Hanging in Russia's Central World War Two Museum is a sepia-tinted photograph dated 1944 of a group of local women in the Baltics joyfully greeting a Soviet tank crew fresh from driving out the German occupiers. As Russia prepares to welcome world leaders to Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the European war on May 9, images like this - with the Red Army as heroic liberator of eastern Europe - dominate its view of the conflict.
Countries in eastern Europe take another view: the end of the war swapped the Nazis for a new totalitarian ruler, the Soviet Union, which snuffed out their independence for 50 years and left them stranded on the wrong side of the "Iron Curtain."
Their decision to use the anniversary to voice this opinion has cast a pall over the celebrations in Moscow and left many Russians bewildered and angry.
"We're fed up with it," Albert Makashov, a parliamentarian and retired general, told Reuters.
"Russia will get over this latest insult. Very soon, patriots will shut off the gas and oil pipelines (to eastern Europe). We'll be selfish and think of ourselves."
Russia's national pride has already been wounded following the rejection in the past 18 months by ex-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia of Moscow's historic influence and the election of pro-western leaders.
So far the World War Two row has seen Baltic republics Lithuania and Estonia turn down their invitations to visit Moscow for May 9. Latvia's President Vaira Vike-Freiberga is coming, but only grudgingly.
Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski said the Allied Powers' 1945 Yalta conference that effectively handed eastern Europe to Moscow was a "tragedy and a trauma." He will bring his reservations with him to Moscow.
Russia is sticking to its own interpretation of the war.
"I would advise these Johnny-come-lately historians ... those who want to rewrite history, to study it first," President Vladimir Putin told a group of Slovak journalists before a summit in Bratislava last month.
Most people in Russia refer to World War Two as the "Great Patriotic War." Desperate battles like that for Stalingrad are seen as defining moments in Russian people's history.
The Soviet Union lost far more people than any other country in the war. Historians say at least 8 million servicemen and at least as many civilians were killed. Apart from Russians, the dead included Ukrainians and other nationalities.
Of the Soviet military casualties, 1.2 million died driving German troops out of eastern Europe, including 600,000 killed fighting in Poland, say Russian historians.
"It gets to be extremely annoying ... (when) .. people talk about the alleged incursion of Soviet forces into Europe," World War Two Museum director Vladimir Zabarovsky said in his office overlooking an antique Soviet tank.
"It's just indecent Soviet forces crossed the border and went further to liberate European countries, in the process by the way suffering enormous human and material losses," he said.
Eastern European countries say the May 9 anniversary marks a triumph over fascism for them too but there are darker episodes that should not be forgotten.
For them, their Soviet liberators were also ruthless conquerors who crushed pro-independence politicians, anti-Nazi resistance fighters and ordinary people who opposed their rule.
Hundreds of thousands of Poles and Balts were killed or deported to Soviet labour camps, where many died. Poland also remembers the 1940 Katyn forest massacre of 15,000 Polish officers by Soviet secret police.
Later, thousands of people were killed in Hungary in 1956 and in Prague in 1968 when Soviet bloc troops invaded to put down rebellions that challenged Moscow's control.
Fifteen years after they threw off the Soviet yoke, many east Europeans are ready to put these painful memories behind them but they are baffled by Moscow's failure to show remorse for Stalinism's sins.
"I understand entirely why states in eastern Europe find it difficult," to come to Moscow for the anniversary, said Richard Overy, a respected historian and author of "The Dictators. Hitler's Germany; Stalin's Russia."
"I'm quite happy obviously for Russia and the former Soviet Union to celebrate their victory over Germany because it was an extraordinary feat," said Overy, professor of history at Britain's Exeter university.
"It's just that the areas that were subsequently drawn under the Soviet umbrella did so with great reluctance and at huge political and human cost. That is what makes the difference."