The leading Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky famously defined history as “politics projected into the past.” Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is taking that concept, and running with it.

The importance of history to the Kremlin was on full display at Putin’s recent meeting with young scholars and teachers of history at Moscow’s Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. Putin made it clear that he believes control of Russia’s past will enable him to command the future. Referring to Russia’s culture wars being fought against both external and internal foes, Putin stated; “We see attempts being made … to recode our society,” adding that these malicious actions aimed at change “always go hand-in-hand with attempts to rewrite history and shape it to particular geopolitical interests.”

In earlier meetings with Russian academics, Putin has advanced a two-pronged message on the significance of shaping and controlling historical narratives: “Past events should be portrayed in a way that fuels national pride” and “We cannot allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us.”

The Kremlin’s overriding concerns in the Putin era when it comes to history have been to assert Russia’s status as a great power and not allow Moscow’s detractors to chip away at its political and moral capital, which rests largely on Russia’s victory over Nazism in the Second World War. It is within this context that Putin has argued there was nothing particularly “bad” in concluding a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. “These were the foreign policy methods at the time,” he contended. To help justify the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he noted that Western leaders cut a notorious agreement of their own, the 1938 Munich Agreement, with Hitler.

In the last few years, a new, third priority has emerged for Kremlin historiography, one prompted by the popular uprisings that swept away dictators and authoritarian-minded leaders in the Middle East and Ukraine. This new tenet of Kremlin historiography preaches social cohesion and damns the idea of loyal opposition to the ruling line.

During his exchange with young historians, Putin raised the theme of societal consolidation at least twice. Perhaps the most significant point in Putin’s talk came when he touched on the leadership style of Yaroslav the Wise, who ruled Kievan Rus in the 11th century. While Yaroslav presided over a cultural flowering and established his kingdom as a military power, Putin noted with veiled criticism that the grand prince failed to institute the type of clear-cut system of succession that had already been adopted by a number of early feudal Western societies. By contrast, “the procedure for succession to the throne in Russia was very complicated and tangled, and created fragmentation.” Ultimately, internecine strife among princes after Yaroslav’s death weakened the Russian state and endangered its very existence. “This is exceedingly important,” Putin said. “This history lesson about periods of fragmentation must trigger a danger signal. We must treat this very carefully, and not allow such things under any circumstances.”

Putin returned to this theme when he discussed the reasons behind Russia’s defeat in the First World War. By the end of 1917, Putin argued, Russia had found itself in “an entirely unique situation.” It “declared itself a loser” in the war and “lost enormous territories,” although “we were not beaten in battles on the front.” So why did this disaster occur? Putin gave a blunt answer; “We were torn apart from within, that’s what happened,” referring to internal disorder that ultimately enabled the relatively small Bolshevik faction to seize power in a coup.

Two interconnected factors underlie the governing elite’s approach to history writing. The first is connected with a deep-rooted authoritarian political culture in Russia. Scholars have long noted the close correlation between regime type and the degree of a regime’s reliance on historical myths. True, all regimes resort to and rely on myth-making. But political legitimacy in liberal democracies is much less dependent than in authoritarian regimes on a unifying historical narrative that fosters compliance with government policies. Genuine democracies are thus much more tolerant of dissent, controversy and competing ideas. Ultimately, democracies can afford the luxury of treating with relative equanimity a tradition of historiography that challenges habitual assumptions.

The second factor in Putin’s approach deals with how the Russian public has tended to view history as immutable: once written, it should not change. “History is a science and if you are serious about it, it cannot be rewritten,” Putin asserted at one point during his meeting with young historians.

Sociological data supports the view that Russians in the post-Soviet era do not see the writing of history as a constantly evolving process, in which what is received as “historical truth” in one era can (and should) be challenged and debunked when new evidence comes to light, or new interpretations are advanced. According to the recent data provided by VTsIOM, a Russian pollster, 60 percent of respondents believed past events should be studied in such a way that would exclude “repeat research” leading to new approaches and interpretations. Only 31 percent of those polled believed that the study of history is a continuous and open-ended process. Furthermore, 79 percent spoke in favor of using a single history textbook in schools so as not to confuse young minds with competing interpretations. Symptomatically, 60 percent said the passing of a “memory law” criminalizing the “revision of WWII results” would be a good thing.

Such polling results suggest that, in more ways than one, the prevailing attitudes toward history and memory demonstrate a meeting of minds between the rulers and the ruled in contemporary Russia.

Igor Torbakov is Senior Fellow at Uppsala University and at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. This article was first published by EurasiaNet and was reprinted here with permission.

Twenty-five years ago, on “9/11”—November 9^th in European date-notation—the Berlin Wall opened and, it seemed, everything changed. Freedom was no longer just an aspiration across much of Europe but a rising reality. The transformation was so profound that it is now hard to remember the bad old days of communist oppression and Soviet dominance, when peoples all across Central Europe lacked hope for the future and feared the secret police.

A quarter century beyond the settlement of the 75-year European civil war (1914-89), what is the balance of achievement following that remarkable overturning of European history and of much of global politics and economics? There is much good, but also some bad, and history did not “come to an end.”

The Soviet empires—internal and external—are both gone, and so is the Cold War, which was the most dangerous time in all of history, when the planet was at risk of being destroyed. The world escaped, although as the Duke of Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo: It was a damn close-run thing.

Other good things happened, notably a definitive answer to the 120-year-old question: “What do we do about Germany?” It became unified, was anchored to the West, and, with the wisdom of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, it surrounded itself with NATO and the EU and sank the Deutschmark in the Euro. Thus Germany is again becoming economically the top nation in Central Europe, but there is no valid basis for fearing a German national menace.

