They're being dished out by a well-known Guardian journalist in this passage:
Through decades of British commemorations and coverage of the second world war - from Dunkirk to D-day - there has never been any doubt about who started it. However dishonestly the story of 1939 has been abused to justify new wars against quite different kinds of enemies, the responsibility for the greatest conflagration in human history has always been laid at the door of Hitler and his genocidal Nazi regime.
That is until now. Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war. Stalin was "Hitler's accomplice", the Economist insisted, after Russian and Polish politicians traded accusations over the events of the late 1930s.
In his introduction to this week's Guardian history of the war, the neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson declared that Stalin was "as much an aggressor as Hitler". Last month, the ostensibly more liberal Orlando Figes went further, insisting the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was "the licence for the Holocaust".
Given that the Soviet Union played the decisive military role in Hitler's defeat at the cost of 25 million dead, it's scarcely surprising that Russians are outraged by such accusations. When the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last week denounced attempts to draw parallels between the role of the Nazis and the Soviet Union as a "cynical lie", he wasn't just speaking for his government, but the whole country – and a good deal of the rest of the world besides.
There's no doubt that the pact of August 1939 was a shocking act of realpolitik by the state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war. You can argue about how Stalin used it to buy time, his delusions about delaying the Nazi onslaught, or whether the Soviet occupation of the mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland was, as Churchill maintained at the time, "necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace".
But to claim that without the pact there would have been no war is simply absurd...
I draw your attention to two features of Seumas Milne's reasoning here. First, he uses the fact that 'the Soviet Union played the decisive military role in Hitler's defeat' as a way of fending off the charge that Stalin was co-responsible for the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War. The 'turn' comes at the beginning of Milne's fourth paragraph, when he treats the outrage over that charge as appropriate in light of the Soviet Union's pivotal role in defeating Hitler. But it's a matter of simple logic that that role does not retroactively undo Stalin's responsibility, through the Nazi-Soviet pact, for the occupation of Poland. Milne's side-swipes against the Economist, Niall Ferguson and Orlando Figes are, consequently, beside the point. At the beginning of the war Stalin was Hitler's accomplice; against Poland he was as much an aggressor; and it is perfectly plausible to say, given what followed the invasion of Poland, that the Nazi-Soviet pact became a licence for the Holocaust.
Note, second, that in the very sentence (at the beginning of his fifth paragraph) in which he allows that that pact was not something one would necessarily want to admire, Milne makes sure immediately to add a balancing consideration - with his reference to 'the state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war'. Same logical deal. That the Soviet Union fought against fascism does not acquit Stalin of the particular charge that Milne started out by addressing.
All of this is part of a larger argument on his part against treating Nazism and Stalinism as morally on a par - against 'equat[ing] Nazi genocide with Soviet repression'. There will be more than one view about this. But, speaking for myself, I have never been tempted to equate the Nazi genocide with Soviet 'repression'. I think the former has a certain moral singularity on account of a combination of its features. But the milder word 'repression' should not be allowed to conceal either the fact that millions of people perished on account of Stalin's regime and its policies, or the accents of apologia that mark this piece of writing by Seumas Milne.