European presidents and prime ministers gathered today on Poland's Baltic coast to mark 70 years since the first shots were fired in the second world war with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland.
But as direct memory of the war recedes, the ceremonies in Gdansk were clouded by bitter recrimination over Russia and Stalinism in central and eastern Europe, feeding current tensions between Moscow and several of its former client states in the region.
While the Poles and the Baltic states demanded apologies from the Kremlin for their communist "enslavement" as a result of the war, the Russians bridled at what they see as western belittling of their finest 20th century moment, the Red Army's defeat of Nazi Germany.
Leaders of Poland, Germany, Russia, France, Britain and a dozen other countries met in bright sunshine alongside Polish flags and brass bands to issue pledges of never again and celebrate the unification of old enemies in an expanding European Union over the past 20 years.
For the first time in decades of solemn commemoration of the second world war, however, the focus fell not on Germany and what its leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, said, but on Moscow and how Prime Minister Vladimir Putin dealt with weeks of verbal sparring with the east Europeans over Russia's wartime and postwar role in the region.
Putin has spent the past decade seeking to restore Russian greatness, partly through rehabilitating Josef Stalin and encouraging a heroic, nationalist narrative at home.
Today he was told bluntly that the Russians did not bring freedom to central Europe, that they stabbed Poland in the back in 1939 following the Nazi invasion, and that the Kremlin's imperial ambitions remain a danger today, as shown by last year's war against Georgia.
The runup to today's events in Gdansk, where a German battleship opened fire on Polish fortifications in the early hours of 1 September 1939, starting a six-year war that left 50 million dead and wiped out much of the Jewish population of Europe, was dominated by furious fighting over European history between Russia and its former satellites in the Soviet empire.
Poland, partitioned in 1939 by the twin tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, and where the Nazi Holocaust mass murder of Jews largely took place, has been the main target of a concerted Russian propaganda campaign in recent weeks.
The Kremlin and its spin doctors have accused Poland of plotting with the Nazis to invade Russia and of gleefully joining in Germany's carve-up of Czechoslovakia.
Moscow's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, warned today of a new showdown between Russia and Europe over the rewriting of history, highlighting the deep gulf in perceptions of the causes and effects of the war 70 years later.
"Freedom came from the east," said Lavrov. "Russia, once again, fulfilled its historic mission to save Europe from forced unification and its own madness.
"Victory was achieved at too great a price for us to simply let it be taken away from us. That is where we draw the line. If someone wants to have a new ideological confrontation with Europe, then historical revisionism and attempts to turn history into a practical political instrument is a direct path toward this confrontation."
Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, flatly rejected that version of history, while paying tributes to the tens of thousands of Russian troops who died in Poland. "They gave their lives for liberation, but they didn't bring us freedom. But we honour them too, and care for their graves."
Tusk and Putin sought to defuse the row, with the Russian leader also paying tribute to Polish bravery against the Germans. But there were no apologies from the Russians.
At the core of the row are two events – the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Katyn massacre.
Under the pact – a week before the war started – Stalin and Hitler secretly agreed to carve up Poland between them. Stalin also annexed the three Baltic states and a slice of Romania.
Hitler obtained carte blanche to start the war without fear of Russian retaliation and Stalin bought time to prepare for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union two years later.
At Katyn, within months of occupying eastern Poland, the Russians massacred much of the Polish officer and cultural elite, up to 26,000, in one of the first acts of mass murder of the war. Moscow then denied the crime for 59 years, blaming it on the Germans.
"This was revenge," said the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, today as Putin looked on. "This was chauvinism."
Putin today condemned the Nazi-Soviet pact, but equated Stalin's actions with those of western leaders at the time. "All attempts to appease the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 through various agreements and pacts were morally unacceptable," Putin said. "We must admit these mistakes. Our country has done this."
Adam Rotfeld, a former Polish foreign minister, described the Russian campaign in the run-up to today as "disgusting". The Polish tabloid press has been screaming with indignation. "Russia! Apologise for your crimes!" said the banner headline in the Super Express. "Apologise for attacking Poland, for the Katyn genocide, for murdering our heroes, for sending Poles to Siberia."
The Russians are particularly outraged over what they see as western attempts to equate Stalin with Hitler. "Those who falsify history forget the things they gained as the result of the Red Army's liberation campaign," said Lavrov.
But "liberation" ushered in 45 years of repressive Soviet communism in Poland and the Baltic. Adam Michnik, a leading Polish intellectual, told the Russians: "For us, Stalin was a criminal and an aggressor. The creator of the lands of the gulag is entirely comparable with Hitler."
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