In the forests of the Russian town of Katyn, the mass graves where more than 4,000 Poles and over 7,000 Soviet citizens were executed by Stalin’s regime are clearly visible: the Poles, in one of the massacres of 1940 in which the USSR eliminated around 22,000 military personnel and intellectuals who could oppose the occupation of the country after Moscow agreed to its division with Hitler; the Soviets, victims of the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, when the regime murdered more than 700,000 of its own citizens — some studies suggest numbers a high as around two million. Today, eight decades later, Vladimir Putin’s government has erected an exhibition next to these mass graves that speaks of “ten centuries of Polish Russophobia” and “Ukrainian Nazis.”
“We preserve the memory; in Europe, they tear down Soviet monuments,” an employee of the complex that now stands on the site told this newspaper. Just this week, in Tomsk, the Kremlin dismantled a monument to Soviet political repression for the first time. And the exhibition on alleged Polish Russophobia doesn’t even mention the most important historical event to have affected the two countries: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by which the USSR and Nazi Germany divided Poland between them.
In the magnificent Katyn Forest, the NKVD, the agency responsible for the Gulag, the Soviet network of concentration camps, had a headquarters. This week, Putin also renamed the academy of the Federal Security Service (FSB, successor to the KGB) after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the father of the Soviet secret police, the dreaded Cheka. Thousands of deaths bear his signature.
The aim of this rewriting of history, from museums to school textbooks, is to make Russians believe that repression was, is, and will continue to be necessary because the country lives under constant threat from the West. “For Russians, Poland has been a constant source of danger,” the exhibition states.
“We’re always blamed,” laments Liudmila, an elderly woman visiting the exhibition with her partner, who says she “knows the story inside out.” The exhibition posters tell the story of Kievan Rus’ in their own way, speaking of Polish “conquests” and Russian “liberations,” including the puppet regime imposed on Poland after World War II. They also accuse Warsaw of signing a non-aggression pact with Berlin without mentioning the one it agreed with Moscow in 1932. And they display a photo of former Polish President Andrzej Duda with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, describing the Ukrainian government as a “neo-Nazi regime.”
This exhibition is just one example. There are more. Authorities closed Moscow’s Gulag History Museum in 2024 and are now announcing that it will reopen this year as a “museum of the genocide of the Soviet people.” All references to Soviet internal repression, its millions of victims, and hundreds of concentration and labor camps will disappear, replaced by the same narrative already presented by other Russian museums dedicated to the massacres perpetrated by the Nazis during the invasion of the USSR.
In yet another case, the Memorial Foundation — the major Russian association for the preservation of historical memory — investigated Soviet crimes for five decades. Its archives contain books with the names of millions of victims. On April 9, Putin’s judiciary declared this organization “extremist.”
That same day, police raided the offices of another symbol of Russia’s short-lived democracy, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and arrested an investigative reporter. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the assassination of another well-known investigative journalist from that same newspaper, Anna Politkovskaya. The plaque commemorating her at the entrance to her home, where she was shot dead in 2006, has been torn down dozens of times in recent months without any consequences.
The Memorial Foundation suspects that the dismantling of historical memory stems from a common source: Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s Order 1564. That document, dated June 2024, completely rewrote the “concept of state policy for preserving the memory of victims of political repression.”
The order went unnoticed, although a well-known opposition politician, Boris Vishnevskiy, warned at the time about its contents. “Under the new standards of state historical memory, Soviet repressions were not massive, and the amnesties [of the Soviet governments] for political prisoners left people like the Banderovci (militants who fought for Ukrainian far-right nationalist Stepan Bandera in World War II) free,” denounced the Yabloko party representative.
“The wording of the order is so vague that it is not clear who was responsible for the repression, who and how many people were victims, and who was rehabilitated,” Vishnevskiy stressed.
According to the Russian prime minister, 2025 and 2026 would be used to review the rehabilitation of the victims, and 2027, 2028, and 2029 to take action.
Every government action reveals, like an unearthed “fossil,” the true “dinosaur” of Russian society, this systematic plan of the state to rewrite the past and thus justify its repression and its war, says Alexander Cherkasov, president until its liquidation in 2021 of the Memorial Human Rights Center, one of the different branches of this historic organization, metaphorically speaking from exile.
The process toward the definitive criminalization of Memorial has been long. The Kremlin labeled the organization a “foreign agent” in 2013. This entailed some draconian requirements, but it was allowed to continue operating. Almost a decade later, a couple of months before the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian justice system took the obligations of this designation to the extreme, such as flagging every comment on social media, to order the cessation of the association’s activities. Some Memorial members went into exile. Others, like its co-founder Oleg Orlov, were imprisoned for protesting against the war, and still others remained in Russia after leaving the organization.
Several former Memorial employees kept its files stored in some of the organization’s former offices. However, the Russian justice system designated this association an “undesirable organization” in February of this year, which entailed administrative sanctions for displaying its symbols or having any connection with it. And just two months later, the Supreme Court labeled it an “extremist organization,” and any contact with it is now a crime punishable by imprisonment.
“Personally, I didn’t expect the transition to this stage to happen so quickly,” Cherkasov admits over the phone. “Since the passage of the foreign agents law, we’ve come a long way. What season of this saga are we in now? We once thought we couldn’t possibly surpass Belarus. Now I don’t know if we’ll surpass Iran or China in the coming seasons.”
Cherkasov warns that with this rewriting of history, “the Kremlin is trying to connect two narratives.” “One, the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; the other, the current war with Ukraine, which Russian propaganda presents as a war against all of Europe, and which, according to Russian propagandists, is a legacy of the Nazis.”
In 2024, in an interview with American commentator Tucker Carlson, Putin directly blamed Poland for the 1939 Nazi invasion and criticized it for not handing over the Danzig [Gdansk] Corridor to Hitler. In the same interview, the Russian leader reiterated his theories that Ukraine has “a Nazi regime” and must return to Russia what he considers its “historical territories.”
Katyn is a symbol of Russia’s thawing relations with Europe. Within the grounds, the museum — founded in 2018 — still stands, displaying the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact regarding the Nazi and Soviet partition of Poland. Those agreements, like the Katyn massacre, were denied for decades by the Kremlin and only came to light in the 1980s thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s government.
However, today Putinism embraces the historical manipulation of the various Soviet regimes. For decades, its propaganda maintained that Germany was responsible for the murder of 22,000 Poles in 1940. And now, the FSB has suddenly found evidence to accuse Berlin, while the Speaker of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, proposes to overturn the apology issued for that massacre and change the information in school textbooks to state that the executions carried out by the NKVD “were conducted by German fascists.”
Russians are wondering when Putin’s regime will remove the Solovetsky Stone, the monument honoring the millions of victims of the Gulag in front of the FSB headquarters. A year ago, in 2025, the authorities erected a statue of their great executioner, Stalin, in the Moscow metro. And although the colossal repression of Stalinist totalitarianism seems impossible to repeat today, Putin has gone further than Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or Andropov by rehabilitating the vozhd (leader) and reversing the rehabilitation of the victims. Russian museums no longer warn of how the Great Terror came about. The verb “to execute” is impersonal, like “to snow.”
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