Budapest Letter: Fifty years after Russian troops crushed Hungary's revolt against Soviet hegemony, Moscow has made a long-awaited gesture of conciliation. It came last week in the shape of dozens of packing cases wrapped in the green, red and white of the Hungarian flag, containing 136 medieval books stolen from a 16th century university by Red Army soldiers at the end of the second World War.
The most precious tomes from the library at Sarospatak, a pretty town near Hungary's border with Ukraine, disappeared from their wartime hiding place in Budapest bank vaults in 1945, only to resurface in the early 1990s in the Volga river city of Nizhny Novgorod.
After years of diplomatic wrangling they finally arrived home with great fanfare, landing at Budapest airport a few days ahead of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is opening an exhibition of the books during his current visit to the city.
Russia hopes the gesture will cast a warm glow over the potential deals of dozens of businessmen who flew with Mr Putin to Hungary, and calm fears here over the security of vital oil and gas supplies from a country that still dominates the central European energy market.
When Kremlin-dominated firm Gazprom cut gas to Ukraine during a price row in January, Hungary suffered a major drop in supplies from pipelines running from Ukraine, and pressure fell dramatically throughout the Balkans and as far west as Italy.
That prompted many EU nations to call for a major review of the bloc's energy security, with the aim of diversifying away from Russian fuel into central Asian gas pumped through the Balkans, and liquefied natural gas shipped to Europe from Africa and distributed by a new pipeline running through the heart of the continent.
In the first visit of a Russian leader to Hungary since 1992 - when Boris Yeltsin apologised for the carnage of 1956 - Mr Putin will discuss oil and gas projects, an upgrade to a Hungarian nuclear power plant and proposals to refit the Budapest metro, which operates mostly Soviet-made trains. And in a region where Russia is still viewed with suspicion, Kremlin aide Sergei Prikhodko said the return of the long-lost library should boost confidence in Moscow.
"It will become a symbolic gesture indicating the new quality of bilateral relations and mutual trust," he said.
"Russian-Hungarian relations are on the rise. They are not plagued by any unresolved political problems. Putin's visit will be the culmination of their rapid and consistent development in recent years."
When Mr Putin moves on to Prague later today, Czech officials will hand over a portrait by celebrated 19th century Russian painter Ivan Kramskoy, which was stolen during the second World War by German soldiers from a museum in Ukraine.
With this exchange of cultural treasures exiled during the Soviet era, and talks on strengthening energy and trade ties, analysts say Russia hopes to ease Hungary and the Czech Republic away from its more strident EU critics in Poland and the Baltic states.
A senior adviser to Mr Putin met Poland's president Lech Kaczynski last week but, despite making positive noises about the visit, he came away without any plans for direct talks between the two leaders, who are reluctant to travel to each other's countries.
Warsaw is upset over a Russian-German undersea gas pipeline that would bypass Poland and the Baltic states, while Moscow is still angry about Poland's support for Ukraine's so-called Orange Revolution and for the pro-Western opposition in Belarus.
Memories of the Orange Revolution - when Mr Putin backed the eventual loser and prematurely congratulated him on victory - may prevent him endorsing the left-leaning Hungarian and Czech prime ministers in their battles for re-election, even though he fears the rise in both countries of right-wing parties with a whiff of nationalism.
"Russia is making a gesture that is aimed at getting credibility in the West," said Polish analyst Przemyslaw Zurawski.
"But by not visiting Poland, [ Putin] is far from making a serious push for better relations."
A Kremlin official admitted that Poland was an especially tricky neighbour for Russia, even when Hungary is marking half a century since the 1956 uprising and the Czech Republic still remembers Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague in 1968.
"We have managed to overcome a whole range of problems in relations with Hungary and the Czech Republic," the official said on condition of anonymity.
"The problems we have with Poland, we definitely do not have with these other countries."
Many Poles say their mistrust of Russia is well founded.
They cite as evidence how Gazprom secretly ran a large fibre-optic cable through a gas pipeline crossing Poland to western Europe, neglecting to tell Warsaw that it could carry a huge and potentially lucrative 37 million calls a second.
Now, with the priceless Sarospatak books back home, some Hungarians are ruing the sting in the tail of the deal.
The Budapest government has been handed a $400,000 (€336,840) bill from Russia for "guarding, cataloguing, maintaining, packaging and transporting" the treasures that the Red Army stole in 1945.
