Alex, it isn’t an either-or proposition, ie, either you deal honestly with Soviet crimes, or you prevent the rise of Nazism. Both are important. But of the two, only one danger is presently real. Russian propaganda notwithstanding, the only supposed “Nazis” around are young degenerates in a number of countries who in reality haven’t got a clue what Nazism really is, but they like to sport Nazi symbolism because of the air of decadence and rebellion that is associated with it. They are about as likely to mount some successful political revolution as pigs are likely to fly.There are no serious Nazi contenders for government today that I am aware of. Please get it right out of your head that Estonia, for example, either has or had any Nazi sympathies. That is a lie that Stalin invented and that post-Soviet Russia has made its own. Nazism is thoroughly discredited, and I don’t believe anyone wants a bar of it. But Soviet ideology is still fondly embraced by Russia, and that country still point-blank refuses to look at its own Soviet history in the eye. It is this dangerous unreality, and the unpredictable behaviour that it is able to cause, that poses a real peril to Russia and its neighbours today, and it is this that must be attended to as a priority.

Here we go with the Crimes mantra again, the usual Baltic Nazi mumbo jumbo, their usual, we and our western propaganda are the judges in their fantacy courts. They never have a judicial decree, but go on and on, thinking their lies will somehow surplant the truth. And yes Estonia fought for the Nazis, killed for the Nazis, did holocaust for the Nazis, and now glorifies the Nazis and parades as Nazis. Nazis travel across Europe to meet there, to celevrate with them. It is Estonia's fundamental DNA. They just hide behind their usual western propaganda. They can't face the truth, so they always go on a diversionary blame Stalin mission. So Alex your head is perfectly clear on the issue.

As ever, CountCash is big on rhetoric, and extremely shy when it comes to verifiable facts. The reason he cannot present facts substantiating a supposed glorification of Nazis in Estonia is because there are none to present.

@ Marzipan,with all those things that have been going on . against russia from the west and the baltics .. you don't deserve an apology especially from the current leaders who had nothing to do with it .and from the common people . you leaders are taking any opportunity to annoy and assault us or stab us indirectly in the back . those things you have mentioned are not important . not a little bit .

Alex, your post will be meaningful if you move on from generalities to specifics. Precisely what are “all those things that have been going on against Russia” in the Baltics? And precisely how do these nameless things exonerate those Russians who were the agents of Soviet Moscow’s policies that murdered, enslaved and deported well over 100,000 Baltic civilians, and terrorized and occupied millions of others in their own homelands from offering at the very least expressions of regret and sympathy for their horrible outrages? You say that the current leaders of Russia had nothing to do with those crimes. The leaders of post-Nazi Germany had nothing to do with Nazi crimes, either, yet the world has rightly expected them to atone for Nazi crimes. As recently as a few months ago Chancellor Merkel visited a Nazi concentration camp with the American President, and solemnly re-dedicated herself to do everything possible to ensure that totalitarian atrocities could never again be repeated in her country. With which foreign leader has a Russian president ever visited any one of the vast GULAG slave labor camps and committed himself to doing everything possible to ensure that such crimes could never again be repeated? If the horror of mass crimes against humanity, whether Nazi or Soviet, is “not important,” perhaps you could give an explanation of what is? Insisting that the chief successor state of the Soviet Union offers the world an apology for Soviet crimes is neither annoying, assaulting nor stabbing Russia in the back. It is rather a matter both of common decency and of political necessity if Russia wants to have normal relations with the wider world.

This whole thing looks as a desperate move by some in Rummy's "new" Europe to keep relations between Russia and the EU strained. Frankly, I as Russian do not give a damn about OSCE and other different European talking shops where they kill their time by playing political games - rather pathetic and ridiculous games. If somebody in Poland, Baltic states and elsewhere in Europe want to waste their time on this nonsense, let them do it - what else is left to them? Their economies are crumbling, their people are unhappy and their governments are often better at pathetic rhetoric than handling economic problems at home. I mean, the world has changed, there has not been USSR for the past 17 years! Still, some people in central and eastern Europe are stuck in their ridiculous "fight with the Communism" like they still live in the 1980s and Mr. Reagan is still their star -)). Wake up, it's 2009, not 1989. Russia shouldn't even react to this kind of outdated rubbish.

Allen makes the mistake of taking his own made-up views, and projecting them upon entire countries. Contrary to his belief, no one at all in Central or Eastern Europe is stuck in any “fight with Communism,” whether ridiculous or otherwise. However, all of Russia’s neighbours have to deal with a demanding, truculent, unpredictable country which has not itself come to terms with the fact that it is no longer the master of an empire. It is Russia’s present behaviour that ensures its relations with almost all its neighbours is bad. The connection with the past is not that Russia’s neighbours are oriented towards it, but that Russia is. Russia’s neighbours are oriented towards the future – they want to be sure that Russia will not savage them again. A sign that it won’t would be if Russia itself disavows its Soviet past, like Germany has disavowed its Nazi past. But far from doing this, Russia justifies its past. The objectionable flavour of so many of its on-going actions and policies derives from this.

Nazis were certainly very bad and very brutal. How bad was USSR? I do not know and neither do most people ..

Everybody is afraid to die but everybody dies regardless. This has always been illogical to me. You serve your purpose then you are no more. I think the problem is that losers, fallouts, out of balance dead people, tend to start these governments then become demoralized when nature takes hold and everyone remembers the glory of yesterday that never happened. Human vanity. You lose awareness and the whole thing starts again. I think that it's what is on top that matters most. Social status is worth more than money or blue eyes, trust me, and it keeps decent order. Money can only buy vanity. The ones they care oh so much for... Those poor souls trapped by conditions that only God understands. Myself and the elephant man will wander around regardless, shielding axe murders, helping average girls look pretty, liars and keeping things past their due dates. I pay the price of our privilege ten fold. Do I want to live? No, but the system needs me, so I will place it's hand behind its back and cause pain. You don't do this. Count Cash, Russia don't want you either. Unless you have something to give, you have no place, which by your text, I doubt you do.

The two were both identical in that they were both totalitarian leaders who promised the moon in return for a sacrifice of freedom and private property. Both leaders promised every citizen a job, healthcare, pension and access to electricity and other perks of the industrial age. At each stage there was disappointment followed by claims that they could make good on the promises with more power. Neither Stalin nor Hitler was ever able to fully deliver on their promises but they were always quick to scapegoat entire people groups. Stalin nearly starved the Ukrainians into extinction. He also wiped out the vast majority of his officer corps after accusing his armed forces of disloyalty. While his 'Potemkin villages' presented a good standard of living to closely controlled foreign visitors, much of the Soviet Union suffered from famine resulting from Stalin's disastrous redistribution of farm land following the liquidation of Russia's emerging middle class. This middle class had come into being after the reign of Czar Nicholas but Stalin soon came to consider them a threat to perfect communism and had their land confiscated and turned into communes. Many of these land owners were liquidated or sent to gulags. Hitler solved his public relations problems by blaming the Jews and those who conspired with them. Loyalty was demanded and division forbidden. Many show projects were undertaken, to include the autobahn and the 'people's car.' Both Naziism and Communism (as well as Mussolini style Fascism) were competing socialist ideologies. Each had figure heads posing as national father figures who demanded obedience, control and agreement of all. While Stalin's path to communism included liquidation of Czar era nobility and redistribution of their wealth (as well as that of the middle class who had emerged post Czar and Pre-Communist party,) Hitler's path to National Socialism was to confiscate the wealth of Jews, and accused WWI 'war profiteers.'