I know very little about the Olympics’ Opening Ceremonies as they haven’t aired yet here and won’t for another 6 hours, but I’ve been told they will try to show what Russia has given to the world over the centuries.

Okay, I’ll grant Russian literature from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy to Pasternak and points in between. I’ll grant Russian ballet. I’ll grant composers like Tchaikovsky. I’ll grant scientific advances like Sputnik. I’ll grant that without Russia as an ally in World War II Hitler’s Germany might have taken a lot longer to destroy and millions of additional people might have died.

But. Russian also gave the world serfdom. It gave us Communism, an ideology which kept the world on a knife’s edge for 60 years. It gave us some of the world’s first anti-Jewish pogroms in the 19th century, which gave the English language that word. It gave us the purges under Stalin. It gave us the AK-47, which became the weapon of choice for every two-bit revolutionary of the latter half of the 20th century.

It gave the peoples in Eastern Europe and in its own “republics” a dreary life complete with secret police looking for heretics and dissidents. It gave us secret trials and assassinations as tools of government policy. It provoked proxy wars throughout the Cold War.

Yes, American history has its share of terrible things too. I don’t deny it. But most of the time we Americans get around to realizing we were wrong and at least apologize to those whom we mistreated. I have yet to see the same behavior in Russia. In fact, what I see in Vladimir Putin is an old KGB hand who’d like nothing better than to recreate the old Soviet Empire as much as possible. Look at what he’s doing in Ukraine and what he has done in the past in Georgia.

So the Opening Ceremonies are probably not going to persuade me that Russian contributions to the world have been a net good.