Guest Post: How the Soviets Stole Christmas

by Michael de Sapio

When totalitarian regimes (particularly those of the Left) come to power, one of the first things they typically do is destroy hallowed cultural symbols, the better to remake society from the ground up. The Soviet campaign to replace the symbols of Christmas is an interesting cultural chapter in the history of what Ronald Reagan famously called the “Evil Empire.” It is discussed here.

All symbols deemed religious and/or "bourgeois" were eradicated and replaced with new, secular versions.

Following the Russian Revolution, the new atheist government began an anti-religious campaign. All symbols deemed religious and/or “bourgeois” were eradicated and replaced with new, secular versions. Thus Christmas (which in the Russian Orthodox calendar occurs on January 7) was abolished in favor of New Year's, and several traditional Christmas customs and characters received new identities. St. Nicholas/Santa Claus gave way to Ded Moroz or “Old Man Frost” (a popular figure originating in pagan times), and the new “nativity scene” featured him and his granddaughter the Snow Maiden in place of Joseph and Mary, sometimes with the “New Year Boy” added in place of Jesus. Christmas cards often featured Ded Moroz riding alongside a Soviet cosmonaut in a spacecraft emblazoned with a hammer and sickle.

Such images seem laughable now, but the impulse to destroy tradition is part and parcel of radical social movements throughout history. Think of the French Revolutionaries, who replaced the Christian calendar with a naturalist one, and even renamed the months and the days of the week so as to avoid any possible reference to Christianity.

And the Soviets weren't the only ones to have a problem with Christmas. The Puritans of seventeenth-century Boston were vehemently against it too. A “Publick Notice” from the period survives proclaiming the following:

The Observation of Christmas having been deemed a Sacrilege, the exchanging of Gifts and Greetings, Dressing in Fine Clothing, Feasting and similar Satanical Practices are hereby FORBIDDEN with the Offender liable to a fine of five shillings.

The one group hated Christmas because it was religious, and the other hated it because it was irreligious. History and human nature are full of paradoxes.

As for the Soviets, they eventually softened their stance. In 1935, the Communist Party official Pavel Postyshev wrote an editorial in Pravda mocking the extreme anti-Christmas faction. He declared that Christmas customs ought to be brought back for the enjoyment and benefit of children. (Needless to say, the goal vis à vis the children was always to make them obedient servants of the State.) After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Christmas became popular again.

All of which goes to show that while you can fight against tradition, you can't utterly destroy it. It may go underground, it may lie dormant, but once restrictions are lifted it will spring forth to new life. And any regime which tries to replace the familiar world with a synthetic one is fundamentally at war with the human spirit.

This first appeared at Intellectual Takeout.

Michael de Sapio writes at Intellectual Takeout.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: A Look Back at 1989's 'The End of History?'

There were, perhaps, only two scholarly articles published in limited-circulation journals of opinion in the twentieth century that stimulated debate and discussion far outsizing the usual readership their authors and editors might have expected.

One was George Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," based on his "long telegram" from Moscow and published pseudonymously in Foreign Affairs in 1947. The other was Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?," which appeared in The National Interest in 1989.  (You readers might be able to suggest other articles with similar reach and controversy; feel free to name them in the comments section, below.)

The phenomenon that was "The End of History?" was described by James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine in October 1989:

Within weeks, "The End of History?" had become the hottest topic around, this year's answer to Paul Kennedy's phenomenal best seller, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers." George F. Will was among the first to weigh in, with a Newsweek column in August; two weeks later, Fukuyama's photograph appeared in Time. The French quarterly Commentaire announced that it was devoting a special issue to "The End of History?" The BBC sent a television crew. Translations of the piece were scheduled to appear in Dutch, Japanese, Italian and Icelandic. Ten Downing Street requested a copy. In Washington, a newsdealer on Connecticut Avenue reported, the summer issue of The National Interest was "outselling everything, even the pornography."

"Controversial" didn't begin to cover the case. Unlike that other recent philosophical cause celebre, Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," Fukuyama's essay was the work of a representative from what is often referred to in academic circles as the real world. This was no professor, according to the contributor's note that ran in the magazine, but the "deputy director of the State Department's policy planning staff."

