A nation’s history is often shaped by tricks of telling. Any account of the past involves remembering and forgetting in equal measure — which, in turn, become the perfect excuse for governments all over the world to serve up one version of national history over another. Vladimir Putin’s first decade as the Russian premier has been spent tweaking crucial moments, if not facts, related to his country’s chequered past. Moving away from Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost — the closest that Russia came to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission — Mr Putin’s rise saw the resurrection of controversial figures from the past often dressed in a garb of power and glory. The latest Soviet-era memento to have resurfaced in Russia is a plaque singing paeans to Josef Stalin. Reinstated in Moscow’s Kurskaya metro station, this monument not only makes the tyrannical years of Stalinism look idyllic but also, in the process, disavows the suffering of countless ordinary Russians who perished in the gulags.

Evidently, such thoughtless ‘revivalism’ is best dismissed as ignorant, but the worrying bit is that historical distortion often has its roots in present interests. Russia’s self-aggrandizing enterprise is motivated, to a great extent, by its desire to have the upper hand in the geopolitics of oil and natural gas. So the architects of modern Russia’s destiny are also keen on staying in the good books of the West by playing things safe. This agenda explains Mr Putin’s clever double take. Although he has invoked a particularly horrific ghost from the nation’s past, he has also made some shrewd concessions by way of making apologetic noises to Poland for his country’s earlier denial of its role in the Katyn massacres of 1940. Even as Russia labours to hang on to its supremacist zeal in its immediate neighbourhood — by threatening Ukraine and Kiev over gas supply and asserting its imperial designs on Georgia — it aspires to redefine Eastern Europe’s past as well as its present.