Russia fires another salvo in its war on historical memory | CNN

War in the Middle East may be roiling markets and testing global stability, but one priority endures for Vladimir Putin’s Russia: rewriting history. Last week, the state-backed Russian Military-Historical Society unveiled a new exhibit in western Smolensk region entitled “10 Centuries of Polish Russophobia.” The exhibit, a news release said, focused on “the hatred of the Polish state elite at various periods of history toward Russia and the Russian people, and how this hatred manifested itself in concrete actions. Specifically, in the seizure of Russian territory and the extermination of the Russian, Belarusian, and Little Russian peoples.” Leave aside the nationalistic language (“little Russians” being the Russian imperial term for Ukrainians) and the politics of grievance, the exhibit itself is an affront to history. It stands on the grounds of the Katyn Memorial, where more than 20,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and prisoners of war were executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. And Smolensk was also the scene of another traumatic event for Poland, the 2010 plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and top Polish officials including senior def