Fighting Evil With the Help of Satan

By Dr. Kostadin Grozev, Associate Professor, Chair of Modern and Contemporary World History, Faculty of History, Sofia University

CHERYL WALKER, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER, December 8th, 2008

Saddleback College history instructor and Bulgarian native Georgy Gounev says his first book published in the United States, "Fighting Evil with the Help of Satan, President Roosevelt and Josef Stalin, 1939-1945," is the work of a lifetime and had its genesis more than 30 years ago when he was working on his doctorate from the Institute of Foreign Relations in Moscow, Russia.

It was then he began to hear from living witnesses to history the real "nature and politics of Stalinism" and how precarious its success would have been without the ignorance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the real nature of the Soviet dictator.

"Had Franklin Roosevelt possessed more integrity and more knowledge about totalitarianism, it could be reasonably argued that he could have and would have handled Josef Stalin in a completely different way," writes Gounev.

He argues that the "total diplomatic failure of the United States and Great Britain with regard to the Soviet Union … produced the dubious legacy of the outcome of WWII … a global conflict in which the right wing totalitarianism was destroyed, primarily by the left wing version of the same system, which was quick in establishing its complete domination over Eastern Europe."

Gounev, who lives in Laguna Woods, says his first person research in both the former Iron Curtain countries and in the United States has brought him to the conclusion that Stalin's manipulation of FDR allowed him to "achieve ALL his wartime related foreign policy goals" even though to his own people before World War II he was considered a mass murderer of Ukrainian and Russian peasants, the initiator of the Gulag system, and an inept military leaders who had left his country ill prepared for the invasion of Nazi forces in 1941.

The writer explains that when Stalin and Nazi German's leader Adolf Hitler were political allies his views of Western leaders like FDR and Winston Churchill was that they were nothing more than expendable capitalists. It was only after Hitler's invasion that he began to realize their ignorance could be used to his advantage.

What makes Gounev's history so unique is that it is based on documentary evidence including books, secret files, speeches, articles and journals, not available in the West as well as interviews with participants.

Gounev says he had been collecting these stories all his life and now, like pieces of a historical puzzle, has put them in their rightful places, in some cases shattering established views of people and events.

All the primary sources are meticulously footnoted at the end of each chapter.

Gounev contends that only if the West understands the mind of Stalin will it understand what is happening in Russia today and, hopefully, not repeat the mistakes of the past.

The author is now working on a sequel to this book which will delve into the motives and goals of Russia's Vladimir Putin, and the rise of Islam in Europe.

"Fighting Evil with the Help of Satan" is currently available on amazon.com or through the publisher at 888-672-6657.

Contact the writer: 949-837-5200 cwalker@ocregister.com