Nothing Is True and Everything Is Great

Russians live in a completely fictional reality of alternative historical facts

To a casual observer, Russia may appear a nation of incredibly surly, perpetually angry introverts who want nothing to do with the outside world. To a slightly more educated one, Russia will be revealed as a nation of incredibly surly, perpetually angry introverts endlessly obsessed with what the outside world, specifically the West, thinks of them. The actual reality is that Russia is a nation of incredibly surly, perpetually angry introverts who know the West lives better and happier lives, hates it for this passionately and requires, demands, thirsts for its love and respect. The even grimmer possibility is that, at various points in its collective soul-searching, Russia is a nation of aggressive savages that wants to drag the rest of the world into its cave.

Russians are mostly aware of this, joke about this and even find reasons to admire themselves for this. None of it leads them to reevaluate their national mission, however, because, collectively, they inhabit an alternate reality in which they are the greatest, most advanced, most enlightened and overall superior nation on Earth, cunningly robbed of its legacy by the perfidious, conceited West, usually visualized as a Jewish caricature. This LCD trip of a fantasy has been supplied to Russians by centuries of isolation, repression and backwardness that resulted in the type of education and public discourse that tends to feed their insecurities.

To be sure, every country on Earth has a national myth of some sort. Russians, however, can justifiably be proud of creating an entire national un-reality (Russians’ tendency to disregard and vilify facts is well documented, in particular in Peter Pomerantsev’s famous book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible) in which they are the humanity’s lodestar.

Here is a small sample of the things that Russians unironically believe in the year of Charles Darwin 2024.

World War II is not a thing, the Holocaust never happened

According to Russia’s official history, there was no such thing as “the second world war”, but instead “The Great Fatherland War”, which began in 1941, with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and ended on May 9, 1945, with Germany’s capitulation to the Red Army. Even the date of this capitulation (it actually occurred on May 8) is manipulated in accordance with Moscow time.

Every single Russian war monument, without any exceptions, will contain these dates

The war, according to Russia’s version of history, was fought exclusively and almost single-handedly by the USSR against Germany, essentially constituting a Russo-German or Russo-Fascist conflict. Great Britain stood on the sidelines waiting to be saved, and the US dithered and procrastinated until it hungrily jumped in at the last second to scoop up the spoils. The Lend-Lease program, without which the USSR would never have had a chance, is downplayed as pitiful concessions of “American SPAM and egg powder” that were meant to humiliate Russians, not help them. The Battle of Britain? What is that? The Pacific Theater? Nothing of note. North Africa? Who cares. D-Day? A Hollywood embellishment. 1939? The year Spartak Moscow won the USSR Football League, nothing more. The joint Soviet/Nazi invasion of Poland? The Winter War? Katyn? All slander.

Russians fought the war alone, won it alone, deserve all the credit alone, were the lone unquestionable good guys.

Americans and Brits aren’t the only ones who get written out of the Russian history of the war. Jews have no place in it either. As post-war USSR engaged in the policies of official antisemitism, the Holocaust was never mentioned in Soviet accounts of the war. The Jews slaughtered en masse in occupied Ukraine and Belarus were referred to as “Soviet citizens” and nothing else, the only victims of death camps Soviets talked about were Red Army prisoners, the only ethnicity portrayed as the sufferer of Nazism was Russian.

In fact, most Russians to this day think that Jews were the least affected ethnicity in the war, due to their perceived cowardice and the ability to worm out of military service. Russians often derisively refer to Jews as “fighters of the Tashkent theater”, implying that they would bribe their way to Central Asian evacuation and avoid the front lines where brave and selfless Russians sacrificed their lives for worthless Jewish hides. None of this bears even the slightest relation to facts (about half a million Jews served in the Red Army, more than 80% of them on the front lines, and Jews have a disproportionally high representation among the recipients of the war-time Hero of the Soviet Union honors), but denying facts is the entire point.

Russians invented everything

Almost every nation tries to lay a claim on inventing something, of course, but in Russia the all-encompassing and obsessive nature of these claims has reached such comical proportions that even Soviet citizenry grew a bit incredulous, giving birth to a famous joke about “Russia, the ancestral motherland of elephants.”

Still, the following are all taken as an article of faith:

• Russians invented the locomotive

  Forget about Brits like William Murdoch and Richard Trevithick, none of what they did merits any interest. The first steam locomotive, declare Russian history books, was built by father and son Cherepanovs in 1834. The Cherepanovs did indeed build the first Russian locomotive, after visiting England in 1833 and studying what Trevithick had built 30 years previously, but nothing done by non-Russians counts, by definition.

