When the government starts dictating how the history is written...

...it can't be for the good.

Glaring omissions abound in Nikita Zagladin's textbook, "History of Russia and the World in the 20th Century." The Holocaust is never mentioned. The book barely acknowledges the Gulag labor camps.

And it flits past Russia's 10-year conflict with separatists in Chechnya, reducing a pivotal episode in modern Russian history to seven paragraphs.

For some Russian academics, Zagladin's penchant for smoothing over the bumps in Russian history is precisely the reason his textbooks have become mainstays in Russian classrooms.

In recent years, authorities have increasingly sought to whip up patriotic fervor among Russians, often at the expense of illuminating Russian history's darker chapters.

Josef Stalin oversaw a murderous regime that killed millions of Russians. But with the country's celebration of the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Georgian-born ruler has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. The Siberian city of Mirny erected a statue of Stalin earlier this month, calling him "a great son of Russia who gave the people everything he had." The city of Orel recently asked the federal government for permission to change street names to honor Stalin.

This is not the way to teach your children about your own nation's history (and to a degree we are guilty of it here). Truthfully confronting the "darker chapters" of your history serves a very, very important purpose...it gives future generations the tools to avoid making the same mistakes (or avoid allowing those mistakes to be made).

Our own history is packed with "darker chapters"...slavery, the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII, forced/mislead sterilizations, discrimination and bigotry, and a host of other not-so-honorable dealings. Hiding these issues, sweeping them "under the rug", only serves to dishonor the memory of those who were wronged and allow people to forget what those who were in the wrong did.

And sadly, what Russia is doing is causing leaders like Stalin, who was every bit as murderous and oppressive as Hitler, to be lionized and reborn as a national hero.

This is not the example we want to follow. It would be like us censoring out the "bad parts" of our history and then making heroes of people like the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace, and those who furthered the institution of slavery (and later the practices of discrimination).

While Bush rubs elbows with his chum Mr. Putin, he would discourage this tendancy if he understood the implications himself. I doubt he really cares, though...the idea of complacent citizens who believe whatever the government spews out is probably to his liking, too.