Here is my piece over at PunditWire and Commentator describing a draft leaked keynote speech by Vladimir Putin in which he makes a decisive break with Soviet-era iconography and paranoia in favour of basic decency:

Traditionally we have taken the Great Patriotic War as starting in June 1941 when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union

This is no longer good enough. It relativizes the historic crime committed by Stalin when he connived with Hitler to attack and dismantle Poland

We must face several bitter truths

First and foremost, those Stalin conspiracies with Hitler directly and unambiguously caused the Second War.

Other options were available to Stalin in dealing with the complex and unhappy diplomacy of the late 1930s. He chose by far the worst one. He chose to side with Hitler and Nazism against civilisation.

I don’t know which was worse. His cynicism, or his stupidity

Thousands of Soviet soldiers quickly died in the USSR’s unprovoked invasions of Poland, then Finland. Their heroic memory must be honoured today

Second, Soviet forces committed war crimes, most notably the Katyn and associated massacres of thousands of Polish POWs. The Soviet regime then lied about these crimes for decades afterwards, blaming the Nazis

Our own official equivocation on this painful issue has to stop. We have avoided calling these massacres ‘war crimes’, and even tried to promote the claim that these prisoners were executed after some sort of formal and respectable legal processThis avoidance of the obvious truth shames us. It shames our military record.

The heroic Polish and wider victims of Katyn and other Stalin war crimes must be honoured today

Third, the scale of the Russian and wider Soviet casualties suffered during the war was magnified many times by the policies of Stalin before and during the war. The purges and murders of top officers before the war had left the Soviet Army weakened. His insane killing of many of our top soldiers continued into the war

The memory of these heroic victims of Stalin must be honoured today

Fourth, thousands of Russian soldiers were summarily shot or cruelly punished by their own army comrades for alleged desertion. Their memory must be honoured today

Fifth, the Soviet Union’s position on international protocols for the treatment of prisoners of war was at best highly ambiguous. This did not cause the bestial Nazi persecution of our POWs, but it surely created a context in which that behaviour was easier to justify on the grounds that the USSR was not going to treat POWs properly. We cannot count how many prisoners on all sides died thanks to Nazi abuse or Stalin’s abuse. But their heroic memory must be honoured today

Sixth, we need to remember that tens if not hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens perished needlessly during the war. Not because of enemy action or the normal horrors of war. But because of Stalin’s unrelenting persecution of his own people

In the shining year in which Crimea has been restored to its rightful place within Russia, it is only fitting that we recall the sacrifices made by the Tartar population of Crimea who were summarily deported far from their homes on Stalin’s orders. Thousands died in misery. Their memory too must be honoured today

Finally, we need to honour the millions of civilians who died from famine or otherwise as a direct result of Stalin’s economic policies that made it far harder for the Soviet Union to defend itself against the Nazi onslaught

And he then makes some important proposals about Russia’s top state symbols.

What are they? And can they wait another decade?

Read the whole thing.