• Russians invented the airplane

  Not a single Russian school student has ever heard about either of the Wright brothers who are universally accepted to have made the first flight in a heavier-than-air craft in 1903. Any Russian with any interest in history will passionately claim that it was Admiral Mozhaysky, all the way back in 1882, who made this historical feat. Don’t even talk to Russians about the Wrights. Even the most progressive and informed of them will never accept their primacy. The fact that Mozhaysky’s airplane never actually flew means nothing. He is the creator of “the world’s first airplane”, as this Soviet postal stamp proclaims, and that’s that.

  

  A six-kopeck stamp can’t be wrong, people!

• Russians invented the steam engine

  If The Great Soviet Encyclopedia is to be believed (and who wouldn’t believe the Great Soviet Encyclopedia!), it was an Urals mechanic Ivan Polzunov who first harnessed the power of steam all the way back in 1763. This, Soviets claimed, had conclusively put Westerners in their place, because Polzunov’s “fire machine” or “miracle samovar” had predated the invention of the Scotsman James Watt by a few years. Which it did, except that Watt’s machine wasn’t the first steam engine, and that honor is usually given to Thomas Savery all the way back in 1689. Once again, in Polzunov’s case, Russians have confused the first appearance of something in Russia with the first appearance of that same thing ever.

• Russians invented the bicycle

  The same Great Encyclopedia bestows this honor on a serf factory worker Artamonov who allegedly won his freedom with the innovation in 1801. The Artamonov legend (he was supposed to have pedaled his invention from the Urals to Saint Petersburg to attend Alexander I’s coronation, thus also inventing the Tour de France) subsequently grew: by Stalin’s era the previously single-named Artamonov would acquire a first name (Yefim) and more inventions, ranging from a water-pump to a steam-powered car. The half-century-long gradual development of the bicycle by various Europeans is, as far as Russians know, never happened.

• Russians absolutely own the entire history of radio

  The Great Encyclopedia doesn’t even mention Guglielmo Marconi. His entire life and work are completely and totally fake news, according to Russians. Radio was invented out of thin air by their own genius Alexander Popov. This is so beyond debate in Russia that May 7, the date of Popov’s demonstration of his “invention” (none of his work was original and didn’t constitute the actual invention of radio), was officially celebrated as Radio Day in the USSR.

• Russians created the law of conservation of mass - out of nothing

  In my Soviet chemistry class, you could get away with not knowing the periodic table (invented by a Russian - for real, this time), but if you forgot to refer to the Law of Conservation of Mass as “Lomonosov’s Law”, you failed every time. Mikhail Lomonosov, who indeed was a sui generis genius, did formulate the general principle in the XVIII century in some of his correspondence, but to call him the discoverer, let alone to claim he had proven it experimentally, as the official Russian history still does, is ludicrous. The law was widely known, though controversial, way before him, and Lomonosov himself never claimed to be the originator. This doesn’t matter to Russians: it’s Lomonosov’s Law and nothing else.

Alaska rightfully belongs to Russia and has been illegally occupied by the US since 1967

Russians believe a variety of bullshit about their past ownership of Alaska. For one, they blame Catherine the Great for selling it to America, despite the fact that it happened 70 years after her death. The belief is so prevalent that “Lyube”, Putin’s favorite band, wrote a song about it in the late 1980s. It’s called, subtly, Give Alaska Back to Us, America!, blames Catherine, reasons that Alaska is the same as Russia because it also has horses, women, accordions and salmon, and includes ingenious lines such as:

Otdavay-ka zemlitsu Alyasochku
Otdavay-ka rodimuyu v zad

This is supposed to mean “give back the beloved Alaska land, give us the native one back” but due to “Lyube’s” shaky command of the Russian grammar it actually says “give the native one into our ass.”

Catherine must have become the focal point of scorn because she is a woman and who else could’ve thrown around Russia’s lands like that! Certainly not the fabulously mutton-chopped Alexander II.

Could a man who freed the serfs also let Alaska be a part of a democratic nation? Never!

But equally as prevalent is the belief that Alexander didn’t actually sell Alaska but leased it to America for exactly 100 years and should have gotten it back by the late 1960s. This “fact” was even taught in Soviet schools. Russians are still convinced that Nikita Khrushchev made a short-sighted political decision not to demand Alaska back because Khrushchev was a stupid liberal who loved giving away Russian lands (see also Crimea).

