The Russian government owes it not just to foreign countries but to the Russian people themselves to examine and discuss these crimes, since (quite unlike in the case of the Nazis) such a high proportion of Stalin’s victims were ethnic Russians or inhabitants of what is now the Russian Federation. This is the crux of what I take to be a fair judgment on the present dispute over 1939. It is that Vladimir Putin is basically correct in his judgment on the strategic calculations of that year, but badly at fault in his judgment of the political systems of the time.

The Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, apologized this month for Poland’s role in Hitler’s partition of Czechoslovakia, stating that, “Poland’s participation in the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 was not only an error, but above all a sin.” He should have added that this built on an earlier criminal error, that of Poland’s nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1934, which effectively demolished France’s alliance system in Eastern Europe, and made it much harder to prevent Nazi Germany’s expansion in the mid-1930s.

As for Britain and France, there have been frequent public acknowledgments of the obvious fact that not merely did they not fight for Czechoslovakia in 1938, but that although they declared war on Germany when Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, they did virtually nothing to help Poland militarily. Allied action on the Western front during Hitler’s conquest of Poland was derisory. In Britain’s case it could not have been anything else, since at that stage Britain had only three divisions fully equipped and prepared to fight on the Continent.

This leads to the question: If Stalin had declared war or risked war with Germany in 1939, and Hitler had extended his attack on Poland to an invasion of the Soviet Union, what would Britain and France have done to help? The answer is blindingly obvious: Just what they did to help Poland — nothing. As for the United States, its own absence in 1939 does not allow its representatives any right to take any position on these issues. Mr. Putin and other Russian representatives are perfectly entitled to point this out.

In the case of a Soviet-German war in 1939, an additional factor would have been at play, which was the openly expressed desire of some conservative circles in both Britain and France for a war between Nazism and Communism that would destroy both.