Leopolis Press

mulam@esinet.net

Leopolis Press was created in February, 2000 by Adam B. Ulam, Gurney Professor of History and Political Science, and Director of the Russian Research Center, at Harvard, during his final illness, in order to publish his last and 20th book, Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections. Leopolis means "Lion City" and was the medieval Latin name for Lwów, the Polish city where he was born and lived for seventeen years. It had the lion as its emblem.

Leopolis Press published a remarkable book in the spring of 2002. Through a chain of connections reaching back to Adam Ulam's childhood in Lwów, an extraordinary manuscript came to light. Titled Life Death Memories, it is the memoir of a Jewish boy, Thomas T. Hecht, who grew up in a shtetl in southeastern Poland, in a culture that World War II obliterated.

In late 2002, Leopolis Press began a collaboration with the Kosciuszko Chair at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, the University of Virginia, to publish a collection of scholarly papers on the transition of Poland to a contemporary European democracy. For this project, Poland's Transformation, Leopolis Press provided its editorial, book design and production capabilities; and the Kosciuszko Chair furnished the text and the basic plan of the book.

There followed Spanish Carlism and Polish Nationalism: The Borderlands of Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Halide Edib.

The Transaction Publishers edition of Understanding the Cold War, containing newly discovered autobiographical material and analysis, plus an introduction by Paul Hollander, remains available. A list of the chapter headings:

Part One: Farewell to Poland
The Ulams' Lwów
The Last Summer
Pre-War Poland: An Assessment

Part Two: A Polish Youth in a New Land
The New Country; A New Life
War Years
A Fugitive Stays with Jozef Ulam: George Volsky's Tale
Echoes of the Holocaust

Part Three: The Professor
Early Harvard Years
A Young Instructor
Implications of the Cold war
On Being an "Expert"
Lenin
Turbulent Foreign Relations
Vietnam

The Fall of the American University
The Tyrant's Shadow
Stalin
The Surprising 70s
Mystery Novels & The Kirov Affair
The Curse of the Bomb
Back to the Past with Revolutionary Fervor
The Communist World
Novel Uncertainties
Poland: A Determined and Nonviolent Resistance
Stan
Travels Abroad
Gorbachev and the Beginning of the End
To the Bialowiezha Forest
Russia Again

Part Four: Postlude

Of Professor Ulam's book Understanding the Cold War, book, John Kenneth Galbraith writes:

"For close on half a century I have known and been delightfully informed by Adam Ulam -- often during a daily encounter for lunch at the Faculty Club. He was the central spokesman on Soviet and Russian matters for all those years at Harvard. I did not always agree; I was always informed and enchanted. We have lost Adam, to our sorrow and regret, but we have this book which tells wonderfully of what we once found so alert and interesting.
"I add my voice in gratitude that we still have this memory of one of the most distinguished and articulate members of the Harvard community, one we remember with both affection and gratitude."

And Harvey Cox, Thomas Professor of Divinity at Harvard, comments:

". . . Fascinating book: Adam Ulam was not only one of our greatest historians of the 20th Century; he also lived through its calamities and catastrophes. This is his moving, often riveting personal account of those tumultous decades. It is a compelling and deeply engaging story."

THE NEW REPUBLIC, NOVEMBER 6, 2000
by STEPHEN KOTKIN*
© 2000, by the New Republic

*Stephen Kotkin directs the Russian Studies program at Princeton

Understanding the Cold War:
A Historian's Personal Reflections
by Adam B. Ulam
Leopolis, 448 pp.

KREMLINOLOGIST AS HERO

Try to imagine the intellectual life of the post-war West without the Polish emigration. The Polish impact has been especially immense when it comes to views on Russia.

Czeslaw Milosz lectured at Berkeley with uncanny empathy on Dostoevsky. Leszek Kolakowski, the renowned moral philosopher at Oxford and Chicago, entombed Soviet Marxism as well as Western Marxism in his monumental trilogy, and composed an immortal parody of revisionist scholarship on Stalinism (for the pages of Survey, edited by Leo Labedz). Andrzej Walicki of Notre Dame struck brilliant portraits of Russian populism and the Slavophile-Westernizer divide, and then delivered his own eulogy for the Marxist faith.

