The Congress, by Joint Resolution, approved July 17, 1959 (73 Stat. 212), has authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation designating the third week of July of each year as «Captive Nations Week.» In accordance with this law President Obama did just that and called upon the people of the United States to reaffirm our deep commitment to freedom. He also added that «the journey towards worldwide freedom and democracy sought in 1959 remains unfinished.»

Of course, Obama is absolutely right but there is still some unfinished business with the text of this resolution itself, and the time to make some appropriate corrections is right now.

That law, contrary to historic facts, uses such expressions like «Russian communism» and «communist Russia.» These should be replaced by «Soviet communism» and «Soviet Union.» In addition, Russia should be added to the list of 30 or so captive nations listed in this resolution.

Similar appeals to many U.S. Presidents and Congress have been made before but recently they got indirect support from the Chairman of the Duma’s Foreign Relations Committee Konstantin Kosachev. Whether he consulted with the Kremlin before making such a bold and courageous statement or not is an open question, but when a man of his statue says that «our society is to no lesser extent the victim of the erstwhile regime, was no less articulate in condemning the crimes of Stalin’s totalitarianism, and acted on its own, without external intervention and democratically, to remove the communist ideology from power,» it tells you a lot.

Let us be fair. It is not easy for the country’s leaders, while the Communist Party (CPRF) still gets around 15 percent of the votes to say publicly that the Soviet system were a criminal one. And, most likely, the main reason why Lenin’s tomb is still sitting on the Red Square is that no one wants CPRF to increase its ratings by getting their people on the streets to defend their beloved corpse.

In September 2005 I wrote a letter to President Vladimir Putin repeating the same question I printed earlier in the Russian daily «Izvestia». I asked him why he doesn’t admit that Russia was enslaved by communism together with 14 other Soviet republics and the countries of Eastern Europe. Moreover, in the absolute numbers of victims it was Russia that suffered the most and it was Russia that liberated itself, all the captive nations, and for that matter, the world, from Soviet-style communism.

I did not get a direct answer from Putin but my Russian visa was not revoked, and I started to receive invitations to appear on many TV and radio talk-shows repeating more or less the same lines. Only a couple of weeks ago I said on one of the main Russian TV channels that it is time to admit that although the Red Army made the most crucial contribution to defeat the Nazis, it was the same Red Army that occupied the Baltics, Western Ukraine, and Eastern Europe for almost 50 years. Since this show was pre-taped these lines could have been easily deleted, but they were not.

My weak voice, of course, is obviously not the only one. The work to deal with the Soviet legacy is being done slowly, but surely. This regime and its policies have been repeatedly condemned by Russia’s current top officials and the media, including government-run TV which are constantly filled with devastating documentaries and feature films describing the horrors of the Soviet era. Most recently both Medvedev and Putin denounced Stalin’s terror in connection with the Katyn massacre, and we have heard them denouncing communist policies and dogmas many times since and before.

The job of writing a comprehensive multi-volume modern Russian history was offered by the Kremlin to no one else but Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the person who, through his writings and public activities, has done more than any other man to destroy the communist ideology. Due to his old age he passed this honor to the Moscow State University of International Relations (MGIMO) — one of the most prestigious schools for future Russian diplomats — Professor Andrei Zubov, known for his calls for Russia’s de-communization similar to the de-Nazification of postwar Germany. History books rarely become bestsellers, but this one surely did. It has won praise from many well-known scholars, including Richard Pipes and others who can hardly be charged with being Moscow’s appeasers or sympathizers.

It would be highly advisable for U.S. Congress to complement Kosachev’s words with the editing or at least with starting the discussion on the text of the «Captive Nations Resolution.» Believe me, this is not just a linguistic exercise, but a long overdue symbolic gesture, which will have a huge positive impact on the «reset» in U.S.-Russian relations.