It is difficult to explain exactly why. Perhaps because of a more vital sense of national identity; perhaps it is the sheer scale of the suffering that makes it more difficult to forget; maybe there is a less admirable instinct for self pity and grudge bearing. But national historic memories, especially about the events of the twentieth century, are much rawer in Eastern Europe than in the West. And that is why arguments about something quite different - the Kremlin’s attitude to its “near abroad,” for example - manifest themselves in rows about the Second World War.

That was the case with the hysterical screaming match that engulfed Europe last week, 70 years after the German invasion of Poland unleashed a far more literal bout of mutual blood letting. Ostensibly, the argument was about who started the Second World War: for Poland, attacked as it was from two sides by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it is difficult to pin all the blame on Berlin; for Russia, where the victory over Nazi Germany is a national cult, any suggestion that Moscow was complicit in unleashing the war is a “cynical lie.” But in reality it was about the whole of Soviet history, and, oddly enough, foreign policy.

The resulting war of words ranged from the defensive - Stalin was buying time; Britain and France had rejected his offers of a mutual-security pact - to attacks on one another’s own record. Hadn’t Poland concluded its own non-aggression treaty with Germany in 1934? Hadn’t it taken part in the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938? And besides, Stalin only took back the land that Poland had seized during the 1920s.

This is no place to rehearse the interminable squabbles that follow from these premises. Suffice to say the arguments on both sides are well practiced, and none of last week’s spat was spontaneous: tensions had been ratcheted up to the point where an explosion was inevitable.

In July the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) caused outrage in Russia by adopting a resolution that condemned Nazism and Stalinism in pretty much equal terms (the Duma in response passed a motion condemning the resolution). In August Medvedev sent a menacing letter to his Ukrainian counterpart Victor Yushchenko, in which he complained (amongst other things) about historical revisionism. And on August 30, two days before the ceremony in Gdansk, Medvedev called such an equation of Nazi and Stalinist crimes “a cynical lie.” Then, while European leaders were gathered in Gdansk, the Russian foreign intelligence service released files “proving” that Poland had brought about its own downfall by flirting with Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

The history war has been going on in one form or another almost since the Berlin wall came down. It is fought on several fronts, but by far the most crucial is the Second World War. Poland, for example, feels that Russia has not properly apologized for the Molotov Ribbentrop pact (though the Russian Parliament has condemned it), the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers (though Russia recognizes it as a Soviet crime), or the 45 years of communist dictatorship that followed “victory.” The Baltic states, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, view the entire post-war period as an occupation. Estonian attempts to relocate a memorial to Red Army soldiers in 2007 led to a diplomatic crisis and a cyberwar. Ukraine, meanwhile, has taken to lionizing nationalist partisans who the Russians consider Nazi collaborators.

The Russian government has become so agitated by these reassessments of Soviet history that has introduced a law, modeled on German holocaust-denial legislation, making it illegal to deny the Soviet victory (shorthand for saying the liberating troops began a new occupation). And in May this year Russian President Dmitry Medvedev founded a commission to “defend against the revision of history to Russia’s disadvantage.”

A lot of this is populism. Russians are not only proud, but touchy about their record in the Second World War. No one who has lived here will have been surprised by a recent opinion poll that found some 63 percent of Russians believe the Soviet Union could have won the war without the help of the allies (if anything, one might be surprised that the figure has fallen in recent years, from 71 percent in 2001). Trying to salvage the Western allies’ honor with the war in the Pacific evokes pitiful smiles: it was not the atomic bombs, but the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 that forced the Japanese surrender.

So to suggest that the Red Army was anything other than heroic touches a genuine raw nerve. Changing the history of the Second World War is the abode of Russophobes and Nazi sympathizers, and is one of the safest possible targets for politicians looking for something to denounce.

That’s the Russian position. But the history war is not just about the Second World War. One of the sorest points between Russia and Ukraine, for example, is the Holodomor (literally “death by hunger”), an artificial famine that devastated Ukraine in 1932-33. The Ukrainians say it was genocide; Yushchenko even sent a draft bill to the Ukrainian parliament in December 2008 outlawing Holodomor denial. The Russians say it was a USSR-wide tragedy.

And that is what the real argument is about: how we remember the Soviet Union. Russia is the legal successor of that state - inheriting both its nuclear arsenal and its debts - and as a result there is a school of thought that says admitting responsibility for Soviet crimes would open the way for compensation claims from the victims and their families. But more importantly, Russia is also the emotional successor to the Soviet Union. And as the Duma’s reaction to the OSCE resolution showed, for many in power any attack on Soviet history is an attack on Russia itself.

The countries Russia quarrels with about history are countries it quarrels with about almost everything else. Poland’s support for the 2004 Orange revolution in Ukraine, its opposition to the Nordstream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, and offers to host an American anti-missile shield have had many Russian political analysts describing it frankly as “an enemy.” The letter Medvedev sent to Yushchenko last month (his second in less than a year), bundled up historical grievances with support for Georgia during the August War last year, plans to join NATO, the “ousting of the Russian language from public life,” and jeopardizing energy security. In light of which, Medvedev wrote, he would not be sending a new Russian ambassador to Ukraine.

So if you’ve been wondering why history has not been left to historians, the answer is simple; in this part of the world, it is not yet history.

Photo by Lord Jim