On February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin delivered a 56-minute televised national address that ended with his announcement that Russia would recognize the independence of eastern Ukraine's self-declared separatist "republics." The president spent most of the speech, however, contesting Ukrainian statehood and arguing that the government in Kyiv owes its territory today to the supposed generosity of the Bolsheviks, particularly Vladimir Lenin. To understand the scholarly merits of Ukrainian and Soviet history as presented by Mr. Putin, Meduza turned to Dr. Victoria Smolkin, a historian at Wesleyan University who studies Communism, the Cold War, as well as atheism and religion in the former Soviet Union. She is also the author of the 2018 book "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism."