TOMSK, Russia — For years, the earth in this Siberian city 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 Stalin’s purges? Would they help him tell the story of the thousands of innocent people who were said to have been carted from a prison to a ravine, shot in the head and tossed over?
The answer was no, and Mr. Trenin understood what many historians in Russia have come to realize: Under Vladimir V. Putin, the attitude toward the past has changed. The archives that Mr. Trenin was seeking, stored on the fourth floor of a building in Tomsk, in boxes stamped “K.G.B. of the U.S.S.R.,” would remain sealed.
http://www.gadsdentimes.com/article/20081127/ZNYT03/811273001/1009/SPORTS?Title=Nationalism_of_Putin__x2019_s_Era_Veils_Sins_of_Stalin__x2019_s
The United States is not exactly the epitomy of egalitarianism and civilization, and has it's own "skeletons in the closet" that have never made it to the history books:
http://theunitedstatesconstitution.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-seminoles-resisted-ethnic.html
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