The unholy alliance between Hitler and Stalin enabled Germany to strike Poland without interference. In turn, Russia absorbed vast tracts of eastern Europe. This would cost 20 million Russian lives and end in a deadly reversal which helped destroy the Third Reich.
THE DEADLY EMBRACE reconstructs the scenery of those years--the pacifism of Neville Chamberlain, Britain's failure to shore up its alliances, the cold-blooded trading between Molotov and Ribbintrop, the Russian and German foreign ministers. When the non-aggression pact was signed in 1939, Poland's fate was sealed.
"Told with such a sense for the essential drama of the story that it is easily the most comprehensive and interesting history of the Nazi-Soviet pact." (New York Review of Books)
