Roger Cohen: Why History Is So Much in Dispute Around the World These Days

[Roger Cohen, who writes the Globalist column for The International Herald Tribune, is author of"Soldiers and Slaves: American P.O.W.'s Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble" (Knopf).]

THE Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Aleksandr Yakovenko, had an interesting suggestion the other day."The job of historians is to tell the truth," he ventured. If only it were that simple.

Mr. Yakovenko made this cute observation as he waded into the historical minefield that President Bush was also navigating last week. At the core of the explosive issues confronted by the president in the Baltic states and Moscow lies this vexed question: Can a meaningful distinction be made, in moral terms, between Communist totalitarian terror and Nazism?

Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the president of Latvia, gave her own answer in a statement before Mr. Bush's arrival in her country. The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 was no liberation for the Baltic states, she suggested, because"it meant slavery, it meant occupation, it meant subjugation and it meant Stalinist terror."

Unlike the leaders of Lithuania and Estonia, who snubbed the event, Ms. Vike-Freiberga attended last Monday's ceremonies in Red Square commemorating the 60th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, surprised nobody by choosing to avoid any expression of contrition for postwar Soviet rule of the Baltic states. The Latvian president, commenting that a Russian apology"would have been nice," called the proceedings"surreal."

So it goes. History is indeed making a surreal comeback - in Beijing and Seoul (where Japan is the target), and in Riga and Moscow. It is reasonable to ask why.

The answer is that unraveling the tangled legacy of the cold war is time-consuming. That struggle had its imperatives, dictated by the ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The manipulation of memory and truth created a web of obfuscation stretching from Santiago to Stalingrad.

For 44 years, history on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain bore no relation to"truth"; it was an exercise in glorifying Communism. In the West, truth could also be a casualty. The 15 years since the Berlin Wall fell have gone some way toward casting light on cold war shadows, but have not dispelled them.

The disputes of the past two weeks illustrate the lingering difficulties. Russia, outraged that the result of its Great Patriotic War, fought at a terrible cost, could be viewed as"slavery and subjugation" by its neighbors, asked whether those neighbors would have been around at all if the Red Army had not helped defeat Hitler."When people today discuss whether we occupied anybody's country or not, I want to ask them: what would have happened to you had we not broken the back of fascism?" the Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, declared."Would your people be among the living now?"

Fair question - but not one that removes Moscow's responsibility for mass deportations from the Baltic states after 1945. Mr. Putin also weighed in, suggesting that the indignation from Riga to Vilnius was aimed in part at disguising a history of collaboration with the Nazis....

Even now, as the past week shows, the dirty laundry of Communism has not yet been hung out in the sun. The search for truth remains a work in progress.