THE ANNALS OF POLAND
War and Exile, 1939-1948
George Kennan:
An American Life, by the preeminent Cold War historian John Gaddis,
is a magnificent book about a brilliant but rather unlikeable man.
In War in the Modern World, we had both Mr. Gaddis and Mr. Kennan force-fed
to us. As a subordinate to the U.S. ambassador in Moscow postwar,
Kennan famously wrote the "long telegram" that spelled out the strategy
of containment that, with various ups and downs, defined American
policy toward the Soviet Union for more than half a century. Very early,
though, Kennan went from brilliant youth to paranoid old man, and if
his later advice had been heeded as carefully as his long telegram,
very likely the Soviet Union would still be with us, and Europe would
still be divided. Here are my notes from the book.
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The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout the World, edited by Tadeusz Piotrowski. This interesting book contains scores of memoirs of Poles who were swept up in the three great deportations of 1940 and sent to the frozen wastes of Arctic Russia, to Siberia, and to "free exile" in Kazakhstan, and their subsequent escape and dispersal around the world. These were, of course, the lucky ones. An equal number--perhaps many times their number--were left behind in the Soviet Union. The book is available at Amazon in hardcover and also in a Kindle editon. Here are my notes from the book.
The general belief is
that Britain and the U.S. hushed up Russia's massacre of Polish officers
and intellectuals, but that never did make a lot of sense.
The U.S. had good reason during the Cold War to
paint the Soviet Union as evil, and what better than an atrocity that left 22,000
corpses in mass graves in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus? Well, it
turns out that the U.S. Congress did exactly that.
Here are its 60-page Findings as published in 1952, with a Foreword drawn from the research I've done on the first year
of the Second World War. It's an ebook for Amazon's Kindle reader or
its various apps, available in the
United States,
Britain, and
Germany.
(Shop the
U.S. store if you live elsewhere in the world.)
Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
