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EDWARD LUCAS

Why Putin’s history essay requires a rewrite

The Russian leader’s revisionist take on his country’s wartime past is self-serving and partisan

The Times

The statue epitomised imperialism, humiliation, repression and lies. The authorities tried hiding it from view. But the public demand was unstoppable. After heated debate and repeated vandalism (including a mocking string of sausages), the bronze figure was removed by a crane.

It depicted Ivan Konev, in Russian eyes a wartime hero but for Czechs an occupier who masterminded Soviet postwar repression. Erected in Prague by the country’s communist-era puppet rulers, it stood not for liberation but enslavement.

Its fall in April was part of a row about the past that has turned Vladimir Putin into an obsessive amateur historian. During an hour-long speech at an international summit in Moscow in December he read his baffled guests lengthy extracts from a pile of archival documents. Last