The fact that the centennial of the Alaska purchase happened in 1967, three years after Khrushchev was ousted by Leonid Brezhnev, is as lost on most Russians as the fact that Catherine had nothing to do with the sale.

Adding to their claims of rightful ownership of Alaska is the myth that the $7.2 million America was supposed to have paid were never received because the ship with gold bullion sank en route. The existence of an official receipt confirming that the entire sum was indeed added to the Russian treasury also means nothing to Russians.

Catherine was wrong, the lease has expired, Khrushchev was a traitor, money was never paid, Alaska must return into the fold in time for Putin’s 2030 reelection campaign!

Russians won the space race

No competition in history has been as expensive and as famous as the race to conquer “the final frontier”, and while it is obvious that America absolutely has the primacy in befriending the Vulcans and defeating the Klingons, the rest of it is open to debate.

The Soviets, of course, have a whole list of firsts in their ledger: the first satellite, the first dog in space, the first human in space, the first human without a penis in space, the first space walk. Russians are justifiably proud of these huge achievements.

The first real human, Yuri Gagarin, is venerated as a national hero almost on par with Stalin (pro: Singlehanded Winner of War, con: killed more Russians than Hitler), Ivan the Terrible (pro: Terrible, con: Terrible), Peter the Great (pro: built the Empire, the navy and Saint Petersburg, con: made everyone pretend they are European), Alexander Pushkin (pro: the greatest Russian poet, con: black) and Vladimir Vysotsky (pro: the greatest modern Russian poet, con: Jew). The first dog, Laika, and the first dogs to come back alive, Belka and Strelka, are also fondly remembered. The first human without a penis, Valentina Tereshkova, was for a while a footnote in history, until she got something better to be remembered by: proposing a list of amendments to the Russian constitution in 2020 that effectively made Putin a czar.

Congratulations, comrade Tereshkova! Now, have a treat!

But all of this rings largely hollow, since Russians never managed to grab the top prize: landing on the Moon. All of their preliminary achievements have thus been relegated to the realm of winning the regular season only to see the rival grab the playoff title.

How did the Russians respond? The only way they knew how: by completely ignoring the lunar landing. Neil Armstrong’s name is literally less known in Russia than Louis Armstrong’s (and Lance Armstrong’s for that matter). The fact that Americans, or anyone, had landed on the Moon was never taught in Soviet school and isn’t taught in Russian ones either. The only way for Russians to even know it is to watch a Hollywood movie or to peruse a conspiracy theory claiming that the Moon landing is a hoax. In fact, about 80% of those Russians who have ever heard of this event believe that the landing was faked by the CIA and Hollywood.

Back in 2015, I participated in an online discussion with about 15 Russian journalists on a variety of topics. The Moon landing was one of them, and to the utter amazement and bemusement of my colleagues, I was the only participant who defended the reality of the landing. The rest of them couldn’t believe I’d be so gullible as to think it actually happened. As “proof” they offered conspiracy theories ranging from insane to incoherent, all of them debunked, all of them taken for absolute, unimpeachable fact in Russia.

This despite the fact that the landing was televised in the USSR, albeit not live, and that Soviet cosmonauts have said it many times that they watched Apollo 11 from their own facilities as it landed.

Soviet citizens watching the Moon landing while thoroughly not impressed

Currently, the Faked Moon Landing is Russia’s sixth most popular conspiracy theory, trailing “The conspiracy of historians to deny Russia’s primacy in everything” (for real), “The secret world government” (of Jews, of course), “AIDS doesn’t exist”, “GMO is poison” and “Earth is run by aliens”. It is a bit ahead of “Gay lobby destroying Russia’s values” and the flat Earth, so there is that.

Speaking of Russia’s winning, here is a whole subset of sports myths.

The 1972 Olympic gold in basketball was entirely uncontroversial

The rest of the world remembers the 1972 Munich Olympics for the mass murder of Israeli athletes by Islamic terrorists. In the Soviet Union, Israel didn’t exist except as a “Zionist imperialist entity” that provided a handy excuse for state-endorsed antisemitism, and Israeli athletes were never mentioned. In fact, when a Soviet team was forced to face an Israeli one in European competitions, Soviet announcers were forbidden from uttering the word “Israel” or the names of any opposing players. Soviets, on these occasions, were facing “The Opponent”, nameless and generic.

