Matthew Luxmoore’s article (Poles apart: the bitter conflict over a nation’s history, The long read, 13 July) contains a gross error likely to lead readers to misunderstand the Soviet Union’s true intentions during the second world war.

There were 1.5 million Poles deported to Siberia, not “hundreds of thousands” as the article states, with no mention of their fate. They were forcibly taken from their homes in eastern Poland to gulags. Most died of starvation and disease under forced labour. To misrepresent this suffering, which took place on a colossal scale, is a crime akin to Holocaust denial.

My grandfather was one of the few who survived. To him and his contemporaries, the hostile Soviet invaders’ motivation was not liberation but conquest. Any such conquest is more successful if it has collaborators, which explains the motivations of the highly selective sample of people cited in the article.

It should be clearly stated that the Soviets and Nazis had agreed to jointly invade and carve up Poland. When Hitler went back on the deal, they fought each other for control of Poland. The Soviets won, and history was rewritten by the winners. They did this with decades of deceit propagated through the Polish school system, denying not just the Katyn massacre but also the bravery of those who, like my grandfather, fought at Monte Cassino, the 1st Armoured Polish Division, which won critical battles in the D-Day landings, and the 303 Squadron pilots who made all the difference in the Battle of Britain. These were disgracefully branded “traitors” by the puppet government of postwar Poland, installed by Stalin in a brazen breach of the agreement reached at Yalta.

Presenting the Soviet loss of 600,000 “liberators” as noble made my stomach churn, as it would every single one of the many Polish people I know. It was a price Stalin was prepared to pay for the hostile invasion and 45-year subjugation of a sovereign state of more than 30 million people. I strongly suggest the author educate himself on the true facts. I recommend the excellent work Trail of Hope by Professor Norman Davies, and the Sikorski Museum in London.

The present-day nationalist backlash is a result of decades of communist lies and brainwashing. Unfortunately, such an aggressive attempt to erase the communist past is likely to ratchet up tensions and make conflict more likely. Much better to let these monuments decay naturally, to symbolise the decline and fall of the aggressively imperialistic but inherently rotten and mendacious USSR.

Christopher Cytera

Cambridge