While much has been written about the politics of history in Poland and in the USSR, in his meticulously researched book Jan Szumski is the first to explore at length how the Soviets controlled and contested Polish history-writing in the two decades after the war.Few historians have ever disputed that the Soviet authorities closely monitored and even shaped the politics of history broadly understood throughout its East European empire.But Szumski, a researcher at the Institute of the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, contributes to the field by tracing the minute details of the this key aspect of Soviet-Polish cultural relations.