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"For us, Stalin was an aggressor and a criminal. He created the country of gulags. He was absolutely comparable to Hitler," Adam Michnik, the liberal Polish newspaper editor and leading former dissident, wrote recently.
(...)"The utterly different experiences of the second world war and the cold war in eastern and western Europe and the fact that the western narrative of what happened has tended to prevail are the source of intense resentment.
"But the entry of eight central European countries into the EU in 2004 has shifted the terms of the debate. When still outside the EU, the east Europeans were wary of sparking too much controversy. Now they are inside, they are making their voices heard.
"The Czechs were the first of the former Soviet bloc countries to hold the EU presidency, this year, and they exploited their agenda-setting prerogatives to try to balance the history books.
"In April in the European parliament, the Czechs pushed through a resolution equating the crimes of communism with those of fascism, calling for 23 August, the date in 1939 of the Hitler-Stalin pact dividing chunks of eastern Europe between them, to be made the "Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes".
"In July in Lithuania, MPs from OSCE countries drove through a similar resolution equating Hitler and Stalin.
"The father of both documents was last year's Prague Declaration pushed by Václav Havel, the former Czech president and human rights champion, which proclaimed that "Europe will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history, recognise communism and Nazism as a common legacy. Different valuations of the communist past may still split Europe into west and east … There are substantial similarities between Nazism and communism in terms of horrific and appalling character." "
