On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Second World War, the French academic offers an analysis of the semiotic parasitism practiced by the Russian Federation. In the Kremlin’s discourse, the Allied victory over Nazi Germany is detached from its history and linked to floating contemporary enemies: the European Union, NATO, and liberal democratic values in the broadest sense. It is no longer a memory, but an ideological weapon, one for the subversion of our values.
Russia’s External Intelligence Service (SVR) recently published an article accusing Europe and Ukraine of trying to overshadow the 80th anniversary of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
The article accused European officials and the Ukrainian government of attempting to sabotage the 80th anniversary celebrations of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and promote historical revisionism and glorification of neo-Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. Most notably, the article asserted that the West is effectively recreating a Nazi-style coalition against Russia, framing current geopolitical tensions as a continuation of World War II hostilities under a different guise.
This text presents a good example of what may be called semiotic parasitism. Such a phenomenon – where symbolic systems get drained of original meaning and repurposed for ideological ends – helps us understand how today’s Russian state weaponizes historical memory.
At its core, this symbolic operation serves an existential need. Russian Victory Day (on May 9) functions as surrogate legitimacy for a state whose origins and structure remain deeply compromised. The Soviet Union emerged in 1922 after the Bolshevik usurpation of power in October 1917. It was not founded through democratic processes but through violence, repression, and dissolution of the Constituent Assembly – the only legitimately elected body in pre-Soviet Russia after the collapse of the empire. Throughout the entire Soviet period, no meaningful elections occurred; the Communist Party monopolized political power through display of unprecedented violence and censorship.
Only in 1989 did the Soviet system permit partially free parliamentary elections, with the first presidential elections in Soviet Russia taking place in 1991. These marked a tentative shift toward democratization. Yet this shift came riddled with structural inequalities, media manipulation, and oligarchic influence. Elections in the 1990s and early 2000s remained formally competitive, but elite capture increasingly defined them. After Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 – amid widespread protests and public discontent – the democratic electoral system hollowed out completely. Electoral falsification became systematic. Opposition figures faced marginalization, exile, and imprisonment; the judiciary subordinated itself to executive power. By the mid-2010s, Russia had effectively returned to authoritarian rule beneath a thin democratic facade.
As institutional legitimacy eroded, the state increasingly relied on symbolic resources – chief among them, the memory of the Great Patriotic War (World War II). The mythic power of May 9, the Soviet V Day, functions as ideological adhesive, compensating for the absence of political pluralism and constitutional accountability. Within Russian symbolic order, “Victory over Fascism” operates not merely as commemorative expression but as a master signifier charged with moral absolutes. It condenses heroism, sacrifice, and righteousness into a single narrative thread that retroactively redeems both Soviet authoritarianism and contemporary autocracy.
And this constitutes a clear case of semiotic parasitism. Semiotic parasitism describes the situation when one sign system or discourse acts parasitically upon another. It is the appropriation and continued circulation of ideological signs that have been severed from their original referential or normative content. Political actors and regimes maintain symbolic coherence not through the generation of new ideological meaning, but through the strategic reanimation of expired
or hollowed-out signifiers. The signs persist as rhetorical forms, functioning primarily as instruments of legitimation, identity construction, or affective mobilization, despite the erosion or exhaustion of their semantic grounding. This phenomenon may be corresponding to France’s Roland Barthes’s concept of myth – a second-order semiological system in which signs are emptied of historical content and transformed into naturalized cultural narratives. In our case, the historical signifier “Victory over Fascism,” once anchored in Nazi Germany’s defeat by the Allies, detaches from referential history and reattaches to floating contemporary enemies: the European Union, NATO, and Ukraine – liberal democratic values more broadly. No longer memory but weapons. The signifier persists while its content gets replaced. The parasite (current Russian ideology) consumes the host (WWII memory), draining legitimacy while transforming it into an aggressive instrument.
The actual complexity of WWII – multinational Allied effort, moral ambiguities, and Soviet regime crimes before, during, after the war – flattens into a univocal narrative. Russia becomes not just one victor among many; it becomes the eternal vanquisher of Evil. Any geopolitical actor opposing Russian interests gets labeled “fascist,” regardless of historical accuracy. The SVR article accuses Ukraine and EU of attempting to “overshadow” Victory Day’s sacred status – a projection of symbolic insecurity presented as moral concern.
