The Great Patriotic War, which cost the USSR nearly 30 million lives, has touched nearly every Russian family in some way, and it is the main—if not only—connecting thread unifying Russians today. Putin knows this in part because he is himself from such a family—he says his brother died during the siege of Leningrad ten years before he was born. He knows the power of this painful heritage. And so, wishing to rally Russians around himself, he has begun to use the memory of the war.
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