“The greatest criminals in our history were those weaklings who threw Russian power on the floor — Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev — those who allowed the power to be picked up by the hysterics and the madmen,” the journalist Ben Judah reported Mr. Putin as saying privately to his aides.

These themes have become central to Mr. Putin’s public discourse as well. “It’s time to stop taking note only of the bad things in our history and berating ourselves more than even our opponents would do,” he declared at the annual gathering of international Russia experts known as the Valdai Discussion Club in 2013. “We must be proud of our history.”

Mr. Putin has buttressed his domestic standing by bending history to justify his self-proclaimed mission to reclaim Russia’s lost glory. In a documentary released on national TV to coincide with the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, which officially became part of Russia on March 21, 2014, Mr. Putin took personal responsibility for the move, calling the loss of the peninsula and the historic Russian naval port of Sebastapol as the Soviet Union collapsed a “historic injustice” that had to be corrected.

This premise is certainly a selective one. Take the case of Perm-36, a museum of Soviet repression created in 1992 on the site of a former penal colony 800 miles east of Moscow. The privately run museum, named after the Soviet designation for the prison camp, was dedicated to the victims of Stalinism. But the local government, sensing a need to demonstrate loyalty to the Kremlin, pushed the organization out. Perm-36 will soon reopen as a state museum dedicated to the airbrushed history of the Russian penal system.

This distorted approach to the past, which stresses Russian triumphs while dismissing Russian crimes, continues in the Kremlin’s current relations with Washington and the capitals of Western Europe. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Russia’s relationship with Germany, a country that has built its post-World War II identity on being open and penitent about the dark side of its history. On a recent visit to Japan, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany, despite the brutality and horror of the Hitler era, is now accepted by the international community not only because of the generosity of its neighbors but also because of the “readiness in Germany to face our history openly and squarely.”