“Our future is certain; it’s the past that keeps changing’ was how Soviet dissidents lamented the re-writing of history.

If only they knew what was coming! Today’s Russia may have lost the certainty of a Communist future, but certainly not the state’s stranglehold over the past.

Russia is not alone, of course. The teaching of history is highly political in every country, including the US, where textbook publishers are caught between the  ‘conflicting desires to promote inquiry and indoctrinate blind patriotism’, according to James Loewen in his book ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’.

‘The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation. Such titles differ from all other textbooks students read in high school or college’, Loewen writes. ‘Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule’.

Such propaganda can be found in countries as diverse as Turkey, Israel and Japan, the last recently accused of officially white-washing the WWII era crimes committed in Okinawa.

Yet Russia stands out for its government’s increasingly zealous and paranoid backtracking on an issue so central to the very raison d’etre of post-Communism: the reclaiming of history by the people.

Nowhere has this symbolism been stronger than in the recent spate of attacks on Memorial, a human rights NGO that was started during glasnost to unearth and catalogue the victims of Stalin’s Gulag.

Break-ins into its archives and seizures of hard-drives have culminated in the shocking murder of Memorial member Natalia Estemirova in Chechnya earlier this month. While Estemirova’s death was likely a result of her role in investigating much more recent history, the fact that groups like Memorial, which formed the avant garde of the Soviet democracy movement, are being targeted threatens one of the few tangible achievements of the post-Soviet system.

Recently, an Orwellian ‘Historical Truth Commission’ has been established, and the parliament is considering ‘legislation that would make it a criminal offence to “infringe on historical memory in relation to events which took place in the Second World War”‘.

Meanwhile, in addition to banning independent history websites, Putin-Medvedev have launched a chilling probe into history textbooks.

This is not the first time that the leadership has taken issue with textbooks; what is most shocking is that the book currently under fire was itself a government-mandated re-write.

When it appeared in 2007, that edition of ‘Russian History from 1945-2007′ provoked a massive outcry for, among other things, designating Stalin ‘an effective manager’.

Today, in a plot twist worthy of the Great Manager himself, the toady authors responsible are being summoned by the very people who endorsed them two years ago to explain the book’s abject lack of patriotism.

Russia’s current War on History is worrying for many reasons, not least because of one unnerving trend: unlike in most other countries, where anti-American, anti-Western and pro-authoritarian feeling tends to be concentrated among the poor and uneducated, in Russia the more affluent and educated are also the most anti-American.

A recent article notes this ‘paradox of the educated Russian — education and professionalism do not translate into a wish for a greater democracy in Russia. Most Russian yuppies wholly embrace the Kremlin’s official interpretation of national ideologies’.

Certainly, many Russians have a legitimate reason to feel aggrieved by the dominant ‘Western’ narratives about the events of the 20th century, written, as ever, by the ‘victors’.

Who can deny that the likes of John Lewis Gaddis are responsible for gross ideologically driven inaccuracies relating to Russia’s role in WWII and the beginnings of the Cold War?

Yet there is enough actual history out there to compete with these silly mainstream narratives, and the last thing that sophisticated, independent scholars like William Appleman Williams, Walter La Feber and Stephen Cohen need is a helping hand from the Kremlin.

The ‘Russian account’ of history can speak for itself, thank you very much.