Fukuyama later expanded his article into a book, The End of History and the Last Man, but before that was released, he participated in a lively conversation about the changing conditions that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the return of liberal democracy to Central Europe, and the economic liberalization of the People's Republic of China.  That era also saw the end of non-communist, authoritarian regimes in South Korea and other East Asian countries, Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, and South Africa and its neighbors, with varying degrees of successful transition.

Some of that conversation appeared in print but some of it was conducted face-to-face with scholars, policy analysts, and politicians.  One such occasion was a conference at the U.S. Institute of Peace on July 24, 1989 (mentioned in passing in Atlas' article, cited above), coincident with the publication of Fukuyama's article in The National Interest's summer number.

I happened to attend that event and apparently took comprehensive notes, which I transformed into an article that was published just after Labor Day in the New York City Tribune.  It's hard to believe that "The End of History?" controversy is almost a quarter-century old.  Many of the doubts expressed by participants in that USIP conference, you will see, proved to be prescient given all that has happened since then -- the first Gulf War, the Global War on Terror, the Arab Spring, the decline of liberal democracy in Russia under Vladimir Putin, and so forth.

Here, for the first time on the Internet, is "Historians Debate End of History," as it appeared in the New York City Tribune on September 5, 1989.

- - -

An amazing debate is taking place in Washington and other world capitals. The subject is more cerebral than the typical debates about policy and performance that we read about in the papers. Participants in this debate include historians, philosophers, journalists, literary gurus, and politicians. And the time-frame of the events discussed in this debate is “plus or minus 200 years”!

The object of this intense speculation and discussion as an article in the current issue of The National Interest, a quarterly journal devoted to defense and foreign policy issues. In the article entitled, “The End of History?”, author Francis Fukuyama argues that our era will see the end of ideological struggle because liberal democracy has triumphed and all contenders against it – including fascism and communism – are in quick retreat.

Drawing on the philosophy of history developed by the 19th-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (who also inspired Karl Marx) and Hegel's 20th-century disciple Alexandre Kojeve, Fukuyama asserts that the fundamental changes we see occurring in the Soviet Union and what we used to call Red China signify something far greater than anyone has yet thought.

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history,” says Fukuyama, “but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Heavy stuff! To consider the implications of Fukuyama's thesis, the United States Institute of Peace gathered an impressive array of scholars at its headquarters in Washington recently. The panel included Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor of history emeritus from New York University; syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer; Ambassador Owen Harries, co-editor of The National Interest; historian Richard Pipes; and Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic. Fukuyama was there to defend his thesis.

Needless to say, the three-hour workshop was intellectually stimulating. Wieseltier launched the first salvo. “I don't believe we are witnessing the end of history,” he said. “We are witnessing the end of the 20th century, and good riddance,” explaining: “The defeat of communism is not quite the same thing as the triumph of liberalism.”

Others found shortcomings in Fukuyama's work without condemning it. Pipes, for instance, said that history is not a good tool to predict the future. “History does not teach clairvoyance,” he noted, “it teaches patience.” Pipes was seconded by Himmelfarb, who said that “history doesn't tell us what will happen, only that something will happen.”

For his part, Krauthammer – who in an essay in Time magazine last year may have been the first American intellectual to proclaim an end to the Cold War – said that Fukuyama has it “half-right.” There may be an end to ideology, he argued, but it is an unwarranted leap to call that an end to history. Simply because the world lacks competing ideologies does not mean evil will be eliminated. “Evil will always be inherent in human nature and will always be able to find an organizing principle.”

Krauthammer was echoed by Harries, who said that “one shouldn't underestimate the inventiveness and imagination of evil.” He said that “it's more certain that Marxism-Leninism has failed than that liberal democracy has triumphed,” adding the perspective that Fukuyama's article “could have been written in 1928.” At that time, he said, “the prospects for liberal democracy looked good … but then the Great Depression came and all bets were off.” The Depression made possible the rise of the Third Reich and, eventually, the Soviet-Nazi alliance that started World War II.

