Turning back the clock? Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been becoming more autocratic for years. is he now trying to hide the horrors of soviet-era history?

• Author: Levy, Clifford J.
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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For years, the earth in the Siberian city of Tomsk had been giving up clues: a scrap of clothing, a fragment of bone, a skull with a bullet hole. And so a historian named Boris P. Trenin made a plea to officials: Would they let him examine secret archives to confirm that there was a mass grave here from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's purges during the 1930s, when hundreds of thousands of Russians were executed?

The answer was no, and Trenin understood what many people in Russia are beginning to realize: Under Vladimir V. Putin--who served two terms as President and is now Prime Minister, after installing his protege Dmitri A. Medvedev as his successor in May--the attitude toward the past has changed. The archives that Trenin was seeking, stored in boxes stamped "K.G.B. of the U.S.S.R.," would remain sealed.

In the Putin era, the Kremlin has often sought to maintain as much control over the portrayal of history as over the governing of the country. As part of their efforts to restore Russia's standing in the world, Putin and other officials have stoked a nationalism that glorifies Soviet triumphs while playing down or even whitewashing the system's horrors.

Across Russia, archives detailing killings and persecution committed by the authorities from the 1917 Revolution to the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991--have become increasingly off limits. The role of the security services seems especially sensitive, perhaps because Putin is a former officer of the K.G.B., the Soviet Union's top security and intelligence agency.

To historians, this reflects a larger truth: Russia, they say, has never fully exposed the sins of Communism, never embarked on the kind of truth and reconciliation process pursued by other countries, like Germany after World War II and the Holocaust, and South Africa after the end of apartheid.

THE STALIN YEARS

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Russia underwent an economic and social upheaval. But now that the country is more stable, the Kremlin is, if anything, getting even more secretive.

"They say Russia has gotten up off its knees, and this is why we should be proud of our past," Trenin says. "The theme of Stalin's repressions is harsh and gloomy and far from heroic. So they say that this is why it should be gradually pushed aside. They say the less we know about it, the better we will live."

Officials at Russia's security archives typically reject requests for access by citing a need to protect...