Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last week happened to coincide with my reading of David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, our 33rd president. Clearly, Russia has been a problem for a long time.
Near the end of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill struggled to convince Josef Stalin to comply with previous agreements about the shape of the post-war world. With his troops deployed in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and elsewhere, Stalin saw expansionist opportunities for the Soviet Union, and he was determined to take advantage of them.
In the late 40s, President Truman confronted few problems that caused him more anxiety and frustration than the U.S.S.R., and few projects took more of his energy than finding ways to prevent its expansion. Truman, a plain-spoken Missourian, said the Russians were “like people from across the tracks whose manners were very bad.”
