Awhile back I was on vacation in Austria, and got into an argument with one of the locals about politics (Goesser bier is to blame). Somehow we got on the subject of their president - an former UN chief - Kurt Waldheim, who had suddenly been discovered to have been in the SS. The drunk made a pretty good point, something along the lines of: "You have to look pretty hard to find an old man in Europe without
some history."
That probably goes double for Eastern Europe.