1. Using as his starting point Timothy Snyder’s best-selling, yet profoundly flawed, historical study, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Daniel Lazare explores how the United States has thrown its weight behind resurgent East Europe nationalisms, in order to assemble a grand anti-Russian coalition from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The effort has required a military build-up and a growing war of words. However, it has also entailed a wholesale historical revision in which WWII, in effect, is being turned on its head. Where historians of all political stripes once readily acknowledged the Soviet Union’s leading role in the victory over Nazism, the new “Snyderian” history dismisses the Soviet role in its entirety, denounces anti-fascism as a lie and a hoax, and describes partisans from Belarus to the Warsaw Ghetto as no better than the invaders they fought. The result is a return to the Cold War politics of the 1950s and 1960s or, even worse, the poisonous nationalism of the interwar period. So dramatic has the effort been, that it fairly compels an equal and opposite revisionism with regard to the post-Soviet period. After all, 1989—if only in the eyes of liberals and social democrats—was supposed to usher in a period of liberation on both sides of the divide. Instead of one superpower displacing another, the upshot was to be an end to power politics altogether so that Europe could remake itself along human lines. But it was not to be. Rather than shrinking, NATO gained a dozen new members. The “peace dividend” failed to materialize, wars erupted in former Yugoslavia and Ukraine, while fascist collaborators from Stepan Bandera to Josef Tizo and Admiral Horthy emerged as popular favorites. How could an ostensibly liberatory program lead to such wholesale regression? What did observers get wrong about 1989—and what, if anything, did they get right?