And beyond the history of ideas, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand strategist and perceptive analyst of the Soviet Bloc, served as National Security Adviser (under Carter), while Richard Pipes, the grand synthesizer of imperial Russian history, also found his way into the National Security Council (under Reagan). The University of Pennsylvania's Moshe Lewin became the acclaimed village elder among historians of Soviet Russia's peasant inheritance, monstrous bureaucracy, and the supposed dynamics of the system's evolution. The itinerant Isaac Deutscher, based eventually in England, achieved biographical mastery over Stalin, ultimately cast out Trotsky as prophet, and talked up Khrushchev, until he was banished. And there have been many others, notably Adam Ulam, who died in March in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a half century of influential scholarship and punditry, and a posthumous memoir, Understanding the Cold War.

Adam Bruno Ulam was born in 1922 in Lwów in Poland, a medieval town that was known as Lemberg under the Habsburgs and would become Lvov under the Soviets. Since 1991, the "City of Lions" has been Lviv in independent Ukraine. Little remains there of the classical education or Old World culture that nurtured the future Cold War historian. In 1939, Adam, who had just graduated high school, and his twenty-nine-year-old brother Stanislaw, a young mathematician at Harvard's Society of Fellows, home for summer holiday, were scheduled to board ship for New York on September 3. Their perspicacious father, a well-to-do lawyer who was widowed the year before, advised his boys to set sail earlier. So they embarked for New York in mid-August. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1. Sixteen days later, Stalin, by prior secret agreement with Hitler, invaded Poland from the east. By then, Stan had returned to Harvard, and Adam enrolled at Brown, the only entering foreign student, and a Jew. The brothers never saw their father or elder sister again.

Brown, where young Ulam studied European and American history, was not City College with its politicized, immigrant alcoves. As the Nazis overran France, began bombing Britain, and then drove deep into the Soviet Union, the gaiety of fraternity life and the "America First" detachment of 1939-1941 was almost too much to bear for a Polish student from occupied Europe. Finally Pearl Harbor broke the isolationist spell. Ulam obtained immigration papers and reported to the United States draft board, only to be rejected for having "relatives living in enemy territory"! In 1943, upon graduating, the tall, strapping youth was summoned for a physical, but he was turned away again, this time for near-sightedness. Unlike other eager call-ups, he had forgotten to wear contacts.

Following his elder brother (and surrogate father) to the University of Wisconsin, Adam got a job as an army instructor for Russian, the unfamiliar language of our wartime ally. The other teachers included an ex-czarist general, a former baroness, and a Moscow-trained Polish violinist with whom Adam shared an apartment. The roommates befriended a retired professor of Byzantine history, Alexander Vasiliev, who had known Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg, and in Madison helped them to order spaghetti and meatballs in Italian. In such company, Adam acquired a fondness for Russian culture rather than the more typical Russophobia of the emigre Pole born of centuries under the Russian boot. The army privates and non-coms whom Ulam had taught to speak Russian were assigned to the Pacific Theater.

At Ulam's first Harvard residence, Claverly Hall, the janitor sported a derby hat and pince-nez, and reminisced about former student residents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later Ulam swapped places with a young scholar named McGeorge Bundy and moved to Eliot House. The housemaster at his new abode, John Finley, a professor of Greek, brought the university's most renowned faculty to the mess hall and social gatherings, and knew by name his entire student "flock," not just the European counts and princes. Ulam boarded with the son of James Joyce, the grandson of Matisse, the younger son of the Aga Khan, and a descendant of Indonesian rajas who told him his family had been in politics for 800 years. "And what did they do before?" Ulam recalls having asked.

In these mandarin alcoves of the new, American-dominated postwar world, Ulam, in J. Press suits and striped bow ties, came to know officials of Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist regime, who had no clue that they were soon to be overthrown, as well as trainees for what would become Mao's regime. Ulam also met Pierre Trudeau, whom he recalls as an aristocratic French-Canadian with "Christian-anarchist" views, as well as the doctoral student in economics Andreas Papandreou. Whatever he did for Greece as prime minister after the downfall of the colonels' dictatorship, Papandreou is said to have been valuable company for obtaining special treatment in Greek-American restaurants, and for navigating Boston nightclubs. Ulam lets slip that in 1945, after the relaxation of gender segregation on campus, a romance blossomed in Widener Library with an unnamed Anglo-Irish representative of the fair sex, leading to dog shows, horse races, and the Boston symphony, but it all "ended tempestuously." In 1947, he received his doctorate and George Marshall gave the commencement address in which he announced his plan for rebuilding Western Europe.