Himmelfarb warned that we should not be too complacent. Using a phrase familiar to anyone who has studied Soviet propaganda, Prof. Himmelfarb said: “It is no accident, comrades, that liberal democracy exists in so few countries.” Although both communist and Third World regimes seem attracted to liberal democracy because of its economic success, the finality of the triumph of liberal democracy depends on more than continued economic prosperity.

“Liberal democracy is a very difficult regime to sustain,” she said. It is fragile – it requires compromise, accommodation, civility, consensus on large questions.

There is little evidence that these nuances of democracy are understood by current communists seeking reform. Pipes pointed out that “the liberalization of the Soviet Union is an extremely superficial phenomenon.” He said that his conversations with reformers in Moscow showed him that they don't understand what liberalism really involves.

For example, they don't understand the idea of protecting the rights of accused criminals even if that person is obviously guilty of a crime. Concepts like habeas corpus are totally alien to them. A basic problem of perestroika is convincing Soviet citizens, steeped since birth in the teaching of Marx and Lenin, that it's okay to make a profit. These are all things we take for granted in the United States.

Fukuyama agreed that there is no certainty in the changes taking place in the world. “It looks increasingly dicey,” he said, that Gorbachev “can keep all the balls that he's juggling in the air.” He warned of a real threat of fascism in the Soviet Union, Slavophile fascists and militarists who make no secret of their anti-Semitism and disdain for non-Russian ethnic groups.

Still, he said, what you see in many countries is “liberalism corroding the moral basis” of political ideologies like communism. He used China as an example. Despite the June 4 massacre, he asserted, “Tiananmen Square vindicates my position.” The remarkable thing about the Chinese experience is that Deng Xiaoping's economic liberalization was supposed to take place without accompanying political reform. The people would not stand for that. The Chinese people, Fukuyama said, “wanted political liberalization not because it brings economic rewards but for itself.” The basic human urge for liberty is hard to stifle.

Ironically, Fukuyama's article about the end of history is just the beginning of what will be a long and fruitful debate about human nature and politics. Already some of the sharpest minds in the United States are participating in this subject.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

From the Archives: 2013 Nobel Peace Prize Recalls Chemical Weapons in Africa

Yesterday in Oslo it was announced that the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize will go to a group that monitors and discourages the use of chemical weapons in violation of international law.

As Alan Cowell reported in the New York Times,

Urging the destruction of an “entire category” of unconventional weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2013 Peace Prize on Friday to a modest and little-known United Nations-backed organization that has drawn sudden attention with a mission to ensure that Syria’s stocks of chemical arms are eradicated.

The award, to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, surprised some Nobel watchers partly because of the unprecedented nature of its current task: overseeing the destruction of a previously secret chemical weapons program quickly amid a raging civil war.

The award brought to mind an article I wrote almost a quarter-century ago about chemical-weapons use by the Soviet Union and its Cuban ally in Africa. Published in the New York City Tribune on July 25, 1989, the piece appeared under the headline, "Nerve Gas Use Poisons U.S. Relationship with Soviets." The headline is somewhat inaccurate, as the article is about calcium cyanide gas, not nerve gas (a distinction brought out in the text).

One sentence stands out as though it could have been written in recent weeks about the situation in Syria:

While 400 or 500 poison gas casualties among tens of thousands of Angolans killed by conventional mean in the past few years seems militarily insignificant, it appears that the Soviets and their Cuban surrogates are using Africa as a laboratory for inhuman experiments.

So far as I know, this article about chemical weapons deployment in Angola in the 1980s has not previously been available on the Internet.

- - -

Is the CIA covering up the use of chemical weapons by Soviet and Cuban forces in Angola? This question was raised recently when strong evidence came to light showing that calcium cyanide, a deadly poison with no known antidote, has been used by Cuban forces against Angolan civilians and supporters of UNITA, the anti-Marxist freedom fighters led by Dr. Jonas Savimbi.

Despite the physical evidence, which has been verified by teams of scientists in Austria, Belgium, Britain, and West Germany, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies refuse to acknowledge that the Soviets have a new chemical weapon nd that they are using it in Angola.

