It was the day Vladimir Putin almost said sorry, the day Angela Merkel reminded the world that Germans had suffered too — a day of death tolls, tales of heroism and martyrdom, warnings against fascism and totalitarianism and triumphalism.

It was also a day when nuance and implication took the place of black-and-white history-telling, but the messages were just as controversial.

Throughout yesterday the Russian Prime Minister tried to show that the Kremlin was not going to bang the big drum of chauvinism — at least, not while he was in Poland. First, in an article for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, he declared: “We must learn the lessons of history if we want to have a peaceful and happy future."

Then he told Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, that “Russia has always respected the bravery and heroism of the Polish people, soldiers and officers who stood up first against Nazism in 1939.”

Times Archive, 1939: Germany attacks across all frontiers

Before 6 o'clock yesterday morning Germany invaded Poland. The British and French governments promptly decided on a general mobilization

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Then, in his speech on the Westerplatte — where a Polish fort was bombarded by a German cruiser exactly 70 years earlier — Mr Putin condemned any collaboration with the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 as “morally unacceptable and politically and practically senseless, harmful and dangerous”.

He may have convinced some of the other politicians present, but not the Poles. The praise of Polish military bravery struck a cynical note: in 1940, more than 15,000 officers and intellectuals were shot and buried in mass graves in Katyn forest by Soviet units. For decades Moscow claimed it was the work of the Germans and even now refuses to accept that it was a war crime. Joint teams of historians will now study the massacre, according to an agreement reached between the Polish and Russian prime ministers.

As for Mr Putin’s cautious admission that the 1939 pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was morally unacceptable, that was somewhat diluted by his reference to 1934 — the year of Poland’s non-aggression pact with Germany. In effect, he was drawing a moral equivalence between the defensive Polish action and the landgrab of eastern Poland by Stalin five years later. And that many European countries, not just the one led by Stalin, helped Hitler on to the war path.

The Poles had hoped for candour from Russia on this day of all days; instead they got historical relativism. “Huge numbers of mistakes were made by all sides,” said Mr Putin. Was that the beginning of an apology for carving up Poland in 1939? Or just an attempt to deflect criticism from the Baltic states and the Finns who were deported to the gulag when the Red Army moved in?

For President Kaczynski of Poland the day started before dawn — the first German bombardment of the war began at 4.42am — with a few forthright words about fascism and about Russia. Stalin’s invasion of eastern Poland on September 17 1939, he said, was “a stab in the back”. As for Katyn, it had to be treated as a war crime. “Jews died because they were Jews,” he said, “Polish officers died because they were Polish officers.”

With the tension crackling Ms Merkel was barely noticed in the ceremonies, although it was regaded as a significant gesture to invite a German leader. She duly apologised: “I pay tribute to the 60 million people who lost their lives in this war unleashed by Germany. There are no words that could even remotely describe the suffering caused by this war and the Holocaust. I bow before the victims.”

The words were strikingly similar to those she used earlier in the year during a visit to Buchenwald concentration camp, but the Poles applauded the sentiment. They were less certain about her defence of Germany’s efforts to remember the plight of ethnic Germans driven out of their homes at the end of the war. She said that her country could mourn these victims "without wanting to rewrite Germany’s eternal historic responsibility" for starting the war.

It was a day for speech-making about the meaning of history and who owns it. The speeches were crisp but many leaders wanted to offer their thoughts about how the story was changing. It was a long, hot day. But the handful of Polish veterans present refused seats; they preferred to stand. That was how they had been trained.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

— The Nazi Foreign Minister Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was eventually hanged for war crimes. Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian Foreign Minister, gave his name to the “Molotov cocktail”

— Their pact was one of non-aggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but also included a secret clause that divided up Poland and Lithuania

— Article II of the secret protocol stated that: “In the event of a territorial and political re-arrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula and San”

— Russians said the agreement was propelled by the Munich Agreement of 1938, when France and Britain agreed that Germany could annex bits of Czechoslovakia

Sources: Reuters, Modern History Sourcebook, Times database

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