The Russian people suffer from a severe inferiority complex, if we can believe the editorial that appeared in Pravda last week. It took the form of a cry from the wounded heart of Mother Russia, a nation wronged by the malicious insults of foreigners.

 

In Pravda’s view, there are people everywhere, particularly East Europeans and Americans, who want “to make the Russians feel guilty for the past.” They accomplish this with reminders of Joseph Stalin’s cruel dictatorship and the decades when eastern Europe was under “Soviet occupation” — a phrase Pravda now prints with quotation marks, as if it were a figment of someone’s imagination.

 

Apparently, foreigners keep harping on these subjects because they “do not want to admit that the Soviet Union defeated both Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the whole of Europe.”

 

This don’t-hurt-our-feelings style of Russian defensiveness was most famously articulated a few years ago when Vladimir Putin said in a speech that “others cannot be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt on us.” It has since taken root in the officially approved publishing of Russia, where it encourages persistent attempts to upgrade Stalin’s reputation...