This past weekend Russian State TV ran a documentary which claimed, in essence, that the Soviet Union invaded Poland because Poland was allied with Nazi Germany and planning aggression against Russia.
In this film, aired on state-controlled TV station Rossiya:
The documentary claims that the government in Warsaw was in a secret alliance from 1933 with Nazi Germany and Japan in plans to invade the Soviet Union. The deal was struck within the, as yet, unpublished part of a non-aggression treaty between Poland and Germany signed in January 1934.
Hitler’s portrait in the cabinet of Poland’s pre-war Foreign Minister Jozef Beck proves the thesis, claims Russian TV journalists.
There is no mention in the documentary on the real reason Russia invaded Poland and the Baltic states in 1939 - the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact secretly signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in which both states agreed to attack Poland and not to commit justification against one another.
The usual claim from the Kremlin will be that Rossiya is an independent station and the Kremlin doesn't meddle in the press. This is a lie - all Russian media kowtows to the Kremlin. Those that do not are driven out of business. The documentary would not have been aired without the tacit approval of the Russian leadership.
But the Kremlin appears to back the claims made in the documentary. In a bulletin published by the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, President Dmitri Medvedev is on record as saying: "The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was a reaction to the efforts of western states at directing German expansion eastwards."
Couple this type of historical revisionism with Russia's recent moves against Georgia and its continuing difficulties with Ukraine - in particular the issue of the Crimean Peninsula and Russia's granting of Russian citizenship to many residents of the area, potentially setting up an irredentist conflict, and a troubling picture is emerging of how Russia views itself and its relations with its neighbors.