Volume 36, Number 5 · March 30, 1989
Dangerous Liaisons
By Gordon A. Craig
Der Teufelspakt: Die deutsch-russischen Beziehungen vom Ersten zum Zweiten Weltkrieg
by Sebastian Haffner
Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 153 pp., sf15.50
The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939–1941
by Anthony Read, by David Fisher
Norton, 687 pp., $25.00
Between Churchill and Stalin: The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Grand Alliance
by Steven Merritt Miner
University of North Carolina Press, 319 pp., $36.00
One of the most attractively situated restaurants in West Berlin is Nikolskoe, a Russian blockhouse that stands, together with a small church with an onion-shaped cupola, on a height above the Havel and provides its guests, as they dine on wild boar and other specialties, with a fine view of the Isle of Peacocks and the landscape of Mark Brandenburg on the other side of the water. The house, built in 1819, was the gift of the Prussian king Frederick William III to his son-in-law, the later Russian czar Nicholas I, and his wife Charlotte and was modeled after a blockhouse in St. Petersburg in which the king and the young married couple had spent happy hours. Charlotte promptly installed her coachman-in-ordinary, Ivan Bockow, in Nikolskoe, and he was soon dispensing schnapps, and later food, to the local peasantry, a practice that has continued. The church, St. Peter and Paul, was built in the Russian style by August Stüler and A.D. Schadow in 1837.
Review, 5428 words
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