The Battle over History

The Communists required all the states of the Warsaw Pact to accept the master narrative according to which the nations had been liberated by Soviet troops. They also attempted to establish this version of history in Finland and Yugoslavia. Large parts of the societies in the Soviet sphere of influence refused to accept this version of history, however.
The old national narratives were kept alive in exile, but they reproduced a view of history not revised since the 1950s owing to a lack of primary sources. In some cases, this went to the point of justifying the collaboration with the National-Socialists for reasons of national defence.
In the 1960s and 1970s the national aspect played a far greater role in the public debate, even in the countries that still had Communist regimes. Starting in the late 1980s the "battle of memory" naturally flamed up anew, because the Soviet regimes no longer had a monopoly on the interpretation of history. The recent history of those countries had to be reconsidered and reinterpreted. The urgent topics included the Soviet terror and the deportations. It was not least of all this battle that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
The most recent history since the 1990s has often polarized the societies. In order to mitigate the political controversy about Soviet and Nazi crimes, several countries – such as Lithuania or Poland – have set up international commissions to evaluate the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. They attempt to re-examine the historiography that had partly been obscured by tendentious and selective accounts and also to assess the collaboration and involvement of the respective countries in the crimes of the National-Socialist and Soviet regimes. .

Latvia
Lithuania
Ukraine
Hungary
Romania
Czech Republic
Yugoslavia, Croatia, Serbia
Finland