Meanwhile in Russia…

… the state is trying to rehabilitate Josef Stalin:

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — At first, the purpose behind the midday raid at a human-rights group’s office here was murky. Police, some clad in masks and camouflage, cut the electricity to Memorial’s offices and demanded to know if any drugs or guns were kept on the premises.

Five hours later, after police had opened every computer and walked out with 11 hard drives, the reason for their visit became clear to Memorial Director Irina Flige.

On the hard drives, a trove of scanned images and documents memorialized Josef Stalin’s murderous reign of terror. Diagrams scrawled out by survivors detailed layouts of labor camps. There were photos of Russians executed by Stalin’s secret police, wrenching accounts of survival from gulag inmates and maps showing the locations of mass graves.

“They knew what they were taking,” Flige said.

New textbooks, not-so-subtle directives for teachers to pass over certain events in silence, the seizure of evidence of the old history:

Memorial’s St. Petersburg branch has been researching and documenting Stalin’s crimes for 20 years, building one of the world’s most complete archives of one of the darkest chapters in Russia’s history.

These archives are now in the hands of Russian police. St. Petersburg prosecutors say they conducted the raid because they were trying to track down an article in Novy Peterburg, a local newspaper under investigation on charges of extremism. But Flige says Memorial has no connection at all with the newspaper.

What Milan Kundera said about the Soviets, back in 1979:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history, Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting

Reading that quote two weeks ago, while sitting on a beach in Mexico, it seemed almost quaint. Not so much anymore.