US: Yousas Urbshis was the last foreign minister of independent Lithuania before the second World War.
When I interviewed him at his home in Kaunas in 1991 - he was 94-years-old then - he recalled how Stalin summoned him to Moscow on October 3rd, 1939, for what the Soviet ruler called "friendly negotiations".
They met at midnight in the Kremlin and Josef Stalin put a map of Europe on the table. "On it was a line," Urbshis said. "He told me the Soviet Union had agreed with Germany that Europe should be divided and most of Lithuania would go to the Soviet Union. It was the first time I had heard of the secret pact between Molotov and von Ribbentrop."
Within the year Soviet troops had occupied Lithuania and its Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Estonia and Urbshis was deported to the Urals.
The Baltics remained under occupation at the end of the war when Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agreed with Stalin at Yalta that eastern Europe should remain under Soviet influence.
On his visit to the Baltic region this month President George Bush made comments about that agreement that reverberated with historians here, and reignited a debate about Roosevelt with some relevance to today's political struggles in the US.
Speaking in Riga on May 7th, Bush said that Yalta "followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact".
It was an attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability that led to the captivity of millions in central and eastern Europe, he said, and was "one of the greatest wrongs of history".
Whether the Allies ever had the capacity to free eastern Europe from Soviet domination is another question. Roosevelt ceded eastern Europe to Stalin because he had little choice. Confronting a victorious 12-million-strong Red Army in battle was not a realistic option for Eisenhower's 4-million strong American force.
As anyone who has read Armageddon, Max Hastings' recent and riveting account of the allied invasion of Europe, will know, it was obvious the war-weary American and British were in no state to challenge the Russians.
Also, Stalin made a commitment at Yalta, which he later broke, to have free elections in Poland and to solve "by democratic means" the political and economic problems of liberated countries.
In charging FDR with a "great wrong", and with sacrificing "freedom for the sake of stability" Bush was in fact expressing an interpretation of history popular on the right, that the Democratic president was guilty of a sell-out at Yalta.
It was more hardline charge than that of any previous president, including Ronald Reagan and his father George Bush.
It is closer to the view of conservatives like Patrick Buchanan, who last week praised Bush for telling "the awful truth" that the pact that Roosevelt signed at Yalta was a "monstrous lie".
Yet, to compare Yalta to the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich was "a bit much", John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, a leading historian of the Cold War, told the New York Times. Without Yalta the division of Europe would still have happened.
Historian Robert Dallek, who wrote in Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy that FDR hoped the future UN would be the place to deal with Stalin, not Yalta, dismissed the idea that Roosevelt and Churchill gave away eastern Europe to the Soviets as "nonsense".
There is much to criticise about Yalta, no one disputes that. FDR and Churchill could possibly have driven a harder bargain.
Yalta conferred legality on an occupation that the West knew would be harsh and undemocratic and resulted indirectly in the return of thousands of Russian prisoners of war to their deaths.
The speech by Bush was seen primarily as a dig at Russian president Vladimir Putin who has referred to the break up of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe and has back- pedalled on democracy.
In Newsweek, Howard Feinman speculated that Bush's tossing of a "Molotov cocktail" at the entire tradition of big-power post-war diplomacy had a tactical purpose: to allow him to focus on the big idea of global freedom rather then on the "messy, immediate facts on the ground in Iraq".
It also served to paint the Democratic Party as appeasers, one of the themes of the 2004 election campaign and it also, Feinman notes, appealed to ethnic groups in the US, Lithuanians, Hungarians and Poles, whose votes the Republicans want to nail down.
Republican attacks on FDR today may have another intention. They come in the middle of a heated debate about Bush's plans to semi-privatise social security, which have led to accusations on the left that he is trying to dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal.
In the 1950s Joseph McCarthy first used Yalta to launch an all-out assault on Roosevelt, the architect of the New Deal, which, with its minimum wage and 40-hour work week, consolidated the dominance of the Democratic Party in the post-war years.
However, an administration official said the White House had not anticipated the fallout from the speech or the connection with the "nasty and stupid" Yalta politics of the McCarthy era.
The irony of Bush's remarks is that they were made in the one part of eastern Europe where the West did keep faith, in a way.
There is no specific reference to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the Yalta document. FDR and Churchill did not agree to their incorporation into the USSR after the war, which Moscow achieved by means of phoney elections.
The post-war West always treated the Baltic countries as "occupied".
As a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s, I recall how the term "occupied" infuriated Soviet officials so much that western reporters used neutral phrases like "absorbed by" (the Soviet Union) to avoid censure.
Soviet authorities did not allow Yousas Urbshis to return to Lithuania until 1956.
"I found I had lost my mother, my father, my older brother and other family members," the dignified, upright diplomat told me in his tiny apartment, tears trickling down his cheek.
"They had been deported to Siberia and died there. I didn't know."
Urbshis lived just long enough to see the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact finally unravel as the tiny country declared its independence in 1991 and Russian troops at last prepared to withdraw.