My earlier posting about Vladimir Putin’s ‘Letter to Poles’ has been taken up (in a shorter version) by RFE/RL.

Have a look at the comments from pro-Russian types, which are especially agitated on the subject of whether the Red Army in 1920 was attempting another ‘land grab’ by invading Western Europe.

Here is Wikipedia doing a valiant job at decribing in ‘neutral’ terms the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21, not a conflict most people in ‘the West’ have ever even heard of.

Basically, in the confusing circumstances of the end of WW1 and wider boundary changes, Poles and Russians lunged at each other for control of much of Ukraine.

The Poles made a serious miscalulation in thinking that Ukrainians would rise up and greet them as liberators. Many Ukrainians seemed to see the Poles as long-lost returning imperialists. Polish advances were quickly reversed.

However, the Russians were not planning to liberate Ukraine themselves. Rather the newly established Soviet ledership under Lenin was bent on spreading Bolshevism into Europe, and hoped to use the Red Army’s advance through Poland to that end.

So, yes, Moscow was bent on another land grab.

Have a look at this fine RFE/RL essay by Vladimir Nadein, which covers the same sort of ground mine covered but with added passion about the way PM Putin scorned those who try to pick raisins from the ‘mouldy bun’ of history:

Poland is not the West. The West knows communism, but Poland feels it. Poland knows how it tastes, how it smells, what it feels like. Poland knows how prison-camp gruel tastes, how gulag latrines smell, what it feels like to have a pistol barrel put to the back of your head.

What good is Putin’s criminal vagueness in such a place? A thousand Ciceros could not convince the Poles that the stale roll of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact contained even one single raisin…

Well…. Here I’m afraid I have to admit something that I usually try not to admit. Readers have no business knowing how much time and effort an author expends searching for the right words. Even in the best restaurants of Paris, the general rule is not to let the diners into the kitchen.

But Putin’s "rotten roll" is a completely unique case. I have already spent half an hour trying to find a brief and precise definition. I have been struggling with terms and epithets, but each time I give up in despair. How much was expressed in this unique baked good!

… Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk preferred to avoid morbid comparisons. "No one in Poland has forgotten or will forget how much blood remains on our land of Soviet soldiers who liberated Poland from Hitler’s occupation," he said.

Putin, of course, saw with his own eyes in what immaculate condition the graves of Soviet soldiers are kept in Poland, and he nodded to confirm Tusk’s words.

"Soviet soldiers in 1945," Tusk continued, "liberated our land, but they were not able to give us freedom because they didn’t have it themselves." Putin met these words with a stony expression.

History is great.

If it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.