Jeanneney of calling for the “first cultural war in cyberspace”.He wrote in the International Herald Tribune that less than half of Harvard’s 15 million books are in English and that texts in other languages will be central to the Google project.. I think this is a danger.” Google’s project involves scanning books in four university libraries, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan, and the New York public library.The worry is that the “Google Print” project would rank sources in order of popularity, thereby giving prominence to Anglophone texts above those written in other languages.The issue touches a raw nerve in France where intellectuals and politicians are alarmed at the diminishing influence of French as a global language. The German Chancellor Gerhard Schr?’s ruling Social Democrats have turned up the heat in an extraordinary political campaign against big business interests, claiming “locust” firms which sack employees en masse are undermining democracy. The east, religiously, culturally and politically, leans towards Russia. The Catholic west Ukraine leant towards the West and was long part of Poland.

Stalin’s famines of the 1930s created sympathy for invading Germans. After the war Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s “breadbasket”, was tightly controlled by Moscow.FINLANDOnce part of the Tsarist empire, independent Finland was awarded to the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In the 1939/1940 winter war it resisted the Soviets, but succumbed. After the war, it escaped occupation, but underwent “Finlandisation”, under which the country was basically Western but committed to a benevolent neutrality towards Moscow.GERMANYGermany started the Second World War by invading Poland, but ultimately sealed its own destruction by attacking the Soviet Union in 1941. After its defeat in 1945, it was divided between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, whose sector became East Germany in 1949 In November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell A year later, the two Germanys were reunited.. In 1989, Poland was the first Soviet satellite state to elect a non-communist government.UKRAINEUkraine’s borders have also shifted often.

They remained so until the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.POLANDThe Molotov-Ribbentrop pact sanctioned Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the event that triggered the Second World War Stalin gainedcontrol of Poland in 1945. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union began with the formation of the Polish Solidarity trade union in 1980. After being occupied by Germany in the Second World War, they were “liberated” by the Red Army in 1944 and became Soviet Socialist Republics. They became part of the Soviet Union under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

As the American novelist William Faulkner once observed, and Irena Koncius’s feelings prove: “The past is not dead, it is not even past.”Successor statesTHE BALTIC STATESBetween the two world wars, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were independent states. But in the Kremlin they arouse the same fears of encirclement and constraint that contributed to the Soviet Union’s post-war occupation of eastern Europe.Such are the treacherous currents of history and memory that will flow beneath the ceremonies in Moscow this week. George Bush, by contrast faces the trickiest of diplomatic tasks. Mr Putin wants to rebuild Russia as a great world power; such aspirations make half of Europe wince.Ironically, the person who will perhaps have it easiest in Moscow is Gerhard Schr?, leader of the country that started the war. Alexander Kwasniewski, the Polish President will be in Moscow. He too insists that Poland’s wartime history must be heard: this anniversary, he has said, “must be full of dignity and historical truth”.Earlier this year, the Russians infuriated Warsaw by saying that Poland should be grateful for the Yalta agreement (which in effect consigned it to the Soviet bloc).On top of anger there is unease too – at Mr Putin’s apparent throttling of democracy, at the renewed nostalgia for Stalin and at the Russian President’s recent lament that the demise of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. By this time, she was three months’ pregnant and a legal abortion was no longer possible in France.”For the first five years, I used to go to Monaco about once a month,” she told Paris Match “Over the months, I fell very much in love …