In touching up Soviet history, Vladimir Putin overlooked a key difference between Neville Chamberlain's naive belief that he could do business with the aggressor and Josef Stalin's cold-blooded decision to join the aggression, and split the booty. At the time, the official Soviet line was that Russia had occupied the eastern half of Poland only to keep order on its borders. The Kremlin also used the opportunity to wipe out the Polish officer corps in the Katyn Forest, a massacre it would blame on the Nazis when it came to light. The Germans were already planning to exterminate millions; why not chalk up another 20,000 or so Poles to their account? Who would know the difference? And so, to all of Communism's countless victims, add history. And now Vladimir Putin continues to distort it even while acknowledging it. By now it's a Russian tradition.
Let there be no misunderstanding. Let's not pretend Western history is some objective, abstract exercise divorced from the passions of the day. History seldom if ever is. For history is not the same as the past but a selective view of it. Often enough our history has been another branch of our politics. The fight for history is conducted not just in police states. At least since Hamilton's and Jefferson's day, each of America's competing parties has offered a different version of the past in order to attract voters to its different vision of the future.
For example, the current administration keeps comparing the recession the country is slowly climbing out of with the Great Depression of the 1930s, although there can be no real comparison. Just look at the unemployment figures from each era, let alone those old photographs of soup kitchens and bread lines.
But in this country there's an opposition and a free press and mid-term elections, complete with a secret ballot, to check the party in power and its authorized history. But in an authoritarian state, the past is just one more nationalized industry. When those who should be correcting the record are silenced, the Stalins and Hitlers are free to remodel history according to their likes. And so are the Putins. Which is why this latest attempt to twist history should not go unchallenged.