GDANSK, Poland (Reuters) - Polish President Lech Kaczynski warned on Tuesday against efforts to rewrite history as nearly 20 European leaders gathered on Poland's Baltic coast to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two.
Russia and its former satellites in eastern Europe are at loggerheads over the role of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1939, when he clinched a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for the invasion of Poland and world war.
While Russians are deeply proud of their country's victory over Hitler in 1945, Poles, Balts and others say Stalin also bears direct responsibility for the outbreak of war for carving up Poland with Hitler and also annexing the Baltic states.
"(We need) to oppose attempts to write history anew, to question the truths of World War Two, the scale of the casualties of Nazism and also of total communism," Kaczynski wrote in the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita.
Echoing that view, communist-era Polish dissident Adam Michnik wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza: "For us, as for many Russian democrats, Stalin was a criminal and an aggressor. The creator of the lands of the Gulag is entirely comparable with Hitler."
Coming off of last weeks Kennedy Deification this is quite appropriate.
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