Cheney, Obama and History Lessons From Poland | Newsweek International

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But the virtue of glasnost under Gorbachev and the often chaotic situation under Boris Yeltsin was that it still allowed for vigorous, freewheeling historical debates. Those were also times when researchers dug into the Soviet archives and unearthed countless documents that underscored the magnitude of Stalin's crimes and failures as a leader, including during the "Great Patriotic War"—the holy of holies in Russia's recent history.

By contrast, Putin's reign—and now the proposed historical commission—has looked like an attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle. A teacher's manual in 2007 called Stalin "the most successful Soviet leader ever." Such efforts can only succeed up to a point. Too much information, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, is already in the public domain to impose a completely falsified version of history. There are also the alternative sources of information provided via the Internet. But in today's Russia, real debate on the big issues is still rare: there are more or less official views, and then everything else is relegated to the margins. Russia can evolve into a more open society in the future only if it allows a serious clash of ideas.

That's exactly what the United States is experiencing in the early days of the Obama administration. The back-to-back appearances by Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney provided a textbook example of competing interpretations of recent history. Did it, and does it, make sense to imprison those accused of terrorism in Guantánamo? Did the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques" amount to torture? The two politicians' diametrically opposing answers to those questions led to diametrically different recommendations for where things should go from here.

This was no academic debate. The Europeans who have been vociferously critical of Guantánamo aren't eager to take the prisoners in (France, for example, has accepted just one of them so far) and are now pushing the Obama administration to take most of them into the United States. Most Democrats were equally critical of Guantánamo, but that didn't stop them from voting down Obama's request for funding to close down the Cuban facility, complaining that he hadn't presented them with a plan on how he would do this safely. Already, the debate about Bush's handling of terrorist suspects has been transformed into a heated exchange about what his successor can or should do, balancing the need for security with the concept of what constitutes fair treatment.

The most characteristic trait of an open society is a willingness to engage in precisely these kinds of serious, no-holds-barred debates about the history of your country—and what that means going forward. There always will be the debates about history between countries like Poland and Germany, often inflamed by electoral politics on both sides. When serious issues arise, they need to be addressed. But it's easy to point to inflammatory demands and rhetoric across a border to score points with voters. It's much harder to look inward. The real test for any society is how much debate it can tolerate about its own most sensitive disputes. Right now, Russia and the United States are offering dramatically different examples of how this is done.

NAGORSKI is vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute and the author of The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II. He wrote this essay for NEWSWEEK's Polish edition, NEWSWEEK POLSKA.

The recent PBS series on "Stalin, the Nazis and the West" points out that Stalin finally started listening to his generals in the latter part of WWII, which may be the only reason he defeated Hitler, who never did. And totalitarian states like Russia under Stalin and Hitler under Germany don't get to try out the "what if" scenarios that open debate provides, and so have to learn the hard way.

But Cheney's labeling everyone who did not agree with his policy mistakes as "unpatriotic" certainly did not help the debate in this country (as if he were an expert on the subject). And not to mention that withholding valid intelligence information from the public, while passing on only the fabricated stuff, was not too useful either. With Obama, there is hope that we can avoid such mistakes. As for Poland, they are caught between two big powers who routinely invade them, and the decisions are not so easy. For the U.S., there is no excuse for the past 8 years.