History seems to have a new place of honor in Russian society. There is a plethora of hobby experts speaking up and putting pen to paper, even though no one wants to appear as competing with the master of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin himself. Putin has become a trailblazer of historical thought on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Still, his efforts can be very briefly summed up as, there is no Ukraine or Ukrainians, never has and never will be.

Now, Putin's former placeholder Dmitry Medvedev, who currently rather enjoys the status of court jester, has also taken up as a historical expert. After all, the status of jester has allowed others to speak the truth and look good doing it without paying with their head in the past. Alternatively, Medvedev finds that putting history in its proper place is a trend worth following and abetting.

In any case, Medvedev, whom the Russian opposition now styles Dimon, following a documentary by a member of Navalny's team, wrote a long tirade on the role of criminal Anglo-Saxon forces in the rise and development of Hitler's Germany. And on Russia's role as the protector of the right kind of ideas.

The completion of the work was timed for May 9, which has been shaped into the most important holiday in Russia. Because the Great Patriotic War has been declared a founding pillar of modern Russian mythology and life largely revolves around drawing ideological parallels between that war and the one currently raging in Ukraine.

That is why the Kremlin simply cannot afford erroneous treatments of history and why Putin issued an eight-page ukase laying down a state monopoly on history. It is probable then that Medvedev's work reflects the official version of what history needs to be.

Medvedev writes that the historical nonsense of the 21st century lies in a return to the most inhumane ideologies of the past. Russia is supposedly fighting resurgent fascism, its zombie reincarnation in the revolting and cynical grandchild of Hitlerism that is Kyiv's Nazi regime.

What is, apparently, worse is that the Kyiv regime is being fed, supplied and egged on by Russia's former allies from World War II, while remnants of forest brothers who were not wiped out when the time was right are suffocating in their Russophobia in underdeveloped Eastern Europe. We also learn that Washington and Brussels are being more cynical and operating on a broader scale than Hitler and his cronies were.

What's more, it were the Anglo-Saxons who created fertile soil for Hitlerism back in the day. According to Medvedev, Germany had no way of rearming after the Treaty of Versailles. Correct. But then the Anglo-Saxons gave them money and the arms race was on.

The London Conference of 1924 cut Germany's reparations sum in half and created conditions for restoring the German economy to a level where it could comply with the conditions of Versailles and pay the reparations. We now learn that this was all aimed at solving the so-called Russia question. And the free flow of German goods to Russia would have made sure the Soviet state remained weak economically.

Common sense implores one to ask why would German goods have weakened the Soviet state? Were they perhaps of poor quality or somehow detrimental to Soviet production? Did Moscow have no say in any of it? Besides, Putin's Russia has been and remains largely dependent on foreign technology. It must be another damned Anglo-Saxon conspiracy...

This is where we need to go on a little excursion. The author, in his bid to become a coryphaeus in history, offers up a lot of names and dates but glances over a number of events. Namely the role of the Soviet state in restoring the armed forces of Germany. Then head of the German army, Gen. Hans von Seeckt was put in contact with representatives of Moscow in 1920. The general was responsible for the restoration of the army in the Weimar Republic.

In 1922, the German Reichswehr and the Red Army entered into a contract that prescribed the establishment of German military bases on Soviet soil. Two years later, a Reichswehr office was opened in Moscow and Germany agreed to cover the bases' expenses in full. Over ten years of cooperation, Germany gave the Soviet state around 100 million Reichsmarks. Based on Medvedev's logic, did the Germans pay a part of the money they got from the Anglo-Saxons to the Bolsheviks?

The bases in Russia allowed Germany to train tank crews and air force pilots, which activities were prohibited in Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. For its part, Germany allowed the Red Army to participate in joint exercises and gave it access to industrial and military technology the Soviets lacked.

The Germans tended to mistrust the Russians as everything that wasn't nailed down – pencils, soap, toothpaste, tools etc. – was stolen. Therefore, Russia's relevant tactics in Ukraine are hardly newfound. This cooperation lasted until 1933, after which there was a pause, followed by Hitler and Stalin's agreement for carving up parts of Europe.

Coming back to Medvedev, he also hints that the Germans' talk of Arian ancestry follows Anglo-Saxon ideas, namely those of the Brits. Let it be said that talk of Arian ancestry can increasingly also be heard in Russia these days.

Medvedev is clearly bothered by the fact that no one in charge of the economic side of the Nazi regime was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. It would also be fair, according to Medvedev, to ascertain how much Anglo-Saxon companies made from cooperating with the Nazis, calculate that money's current value and pay it out as compensation for the genocide of the Soviet people. But to no one else who suffered in the war...

Leaving aside the rest, allow me to close by pointing to Dimon's thesis that Russia sees as its mission rooting out the current form of the brown plague once and for all, surgically if necessary, and that the so-called special operation in Ukraine is just the first step on the road to a new world order. That is what we should take away from here. That Ukraine is just the start and the goal is more comprehensive and broader. Consciously or not, but the court jester has let the truth slip.

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