Back To the U.S.S.R. By pushing a patriotic view of history and the humanities, the Kremlin is reshaping the Russian mind.

Byline: Owen Matthews (With Anna Nemtsova in Moscow)

In Russia, the ghosts of the past refuse to die. This month, several hundred mourners gathered in the Moscow suburb of Butovo at a mass grave of 20,000 victims of Joseph Stalin's purges. As priests chanted a liturgy for the dead, mourners hauled up a giant pine cross cut from trees on the Solovetsky Islands, a notorious gulag. "Russia must never forget what happened here," says 81-year-old Olga Vasiliyeva, whose engineer father was shot in 1937 as an "enemy of the people." "We cannot gloss over the crimes of Stalin; otherwise we will end up repeating them."

The Kremlin, it seems, doesn't agree. Russian President Vladimir Putin told a group of history teachers last month that though Russia's past had "problematic pages," they are fewer and "not as terrible as those of some others." Regardless, he said, it was the teacher's duty to make schoolchildren "proud of their motherland." To that end, the government has embarked on a campaign to change the way history is taught to Russian schoolchildren. Earlier this year, the Russian Academy of Education commissioned a major review of key history textbooks. But historians complain that new guidelines issued by the academy are designed to whitewash the atrocities committed by Stalin and downplay the Soviet Union's loss of the cold war. "The Kremlin thinks it would be much easier to consolidate the society around pleasant memories of history, rather than around negative facts," complains one of the editors, historian Isaak Rozental. "Their approach is not to study history but to use it." One new state-approved text, "A Book for Teachers: The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006," describes Stalin as "the most successful leader of the U.S.S.R." Of the estimated 25 million killed in the purges and in collectivization, it notes, with chilling blandness, "political repression was used to mobilize not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite." The new history is much tougher on Boris Yeltsin--who led Russia's chaotic post-communist transition in the 1990s--denouncing his "weak" and "pro-Western" policies.

This effort to rewrite Russian history comes on the heels of Kremlin attempts to push its views of a great resurgent Russia into every sphere of science and the humanities. Russia's most high-profile scientific venture of recent years used its famous research submarines to plant a Russian flag on the seabed under the North Pole last month as part of an effort to claim the potentially resource-rich area for Russia. And the Kremlin's best-funded humanities program creates a new Russian Institute to promote spoken Russian and Russian culture around the world, and particularly in former Soviet states.

Could this new wave of state-sponsored patriotism lead to a closing of the Russian mind--with intellectual debate going the same way as free speech and opposition politics? Gleb Pavlovsky, director of Moscow's Center for Effective Politics and one of the Kremlin's chief ideologists, scoffs at the idea. He argues that any controversy generated by the new history textbooks shows that "intellectual life in Russia is alive and well." "It is impossible to create a state ideology in an information society," he says. "But what the authorities do want is to define the debate--to shape what is considered politically correct and what is ...