I’ve been trying to decide what to make of the hurt feelings and prickliness surrounding the recent World War II commemorations.

Quite naturally, the Allied countries in Europe and the United States view their roles in the war as heroic. Sacrificing so much in order to defeat the Nazis was heroic. But agreeing to carve up Poland and Lithuania with them, as Stalin did in the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, was not.

Nor was fighting to hold on to India, as Britain did (see historian Mark Mazower’s piece in today’s Guardian), or North Africa, as France did.

Even Poland – Poland! – was tainted by its participation in the Munich pact that gave part of Czechoslovakia to Germany.

But Vladimir Putin’s “everybody made mistakes” approach still rankles. Is there really a moral equivalence to Poland’s annexation of part of Czechoslovakia and the Katyn massacres and the Soviet invasion of Poland?

I can understand why Russians, who consider themselves the greatest victims and greatest heroes of the war, don’t take kindly to being accused of helping to start the war. Russians probably feel they’ve never gotten due credit, while every five years Western leaders gather on a windy outcrop in Normandy to commemorate D-Day.

It would be much easier to give that credit if the Kremlin would stop equivocating about things like Katyn or Stalin’s legacy. When Putin says that freedom came from the east, what must go through the minds of the leaders of the former Soviet states and satellites? Who among them would call the period between 1945 and 1989 “free”?

At least Lech Kaczynski acknowledged what he called his country’s sin in 1938, saying, pointedly, “We in Poland know how to recognize an error without looking for justifications.”

Some commentators say that Putin won’t denounce Stalin because it would be too close to denouncing his own brand of authoritarianism. But I don’t think that’s it. I’m no fan of Putin, but he’s no Stalin and comparisons would be silly. I think it’s because he knows that Russians are sensitive about, and therefore vulnerable on the subject of, their place in the world. While I doubt there are many Stalin fan clubs in Russia, many of his countrymen credit him for bringing them from feudalism to the Industrial Revolution to the threshold of outer space. It’s just a pity that 10 million people died and countless more were evicted from their homes or imprisoned while he was doing it.

Then there’s Stalin’s expansionism. Mazower paints the action in Asia and the Middle East in World War II as battles between dueling empires. That was obviously true in Poland as well. Before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin was taking his pieces of Europe. But while most of Europe’s gaze has turned inward since the war, Vladimir “spheres of interest” Putin is hardly in a position to apologize for his distant predecessor’s overreach.

Even comfortable countries, like Britain, who consider themselves the victors in the Cold War are slow to take a look at their actions and motivations during and after World War II, Mazower posits. It’s simply impossible for me to imagine Russia, with its complexes about being abused and taken advantage of, doing a psychic closet-cleaning. Especially when that lingering resentment of the West suits the ends of its strongmen rulers.