On Sept. 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland. Germany, which had done the same in the western part of the country two weeks earlier, acquiesced under the terms of a notorious neutrality agreement between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin that divided parts of eastern Europe into Nazi and Communist spheres of influence.

That’s just history in most of the world, but it’s contemporary politics in some of it. An Associated Press correction last week and reactions to it show that the question of whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at the dawn of World War II remains a hot-button issue for many Russians and eastern Europeans.

The correction was issued to an article about a Holocaust commemoration in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv that originally called the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “former allies.” It noted that the two countries signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 that “paved the way for them to carve up Poland and for the Soviet Union to take the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.”

The correction followed letters from the Russian Foreign Ministry sent both to the AP and to other media outlets that printed the story, saying that the phrase “former allies” was a “vivid example of attempts to rewrite history” and that the U.S.S.R., had never been the ally of Hitler’s Germany. The AP concluded that the pact reached on Aug. 23, 1939 by the German and Soviet foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov didn’t constitute a formal alliance, thus the correction.

This isn’t how history is seen by many people in Poland and the Baltics.

“The Soviet-Nazi alliance began World War II,” tweeted Jerdzej Tomczak, a member of the Polish delegation to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“An annual reminder of Russian denial at its peak,” former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves posted. “17 September, when Russian joined their ALLIES (the term they go nuts over when you say it), the Nazis.”

It’s not just about history, of course: Note Ilves’s use of “Russian” rather than “Soviet.” The Soviet Union’s contribution to Hitler’s defeat is the cornerstone of the national ideology propagated by President Vladimir Putin’s regime. It’s still taught in Russian schools and commonly held in Russia that the U.S.S.R., entered World War II when Germany attacked it in 1941.

In 1989, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union officially condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and admitted that it contained a secret protocol that established the two countries’ spheres of influence. Putin would later claim, falsely, that it was the post-Soviet Russian parliament that issued the condemnation — and added immediately that he expected other countries to condemn their own deals with the Nazis.

Lately, Putin hasn’t even gone that far. He has stuck to the Soviet version of history: that the pact was necessary for the Soviet Union’s security in the face of a treacherous Western appeasement policy toward Hitler which, as Stain said in a March, 1939 speech, aimed to pit Germany and the USSR against each other in the service of their mutual destruction. In 2014, Putin defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop deal during a meeting with historians. “Everybody says it’s so bad,” he said. “But what’s so bad about the Soviet Union not wanting to go to war?”