Prof. Aubin Heyndrickx, a distinguished toxicologist from the University of Ghent in Belgium, came to the United States recently to bring his findings regarding these chemical weapons to the attention of American policymakers. He said that U.S. officials are afraid to acknowledge the use of calcium cyanide in Angola for political reasons, because there is a “direct implication of Russia” in the evidence. The United States, he said, “is one of the most difficult countries in the world to accept realism.”

Prof. Heyndrickx describes calcium cyanide as unprecedently effective. It is, he says, faster at producing death than nerve gas. In doses too small to kill, it causes irreversible brain damage, skin burns and abrasions. The surviving victims, he said at a luncheon sponsored by the International Freedom Foundation in Washington, need our humanitarian assistance. They need new clothes, because often all the clothing in their villages has been contaminated by the poison. They need medical care. But most of all, they need recognition by Washington officials of their plight.

The overarching reason for official U.S. skepticism on this issue is the renewal of detente and good relations with Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika, and the fear of damaging East-West relations. But the more immediate concern for American diplomats as well as others (from Cuba, Angola, and South Africa) is the success of the Angola-Namibia settlement agreement signed last December. This agreement, the result of eight years of hard negotiations under the leadership of Chester Crocker, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, could be scuttled if news of chemical weapon use by Cuban forces became public.

In fact, Congress has mandated that if the president confirms that the Cubans are using chemical weapons in Angola, then the United States cannot provide money for the United Nations peacekeeping and transition forces in Namibia. The Bush Administration is hesitant to let Congress know – officially – that 400 to 500 Angolans are suffering the acute effects of calcium cyanide poisoning, not to mention the hundreds who have died since 1985, when the weapon was introduced to the Angolan conflict. As a result, despite the need for medical care in Western hospitals, the United States, Belgium, and the United Kingdom have denied entry visas to Angolans in great pain from cyanide gas poisoning. The authorities are afraid the victims' stories, once made public, will threaten fragile diplomatic efforts.

Still another reason why the intelligence community is afraid of this news coming to public attention is misplaced professional pride: the CIA and other agencies are embarrassed for not having discovered this new Soviet weapon. Moreover, because there is no known protective measure against this type of gas, nor any known antidote, its existence would throw NATO planning into a tizzy.

All the gas masks, all the poison gas pills, all the detection devices issued to NATO soldiers – all would be useless in the face of a Soviet calcium cyanide attack on the European front. Coincidentally, it has been demonstrated that in Afghanistan, Soviet troops have been testing new protective clothing and new types of gas masks. A captured gas mask is currently being examined by scientists in West Germany; no results of their investigation have yet been announced.

That is why this situation is worrisome. While 400 or 500 poison gas casualties among tens of thousands of Angolans killed by conventional mean in the past few years seems militarily insignificant, it appears that the Soviets and their Cuban surrogates are using Africa as a laboratory for inhuman experiments.

Like the Nazis and the communists who faced each other down during the Spanish Civil War, using the plains of Spain to test new weapons as a prelude to World War II, the Soviets and Cubans are testing this previously unknown poison on innocent Angolan civilians caught in the crossfire. Captured Angolan army officers have told Western intelligence agents that they themselves are not allowed to handle these weapons; only the Cubans use them under strict Soviet supervision.

Fortunately for the Angolan people, there has been no recorded use of these horrid weapons since April of this year. Still, that use came after the settlement agreement that is bringing an end to the 15-year-old conflict in the region and bringing independence to Namibia. It constitutes a violation of that agreement – not a minor violation, but a major breach of trust by one of the parties (Cuba) against the others (South Africa and the United States).

In light of the Soviets' use of poison gas against their own people in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi a few months ago, this situation should not go unnoticed. The Bush Administration should order a full-scale investigation.

Department of Defense scientists should go to Jamba in Angola, where an unexploded calcium cyanide bomb has been captured by UNITA soldiers and sits ready to be examined. The State Department should hurry along visa applications to allow gas victims to come to the United States for medical care.

President Bush should put pressure on our NATO allies to release the results of scientific studies that are currently being hidden from public view for political reasons, studies that demonstrate conclusively that new Soviet poison gas weapons have been used in Angola. The Soviets and Cubans should be called to account for this violation of human rights and the treaties that banned the use of such weapons more than 60 years ago.

