Katie Stallard was reporting from Ukraine in 2014 as the Russian army annexed the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. As a foreign correspondent for the British outlet Sky News, she had a ringside seat as Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked World War II to justify and celebrate the invasion. 

In Stallard’s new book, “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” she analyzes how leaders in Russia, China and North Korea manipulate and distort historical narratives about war as a way to maintain and strengthen their hold on power. Stallard drew extensively on her experience reporting on the ground in all three countries.

In Russia, Putin “has elevated the memory of the Great Patriotic War to the status of a national religion,” Stallard writes. Meanwhile in China, President Xi Jinping has used World War II as a marker of the end of China’s so-called “century of humiliation.” And war narratives are especially important in North Korea, where Kim Il Sung is falsely presented as a war hero who freed the country from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and secured a victory over the United States in the Korean War eight years later.

This is history, Stallard points out, stained with a “veneer of patriotism.”