Russia is famously a country with an unpredictable past. With a brief exception of the 1990s, regimes of the day freely rewrote the historical narrative for their own expediency. A famous Soviet-era joke advised that the latest edition of the encyclopedia had a regrettable misprint: instead of “distinguished statesman, hero of socialist labor” the paragraph should read “enemy of the people, convicted foreign spy.”
Under ex-KGB apparatchiks who seized control of the Russian government a decade ago, the discussion of Soviet crimes became unfashionable. The new leaders declared the USSR’s dissolution “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” reinstated the Stalinist national anthem, approved a school textbook referring to Stalin’s mass purges as “adequate to the task of modernization” and suggested decorating Moscow with posters of Stalin for the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II.
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