Putin imposes the "truth" of Stalinism
Since its founding, communism has amassed the spoils of more than 100 million dead. Its totalitarian ideology was pitted against another no less criminal ideology, Nazism, and the greatest consequence of that confrontation was World War II, which to date is the conflagration with the greatest number of victims, between eighty and one hundred and twenty million, depending on whether or not one counts those who were left permanently disabled or ended up dying later as a result of its after-effects.
The fact that the Soviet Union was on the winning side in the Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Russia, resulted in the forced establishment of a totalitarian communist regime in the eastern half of Europe, which stifled any and all attempts by countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to opt for democratic political systems of coexistence. The victory over Nazism served, then, as an excuse not only to consecrate the supposed goodness of communist totalitarianism over Nazi-fascist totalitarianism, but also to whitewash all the crimes committed by the successive communist revolutions that were subsequently implemented, with such forceful examples as China, North Korea and Cuba, for example. In that gigantic universal laundering operation, Moscow invested huge amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of agents and all kinds of scientific and technical means to infiltrate and convince the intellectual elites of the Western democracies that the goodness of the communist revolutionary aims more than justified the excesses that may have been committed.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR exposed the great lies of the system, where a "nomenklatura" of the privileged always benefited from the hardships of the people, and where alleged truths such as egalitarianism, the right to self-determination of peoples or environmentalism were no more than statements which, when someone raised them independently of Moscow's dictates, risked arrest, confinement and torture in remote prisons or unceremonious extrajudicial execution.
Despite strong resistance from left-wing political parties and organisations, the European Parliament eventually adopted a resolution on 19 September 2019, which equated communism with Nazism and condemned both equally. This resolution was in turn adopted by various national parliaments of the EU member states, although in some others, especially Spain, it is not even contemplated, even less so now for obvious reasons.
This resolution was interpreted by the Russian president as "a completely insane assumption". The former KGB (Committee for State Security) colonel suddenly saw the danger it entailed, not only with respect to the reinterpretation of history that has been taught in vast Russia, but also that his undeniable totalitarian impulses (persecution and dismantling of all political opposition, invasion and appropriation of territories such as the Crimean peninsula or blatant actions in support of secession in Ukraine or the Baltic states) would be linked to Russia's undeniable expansionist and imperialist zeal.
Consequently, President Vladimir Putin had a law passed by the Duma, which he himself signed and promulgated on 1 July, expressly forbidding any doubts about the good and heroic nature of the "Victory" over Nazi Germany, let alone equating the two bloodthirsty leaders of that war, Hitler and Stalin. Moreover, the famous pact signed in 1939 by the foreign ministers of the time, Joachim von Ribbentrop for the Third Reich and Vyacheslav Molotov for the USSR, whereby the two totalitarianisms would share Poland, will have only one true interpretation: that "the USSR only agreed to sign the document after all alternatives had been exhausted and all Soviet proposals to create an anti-fascist coalition in Europe had been rejected".
Such is Putin's concern that there should be no room for any historian, researcher, journalist or simple citizen to question this official "Truth" that he has set up a supreme commission to ensure that there is no room for the slightest doubt. Putin's decree gives the commission full powers to supervise in all state bodies and institutions any text, circular, provision or legislative initiative in which the slightest nuance could be introduced that could tarnish the official version. The new Truth Commission will thus have full powers to censure "any action affecting the national interests of the Russian Federation in the field of preserving truth and historical memory".
As in the film warnings about the scripts of the events being narrated, it could also be said in this case that any resemblance to similar rules in some other country on earth is mere coincidence.