Is Russia’s ‘Z’ the new swastika?
A universal symbol hijacked by supporters of Putin’s war has the potential to do untold harm, says Harry de Quetteville
Three strips of tape forming the letter “Z” – that’s all it was. A DIY symbol on the shirt of 20-yearold Ivan Kuliak, a Russian gymnast performing on the parallel bars at a competition in Doha. But, as always in times of war, symbols matter. And no matter the place or the context, these days “Z” is no longer just a letter of the alphabet.
Instead, it has become an icon of support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, daubed on Russian roads and walls, on bus shelters and cars, stitched into jacket lapels or formed by human chains – a public sign of devotion to Vladimir Putin and his campaign. You can even buy T-shirts emblazoned with it from the website of the statecontrolled broadcaster, Russia Today, for 1,190 roubles – worth almost £12 a month ago; a little over £6 today.
Displayed on the chest of a musclebound Russian athlete with cropped blond hair, however, darker associations form for “Z”: images of German competitors, Aryan supermen as they were proclaimed, standing next to swastikas in the 1930s, swearing loyalty to the Führer. No wonder Ukraine’s Illia Kovtun, who won the parallel bars competition, looks aghast as he is forced to pose next to Kuliak, who came third.
Of course, perhaps Kuliak was forced to wear the “Z”. Or perhaps he merely wanted to show solidarity with Russian conscripts, duped and dying in Ukraine. Having reportedly undergone military training himself last year, he will know that many of them are his young age, that they retain boyish features just as he does, and that they were certainly not prepared for this.
But perhaps not.
For though it is only a little more than a week since Russian armoured columns rolled south from Belarus into Ukraine, many bearing three stripes of tape like Kuliak’s, “Z” has undergone a transformation. Then, according to Ukrainian soldiers, it simply marked out units from Russia’s Eastern Military District, based half a world away in Khabarovsk, just north of the border with China, inland from the Pacific Coast.
Now, however, “Z” has been appropriated and subverted, propelled from the practical insignia of a military marshalling yard to the emblem of a propaganda war unleashed by Moscow on the home front. It has come, not coincidentally, as many of the Eastern Military District’s armoured vehicles have got bogged down: even as they flounder in Ukraine, so the “Z” campaign, channelling support, defiance and chilling aggression, has taken wing in Russia.
Its spread from the battlefield to the civilian front has been astonishing. As evidence of the former, writer Kamil Galeev, a Russian opposition activist and formerly a Fellow on Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at the Woodrow Wilson research centre in Washington DC, has posted pictures of a “Z” that Russian soldiers have formed from the insignia they claim are ripped from uniforms of killed Ukrainian soldiers. Other pictures, meanwhile, show children back home in a Russian hospice, presumably terminally ill, led out to form a human “Z” snaking through the winter snow. In orchestrated videos circulating on social media, flag-waving Russians stand in serried ranks wearing the “Z” emblem.
“‘Z’ doesn’t exist in the Cyrillic alphabet,” notes Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Europe at Cambridge University, “but it’s rapidly become widely used by Putin’s supporters.” They include Maria Butina, a politician who was convicted in America for “acting as an unregistered foreign agent after she was discovered involving herself in the National Rifle Association and attempting to influence Donald Trump”. For “unregistered foreign agent”, read spy.
In St Petersburg, “Z” is displayed in huge neon signs on major buildings. Nor is it limited to Russia. In Belgrade, thousands of pro-russian sympathisers marched over the weekend to back the invasions, many with placards bearing the three simple lines of the “Z”.
Such mutual support has been seen before, in the Balkan wars of the mid-1990s. Then, Russian peacekeepers would signal to Serb troops – later convicted of genocide – with a three-fingered salute. The salute, representing the Trinity, was a gesture of fellow feeling from Russian Orthodox soldiers to fellow Christians of the Serb Orthodox Church.
To many Bosnian Muslims, however, the three-fingered salute came to represent terror and death, a taunt by their ultra-nationalist Serb captors, known as Chetniks, which they were made to echo, and which often presaged torture or execution.
Naturally, though, it is the swastika which, of all symbols, has come most indelibly to represent terror, extremism and murder. It too had innocent origins, perhaps as long as 7,000 years before it was appropriated by the Nazis, deriving from the Sanskrit word “svastika”, meaning “good fortune” or “well-being”. The sign itself was sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism for millennia. A century ago, Rudyard Kipling happily daubed the covers of his books with the swastika. For the first years of its existence, the US 45th Infantry Division wore a badge which celebrated its many Native American soldiers with an ancient American Indian symbol of good luck – an orange swastika.
But Hitler changed all that. Fascinated by the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans, mythologising them as a master race who conquered India, he used them as a template for the rise of Germans under his own rule. By then, the swastika’s veneer of ancient glory had already been given several more coats by the German businessman-turned-archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who in the 1870s claimed to have discovered the remains of Troy, immortalised in Homer’s Iliad. There, in a vast dig in modern-day Turkey, Schliemann discovered what the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC subsequently described as “at least 1,800 variations on the same symbol: spindle-whorls, or swastikas”.
Nothing could better encapsulate the idea of a classic, eternal civilisation that Hitler sought to build himself. “The swastika [symbolises] the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man,” he noted in 1925, in Mein Kampf.
So ingrained did it become in the German psyche that, a decade later, Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was using the swastika interchangebly with the image of Hitler in her notorious film of the Nuremberg Rally, Triumph of the Will, switching between symbol and Führer to channel personal feeling into a greater national identity.
Yet a decade on again, the swastika had become forever polluted and reviled. Post-war, it was no longer the emblem of richly choreographed mainstream propaganda, but sprayed opportunistically by the marginalised extremists and anti-semites on Jewish graves. Kipling banished it from his books.
What fate now, then, awaits “Z”: should it go on to be associated with ever more atrocities in Ukraine, and the propaganda campaign of an increasingly totalitarian regime in Russia?
Will Zurich Insurance, whose logo is a large white Z on a blue background, suddenly find itself, through events quite beyond its control, sporting an emblem immediately associated by a global audience with murder?
It would not be the first to attract controversy. Shoemaker New Balance found itself fighting a public relations battle after a white supremacist website declared its products the “official shoes of white people”. For decades, indeed, brands have repeatedly been “hijacked” by fringe groups. Fred Perry shirts have been co-opted by the US far right Proud Boys; in this country so has another British sportswear brand – Lonsdale, because its name contains the letters NSDA, close to the German acronym for the Nazi Party.
Reasserting control over a brand can be hard. “As a brand, you like to think you’re in control of your image,” says Cameron Clarke, editor of marketing magazine The Drum. “The reality is sometimes you’re not.” Fred Perry’s response, he notes, was “to stop sales in the US of the particular polo shirt favoured by the Proud Boys. The important thing is to stand up when [a brand] feels their image is being appropriated.”
Far more significant than brand impact, however, is what the possible evolution of “Z” could signal for Russia. For Galeev, the conclusions are clear. The country already has a police state that offers control and repression, and a political system focused solely on the leader. With “Z”, it may have a symbol to vaunt and mythologise its military forces and behind which its people can unite, collapsing the space between a civilian and military state.
In his view, “Z” is the third key strut of an ideology that the world had hoped was behind it. “Russia,” he writes, “is now fascist.”