He wrote nineteen books, one a novel. As he here recounts, he initially devoted himself to examining Marxism's powers of seduction, which he linked not to intelligentsia manipulations but to psychological proclivities arising out of social developments, especially in peasant societies undergoing industrialization. And whereas some celebrated analysts, such as John Maynard Keynes, had dismissed Marxism as "illogical and dull," Ulam highlighted the doctrine's intricacy and comprehensiveness, which, he argued, explained its attraction not just to peasants but also to intellectuals. Ulam also wrote about the Soviet-Yugoslav split in 1948, which just three years after the Chinese revolution, he presented as a harbinger of the fracturing of communism. These two themes--Marxism's spreading influence and its resulting divisions--formed the core of Ulam's work.

Having already ruffled some academic feathers by aptly describing the power struggle after Stalin's death in 1953 as akin to gangland Chicago under Capone, in 1965 Ulam published The Bolsheviks, the most incisive study to date of Lenin and his followers. Ulam's Lenin came across as a cultured Russian gentleman and an heir to a long revolutionary tradition, but also as a fanatic who, when the moment fortuitously arrived, beat the underground party into seizing power at all costs. What Ulam called Lenin's "penchant for terror" he attributed to a "perverse hatred" that the dropout law student felt toward "his own class," the intelligentsia, and to the hanging of his elder brother by the czarist police. Such occasionally strained psychologizing went together with skillful recuperations of seemingly obscure ideological disputations, alleged to have long-term repercussions, and sober details of political repression.

The upshot, a powerful portrait of the Bolshevik leader and the Bolshevik movement written despite the inaccessibility of many documents, burst on the scene after the de-Stalinization in 1956, the launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the Cuban revolution in 1960, all of which had contributed to a sense that the Soviet Union had not simply recovered from World War II but recaptured its revolutionary elan, and might just be the wave of the future. Here Ulam notes that the opening of the secret archives has brought little that was truly unknown about Lenin, unless one counts the proof of his consummation with Inessa Armand. The dictator's "all-engrossing passion for revolution," he writes, had "seemed to preclude the possibility, perhaps the ability, to respond to the temptation of the flesh."

Stalin had succeeded Lenin, and in 1973 Ulam published his acclaimed biography, Stalin: The Man and His Era. At the time the book appeared, the extent of the terror and the Gulag was being minimized by some leading American scholars, while even intellectuals without leftist sympathies sometimes felt that accepting the full unvarnished truth about the Soviet Union smacked of bad taste, or even McCarthyism. Ulam piled up the sordid details of Stalin's reign, and against the post-Khrushchev interpretive trend, he argued that the tyrant represented not a perversion or a usurpation of Leninism but rather its "defining characteristic." To his critics, who noted the utter absence of society in his great-man histories, Ulam countered, as he recalls that, "the most practical and important approach to the study of the Soviet Union was through its politics, which in its turn had to be an inquiry into what was going on in the political leadership." Dubbed Sovietology or sometimes Kremlinology, this endeavor at its best entailed voracious reading of official sources, often between the lines, frequent resort to the accounts of defectors, and inventive guesswork.

So much about the Stalin years seemed to defy logic, such as the accusations of mass spying and wrecking throughout the Soviet elite during the Great Terror. Ulam surmised that in the conspiratorial atmosphere of the 1930s, most people, mentally equipped with little more than the official ideology, probably believed the preposterous charges that resulted in millions of arrests. "Working on Stalin, as I suppose on Hitler," he confesses, "is not a pleasant job. One cannot help becoming depressed by recounting the stories of human depravity and mass suffering." Ulam admits, however, having "found occasional distraction in trying to solve the intriguing historical puzzles of the period," mysteries "that would challenge the ingenuity of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot." The archives, still not fully revealed, overwhelmingly confirm Stalin's responsibility for the massacres as well as the system's inhumanity, with copious new details; but the secret documents offer few new insights into Ulam's larger questions of the bases of mass participation and the adherence to socialism despite knowledge or even direct experience of the pervasive bloodletting.

Ulam applied his feel for Communist personalities and paradoxes to the mysteries of international behavior of the Soviet Union as well. In such works as the instant classic Expansion and Coexistence (1968, 1974), as well as The Rivals (1971) and Dangerous Relations (1983), he wondered whether the Soviet leadership could achieve a lasting detente with the West, or required a permanent siege mentality for domestic purposes—a potentially shattering proposition in the nuclear age. Hawkish specialist-officials such as Brzezinski and Pipes largely dismissed any possibility of lessening hair-trigger tensions, arguing that the Soviet system could never change, while some left-leaning scholars such as Deutscher and Lewin foresaw a relaxation both feeding and growing out of a Soviet domestic liberalization. Inclined neither to bring on doomsday nor to pursue the chimera of socialism with a human face, Ulam hinted that the Soviet regime was beset by the contradictions of its expansionist successes, and might become more accommodating abroad even as it remained authoritarian at home. That is more or less what happened, until Gorbachev arrived to expose the incurable ailments and unwittingly hastened the system's suicide.

