C ENTRALand Eastern Europe is a good vantage point from which to judge President Bush’s recent visit to Moscow for the anniversary of VE Day-and the resulting debate over Yalta and the value of his democracy project. After all, Prague and Warsaw were the flashpoints that prepared and ignited World War II. Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939 because the German army had crossed the Polish borders the Allies had guaranteed six months earlier (in response to Hitler’s seizure of the rump of Czechoslovakia). Poland was one of the four nations that fought in World War II from start to finish (the others were Britain, Germany, and the USSR)-first in the invasion of Poland, then in the RAF, later in the Polish army recruited from Stalin’s gulag and sent via Persia and South Africa to southern England to prepare for D-Day, and throughout the war in an astonishingly brave and resilient Polish Home Army. When in 1946 “Chips” Channon, the Chicago meat-packing socialite heir and British Tory MP, gestured around the room at a smart London society wedding and said with fatuous snobbery, “This is what we have been fighting for,” Emerald Cunard replied, “Oh, are they all Poles?”
For, by then, the Poles had been, well, not forgotten exactly, but pushed very firmly down the memory hole, along with the other faraway nations passing behind the Iron Curtain. Only a handful of MPs (among them, to his credit, the future prime minister Alec Douglas-Home) voted against the Yalta treaty in the House of
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