Best Book on Foreign Affairs 1962

Winner of the OPC Award for the best book on foreign affairs was Seymour Freidin’s The Forgotten People. The book traces fifteen years of attempts to Sovietize 100 million Eastern Europeans, drawing heavily on Freidin’s long first-hand experience among them. The death of the Czech republic the Poznan uprising, the Hungarian revolution, the builing of the Berlin Wall… The Forgotten People is largely a chronicle of naked aggression from the East, of helplessness in the West. But weaving through the book is a hopeful thesis. The brutal repression of the Hungarian revolution and the walling-off of East Berlin, Freidin argues, are but two examples of Russia’s failure to win the minds and hearts of the Eastern Europeans themselves. With spiritual and, in certain circumstances, physical backing, Freidin believes that in time these people can free themselves.