"Who in 1971," Ulam muses, "could have believed that if the USSR went down it would do so with barely a whimper?" Concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which precipitated warnings of Soviet global domination, he claims that "even in 1979-1980 I felt that the era of militant Communism was definitely over," given the threats posed by the anti-Communist resistance in his native Poland and a "capitalist-road" China. Still, he observes that he did not fathom the depth of Soviet problems, and he did not predict the collapse. No one did. As other scholars publish highly selective collections of declassified Soviet documents, which supposedly confirm their long-held views, Ulam, more right than most, had the courage to concede that "I was rather timid when assessing the chances for fundamentchanges," and that on some major questions "I was quite mistaken."

Perhaps no subject exercised the lifelong student of European political systems and international affairs more than the American university, which Ulam had known since his years at Brown. Writing of the 1960s, Vietnam, and the student protests, he recalls encountering on his way to class "morning scenes of a sizeable crowd sometimes filling the large space in front of the library and an orator with a microphone denouncing violently some special iniquity of the university and/or of the bourgeois world." He pronounces the issues (or some of them) legitimate, but the methods not. The smugness that "Harvard was not Columbia" ended with the takeover and the forcible clearing of the administration building. Ulam admonishes that "the university in a democratic country is not the proper place for political struggle," while also judging the faculty's behavior at the time as "un-heroic."

Lecturing to Harvard students on socialism and revolution, Ulam had to be dragged to the suddenly recurring faculty meetings, which he likens to a "rowdy Balkan parliament" of "scholarly men, . . . largely without prior interest in politics, split up into combating factions." Of the phenomenal post-1960s growth in academic administrators, he concludes sardonically that "a great proliferation of bureaucracy follows every revolution, and Harvard was no exception." In 1972, Ulam published The Fall of the American University, in which he decried the "governmentalization and politicization" of the American academy, though he would continue to prosper at an American university for several more decades. He also became captivated by Russia's tumultuous 1860s and 1870s, writing In the Name of the People (1977) about the radical revolutionary mystique, the bomb throwing, and the assassination plots.

Cursed to live in interesting times, the exile from bygone Lwów came to know three American presidents, but mostly kept his distance from Washington. The academic conference circuit was not his cup of tea either. He never returned to his birthplace in what he playfully liked to call "Ukrainian-occupied Poland," and he avoided all travel to the Soviet Union, when it became possible after 1957, except for one short trip in fall 1985, preferring to receive important contacts along with students at the Russian Research Center (known since 1997 as the Davis Center). Ulam's tidied-up reminiscences are interspersed with warm recollections from his brother (who died in 1984), his ex-wife (the book's publisher), his sons, colleagues, former students, and old family friends. A zestful storyteller, Ulam favors the winning anecdote and the wink and nod over the tedium of score-settling. His tales of clubby academic practices and upheavals amid the Ivy alternate with ponderous exegeses of ever-receding Cold War controversies and brief mentions of out of place characters, such as Heinrich Bruning, the German chancellor who gave way, eventually, to Hitler and also found a home at Harvard.

A COMMENT ON THE MEMORIAL EDITION

by VALERY BAZAROV
Family History Specialist,
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

Reading Adam Ulam's Understanding the Cold War was a personal experience for me. Everything Ulam was writing about the post-war Soviet Union I lived through. For forty-six years, the bigger (alas!) part of my life, the USSR was my native country. I was eleven when Stalin died, and I remember my mother crying in front of his portrait. I remember the day when Beria was denounced as a traitor.

&bnsp; I remember how deeply we were shocked when for the first time we read in the newspapers that Stalin was something less than God. For many years the Cold War was my everyday reality, and I always was interested in what really happened on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Especially mysterious were the Elders of the Kremlin, whose aura was once impermissible. Ulam leads you through the gallery of the portraits created by his skills, knowledge and magic intuition. They are all full of life: Stalin, Khruschev, Gorbachev, even short-lived Chernenko. The perfection of the result reached by the laconic economy of expression and psychological detail is on the scale of da Vinci's drawings.

