Moscow is paranoid about what the world intends to do with the Soviet past and the Russian present. It cannot afford a European historical consensus negating how it sees itself, the only way it wishes to be seen. The Putin-Medvedev regime sometime back resurrected the ghost of Stalin and rehabilitated the Soviet past. Now, it is institutionalising the construction of a national historical narrative connecting Imperial Russia, the Soviet empire, and the post-Soviet era in a whole — with the emphasis on “continuity” rather than the rupture or “break” that the Soviet collapse meant, something Putin calls the “greatest tragedy of our times”. But the battle for memory is not Russia’s alone to fight.

History is a political tool used to serve the present. So when Dmitry Medvedev recently announced an Orwellian-sounding commission to “counter the falsification of history”, Oxford historian Robert Service aptly called it “absolute poppycock”. Russia’s bludgeoning through history, its identity and memory compounded by geo-political and economic ambitions, however, has to be seen against a project that EU historians have embarked upon.

Forget 40 years of the moon landing, 20 of Tiananmen or the first burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford. 2009 is also 70 years since the outbreak of World War II; 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down and East Europe exited the Soviet orbit. What Europe lost was compensated for in the EU — a re-baptised continent, yet a work in progress as evident in its eastward expansion, gathering in states and cultures some of which should have rightly belonged or once belonged to Old Europe. Milan Kundera is an iconic voice of this desire of the East to be included in the Western narrative. This, however, is also an anachronistically Orientalist idea whereby East Europe demarcates itself from the real East — Asia, or the “barbarians”. Now, Russia refuses to belong to the West; yet it fears not just accountability for Soviet crimes but being re-bracketed with the barbarians, even as the West comes closer to Moscow via former Soviet

... contd.