Sir, – Tomasz Piatek’s frustration (July 2nd) at reading Paddy Agnew’s description of the better-off youth in the cities of Poland he came across during Euro 2012, while the majority of his country’s citizens struggle to make ends meet, is misdirected. To hanker after a period of communism that “promoted social and family values and instilled the ethos of human kindness” is delusional. These qualities would have abounded among Poles anyway, despite the beneficence of Joseph Stalin. Perhaps the greatest legacy of Stalinism was the deliberate elimination of the leaders of Polish society beginning with the Katyn massacre, and continuing through the mass disappearances, the uprooting of millions of Poles after the second World War, the show trials and the judicial murders of the period up to 1989, episodes that go some way toward explaining the uncertain course of Polish leadership over the past 20 years, but hardly acts of “liberation and emancipation”. – Yours, etc,