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One of the things that always strikes contemporary visitors to Russia is the lack of monuments to the victims of Stalin's execution squads and concentration camps. There are a few scattered memorials, but no national monument or place of mourning. Worse, fifteen years after glasnost, ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been no trials, no truth commissions, no government inquiries into what happened in the past, and no public debate whatsoever. This was not always the case: during the 1980s, when glasnost was just beginning in Russia, gulag survivors' memoirs sold millions of copies, and a new revelation about the past could sell out a newspaper. But more recently, history books containing similar "revelations" are badly reviewed or ignored. The president of Russia is a former KGB agent, who describes himself as a "Chekist," using the word for Lenin's political police.

The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Life is genuinely difficult in Russia today, and most Russians, who spend all of their time trying to cope, do not want to discuss the past. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. Post-Soviet Russia is not the same as post-Nazi Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities were still in people's minds. The memory of the camps is also confused, in Russia, by the presence of so many other atrocities: war, famine, and collectivization. Why should camp survivors get special treatment? It is further confused by the link made, in some people's minds, between the discussion of the past that took place in the 1980s, and the total collapse of the economy in the 1990s. What was the point of talking about all of that, many people said to me: it got us nowhere.

But the most important explanation for the lack of debate is not the fears and anxieties of the ordinary Russian, but the power and prestige of those now ruling the country. In December 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thirteen of the fifteen former Soviet republics were run by former communists, as were many of the satellite states. To put it bluntly, former communists have no interest in discussing the past, it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their image as "reformers."

[source: Anne Applebaum, author of "Gulag: A History."]