The simulated screeching of the Stukas over Warsaw almost has you ducking for cover. The thump of marching jackboots portends terror. The melancholy piano of Chopin tugs at Polish heartstrings.

In the Museum of the Warsaw Rising, the sound effects are powerful, the visuals compelling, the tragedy forcefully conveyed. The story of the Polish capital's suicidal rebellion in 1944 against the Nazi occupation is vividly told through interactive, multi-media installations that play on the emotions as much as they engage the intellect.

Critics complain that it treats the past like a Disneyland theme park and avoids important and troubling questions. But it is the first such modern museum in Poland, devoted to the 63-day insurrection in August and September 1944 that left 200,000 dead and incurred a terrible revenge when the Nazis methodically razed Warsaw.

The museum is the first to reconstruct the events of a famous, but neglected, chapter in the history of the second world war. And it is a box-office sensation.

On a working day last week there were long queues to pay the £2 entrance fee. The large exhibition halls were crowded with children, teenagers, nuns, priests and pensioners.

In its five-year life, the museum has attracted 1.5 million visitors, 10 times the attendance rate of other Warsaw museums. "We have a sad and fascinating history. And under the communists, we could hardly talk about much of it," says Piotr Sliwowski, the museum director. "But people are now hungry for their own history. The desire to recover our history has just been waiting for the right time to explode."

That time might be now, and not only in Poland, but across the countries of central Europe, where national memories have long been suppressed and where the use and abuse of history have been a barometer of the political climate.

The current political weather is unusually clement. The post-communist 1990s were too hard and chaotic to focus on past tragedies. But now with a bit of money to spare, the history projects are multiplying. In Poland alone there are umpteen new public extravaganzas being planned.

A museum on 1,000 years of Polish Jews is to open in Warsaw in 2012. A treatment of Stalin's massacre of the Polish elite in the forest at Katyn in 1940 by the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda has been the film of the year. Wajda is now planning a new museum on the communist era. There are grandiose schemes for a new museum of national history, another devoted to the Polish military, another in Gdansk dedicated to the second world war.

Behind the museum fever lurks a determination to restore the national memories of countries from Hungary to the Baltic states, and a campaign taking issue with western Europe aimed at setting history's record straight.

In the history wars of 2009, the key date is 1945. Its meaning is hotly contested. In the dominant western narrative, the good guys won and the bad guys lost. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin teamed up to defeat Hitler. Europe was liberated from fascism and Stalin's Red Army played a key role.

But when the Russians, British and French mark VE Day, their celebrations grate on the Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians and Czechs. For them the holiday is as much a day of mourning, lamenting their loss of independence, their occupation by the Russians, and the onset of more than four decades of communist dictatorship.

"For us, Stalin was an aggressor and a criminal. He created the country of gulags. He was absolutely comparable to Hitler," Adam Michnik, the liberal Polish newspaper editor and leading former dissident, wrote recently.

This is a view that scandalises many in the west, and is playing into British politics because of the controversy surrounding David Cameron's alliance in Europe with rightwing Poles and Latvians.

Michal Kamínski, the rightwing Polish politician who leads the new Tory-dominated caucus in the European parliament, has become embroiled in rows over his involvement in 2001 in a campaign opposing apology for a Polish village massacre of Jews during the war. For Fatherland and Freedom, the Latvian party allied with the conservatives in the grouping, is a nationalist party that commemorates Latvia's Waffen-SS legions allied with the Nazis, some of whom collaborated in the mass murder of Baltic Jews in the 1940s.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, whose family roots are of Polish Jewish origin, has led the attacks on Cameron and his allies, perhaps unwittingly thrusting the debate over the second world war in eastern Europe into the early stages of a British election campaign.

"The basic problem for the east Europeans is that the west and the Russians have a fundamentally similar view. The war ended in 1945. It was zero hour. And then things got better. The east Europeans can't see it that way," said Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian who is running a Vienna project seeking to reconcile opposing perspectives on European history. The utterly different experiences of the second world war and the cold war in eastern and western Europe and the fact that the western narrative of what happened has tended to prevail are the source of intense resentment.

But the entry of eight central European countries into the EU in 2004 has shifted the terms of the debate. When still outside the EU, the east Europeans were wary of sparking too much controversy. Now they are inside, they are making their voices heard.

The Czechs were the first of the former Soviet bloc countries to hold the EU presidency, this year, and they exploited their agenda-setting prerogatives to try to balance the history books.

In April in the European parliament, the Czechs pushed through a resolution equating the crimes of communism with those of fascism, calling for 23 August, the date in 1939 of the Hitler-Stalin pact dividing chunks of eastern Europe between them, to be made the "Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes".

In July in Lithuania, MPs from OSCE countries drove through a similar resolution equating Hitler and Stalin.

The father of both documents was last year's Prague Declaration pushed by Václav Havel, the former Czech president and human rights champion, which proclaimed that "Europe will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history, recognise communism and Nazism as a common legacy. Different valuations of the communist past may still split Europe into west and east … There are substantial similarities between Nazism and communism in terms of horrific and appalling character."

The east European campaign is offensive to many Jews who view Nazism as incomparably evil because of the singularity of the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million people on grounds of race. Ephraim Zuroff, the Israeli Nazi-hunter, has denounced the campaign as revisionism, "the beginning of a campaign to rewrite the history of the second world war in a way that will whitewash the villains, dishonour the victims".

Stanislaw Krajewski, a Warsaw mathematics professor and a Jewish community leader, is more nuanced. "Can you have moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin? The German occupiers came here and wanted to kill Jews. The Soviets came and wanted to build a better society. But they used terror. Their aim was not to kill. That's the main difference. But the outcome was not much different. So to say that Stalin was as bad as Hitler is not a problem."

The debate can degenerate into an invidious competition over victimhood, over how many millions perished, over who suffered the most. "Who wants to win that contest?" asks Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a Canadian Jew with Polish roots who is leading the work on the new Polish Jewish museum in Warsaw.

But Snyder, who is also writing a book on wartime eastern Europe "between Hitler and Stalin", pointed out that "many more people died under the hammer and sickle than the swastika."

He also argued that knowledge of the Holocaust would be helped, not hindered, by a proper accounting of the past 60 years.

Sliwowski at the Rising Museum says his parents sheltered some Jews from the Nazis during the war and he has no interest in belittling or relativising the Holocaust.

Poland, however, was "enslaved" by Moscow and he is unabashed about his purpose, lecturing British and Nato military officers about Poland's wartime past, about its home army, the biggest non-communist guerrilla movement in Europe fighting the Nazis. He is on a mission to make up for lost time.

"History is not boring. It's the glue holding society together. But the old-fashioned museums kill history and they are patriotism killers," he says. "We are showing people that we have our own heroes, the Warsaw insurgents from 1944. We are discovering the meaning of the word patriotism again."

guardian.co.uk