Memory

There is a particular sadness in watching two friends turn on each other, and a particular obscenity in watching a third party — the one who wishes them both dead — smile at the sight. That is what has come to pass, in the summer of 2026, between Poland and Ukraine. Not the familiar drama of Russia against the West, but something stranger and more disheartening: two allies, one of them fighting for its very existence, reaching back eighty years to open a grave. Poland’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz — the leader of its peasant party — announced that Ukraine will have serious trouble entering the European Union so long as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its nationalists remain on its banners. One cannot, he said, raise onto a European pedestal those who destroy European cooperation; with Bandera, Ukraine will not enter the Union. And in almost the same breath — this is the detail that gives the game away — he added that Poland would not be handing over its MiG-29 fighter jets after all. History and weapons, fused in a single sentence. ...

There is a date that ought to be carved into the memory of anyone who cares about how nations come to terms with their own crimes: the twenty-fifth of February, 1956. On that day, at the close of the Twentieth Party Congress, a leader of the Soviet Union stood up and told the assembled delegates the truth — or at least a usable fraction of it — about the man whose portrait they had all worshipped. The hall listened in a silence that has been described, again and again, as deafening. When he finished, the session chair proposed that no discussion be opened and no questions be permitted. The reason was obvious: a discussion would have detonated. The report was approved, then quietly buried — distributed only inside party organizations, kept out of the open press. Even the act of telling the truth was conducted as a half-secret. ...

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. ...