The term “fascism” in contemporary Russian discourse is a signifier without a stable referent. The fascism invoked is not historical Nazism but floating enemy-form applicable against virtually any opponent. It has become a moral placeholder, emptied of specificity, available for ideological deployment at will. Modern Russian antifascism no longer constitutes a political or ethical stance – it is a fetish, a legitimizing token masking expansionism, repression, and imperial nostalgia.
Victory Day functions simultaneously as a ritual and mechanism. It ritually reaffirms the historical vision where Russia stands always right, always threatened, and always victorious. It mechanically reproduces state legitimacy by fusing historical memory with present propaganda. The temporal rupture between 1945 and 2025 heals not through genuine continuity but through mythical substitution. The Soviet Union – a regime born of mass terror – gets reimagined retroactively as Europe’s ethical savior. The Russian Federation – increasingly authoritarian and globally isolated – inherits this myth to justify its present trajectory.
Thus, the semiotic operation is completed. What looks like commemoration actually functions as a symbolic laundering system. Past crimes bathe in the light of a single redemptive event. The present democratic void hides behind the shadow of historic triumph. The signifier – “Victory over Fascism” – remains, but its referent has morphed into a symbolic domination tool.
What merits observation about the SVR’s publication is not its subversive nature but its open, discursive character. The SVR now functions as a media outlet. Official press releases and website manifestos replace secret operations. What once functioned clandestinely now operates in a ritualized, normalized, even aestheticized manner. The SVR no longer conceals its subversive agent role – it performs it publicly.
The Soviet regime created a new conflict category – a non-kinetic ideological war – later adapted (though often stripped of its Marxist core) by Germany and many others, East and West alike. This
Offered an alternative pathway between diplomacy and warfare, and is known as the Third Option1. Bolshevik secret police, the Extraordinary Commission (TcheKa) and its successors, pioneered disinformation, assassinations, and other “active measures” as means for structuring international relations and addressing domestic security concerns.
Nowadays however, judging from recent SVR publications, the Third Option has expanded from secret intervention to publicly displayed symbolic destabilization. Russia, lacking traditional soft power, has invested in what we might call chaosemantic projection – using destabilizing language, myth, and disinformation to parasitize history and question adversaries’ symbolic order while shielding internal legitimacy from critique.
While Cold War subversion aimed at ideological infiltration, modern subversion targets epistemological destabilization. The goal is not conversion but confusion; not persuasion but rendering meaning unreliable, sowing seeds of doubt. The SVR’s propagandistic texts therefore extend beyond a narrative – they constitute semiotic sabotage exercises, attempts to hijack, hollow, and repurpose key signifiers2 (fascism, victory, and Russophobia).
This represents a new reading of the Third Option – a postmodern subversion of the Western master narrative. That is the goal. The lingering question however is: who are the intended readers of this literary exercise? Western elites? The Russian general public? Vladimir Putin? The SVR’s textual production demonstrates a peculiar inversion: a secret service whose public discourse constitutes its most obscure operation. Its target audience remains the only true state secret or at least that is what it feels like.
François Millet is a pseudonym. The author specializes in the history of intelligence services and teaches at a prestigious French institution of higher education.
Footnotes
- Loch K. Johnson – The Third Option. Covert Action and American Foreign Policy. Oxford University Press, 2022
- Linguistic hijacking is more than a mere misapplication of a term; it is a pattern of inaccurate usage that functions as part of a resistance to knowledge of oppression. Resistance to knowledge of oppression is a form of active ignorance, a multifaceted group activity aimed at erasing or containing the spread of undesirable knowledge, in order to protect and perpetuate systems of domination. It involves spreading misinformation, misrepresenting crucial facts and concepts, misdirecting attention, covering up evidence, erasing testimony and silencing voices of oppressed groups, creating counternarratives, and many other things as well. A particular use of a term, such as a misapplication of “nazism,” counts as linguistic hijacking if it is part of a usage pattern that facilitates resistance to knowledge of oppression in this sense. Similarly, semantic corruption is a manipulated semantic change imposed by those in power that furthers their ends, quintessentially by debasing important connections between representation and reality. Derek Anderson – Linguistic Hijacking, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Volume 6, 2020, Issue 3, Article 4