Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent article for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza – written to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland – expresses his determination to make twentieth-century European history a major part of the Russian government’s business. That article reflects the deep, unresolved problems of Putin’s era: the inability to distinguish between the Soviet past and the Russian present; an unscrupulous mix of political conservatism and historical revisionism; and indifference, bordering on incomprehension, with regard to the key values of democracy.