I remember one day about 40 years ago hearing a deep, rumbling, crumpling noise coming from beyond the eastern horizon.
Turned out Jimmy Carter had just appointed Zbigiew Brzezinski as SecDef, I think it was (or NSA, I forget which). The noise was Russian sphincters imploding in Moscow, as they contemplated a Polish-American Ph.D. with 800 years of Polish history at his fingertips, in which the Katyn Forest massacre was something that happened just last week, sitting next to the levers of power.
Sample Russki-puckering exchange: In a staff discussion of nuclear scenarios, Zbig asked some briefer how many Russians a general exchange with the United States would kill. The briefer tossed off an estimated number of Soviet KIA's Union-wide, but Zbig stopped him. "No," he said, "I asked you, 'How many Russians would it kill?'" He meant "Great Russians", Russian-Russians, the architects and backbone of the Soviet Evil Empire, and the Russians would get that when it got back to them ..... and squirm. Zbig was vivisecting them in his mind, thinking how to take apart and kill the Russian Empire, stone cold dead beyond any chance of resuscitation.
Something our guys should have seen to, 15 years ago, when we had the chance and the old Communist bosses were on their ass.