In the end, the entire Soviet system and with it, the Iron Curtain it controlled, imploded without a shot being fired.

But today, a muscular, interventionist Russia—from  Crimea to Syria, to Israel/Palestinian negotiations—is back with a vengeance. Moscow is led by a re-tooled and unfettered Vladimir Putin, perceived as a step ahead of Barack Obama on the global chess board of real-time geopolitics.

Perhaps worse still, is the strong suspicion that  Mr. Putin has hacked sensitive emails and possibly plans to manipulate online presidential voting, to tinker and debase our democratic ways of doing things.

A little noticed incident on September 1st, offers some insight into how far Putin may be prepared to go to rewrite history in order to dictate tomorrow’s politics.

In Perm, the second largest city in Russia’s Ural region, blogger Vladimir Luzgin’s conviction was upheld by the Russian Supreme Court for posting: “The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War.  That is, communism and Nazism closely collaborated, yet for some reason they [Putin and the communists] blame Bandera who was in a German concentration camp for declaring Ukrainian independence.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling decried by Luzgin came on the 77th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, 17 days before the anniversary of the Soviet invasion from the East.

Luzgin’s blog omitted key facts about Bandera. Stefan Bandera was a Ukrainian Nationalist who initially collaborated with the Germans. Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, noted Bandera’s role in Holocaust crimes and the tens of thousands of Jewish victims murdered in Ukraine during the initial months of the German occupation.

But Luzgin’s real crime and punishment in the eyes of the Russian Supreme Court are not his apologetics for Bandera’s Holocaust crimes but his reposting the irrefutable truth that Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia collaborated in carving up Poland in 1939.

The Soviet invasion came in the wake of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact between German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that declared neutrality between Germany and Russia in the event of a new world war. A secret protocol divided territories of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Romania, into German and Soviet “spheres of influence.” >

Without the Nazi-Soviet Peace Pact, which remained in effect until Germany invaded the USSR on June 21, 1941, the history of WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust almost certainly would not have unfolded as they did. Stalin’s realpolitik justification then—and Putin’s now—is that the Pact gave Russia needed time to prepare for the inevitable German invasion. This may seem plausible, except that it leaves out the primary reason that the Soviet military was so ill-prepared:  Stalin’s paranoid purge in 1937-1939 that left the Red Army bereft of field marshals,  admirals, and army corps commanders.

The 2016 Russian Supreme Court offers the legalistic justification for convicting Luzgin because there is no mention in the official findings of the postwar Nuremberg Trials that the Soviet Union invaded Poland. That is technically true because Stalin was in a position to block any such admission in the Nuremberg findings the Soviets helped draft.

Back in 1989, at the dawn of a new era for the Russian people, the Simon Wiesenthal Center was invited to screen its Academy Award- winning Genocide documentary to hundreds of Soviet elites in Moscow. The collective gasps were loudest at two pivotal moments—the arrest of Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg by the Soviets, and the image of Ribbentrop and Molotov signing the 1939 Pact, perhaps the first time the signing was ever shown in public in the Soviet Union.

Today, some of Russia’s neighbors are doing some rewriting of history of their own.

In Poland, the right-wing Law and Justice Party roared back into power in 2015 after a decade in the political wilderness. A prosecutor in Katowice has questioned a Polish-American scholar, Princeton Professor Jan Tomasz Gross, to determine if he committed the crime of publicly insulting the nation for telling the truth about atrocities committed by some Poles against Jews during World War II.

Despite new laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in Hungary, which is also dominated by the far right, Holocaust distortion remains rife. And in the Baltics, annual marches by Latvian SS veterans continue to celebrate Waffen-SS units that fought side by side with Nazi troops against the Soviet Red Army. Portraying the Latvian SS as “freedom fighters,” such marches whitewash history and glorify individuals who before joining the Legion were active participants in the mass murder of innocents.

Russians will never forget the 20 million killed they suffered to defeat Nazi Germany. But to bolster his own image, Putin’s defense of Stalin confirms the Russian strongman is not above tinkering- with the past or the present- if it serves his future goals.

This essay was co-authored by historian Dr. Harold Brackman

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