One clue to what a country may do in the future is to watch what it does with the past. So I find it more than a little disconcerting that Vladimir Putin's Russia is rewriting its history books to play down the horrors of its totalitarian history.

"The dark pages of our own history were not so terrible.”

Several months ago, President Putin told a meeting of Russian academics that Russia needs new schoolbooks that will “make the young proud of their country.” He gave the academics a lecture on patriotism, insisting that the history of the former Soviet Union “has fewer dark pages than that of the United States,” and that Stalin's repressions were “less terrible” than America's war in Vietnam or Hitler's Nazism. Russia did not use chemical agents to defoliate thousands of square miles, as America did in Vietnam, nor did it “use nuclear weapons against civilian populations” as the United States did in Japan at the end of World War II. The “dark pages of our own history,” he concluded, “were not so terrible.”

What Putin considers “not so terrible” includes an appalling history of communist repression that cost the lives of millions of Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, condemned the crimes of the communist past, and Russian history books were rewritten.

Igor Doloutski, a high school teacher, has produced seven editions of a history he first wrote in 1989. His first edition – published in the heady springtime of “perestroika,” pointed out to Russian students that the Soviet “occupation” of the Baltic States after World War I explains their anti-Russian feelings today. In a 1998 edition, he called the Russian war in Chechnya a “shameful” page in Russian history, and in a 2001 edition he quoted the liberal Russian politician Grigory Yavlinsky's warning that Russia risks evolving into “an authoritative regime.”

Such unadulterated candor was finally too much for the Ministry of Education and it removed Doloutski's history from the list of recommended school books. Most Russian history teachers now use books that emphasize the Soviet Union's victories and tone down its crimes.

Stalin's regime of terror caused the death of tens of millions

That President Putin, an ex-KGB agent who rules a newly resurgent Russia, wants to rewrite his country's history may not be surprising. One of the beliefs shared by all nationalists, as the writer George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is that “the past can be altered”. Many Russians seem to share Putin's approach to history. As one Russian political scientist points out, “Russia can't face its past. It's too soon, too emotional.”

Of course Putin and his eventual successor cannot turn back the clock and would have no interest in doing so. Russia today is a “managed democracy” with increasing state control of its lucrative oil and gas resources, but it is part of the free world nonetheless.

However, by rewriting his country's communist past in order to give the younger generation something to be proud of, Putin makes it all the easier to perpetuate some of the bad old ways.

Some examples:
1. A number of Russian journalists whose stories angered the authorities have been killed, and police have never solved the cases.
2. Recently, Russian journalist and human rights campaigner Larissa Arap was forcibly held in a psychiatric clinic in Murmansk after giving a newspaper interview in which she claimed that psychiatric internment – a widespread practice in the Soviet Union – is making a comeback.
3. Every year, President Putin joins in the celebration of the “Day of the Chekists (the historic name of Russia's secret police agents) but there is no official recognition of the seventieth anniversary of Stalin's 1937 purges.

Such things may merely be straws in the wind, and certainly not a major preoccupation for most Russians, who are clearly pleased with their country's new prosperity and assertiveness under Putin. But George Orwell, if he were alive, would recognize the signs, and be worried about the state of Russia today.