As David Satter demonstrates in a book that ought to be essential reading for Western political leaders today, Russia has never come to grips with its Communist past. The title of Satter’s study — It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway – captures the essence of the contemporary Russian sickness: historical amnesia and denial, leading to systemic and internalized misrepresentation of the past, and thence to falsification of the present. The crimes of the Soviet past have never been publicly examined, much less repented. Millions of victims of Communist terror and murder have been forgotten. There has been no public confrontation with the questions, How did this happen in the first place? And, What allowed it to continue? Denazification was regarded as essential to German rehabilitation after the collapse of the Hitler regime; no such attempt to reckon with the Communist past has taken place in Russia, in part because the West, playing the good sport after 1991, did not help facilitate it. Thus Vladimir Putin’s laments for lost Soviet “glory” are not dismissed as the ravings of a warped mind (and soul); they are applauded, as are his attempts to re-create a simulacrum of Stalin’s empire under the rubric of “New Russia” or a recovered and reconstituted “Russian space.”…

Satter sums up the diagnosis at the end of his chilling book:

Russia today is haunted by words that have been left unsaid, sites that have not been acknowledged, and mass graves that have been commemorated partially or not at all. In the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been little attempt to understand the Soviet period or to draw inspiration from those, like Andrei Sakharov, who stressed that what Russian society needed was a new morality. The failure to face the moral implications of the communist experience, however, has meant that real change in Russia was not possible. The psychology of state domination was left intact to influence the new post-communist Russia.