The Ulam book is a treasure for those who want to know what is expected in our ever-changing world. As a good historian, Adam Ulam could extrapolate the past into the future. That is why his words sound prophetic: that after the demise of the Soviet Union "the challenge to the United States and other democracies is all the greater because the danger will be continually shifting in its nature and identity."

And one more thing: I have read other works of Adam Ulam and always respected his talent and erudition. After Understanding I got to know him as a person. So, I have one more friend.

A REVIEW FROM CHOICE

by J. P. SMALDONE
Georgetown University
Sept 1, 2001 © 2001 by Choice

Written in the last days before his death in March 2000, this book is a fitting epitaph and memorial to Ulam's half-century of monumental scholarship.

His 18 books and long tenure as twice-director of Harvard's Russian Studies Center mark him as one of the world's foremost scholars of the Soviet Union/Russia. Organized into 31 vignettes, Understanding the Cold War is an engaging, insightful, and poignant mix of autobiography and reflections on the Cold War and its aftermath. Occasional personal notes inserted by family members and academic colleagues add to its vitality. Although lacking the apparatus of footnotes and bibliography, an accompanying Web site provides photos and biographical and historical materials documenting Ulam's life and times. It will appeal to scholars and other serious readers of recent history and autobiography. . . .

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A Recent Review of Life Death Memoriesby Thomas T. Hecht:
ISBN 0-9679960-1-5

Die Aktion

Booklist
May 1, 2002: Vol. 98, No. 17
(l.) One of five illustrations by Eric Binder © copyright 2002 by Leopolis Press.

Gr. 9-12. "I had an uneventful childhood. My family loved me." It's the plain, personal voice that gives this Holocaust memoir its power, the feeling of ordinary people's lives, in all their differences and complexity, forever cut off. High-school readers and adults will get a strong sense of the history through the dual viewpoint: the Jewish teenager who was there when the Germans came to his Polish shtetl, and the adult New York attorney looking back at what he can never forget. Although the writing is direct, almost monosyllabic at times, this isn't for young reaaders: the brutality is suddenly close-up, just as it was for the boy when he heard that his beloved older brother, his "soulmate," and his father were shot to death and thrown into a common grave, and discovered that his other brother, the one he never liked, was tortured and blinded before he was shot. Hecht and his mother escaped, hiding in the forest, but there's no Life is Beautiful innocence in their survival story. Only haunting survivor guilt.
by Hazel Rochman

and a review from Library Bookwatch, June, 2002 (© Midwest Book Review, Oregon, WI):
Life Death Memories is the deeply personal and candid recollections of Thomas T. Hecht, a Jewish man who grew up in a Polish shtetl during the murderous years of Hitler's horrific and genocidal "Final Solution." Hecht's village culture was obliterated in the wake of the Holocaust; scarce survivors and scarcer memories of it remain today. A memorial to those murdered and a powerful testimony to the human capacity for mass atrocity, Life Death Memories is a welcome addition to Holocaust Studies reference collections and not-to-be-missed powerful reading.

Life Death Memories appeared in spring, 2002.

Comments About Life Death Memories:

"Rarely am I left speechless—but I doubt that I can find the words to describe how deeply moved I was by this Holocaust memoir, a memoir that feels so unlike any other even as it manages somehow to encapsulate them all. What could have been another tale of devastation and desolation is transmuted into an affirmation of the human spirit."
Laurence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School

"One can look at the Holocaust with equal validity as the terrible liquidation of 6,000,000 people or the process of destroying each of these people one-by-one. Thomas T. Hecht's Life Death Memories is the story of one person, one family, and one shtetl that illumines the whole. History is memory, and the author proves himself to be a fine memoirist."
Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers. He is the author of many books, including Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power and Behemoth.

"Mr. Hecht's is one of those books which once started are almost impossible to put down. It is the story of a young boy brought up before World War II in a small Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian town, who with his parents and brothers, all lovingly and vividly portrayed, spent the years 1939-1941 under Soviet occupation and the following four years under the brutal reign of the German conquerors. Nearly his entire family met their end by gas or by bullet, and it was by the barest of luck that he managed to survive. Among the most moving pages in the book are those devoted to the Ukrainian and Polish men and women who found the courage, in the face of the savage anti-Semitism raging around them, to come to the aid of Jewish victims, thus risking death at the hands of their neighbors and German masters alike. Life Death Memories is one of those volumes you cannot afford to miss."
Abraham Brumberg is the author of Poland: Anatomy of a Revolution. He is a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement (London), The New York Review of Books, and other journals.

