THE BALKANS: Frontier of Two Worlds

This is a very important book which makes very difficult reading. Perhaps no book on the powder keg of Europe could be anything but difficult; there have been a few (Pribichevich' World Without End is the outstanding example) that have been exciting reading. This new book brings the reader almost up to the minute, with a country by country (Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey, Greece) analysis, showing the processes by which Russia won control through a Communist minority- through armistice reparations and land grabs- through revolution in political circles- through economic domination- of the first four. The analyses of the last stand which the Western Democracies are now making in Turkey and Greece has an immediacy that makes it vitally important to read the whole, to understand the part. The authors show how our chances have been muffed; the mistakes of planlessness resulting in collapse of opportunity; and the dangers inherent in those trouble areas,- the Straits, the NE Turkish provinces, the border of Macedonia. A frightening, enlightening book-confessedly biased against Russia.