012 and 2021. Russian aggression in Ukraine after 2014 was recast as a defensive struggle by connecting it to the Nazi threat between 1941 and 1945. Sanctions introduced to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea and the downing of MH17 were attributed to Cold War-era Russophobia. Moreover, Russian military intervention in the bloody Syrian civil war was normalized as an assertion of traditional Russian superpower status.

In subsequent chapters, McGlynn supplies a useful taxonomy of specific themes that she connects to specific politicians, pundits, and media personalities, documenting her major claims with large data sets rather than mere anecdotalism. And although McGlynn probably exaggerates the degree to which this jingoism replaced more traditional historical scholarship during the decade in question, her findings inform many of the most disturbing new developments in the Russian public sphere since 2022.

Memory Makers concludes by arguing that history was politicized between 2012 and 2021 not only to make sense of specific crises, but also to foster a newly unified sense of “cultural consciousness.” Along the way, McGlynn makes the perceptive observation that these efforts to shape Russian identity were much more statist than they were nationalist, in so far as they celebrate the authority of the state rather than the lives of its citizenry. This analysis helps explain the Putin administration’s heavy reliance since 2022 on propaganda concerning Russian civilization and its messianic mission abroad.

A detailed focus on the construction of this new historical line, Memory Makers often implicitly assumes that this mythmaking quickly found widespread resonance in contemporary Russian society. Although McGlynn briefly problematizes the issue of public opinion (170), more treatment on the difference between the construction and reception of propaganda would seem merited, as even authoritarian societies rarely internalize official messaging uncritically. What’s more, the Russian public’s halting embrace of the present war (and the state’s recourse to unprecedented levels of censorship and repression to silence antiwar sentiments) suggests that the impact of all of this historical propaganda since 2012 has been surprisingly limited.

Although Memory Makers is right to stress the importance of the Soviet past to the Russian present, its implicit assumption that this was the product of a top-down campaign run by the Kremlin probably relies too much on outdated Soviet propaganda models. Indeed, McGlynn is often at her best when explaining how patriotic entrepreneurs and other non-state actors competed among themselves to contribute to this historical agenda—something that suggests the existence of a multivalent marketplace of ideas operating under state supervision rather than Stalinist diktat.

Published in 2023, Memory Makers connects its findings from the 2012–21 period to the present war in passing at a number of junctures. A more sustained engagement with new wartime forms of patriotic mobilization—even if outlined only in the study’s conclusion—could have at least identified continuities and discontinuities in the way that history has been weaponized since 2022 to justify the war against Ukraine. Even without such analysis, however, Memory Makers makes for insightful and often prophetic reading and will appeal to audiences interested in the use and abuse of Russian history today.