Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005
Hero
By Anne Applebaum
The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov
edited and annotated by Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov
Yale University Press, 397 pp., $45.00
Since becoming president of Russia, Vladimir Putin has worked hard to mold Russian memories of the Soviet Union into something more positive, or anyway more nostalgic, than they had been under his predecessor. His goal, it seems, is to make Russians proud of their country again, to find heroes they can once again worship. Toward this end, he and the bureaucrats who work for him have altered textbooks, closed archives, and brought back Soviet symbols, including the old national anthem. In May 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Putin even presided over an open celebration of Soviet imperialism, complete with Soviet flags, tanks, and presidential justifications of the postwar occupation of the Baltic states.
Review, 3246 words
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