What makes Natylie Baldwin’s book different from most other books about Russia is the fact that she is neither an academic nor a journalist, but a professional who became so concerned about the threat of nuclear war that she devoted several years of free time to studying that country. Baldwin soon realized that under the influence of America’s foremost authority on Soviet affairs, Zbignieuw Brzezinski, whose Polish ancestry primed him to condemn everything Russian, foreign policy analysts were ignoring reality. With no academic overseers to worry about, she teamed up with another California writer, Kermit Heartsong, to investigate whether Zbig’s “Grand Chessboard” published in 1998, held up two decades later. Finding that it did not, the two wrote a detailed rebuttal titled Ukraine: Zbig's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated.Meanwhile, in an effort to diffuse tensions between the two nuclear powers, starting in 1983, another California woman had sought permission from the Soviet authorities to organize meetings between American professionals and their counterparts. After ‘Chessboard’ was published, Baldwin participated in a trip organized by Sharon Tennison’s Center for Citizen Initiatives. Coming face to face with how little the average American knows about the other nuclear power, Baldwin decided to write the View from Moscow, pulling aside the curtain of Russophobia designed to prepare the American public for war, as outlined in the 1992 Defense Planning Guide known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Still following Wolfowitz’s instructions that the US must prevent by any means necessary the emergence of a power having the means to challenge US hegemony, and signaling out Russia, with its unique mineral wealth, as fitting that bill, in his first hundred days in office, President Biden described its president as ‘a killer’. Repeated claims that Russia ‘invaded Crimea’ (which Catherine the Great had won from Turkey), and Eastern Ukraine, whose Russian speakers refuse to recognize the fascist-tinged Ukrainian government set up in 2014 by the Western-backed ‘Maidan’ insurrection, the media avoids mentioning the fact that Moscow, and its ally Beijing, have issued standing invitations to the US to join them in a ‘multi-polar’ condominium.The invitation results from both countries having suffered Western aggressions, Russia’s starting with the one made famous in Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky by the medieval religious order of the Teutonic Knights, continuing with incursions by Swedes, Germans, Napoleon, and Germany (twice), leading to Eastern Europe becoming a buffer zone under Soviet control until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Russian Army’s decisive role in the defeat of Hitler (including the taking of Berlin) could not be recognized by the US without tacit acceptance of the Soviet regime, which, far from being an Evil Empire, brought development to the nations on its southern and eastern peripheries, as well as to Eastern Europe. (Having spent the late sixties in Poland and Hungary, I can personally attest to that.) Although originally billed as a peace-keeping force never to move beyond Germany’s Eastern border, NATO was created to defeat the Soviet Union, and its tanks continue to line Russia’s Western borders, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, its ships monitoring Russia’s access to the warm water Mediterranean, attempting to rewrite Crimean history.Baldwin’s book, which reveals a far different country from the Russia denounced in the Western press, could not come at a more crucial time. And thanks to the internet, where independent thinkers are now able to share their knowledge and experiences with the world, in her blog, Natylie’s Place, Baldwin disseminates the work of other independent Russia observers.