Such historical distortions have characterised Putin’s rhetoric in recent weeks – but long-time observers of contemporary Russia such as Katie Stallard, journalist and author of Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea, recognise that such weaponisation of history has long been a key part of the Russian leader’s arsenal.

Stallard was living in Moscow during the 2014 Ukraine crisis and working as a television correspondent for Sky News, moving back and forth between Crimea and eastern Ukraine, under separatist control, and other parts of the country.

“I just was so struck by the fact that whichever side of that line you were on, it was like you were in a parallel reality,” she says via Zoom from Washington. Different explanations prevailed on either side of the divide, depending on what news media was being consumed.

When Stallard returned to Russia, things that she and her colleagues had seen with their own eyes in eastern Ukraine – Russian tanks; Russian soldiers – were refuted as factually impossible.

“That was fascinating to me,” Stallard says. The discrepancies prompted her to reflect more deeply on the questions that she would eventually try to answer in Dancing on Bones: “How do you understand the version of history that the state is presenting to you? How does that shape the current reality?”

Her aim in the book, she says, was to unpack early conditioning, how that influences people’s view of their leaders, “and how that supports some of what seems to us from the outside to be totally inexplicable moves”.

The three countries that are the focus of Stallard’s book – Russia, China and North Korea – are united in having autocratic leader­ships that manipulate history to strengthen their grip on power. They differ significantly, however, in how hard that historical revisionism has to work to confer legitimacy.

The Chinese Communist Party, for example, can point to four decades of economic growth as justi­fication for their rule: Russia and North Korea, by contrast, are both facing different forms of economic catastrophe.

“Regardless of any economic legitimation, nationalism is the card that you can always play,” Stallard observes of this contrast. “With regard to Russia, I think the test is going to be to what extent Putin can perpetuate that in a new time of economic chaos and collapse, with more young Russians coming home in coffins.

“In all three cases, though […] there’s this idea that defending the country and defending the history is the one thing you can always come back to regardless of the economic situation.”

Narratives of wartime victory are, for all three countries, central to the overall story their respective leaders are eager to promote. In China and Russia, it is World War II, as it is known in much of the West, that has become foundational.

The current Chinese leadership has extended the official length of this conflict – referred to in China as the “War of Resistance against Japan” – by six years, pulling back its start date to 1931: the year Japan invaded Manchuria, in China’s northeast.

Despite a complicating factor – the Nationalists rather than the Communists were, inconveniently, in charge of China for the duration of the fight against Japan – Xi Jinping invokes the conflict as a moment of national strength at the tail end of the so-called century of humiliation: “the first complete victory in a recent war where China resisted the invasion of a foreign enemy”.

In Russia, this conflict is also known by a different name – the Great Patriotic War – and Russia’s victory is celebrated enthusiastically on May 9 each year. The war is one of the few unproblematic periods of Russia’s 20th century history; a parable of good overcoming evil.

In the 2014 crisis, Stallard saw how central this narrative was in framing the fight in Ukraine as one against “fascists”; Putin has of course declared “denazification” as one of his aims in the current war.

In North Korea, meanwhile, the narrative of the second world war offers future leader Kim Il-sung as action hero, almost single-handedly liberating the homeland from Japanese forces, before leading North Korean forces to a glorious victory over the United States in 1953.

“This isn’t true,” Stallard writes, “but three generations of North Korean leaders have brandished this make-believe history as proof of why they must be in power.”

Despite such absurdities, the regimes peddling such fairy-tale versions of their national story remain in power. Stallard wrote much of the book during Donald Trump’s presidency and noted how democratically elected Western leaders such as the US president and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson were continually appealing to similarly nationalistic myths of the past.

“We should be really wary of leaders who are offering these very glorious, uncomplicated visions of the past,” she says, “because that really serves the people currently in power. It doesn’t learn any of the lessons of history. It doesn’t honour the sacrifices of people who did fight in these wars, and it doesn’t do anything to tackle contemporary problems in these countries.”

In Western democracies, such mythmaking is countered by other voices, other narratives. In the autocracies discussed in Dancing on Bones, historians have become subject to increasingly punitive laws designed to discourage discussion and debate, “so that there’s only the great and the glorious and the good”, Stallard says.

And when it becomes especially dangerous, she concludes, “is when that’s the only story you can tell”.