Another Russian-Polish dispute about history

Russia and Poland have been caught up in a dispute about the assessment of the history of Auschwitz since the directorate of the museum on the site of the concentration camp refused to accept a set of statistics about victims put forward by Russia. According to those statistics, half of the murdered Jews were Soviet citizens. The museum points out that many of the Jews came from areas in Poland, Romania and the Baltic states that only became part of the Soviet Union in 1939, with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Erkki Bahovski explains: "It's not the first time Poland and Russia have argued over historical issues. To this date Russia has still not recognised the massacre of Katyn, during which around 20,000 Polish officers were murdered. It prefers to regard it as a crime of the past. Another contentious issue is the history of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, when the Red Army waited on the other side of the Vistula River and simply watched while the Germans slaughtered thousands. The current dispute about the texts at Auschwitz is relatively peaceful in comparison."

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