"Mr. Hecht's book is a valuable addition to the memoir literature on the Holocaust. He bears eloquent and perceptive witness to the hellish world into which he, his family, and his community had been plunged. The book will serve as an instructive source to lay readers as well as to professional historians. To lay readers it will convey in vivid detail the nature of that Dantesque world--the almost unimaginable barbarism of the perpetrators and the ordeal, the anguish and agony of the victims. To historians it will offer fresh evidence for their unending task of fathoming that horrific crime."
Daniel J. Goldhagen is the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. He teaches at Harvard's Center for European Studies.

"This account of Jewish life in Poland before and during the era of the infamous Ghetto is as immediate as it is harrowing. The details in a memory not lost but made indelible by love and grief bring vividly to life the sensory and spiritual fabric of existence under constant and brutish siege."
Anne Bernays is the author of many books, including Professor Romeo.

The book's Introduction is by Irene Pipes, President of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies.

book cover

An excerpt from a chapter entitled "Escape":
© text copyright 2002 by Thomas T. Hecht.

It was time to try my luck. Among the three of us, I was the least recognizable as Jewish, and I insisted on going to the village during the day. While trudging off to the village in full daylight, I kept looking back to fix in my mind landmarks for the place in the field where my mother and Tauba remained hidden. I was near the village square when a young boy came over to me. He asked me where I was going. I told him I had come to look for milk and bread. He said, "Come along with me." As I followed him, nearing the house where he promised I could get some, I noticed two bicycles leaning against the wall. The sight electrified me with an instinctive jolt of suspicion. Swiftly, like an animal, I turned around and ran toward the fields. The young village boy turned and ran after me. Just then, two Ukrainian militiamen bolted out of the house, and they, too, chased me. It was a trap. . . .

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Poland's Transformation:
A Work in Progress

compiled and edited by

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz
John Radzilowski
Dariusz Tolczyk

Published in Collaboration with
The Kosciuszko Chair
at the Miller Center of Public Affairs
the University of Virginia

ISBN 0-9679960-2-3

Price $29.95 including shipping

Advance comments about this collection of studies:

"Poland's Transformation provides a comprehensive as well as incisive overview of the extraordinarily difficult and historically unprecedented process of transforming an increasingly corrupt and decayed totalitarian system into a modern democracy."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Professor of American foreign Policy, School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University

"This extremely useful volume explains the essential elements of the post-Communist political transition in Poland. Its authors convey not only the basic necessary information of recent history but more importantly the cultural and ideological underpinnings that can be captured only by authorities who have developed over a lifetime that special sixth sense for detecting the elusive and unquantifiable soul of a country."

John Lenczowski, Director, the Institute of World Politics

"Defying the stereotypes of their national character, Poles carried out two peaceful revolutions in the span of one generation: first, the self-limiting movement of Solidarity, which undermined the legitimacy of Communism, and then a negotiated transfer of power from Communism to free-market democracy.
"Today, while Poland is seen as a success story and is joining political and economic clubs of the democratic West, Poles themselves seem downcast. In making moral compromises with an outgoing tyranny, can you avoid cynicism and disappointment with democracy?
"We should be grateful to the authors and editors of this thoughtful volume for asking questions which remain relevant for that uncomfortably large part of humanity that still lives under totalitarian or authoritarian regimes."

Radek Sikorski, Executive Director, New Atlantic Initiative, American Enterprise Institute; Former Deputy Foreign Minister of Poland, 1998-2000; Former Deputy Defense Minister of Poland, 1992.

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Spanish Carlism and Polish Nationalism:
The Borderlands of Europe In the 19th and 20th Centuries:
Edited by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and John Radzilowski

"As every schoolboy knows, Europe's Catholic Right has consisted of reactionaries who began in the service of residual feudal landowners and ended in support of big capital's exploitation and oppression of the masses. . . [T]he totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century proved prescient the warnings of the Cathloic Traditionalist Right about the consequences of radical democracy and cultural nihilism. These splendid essays, as readable as they are scholarly, launch a long-overdue assessment of vital political events."
Professor Eugene Genovese, former President,
The Historical Society

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Old Constantinople (above).

Portrait of Halide Edib, ca. 1903 (r.).

House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Halide Edib
Introduction by Sibel Erol, New York University

"Halide Edib lived through the most turbulent times in modern Turkish history. Most unusually for a woman of her day, she did so not only as an eye witness, but as an active political participant. She was on close personal terms with powerful leaders such as Talat Pasha and Ataturk, but retained a critical and independent mind. All this gives her memoirs their unique character."
E. J. Zurcher, Leiden University

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