Most of the world applauds the diplomacy that led to the Angola-Namibia settlement late last year. It would be foolish to jeopardize that agreement for trivial reasons. However, that risk is worth taking in order to expose to the world the Soviet Union's use of dangerous, new chemical weapons.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

Leon Gouré, 1922-2007

I learned from an obituary in Thursday's Washington Post that a sometime colleague of mine from the 1980s has passed away. According to the Post:

Leon Gouré, 84, a political scientist, Sovietologist and expert on Soviet civil defense, died March 16 of congestive heart failure at Capital Hospice in Arlington. He was a longtime resident of Potomac.

Mr. Gouré focused on civil defense at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were taking civil defense measures, even though the Cold War doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" required that both populations be vulnerable to nuclear annihilation. Convinced that the Soviets had concluded they could limit the damage and casualties resulting from nuclear war, Mr. Gouré reported in 1961 that the Soviet Union was quietly engaged in a massive civil defense buildup.

Back in the days when I was actively involved in the American Civil Defense Association (TACDA) and writing for the Journal of Civil Defense, I often found myself on the same program as Dr. Gouré. (There is, in fact, a Journal of Civil Defense cover that juxtaposes our head shots. Elsewhere on the page is a photograph of Edward Teller that must have been taken some 30 years earlier -- and this was published in August 1982!)

Though it would not be expected in a short obituary, the Post does not note that Gouré's views were controversial in the 1980s. There were those who argued that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union should have a civil defense capability. (That the arguments came from those outside the Soviet Union meant that their views were taken seriously only on one side of the Iron Curtain.)

In a brief article in the Journal of Civil Defense in June 1982, which I dug out of my personal archives but also found on line here, Gouré was quoted on page 25 as saying:

As the Soviets see it, no strategy or defense posture, and therefore no deterrent, can be fully credible or rational without a war survival capability, because it doesn't seem entirely reasonable that countries will deliberately court national suicide . . . the Soviets are absolutely right when they point out that in the nuclear age the fate of states does not depend only on what they do to each other but to a large and maybe decisive degree what happens to their own homeland . . .

In a "Too Good to File" feature in the February 1981 issue of the Journal (p. 22), there was an excerpt from a speech Gouré gave in Kansas City the previous December:

The Soviet Civil Defense Program is massive and comprehensive. It has been under way for some 30 years and has been repeatedly upgraded .... The program includes such things as the massive construction of blast shelters in the cities and in industrial sites, fallout shelters in rural areas, detailed planning of evacuation and dispersal of the urban population, yearly compulsory instruction of the entire population from school children to retirees, a wide range of methods to decrease the vulnerability of industry to attack (transportation and so on) ....

The civil defense system permeates the entire administrative, economic, educational and social structure of the USSR. You'll find it everywhere and at all levels ....

While the Soviet civil defense budget is kept secret estimates range as high as $35 per person per year - about what the Swiss spend right now on civil defense, although I would say a figure of about ... $15 to $22 per year is probably more likely.

Lest one get the impression that, because of his research interests, Leon Gouré was a dour individual, let me dispel that misapprehension. He had a sense of humor, too.

In a review of one of Gouré's many technical studies of Soviet civil defense (Journal of Civil Defense, February 1985, p. 21), Dr. Max Klinghoffer found an example of that humor:

Apparently some Russians, at least, have retained a sense of humor, according to Dr. Goure. One anecdote: "In the event of nuclear war, wrap yourself in a sheet, and walk to the cemetery. Why walk? To prevent panic." (One wonders if the teller of this story is now amusing his companions in Siberia.)

Gouré's work was admired and respected by his colleagues and associates. In that same review, Dr. Klinghoffer -- then president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, an organization that was established as a counterweight to Physicians for Social Responsibility -- began by saying:

Dr. Goure has again produced one of the most informative works on Soviet preparedness.

