Weaponizing History
A regime that can offer its people no future does the next available thing: it seizes the past. This is not a metaphor. On his inauguration day in May 2024, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the “Foundations of State Policy in the Sphere of Historical Enlightenment,” which quietly accomplished something no free country would attempt — it defined history as a state-regulated activity. A presidential commission was created. Disputed historical questions — the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyn massacre — could now be referred upward, to bodies like the Security Council or the State Council, for adjudication. Read that sentence again, because it contains the whole disease in miniature: in Russia, what happened in the past is now, in principle, a matter to be decided by the same organ that runs the secret police. ...