Painting over the past produces a poorer present

Depending on your sympathies, your education and your historical experience, a giant bronze soldier in Tallinn may celebrate the liberation of the Estonian capital from fascism, or it may depict the "unknown rapist" whose arrival marked the end of one occupation and the start of another.

In Ukraine’s capital, Kiev (or Kyiv - even spelling can be controversial) the church of St Cyril is to some a precious symbol of the fabled medieval principality from which both Ukraine and Russia claim descent; to others an obscure museum that badly needs a new coat of paint and proper management.

These are not arcane arguments among historians. The Estonian parliament has infuriated Russia with a new law on war burial sites that will allow the bronze soldier to be shifted to the suburbs. Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Kremlin consultant (and grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who stitched up the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939) said the policy was "akin to the Inquisition’s destruction of the texts and monuments of classical antiquity". From the upper house of Russia’s parliament, Mikhail Margelov, another foreign-policy heavyweight, has called for a suspension of diplomatic relations.

The impending takeover of St Cyril’s church by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which wants to whitewash the inside, destroying unique frescos showing the life of St Cyril, has provoked anguish among Ukrainians who feel that their their country’s religious and cultural material heritage has already been appropriated, sold off, or annihilated by their junior Slav neighbours to the north.

The best thing to do with the past is to study it properly before arguing about it. It is remarkable that the frescos in St Cyril’s have not been properly catalogued or photographed, in a country with few surviving medieval monuments and with hardly any with iconographic evidence from the Byzantine period. Such historical traces are uncomfortable for those who see Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ of Christianity and who downplay Kievan Rus’ as the cradle of Ukrainian culture.

But history is a tempting weapon for those seeking to score a political point. In Estonia, the issue of the bronze soldier has been artificially stoked by the Reform party, the main component of the governing coalition. It wants to burnish its patriotic credentials before the parliamentary elections in March.

In a narrow sense it has succeeded: the issue is a polarising one, pitting Estonians who reject everything about the Soviet era against those who retain a lingering respect for the Red Army’s bravery. But it is hard to maintain that it is an argument that Estonia needs to have right now; nor that it is an issue on which it is worth expending the shamefully scarce political capital that the country has abroad. Most Western countries reckon that war graves should be depoliticised where possible (admittedly, it is not a direct comparison: Estonia says there are no Soviet war dead buried underneath the bronze soldier, though Russia insists that there are).

Estonia’s parliament is also considering designating 22 September, when Soviet forces captured Tallinn, as a "resistance memorial day" and penalising the public display of both Nazi and Soviet symbols in Estonia. But there are so many other things for politicians to worry about. The suspicious renationalisation of the country’s railways, rampant corruption in some ministries, xenophobic migration laws and endemic short-termism in politics are all knocking some stripes off the ‘Baltic Tiger’.

If Estonia wants to demonstrate how far it has moved from its Soviet past, divisive gestures are a poor substitute for good government.

• The author is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

Depending on your sympathies, your education and your historical experience, a giant bronze soldier in Tallinn may celebrate the liberation of the Estonian capital from fascism, or it may depict the "unknown rapist" whose arrival marked the end of one occupation and the start of another.