In a June 1984 review (p. 20) of another report produced by Gouré, Van E. Hallman wrote:

This comprehensive assessment of Soviet preparations for post-strike operations must be considered required reading for all persons interested in civil defense as well as those involved in governmental decision making or strategic analysis. As stated by Dr. Goure, "The Soviets are well aware that in a nuclear environment, post-strike operations will be difficult and complex and require extensive manpower and equipment. Therefore, from an organizational viewpoint, the great majority of the more than 20 million Soviet civil defense personnel are assigned roles in these operations." This statement, supported within the report by extensive evidence, should persuade skeptics that the Soviets intend to survive as a national entity in the event of a nuclear war between our two countries.

Reviewing Gouré's 1984 volume, Soviet Civil Defense Public Instruction and Training Programs, in the April 1985 issue of the Journal of Civil Defense, Dr. James M. Ridgeway began (p. 20):

This report should be read and weighed by legislators working on civil defense matters, and by the planners and managers of the national CD program in the U.S . It is a "buy" for local and State directors who need material for speeches and with which to update "strategic briefings" in instructional programs.

A brief excerpt from the February 1983 Journal of Civil Defense (p. 28) illustrates the sort of point/counterpoint debate that was going on during the last years of the Cold War. (I was intimately involved in these debates, participating in forums on college campuses around the country and on radio and television as well. Perhaps my most noteworthy appearance of this sort was on Crossfire, then co-hosted by Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden, in which my adversary was Australian anti-defense activist Helen Caldicott.) Leon Gouré was at the heart of it, too, though as someone who had been born in the Soviet Union and forced to flee both the Communists and the Nazis before arriving in the United States, he could speak with a greater degree of authority than folks like me:

Valentin M. Berezhkov, representative of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. said, "It's senseless to think someone could survive or win a nuclear war."

He said the Soviet Union has special organizations in case of natural disaster but the building of underground shelters ended in the 1960s.

"We realized it would not be good protection from nuclear war, so we didn't spend any more money on digging passages," Berezhkov said.

He countered U.S. speculation that the Soviet Union is prepared to evacuate cities and chided U.S. officials for promoting evacuation and relocation plans.

"It is impossible to evacuate. It takes only minutes for a nuclear warhead to get to (one nation from the other)," he said.

-- from a report in The Oregonian
on Valentin M. Berezhkov's
October address before the
United States Civil Defense Council

The case for the existence of a large Soviet CD capability is straight enough, irrefutable and is not a matter of opinion. It is based on analysis conducted over years by the U.S. intelligence community (see Director of Central Intelligence, Soviet Civil Defense, July 1978), on masses of Soviet civil defense publications - i.e., books, journals, newspaper articles, photography and films . . . on statements by Soviet leaders and military chiefs, on interviews with Soviet emigres, and on observations in the USSR by knowledgeable travelers. Incidentally, I have interviewed U.S. students who spent some time studying at the Moscow and Leningrad Universities, and they had no trouble finding evidence of Soviet CD or photographing Soviet shelters. Of course, foreign students are not allowed to attend the military CD courses at the universities which are compulsory for Soviet students.

- Leon Goure

The article about Leon Gouré in Thursday's Washington Post tells about a hazardous but no doubt exciting and educational experience as a youth:

Mr. Gouré was born in Moscow on Nov. 1, 1922. His father belonged to the Mensheviks, socialists allied with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution until they were liquidated by Vladimir Lenin. Most of the Mensheviks were Jewish.

The elder Gouré took his family into exile in Berlin in 1923. The Gourés were forced to flee again when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany a decade later. Settling in Paris, they fled a third time when the city fell to the Nazis in 1940. Leaving Paris on the last train out, they made their way to Hoboken, N.J.

Shortly after arriving in the United States, Mr. Gouré enlisted in the Army. He had never held citizenship in any country until a New York City judge granted expedited citizenship to 150 basic trainees, including Mr. Gouré.

Three years after his arrival in the United States, the fledgling U.S. citizen was back in Germany as an infantryman. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and later served in counterintelligence, where he used his fluency in German, French and Russian to interview Nazis and their collaborators who were being held after the war.

There is a movie in this. Someone should prepare a treatment to send to Hollywood. If The Good Shepherd can get made, why not The Voice in the Wilderness: The Leon Gouré Story? Perhaps George Clooney or Clive Owen could play the lead.