promised to put it in a prominent place. When the officials returned to check, they discovered that the portrait had been displayed all too publicly: above the toilet. The family were sent to Siberia. Many people simply complied without protest - as they did in Germany. Others were ingenious in their opposition. Stories abound. During a visit to the Ukraine in October 1989 an old priest told me about a woman who asked for the secret baptism of her baby (as, indeed, Gorbachev's mother arranged for his baptism, and leading dissident, Alexandr Ogorodnikov's grandmother, arranged for his). The priest complied. The woman made the priest promise not to register the baptism and to say nothing to the authorities as her husband was a senior KGB official. A few weeks later, a man came to see the same priest and asked for his son to be baptised. This time the priest refused. He explained to the father that the boy had already been baptised. It was the same child. This revealing story is a glimpse of a world of distrustful, divided and often frightened families, fearful of confiding in one another lest the slightest slip of a tongue provided incriminating evidence against them.
The Hitler-Stalin Pact
By 1939, with Germany facing war on two fronts, Stalin concluded the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Accord. The Soviet Union seized the Western Ukraine from Poland. Stalin also took the Baltic States of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, and attacked Finland. Russia under Stalin was as faithless, aggressive and despotic as Nazi Germany herself. Whilst the war between totalitarianism and democracy resulted in the overthrow of Hitler, its conclusion saw the dismemberment of Europe at the Yalta Conference and the further extension of Stalin's ambitions. In 1924 he had formally abandoned the objective of world revolution and domination. By 1945, with most of Central and Eastern Europe under Soviet control, he had accomplished half of the task.
Appeasement Does Not Pay
If that war taught the Western democracies anything, it was that appeasement does not pay; that if effective steps are taken quickly enough the aggressor can be