It is difficult to write an interesting book on politics when 1) the national politics in question cover a country unfamiliar to the reader and 2) included individuals from an obscure past, yet Professor Craig managed to create a history that is lively and very informative.  We tend to think of Prussia as a militarized state, going back to the time of Frederick the Great, and yet there were several attempts by both the civilian and military leadership to exert civilian control over the military (primarily the officer corps).  Each attempt failed due to either poor and uncoordinated political moves, foreign wars or the revolution of 1848.

In 2008, Tim Tzouiadis wrote a book entitled, The Forsaken, An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia in which thousands of Americans left for jobs and security in the Soviet Union during the Depression.  Led to believe the stories of American journalists (such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times) and “intellectuals” like George Bernard Shaw, they saw the Soviet Union as the wave of the future after the “failure” of Capitalism.  Hundreds were also offered positions on a contract by Henry Ford who was helping the Soviets build auto plans; they were skilled tradesmen and their skills were lacking in that war-torn land.  Of all the thousands who took the trip, only a handful survived and returned to the U.S.; most of those were children who were sent home for some reason or some workers who quickly turned around and returned. Later, having lost their U.S. passports, most were arrested and sent to the Gulags or executed outright as being “spies” and “wreckers”.  Only one man and one woman survived terms in the Gulags to return to the U.S.

In graduate school, one of my top professors was Dr. Samuel Sarkesian.  Before becoming a professor at Loyola Chicago, he had a military career, ending up as a Lieutenant Colonel.  That quiet man was one of the first officers chosen by Colonel Aaron Bank to set up the 10^th Special Forces.  Formed in 1952, it was designed to combat terrorism, operate behind enemy lines, etc.  He served behind North Korean lines during the Korean War, as well as on various missions in Africa, Eastern Europe, Viet Nam, etc.

History is replete with lost wars, often caused by rivalries between top decision makers over strategies, type of munitions, tactics, and of course, political turf wars.  It is refreshing to read a book which outlines how five different men, all driven (by patriotism, some also by glory) managed to create the most powerful navy in the history of the world and use it in a manner which contributed to the total victory over the forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  As the book focuses on these five men, the actions of the hundreds of thousands who served under them and were at the “sharp end of the stick” are not covered, but one is struck by the force of their personalities and how those personalities much have inspired many of those lower down the ladder.

How was it that under a regime which introduced radio on a mass scale to the average family, that pioneered the Americanization of political campaigning in Europe and that openly encouraged the average citizen to at least boycott their Jewish neighbors, how could the average citizen claim ignorance of the actions of the Nazi regime?  The regime made no secret of its ideology nor of most of its methods and yet, even in the period leading up to the start of the war, yet after the war, people claimed that they did not know what was happening right before their eyes.

Nedrasov who fought as a sapper in the trenches of Stalingrad does not present a sweeping, patriotic novel of individual bravery, but rather a story of small episodes where individual soldiers flit in and out of the main characters life during the battle.  Some are brave, some are stupid, some seek to earn medals while others wait for their end. 

Neill Ferguson, one of todays top historians and social observers pulled together several noted historians (John Adamson, J.C.D. Clark, etc.) to create alternative views of history.  Unlike most counterfactuals, each section requires the reader to have a better than average understanding of the period being discussed.  The first time I read this book I knew that I would have to read it three of four times to really grasp some of its arguments. 

Andrei Vyshinsky rose to fame as the chief prosecutor during many of the infamous show trials of the late 1930’s in the Soviet Union.  A brilliant student, lawyer and lover of academia, he was a second level (never entering Stalin’s inner circle) bureaucrat who managed to use the deaths of those he prosecuted to advance his career.  Although the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, Joseph E. Davies felt that the trials were conducted to the highest legal standards (his book, Mission to Moscow was made into a terrible propaganda movie in 1943) they could only be viewed in that manner if you wondered why defendants who recanted were taken from the court room and then their written statements reversing their recanted statements were admitted and they were convicted (many who recanted were so badly beaten that they could not be taken into the public eye and were quickly executed).  As a side note, Ambassador Davies spent most his time antique hunting and sent hundreds of “finds” back to his home in the U.S.

For decades, Robert Conquest, before his death was considered the premier expert on the rise of the Soviet Union.  His research was often criticized by those on the left but with the opening of the Soviet archives, his excellence was proven beyond a doubt.  In this book, he lays out what may be the greatest genocide in the world’s history, that of the Ukrainians especially during the years of 1929-1933.  During that time, as many fourteen million people were executed or starved to death in a deliberate policy designed to break the back of Ukrainian nationalism and the will of the peasants to resist Soviet power.