Poland's eastern border is not only the frontier of the European Union. It also marks a divide between two political worlds. On one side, there is Belarus, whose rulers yearn for the Soviet era. On the other, there are the eu's new members, who saw the end of communism as a longed-for liberation of their human, political and economic potential, a liberation that is now in progress. "All Poles are anti-Communist," says a Polish politician, Roman Giertych, an outspoken critic of the Belarussian regime. "And just 20km from the border in the town of Grodno, you have a statue of Lenin, in a street named after Karl Marx." Mr Giertych's views have been sharpened by recent events: Poland has just recalled its ambassador from Belarus, in protest at the authorities' repressive treatment of an ethnic Polish minority that numbers 400,000 or more. There have been pickets of the Belarussian embassy in Warsaw, and protest rallies elsewhere. Belarus has responded, with state-controlled television claiming that Polish politicians are American puppets and that "America wants to capture all of Russia, and Belarus is a gateway to Russia."
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