Written in 1974, Dr. Checinski’s grossly under-recognized and under-utilized analytical tour de main provided inarguably the most in depth examination of the Soviet and Polish defense industrial bases and their perverse economic proclivities to come out of the “West” during the Cold War. A trained and brilliant economist, he paints an almost Dostoevskyian portrait of a military industrial complex most aptly characterized by the Russian Grandmaster Mikhail Tal’s description of chess: “You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.”

Dr. Michael Checinski was a Polish-born Israeli academician and scholar and Holocaust survivor who spent his formative years serving as an officer in the Ludowe Wojsko Polskie — or the Polish People’s Army. He variously served as a part of the Polish military’s counter-intelligence division, as a lecturer at the counter-intelligence school, as a senior lecturer at the Institute of War Economy and as a faculty member of War Economics at the Polish Military-Political Academy. He emigrated to Israel in 1969 and served in the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, with an occasional leave taken to be an associate at Harvard University’s Russian Research Center. He passed away in Haifa, Israel in 2011.