Are the Russians hiding under the bed?

It sounds like a question from the Joseph McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. It is easily forgotten that Robert Kennedy and many other political household names got their start supporting anti-communism and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

One of the reasons that Lyndon Johnson was so aggressive in Vietnam was to prove his meddle as an anti-communist.

Whether the Russians did interfere in U.S. elections, and whether Donald Trump and his buds are too intimate with Vladimir Putin, the current Russian dictator and Czar, are questions that beg to be answered. However, let us not forget that there was a time when the United States got into the sack with one of the most evil men the world has ever known, Joseph Stalin.

Winston Churchill felt his skin crawl in just having to think about the butcher of Moscow. Stalin was not merely the leader of the old Soviet Union during World War II, but he was in fact one of the greatest murderers of all time.

The United States and the allies supported Stalin, gave his country valuable lend-lease weaponry, and entered into dubious pacts with Stalin in order to defeat the even more evil Adolf Hitler, may his name be erased. Most historians take the view that the allies had no choice but to make a deal with and do business with the likes of Joseph Stalin.

The Germans had conquered most of Europe and were on their way to the Kremlin.

The United States, isolationist and fearful, stayed out of the war until the Japanese did the free world the favor of attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor.

No one could have been happier at the turn of events that Churchill himself.

With the United States in the war, there was a chance that Roosevelt’s connections with the Soviets would swing the balance of power to the allies. Stalin, evil cretin that he was, first made a deal of nonaggression with Hitler.

The latter was dumb or crazy enough to violate the deal and attack the Russians.  Churchill could not believe the good turn of fortune.

The insanity of the Japanese and the irrationality of the Germans brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the defense of the British Empire.  Had the Germans picked off one country at a time, Great Britain almost certainly would not have survived even with the vast convoys that made their way from the United States to our embattled ally.

With the United States and the Soviet Union in the war against the Butcher of Berlin, it was necessary to forge an alliance with the Soviets. So mistrusting was Churchill of the Soviets that there were times when he refused to share intelligence with them. Roosevelt had a more practical approach.

The ill elder statesman who came to power during the Great Depression may not have been a big fan of Stalin but he was willing to benefit from Russian blood.

Many historians believe that the tens of millions of Russians who were slaughtered in World War II made possible the allied victory over Nazi Germany. By the time the allies entered Germany, the Soviets may have had double the number of troops of the U.S. and Britain combined.

There are those who believe that at the Yalta Conference, the United States ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviets and later China to the Communists.

The reality is that the West had little choice. The Soviets had already conquered Eastern Europe and it was only by a turn of good luck that they did not occupy Greece as well.

On a personal level, I remember the story of the two survivors of my mother’s family. Both Avraham Schneps and his son, Joseph, managed to escape the death camps of Europe and fought for the Red Army.

They somehow managed to survive the war, although their spouses and the rest of the family who were simple Polish peasant farmers living outside of Krakow, went up in the smoke that was the carnage against the Jewish community in Europe.

After the war, Avraham and Joseph were rewarded for their service to the Soviet Empire by being sent to Siberia with most of the rest of what was left of Soviet Jewry. How they survived and eventually made their way to Israel is a story for another column.

I still remember the tears rolling down the face of my grandmother, Pesel, who had come to the United States before World War II, when she learned that her brother and nephew had survived.

Hitler was the devil, and Stalin was a demon.

Patrick Buchanan, the Nixon speechwriter, even went so far as to claim that the United States fought the wrong war and should have cooperated with the Germans to defeat Soviet Communism!

For him, perhaps six million Jewish incinerated bodies were not enough.

The question is whether Donald Trump and his future cabinet members will sell the United States down the river by trying to become cozy with Putin and the new Russian Empire?  Putin certainly is not to be trusted, and does not have the interests of the United States or the Free World close to his heart.  Putin is a ruthless, calculating despot whose only interest is to enlarge his own domain.

On the other hand, the Russians have every reason to be in abject fear of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.  Islamic terror is nipping at the corners of the Russian Empire, while the United States flops around trying to search for security in an insecure world.

There may indeed be a reason and basis to cooperate with the Russians, so long as we do not relinquish our ideals nor our influence to the new King of the Kremlin.

Only a very sophisticated and careful approach can utilize the Russians as temporary allies in the struggle of Western civilization against the darkness of the multi-headed terrorist snake.

We must be strong and smart enough to make the Russians understand that they are not going to mess with our republican form of democracy, but at the same time there are ways in which we can work with Putin rather than waging a McCarthyite irrelevant war against him.

This is neither a liberal nor a conservative choice, nor a republican or a democratic food fight.

The issue is whether our leadership will be able enough to work with the Russians to the extent that it is in our interests, while laboring assiduously to assure our fundamental freedom?

What is key is that we not exercise kneejerk reactions either against or in favor of the Russian Ragamuffin.

Cliff Rieders practices law in Williamsport and is past president of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association.