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I would be fascinated to know if Westerners can fully appreciate the political significance behind President Dmitry Medvedev's decision to create a special commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." Most foreigners would probably say, "This is very strange. Doesn't Russia have more pressing problems it needs to tackle, such as the managing the crisis, modernizing the country's political and economic institutions or battling corruption?"

Had the year been 1950, when the Soviet Union was making colossal efforts to recover from the aftermath of World War II, foreigners would have been equally perplexed that Josef Stalin chose that moment to initiate a huge public debate on the Marxist approach to linguistics.