By Anna Badkhen

        You're probably sitting there thinking this was an abstract from some flyer you might find glued to the walls of Moscow's malodorous apartment building stairways. This passage does look like something the Kremlin might compose in its ongoing effort to spin the war in Chechnya.

Yet it was not written by a group of Russian officials seeking to weed out all dissent. A clerk at the U.S. Justice Department in Washington typed this pamphlet — titled "Spies and Lies" — more than 80 years ago, when the xenophobic administration of President Woodrow Wilson was commanding U.S. troops in World War I.

Needless to say, German-Americans were Enemy No. 1. "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic whenever he gets ready," Wilson said at the time. To make sure no one succeeded at sabotage (which all German-Americans, no doubt, were busily scheming at the time) the president pushed through the Espionage Act and set up the Creel Committee on Public Information, soaking the nation with prejudice against Germans.

Now, replace the words "hyphen" and "republic" in Wilson's statement with "Chechen passport" and "Russia." Does it sound familiar?

In America, 80 years later, the propaganda continues. American high school students won't find the flyer in their history textbooks. Most textbooks portray the openly racist president as a hero and are silent on his misdemeanors (like, for example, his invasion of Haiti in 1915, or his tacit support of increases in racial violence — including the re-formation of the Ku Klux Klan — in the United States). Inquisitive teenagers may discover a reprint of it (and many more embarrassing facts about U.S. history that often contradict what is taught in schools) in "Lies My Teacher Told Me," an iconoclastic book about the way history is taught in America, written by historian James W. Loewen in 1995.

Russian high-school history textbooks say nothing about the military's latest campaign in Chechnya because it is not history yet. But 80 years from now, what will they say?

Mainstream Russian media provide the official spin on the war. They say the army is doing the right thing by trying to rid the volatile southern region of evil Islamic extremists who seek independence. Few newspapers dare report the random detentions, arbitrary killings and routine trade in imprisoned Chechens — or the bodies of murdered Chechens — that are emblematic of this campaign. The military underreports the number of casualties among its troops. The media never question the figures.

And even so, the military is not happy with press coverage of the war. Last month, military commander Anatoly Kvashnin criticized journalists for reporting too much bad news from the region. "You are not doing a very good job," he said.

Will historians do better? And if they do, will there be a James W. Loewen to write a book about it?

Anna Badkhen is a freelance correspondent based in Moscow.