Earlier this month, German writer Gunter Grass admitted that he had served in the Waffen SS -- the combat arm of the SS -- during World War II. Previously, it was believed that he had served in a defensive anti-aircraft unit. His confession caused a heated, mostly negative response around the world, especially because the Nobel Prize-winning author had concealed this fact for nearly 60 years. U.S. author John Irving was among his few defenders.

Predictably, most Russian journalists slammed the writer; anything related to the Nazis is seen as being anti-Russian, and on top of that, Grass had recently been critical of the Chechen war. But what's the track record of Russian authors with regard to their own shameful pasts?

We can start with Alexander Pushkin, who was a Decembrist sympathizer in his early years (hence his numerous exiles) but a loyal, almost anti-Western tsarist by the end of his life. Yet this was a peaceful evolution of views, nothing more. A more telling example is that of another great poet, Nikolai Nekrasov, who once wrote and publicly recited an ode to General Mikhail Muravyov. Muravyov had bloodily suppressed the Polish rebellion of 1863, and liberals, including Nekrasov, could not have approved of that -- but Nekrasov wanted better conditions and less censorship for his liberal-minded journal, and he hoped that the influential general, mollified by praise, could help. The plan did not work, however, and for the rest of his life Nekrasov repented, both privately and in his poems.

In communist times, attempts at having a conscience were few and dangerous. Writers, under the umbrella of the Writers' Union, voted unanimously against any presumed enemy in their ranks. Mikhail Sholokhov -- a Nobel laureate, like Grass -- spoke at a Party congress lamenting the leniency of the law that sent dissident authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel to prison rather than executing them. He never took his words back.

When yet another Nobel laureate, Boris Pasternak, was ostracized by his colleagues, feigning illness to avoid voting was already a heroic act. In a recent interview, Sergei Mikhalkov, the doyen of Russian children's poetry and the lyricist for three versions of the Soviet and Russian anthems, including the current one, was asked whether he regretted voting against Pasternak in 1958. Mikhalkov's answer was curt: "I considered Pasternak a great poet, but he broke the law."

It seems that repentance and feelings of guilt have not come easily to Russian writers of the last century. Any Russian critic of Grass should remember that.