"I think it is very important for a democracy for the citizens to know who was who, who was the hero and who was the villain"

Writing in The Independent's Stephen Castle revealed the Soviet plan to annihilate Europe, while Graham Bowley reported in the International Herald Tribune that Poland's government opened up previously sealed Warsaw Pact military archives, including a 1979 map showing Soviet plans to sacrifice Poland in the event of nuclear war with the West.

Explaining how the Soviets had made Poland the main target for Nato, [Polish defence minister Radoslaw Sikorski] argued: "We need to know about our past. Historians have the right to know the history of the 20th century. If people did some things they were not proud of, that will be an education for them too.

"I think it is very important for a democracy for the citizens to know who was who, who was the hero and who was the villain. On that basis we make democratic choices.

"I think it is also important for the health of civic society for morality tales to be told: that it pays to be decent and that if you do things that did not serve the national interest, one day it will come out and you might be called to account."

…Interestingly, the Warsaw Pact training map illustrates a defensive military operation in response to a Nato nuclear strike, and the Soviet forces appeared to stop at the English Channel. French territory is also avoided, a fact which Waldemar Wojcik, head of Poland's central military archive, explained by the fact that France was outside Nato's integrated military command structure.