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What Russia Wants. Russia and Postwar Europe minutely investigates (chiefly with the aid of Soviet sources) the shifts of Soviet foreign policy between 1917 and 1943 — an investigation lit up by such flashes from the Bolshevik mind at work as Lenin's comment on his meeting with France's diplomatic representative, Count de Lubersac: "We shook each other's hand . . . aware that each one of us would readily hang his partner. But our interests coincided." But most interesting for U.S. readers will be Dallin's forecast of Russia's cur rent territorial ambitions in Europe. In the Czar's secret archives the Bolsheviks found a plan of the Russian territorial and political demands after World War I (see map, p. 98). They included:
¶ East Prussia and parts of Pomerania and German Silesia up to the Oder River.
¶ Galicia and northern Bukovina (now parts of Poland and Rumania).
¶ Most of European Turkey and the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus.
¶ Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to be a Russian sphere of influence, with a corridor along Austria's eastern frontier connecting the Czechs and the Yugoslavs, cutting off the Austrians from the Hungarians.
¶ Hungary and Rumania, nominally inde pendent but surrounded by the Russian sphere of influence.
This plan, says Professor Dallin, "is still accurate" Chief differences: Turkey is not now at war with Russia, Rumania is.
"Hence, the road to the Balkans now leads across Rumania and not through Turkey," while Czarist Pan-Slavism has been replaced by Partisan armies (Yugoslavia), Liberation Committees (Poland), mutual assistance pacts (Czecho-Slovakia).
But even more important than this prognosis, in the last analysis, are Professor Dallin's chapters about Russian relations past & future with Germany. There is an old saying that "Whoever controls the Moravian Gate [the gap between the Tatra and Bohemian mountains] controls Europe." Professor Dallin is well aware that Germany is the Moravian Gate of European politics—that control of Germany will determine whether Europe is to go Communist or democratic. The question is: Who will control Germany after the war—Russia or Britain and the U.S.? Professor Dallin does not know the answer to this one, which only the history of the next two decades can give. But he quotes Lenin ("We cannot live in peace—memorial services will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over world capital-ism"); and the official Soviet review, Bolshevik ("He who does not understand the German question does not understand the path of the development of proletarian revolution in Europe"). Professor Dallin's book is above all a contribution to such understanding.