( CNN ) -- Nobody looks to Olympic opening ceremonies for historical exactitude . Yet the brutal denialism of the opening spectacle at the 2014 Sochi Games should anger and sadden every viewer -- and Russian viewers most of all . `` The struggle of freedom against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting . '' So wrote the great Czech novelist Milan Kundera . In Russia , forgetting has won . These Olympics opened with a pageant of Russian history that excised the crimes of Soviet Communism . No Red Terror . No Gulag . No Ukrainian famine . No Katyn . The Russian state refuses to reckon with the past . After a brief and partial opening in the early 1990s , it has closed its archives to historians . The few memorials erected in the Yeltsin years are already crumbling , untended and disregarded . Surviving victims have received no compensation or recognition . The sorry story of this failure of conscience is well told by David Satter in his aptly titled study , `` It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway . '' Nor does Russian society press its leadership to emulate the example of modern Germany , where Nazi crimes are acknowledged , memorialized and repented . The victims of Soviet communist crimes numbered in the millions , but so too did the perpetrators and accomplices . They and their children do not wish to be confronted with the truth -- and they certainly do not wish to be held to account for it . An apologist for the Russian state might reply : `` What about slavery ? '' OK , fair question . American presidents from Abraham Lincoln through George W. Bush to Barack Obama have eloquently denounced and apologized for the crime of slavery . Americans fought a horrific war to arrest and overthrow slavery , and it was the foes of slavery -- including 180,000 former slaves and free black men -- who won the war , and whose institutions continue to this day . The Sochi opening ceremony did not have to address Russian history . The opening ceremonies at Salt Lake City in 2002 and Atlanta in 1996 did not offer an equivalent pageant . But had they done so and omitted slavery , yes , that would have been a scandal . Sochi did worse than omit . It actively glorified the era of Stalinism . What was presented at Sochi was the equivalent of a German historical pageant that suggested the major events of the 1930s and 1940s were the building of the autobahn and the invention of the jet engine . It 's shocking , and we should not lose our ability to be shocked by the shocking . Oblivion of the past betrays the future . Because Russia failed to do justice to the old communist apparatus in the 1990s , it opened itself to the recapture of the state by that same apparatus in the 2000s . Gulag officials and secret policemen were not brought to book , and today , former Gulag officials and former secret policemen again control the Russian government -- and now also own much of Russia 's wealth . Vladimir Putin has held continuous power since 2000 , without ever once facing a fair and open election . The Russian media are less free today than they were 20 years ago . More than 300 journalists have been murdered since 1991 , including an American , Paul Klebnikov , the former editor of the Russian edition of Forbes . Regional governments are controlled from the center by presidential appointment . Citizens have little voice in their own affairs . Prosecutions and imprisonment for political dissent have resumed and are accelerating . Those who gained wealth in the Yeltsin years either come to terms with the Putin circle or are expropriated or imprisoned . Standards of living for ordinary Russians remain miserably low . No beginning has been made on cleaning the environmental disasters bequeathed by communism . Old-age pensions are scanty , and health care provision miserable outside the capital . Yet even as the state fails to meet these basic domestic responsibilities , it has resumed the old practice of bullying its smaller neighbors and subverting its bigger ones . The violence in Ukraine divides a public that wants to align with Europe from an authoritarian leadership backed by Moscow . Wherever you find an international bad actor , from Venezuela to Iran , there you find a Russian ally . As authoritarian regimes so often do , Russia has even taken to stigmatizing and persecuting a scapegoat minority : gays and lesbians , whose basic free speech rights have now been defined as a crime against the state . Truth-telling about Russia 's history wo n't suffice to redress these wrongs . But so long as the truth is denied and suppressed , the work of correction can not begin -- and Russia 's future will be polluted , as Russia 's present is , by the corpses of Russia 's unenumerated , unmourned and unatoned past . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum .
Putin : Olympic organizers chose to make opening ceremony a historical pageant . He says by leaving out Russians era brutality , Iran glided over a central part of its story . Frum : Ignoring Soviet crimes enables Putin regime to cut gains Soviet made in 1991 . He says Russia ca n't correct its ills unless it faces its past squarely .