Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Francis Casimir Kajencki (1918-2008) A puzzling circumstance of the Second World War is that it reached the status of a global conflict when the British and French empires, ostensibly out of concern for Polish sovereignty, declared war on Germany in the wake of its September 1939 invasion of Poland, but that these same powers not only did not declare war on the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland that month, but joined forces with Stalin’s government in an alliance to defeat the Axis. Allied “victory” in Europe, moreover, resulted not in the restoration of Polish independence, but Soviet occupation of Poland along with the rest of Eastern Europe. A little-known book, American Betrayal: Franklin Roosevelt Casts Poland into Communist Captivity , grapples with this problematic legacy of the war. Self-published by Francis Casimir Kajencki in 2007, the year before he died, the book is a patriotic Polish-American’s pained assessment of his country’s treacherous treatment of its belea