A decade ago Robert Harris wrote a bestselling thriller, Archangel, depicting a plot to restore communism in Russia through a secret son of Joseph Stalin. The book's excitement rested in part on the frightening plausibility of a popular movement to revere the memory of Stalin.

Now the fiction assumes, if not flesh, then at least topicality. An online television poll in Russia to select the country's most significant historical figure has Uncle Joe vying for first place with Tsar Nicholas II.

The vote doubtless reflects the myth of Stalin's wartime leadership, while discreetly overlooking the domestic horrors. On the scale of selective memory, that is at the grosser end. Yet public life is full of hypocrisies.

Nothing better exemplifies the collective delete button, however, than a nation's account of its own history. The BBC's 100 Greatest Britons poll in 2002 put in eleventh place Lord Nelson - not only gallant victor at Trafalgar but also brutal suppressor of a liberal rebellion at Naples. This month a major exhibition opens at the British Museum celebrating the achievement of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who is better known in Britain for his wall than for his brutal, near-genocidal, crushing of the Jewish revolt of AD132.

Yet there are patent limits to relativising history. The organisers of the German Unsere Besten poll in 2003 wisely disallowed voting for Hitler. Stalin - in fact a Georgian, rather than a Russian - merits an obloquy quite as universal. Even Russia's television voters should accept that you can indeed make an omelette without murdering 20 million people.