Meanwhile, President George H.W. Bush led in working to create a “Europe whole and free” and at peace. The US stayed in Europe, NATO was not wrapped up but has continued to keep European history pacified. Central Europe was taken off the geopolitical chessboard with the Partnership for Peace Program and, for many countries, NATO and EU membership. Ukraine was encouraged in its Western, democratic vocation, but without first being pulled into a Western alliance system that could be perceived as a challenge to Russian Federation. (The fact that a succession of Ukrainian governments largely funked the task is another matter).

The first President Bush, followed by Bill Clinton, also tried to prevent the growth of revanchism in Russia, to avoid what happened with the Treaty of Versailles, whose punitive features against Germany helped produce Hitler. This effort, too, went awry, as leaders in the G. W. Bush and then Barack Obama administrations forgot this central lesson and heaped fuel on the fire of Russian nationalism that was set alight by Vladimir Putin. Maybe the result (in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine) would have been the same, under Putin or any other Russian leader who appealed to his people’s sense of lost position and prestige, but the US failure to take account of legitimate Russian concerns certainly did not help.

There have been other negatives, unintended byproducts of success following the Berlin Wall’s opening. Many West European countries wisely shifted limited security resources from military spending not needed after the Cold War to economic support for Central Europe—beginning with the Federal Republic of Germany’s investment of trillions of Euros in the old East Germany. But the US did not. Today in the United States, non-military instruments are starved while it maintains the mightiest military in history at a time where there is no “peer competitor.” Thus, while priding itself on being the “indispensable nation,” the US was caught short by the Ebola epidemic and has done so much less in other countries compared to the good it could do and the security it could promote in the broadest sense of that term.

The US did not totally ignore Will Roger’s warning: “When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.” But after our “9/11,” the US did overdo Afghanistan by trying to get its political and social cultures to leapfrog centuries of development; and the US then committed one of the worse follies in American history, by invading Iraq for no good reason. The results have been  more than 5,000 US servicemen and women dead, thousands more wounded, little promise in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and more than 3 trillion dollars of treasure wasted when it could have been used to refurbish the American homeland and create a more solid and lasting basis for US power and influence.

It is doubtful that either excess—in Afghanistan or Iraq—would have been possible during the Cold War, when the United States had to be worried about a superpower competitor, prepared to promote its own, contending interests. The lesson for today has to be that, just because it is possible to do something, it is not necessarily wise or prudent to do it.

So chto delat? As Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Here are some ideas, mostly for America:

• Reassess what we do in the outside world. What is needed for our security and that of friends and allies, and what can be “given a pass” or handed off to others (including our European friends)? Where is it wiser, in our own interests, to stand apart rather than to become engaged?

• Recruit a first-class team of people in the Obama administration who know how to “think strategically.”  This essential quality began to decline near the end of the Cold War and continues on a steep downward trajectory. With the collapse of the Cold War’s organizing principle, it seemed that less strategic thinking was needed. Yet it has been just the reverse, when so much is in play, there are so many variables, the US cannot “do it all,” it cannot count on the American people to support all foreign ventures, and it thus faces a greater need to set priorities and to make choices than it did when the Soviet threat could justify a wide range of courses of action and involvement. At the same time, press the think-tank community to do the same, instead of continuing to serve largely as means of building political consensus to implement an agreed foreign policy—when there is no clarity of strategy purpose and methodology around which to build a consensus to meet America’s future needs.

• Put more money into USAID, change the balance of funding between military and non-military instruments from the current 13:1 to a ratio that will better enable us to promote our interests and values, and recreate the United States Information Agency, one of our best “unsecret weapons” that was foolishly scrapped.

• Recommit the US to being a European power. Washington’s interest in NATO dropped to an all-time low before Mr. Putin stirred up interest by his misbehavior in Ukraine. Now that interest is sinking again, and the number of people in Washington fully engaged in European security or in other aspects of US engagement in Europe is declining radically. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is charged with implementing decisions of last September’s NATO summit in Wales, in part to reassure Central European allies wary of Russia, but it is doling out only peanuts for people in and out of government to think through what has to be done.

• Challenge the Europeans allies to do even more for security on the continent and in selected places beyond—not through increased defense spending in each allied country to at least 2% of GDP, an American obsession left over from the Cold War. Most of that 2% should go to non-military political and economic instruments to help integrate Central Europe more fully in Europe, to do more in Africa, and to get on with the critical work of building a solid Ukrainian economy. Also tell the Ukrainians to dismantle their kleptocracy and tell Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, either to restore his country’s democracy or both NATO and the EU will send it packing.

• Start work on a long-term security structure for the Persian Gulf and other parts of the Middle East. End the illusion that getting rid of the Assad regime in Syria is the answer to anything—it would likely only produce more regional chaos and a Shi’a bloodbath. Meanwhile, put the Saudis and others who have turned a blind eye to the export of terrorism and the fostering of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, to stop immediately the flow from their countries of Islamist ideas, money, and arms, as the price of continued good relations with the US.

More needs to be done to deal effectively with the requirements of a world newly created in the wake of the end of the Cold War’s certainties, a product of the Berlin wall’s opening, but this is enough to be getting on with. It befits America’s role as a great power, a champion of freedom, a protector of those most in need of protecting, a beacon of hope. It is what we expect in terms of leadership by our president and Congress. It would be a fitting commemoration of what a lot of courageous people did across Central Europe a quarter century ago. Can we be less committed and far-sighted than they were?