The other thing the 1972 Games are known for is the American swimmer Mark Spitz’s earning a literal cartload of gold medals, the most anyone had ever done in the same Olympics to that point. His double sin of being American and Jewish meant that his record wasn’t valid or admirable in any way, which is why he was vilified by Russian sports historians for being a “son of a millionaire” who “sold his sports soul to advertisers” and “whose name no longer commands any respect in the sporting world.”

Finally, the other thing those particular Games became famous for was the men’s basketball final, in which the USSR defeated the previously unbeaten USA team by a single point on a last-second layup. Of course, in the rest of the world this play was hugely controversial because the Soviets failed on the first attempt but were given a re-do by a sports functionary who came down from the stands to order the officials to set the clock back. To this day, Americans don’t recognize the result and don’t accept their silver medals.

Russians, though, are utterly unaware that anything remotely controversial had occurred. The “three seconds incident” was never mentioned on TV or in newspaper accounts, and the entire ending of the game was always presented as a pure, unspoiled Soviet triumph. In a recent movie about their glorious victory the entire episode is omitted. There probably wasn’t any time for it, what with all the historical inaccuracies that needed to be inserted into the script. Among those were the Soviet players windmill-dunking on hapless Americans and breaking backboards in the process (something absolutely against the 1972 rules), Ukrainian and Lithuanian players mouthing off with treasonous, anti-Soviet attitudes and having to be put back in their place, an entirely fictitious account of the Soviet coach’s sick child and moving the team captain’s fatal heart condition back in time by about 10 years.

When asked about all these fictions, the director of the film replied that his goal was to inspire the youth and not “blindly copy reality”, which is a phrase so deep and so Russian, it should be a line in the national anthem.

Reality can’t ball for shit, yo!

… but the 1980 Olympic loss in hockey totally was!

That’s one thing Hollywood, the world-renowned merchant of realism has to learn from Russian filmmakers, then, because Miracle, the Disney-made film about USA’s shocking 1980 Olympic hockey win over the USSR, famously obsessed over historical details. In fact, when I spoke to Mike Eruzione about 10 years ago at my son’s hockey tournament, the former US captain was able to point out to only one scene that was fictionalized for added drama.

Eruzione with his second most favorite Russian-speaking goalie

Well, according to Russians, the entire plot of Miracle is absolute fiction, because the only reason Americans won… Well, actually, there were many reasons. According to some ex-Soviet players, the entire American team was pumped up to the gills with psychotropic drugs developed by the CIA for the exact purpose of beating Russians to the loose puck. According to Vladislav Tretiak, the biggest reason was that the Soviet team was housed in a prison (technically true, because the buildings of the Olympic Village in Lake Placed were later repurposed for a penitentiary) and these inhumane conditions left them unable to effectively prepare by studying and discussing works of V. I. Lenin. And every single Russian fan is 100% sure the referees were hardened capitalist ideologues.

Also, apparently, Americans cheated by including Eruzione, who had played a few games as a pro, in their supposedly amateur squad. Which, of course, faced off against a team of simple Soviet soldiers, factory workers and aviation engineers who played hockey out of sheer love of art.

Also, Russians absolutely beat Canada in the 1972 Summit Series

In 2014, I met the famous Canadian commentator Don Cherry at the Sochi Winter Olympics, and he told me he absolutely loved the recently released Russian biopic about the hockey legend Valeri Kharlamov. “Tell me, when is the sequel coming out?”, he asked. The question was prompted by the fact that the film ended after Game 1 of the 1972 Summit Series against Canada, which the USSR won convincingly. There were 7 more games in the series. Canada won four of them, with one tie, claiming the overall victory. Cherry wanted to see the rest of the story.

But there is no rest of the story, as far as Russians are concerned. They series ended with their win, and that is that. Of course, 1972 is too famous an event to completely sweep under the rug. Too many people still remember it, but even to them the actual result doesn’t matter. The official narrative in Russia is that “Soviet amateurs took on Canadian professionals and destroyed the myth of their invincibility.” Which is true, except for the “amateurs” part.

Once again, when asked about the weird happy ending, the Russian director was utterly unfazed. “This is not a documentary”, he said. “If someone wants to tell the rest of the story, they can make a sequel.”

Once wonders if the same guy is working on his own version of the movie about the 1980 Olympic hockey game, in which the ending credits roll with 2 minutes left in the first period.

Russian food is lusted for all over the world

No, hear me out now. Russians, of course, are perfectly aware that their mayonnaise-based salads and the horrors that are kholodets and “herring under the fur coat” are not in fact popular beyond the borders of the former USSR. Nobody in their right mind would order an ukha in a Michelin restaurant. Nobody is this delusional. However, in modern-day Russia, a deeply entrenched and utterly insane cult of Plombir, a relatively flavorless Soviet-era ice cream, has taken hold.

Bow to its plain majesty!

Plombir (the name itself mimics the French plombiéres but bears no resemblance to the original product) was sold in the USSR for 20 kopecks a pop. Its flavor is best described as “nondescript” or, perhaps, “inoffensive.” It tasted like very fatty milk with industrial amounts of sugar and little else, which is exactly the reason modern-day Russians have developed a myth that it was made with the purest, most natural ingredients and was thus the highest-quality ice cream ever created.

Both claims are ridiculously wrong, but the Plombir Cult worships the imaginary Soviet past, the perfect lost paradise of their childhood, and cults such as this have no use for reality. Plombir’s very plainness and flavorlessness serves as an avatar of bygone purity in an egalitarian society where all were brothers, gazing sanguinely and purposely into a bright future full of most elevated aspirations.

Today’s Russians have created a reality in which Plombir’s exceptional, otherworldly quality made it the most sought-after ice cream in the world, which in the West was only served in the most exclusive restaurants at breathtaking prices, while lucky and robust Soviet kids could munch on it happily at measly 20 kopecks for a wet, leaky waffle cup full of “natural ingredients.”

This cult is so pervasive that the word “plombirshchik” has entered the Russian vernacular, meaning “a nostalgic person, someone longing for the USSR.”

The Russian version of Sherlock Holmes is the most iconic one

There are, of course, many more tales of Russia’s extremely acrimonious divorce from reality, but even the most exhaustive Substack posts must end somewhere, and this one is already well into the longread territory, so let’s end it on an upbeat note: with a more or less humorously absurd claim.

In the early 1980s, Soviet TV came up with its own take on the immortal Victorian detective, a TV series named “Ze Advenchoors of Sherlok Khlomz and Doktor Vatson”, starring the raspy-voiced Vasily Livanov as the former and the prim and proper Vitaly Solomin as the latter. Livanov is still alive, Solomin has recently died, but both went on to dedicate their old age to staunch support of Vladimir Putin in general and his glorious conquest of Ukraine in particular.

But before this unfortunate yet entirely predictable eventuality (Russian cultural and sports celebrities, on the whole, rarely view themselves as anything other than servants of Ze Mazzerland), Kholmz and Vatson became darlings of Soviet TV audiences. Their adorably amateurish takes on Victorian gentlemanness were viewed by Russians as the pinnacle of class and refinement.

“Is that a train I hear, Kholmz?” - “I see you have been reading the Great Russian Genius Tolstoy and His Immortal Masterpiece Anna Karenina, Vatson!”

The series itself, of course, is not the masterpiece many still believe it to be. It’s mostly a straightforward retelling of Doyle’s plots, full of egregious overacting, and captured on that famous high-quality Soviet film that rendered all night scenes (which constitute the majority of the stories) into 10 straight minutes of darkness with hoofbeats in the background, punctuated by Livanov’s raspy declaration of “Vee arr khere, Vatson!”

Well, it so happened that the English, who love everything exotic, have enshrined Livanov’s portrait into the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker Street, along with other portrayals of the detective. This, however, gave Russians the reason to think that even the English themselves have recognized Livanov’s supremacy as the best Holmes of all time, something that is now canonic in all Russian cinematographic discourse, along the the myth that this title was bestowed upon Putin’s aged flunky by Queen Elizabeth II herself.

Well, “Western Ruler of Note Said Something Russian Is Best Ever” is definitely another subset of Russia’s national mythology (“Kennedy said national greatness is counted by space flights and Olympic medals”, “Bismarck said Russia’s spirituality is its greatest weapon” are both a thing), but at this point, it’s probably as good a time to stop as any.

The great proponent of Russia’s primacy in everything, Ensign Pavel Chekov, once said: “The Garden of Eden was just outside Moscow. A very nice place. It must have made Adam and Eve very sad to leave.” Well, Pavel, many Jews were. Most weren’t.