George Washington's Secret Weapon: The Polish Military Genius Tadeusz Kosciuszko

This is the amazing saga of a little-known, penniless Polish volunteer who was crucial to America’s War for Independence. If someone had just imagined his life, no one would believe it. Tadeusz Kosciuszko was born in 1746 to an impoverished noble family in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He managed to get a good military education but was exiled from his country for trying to elope with the beautiful daughter of a powerful magnate. Except for his knowledge, character, and striking good looks, he had few advantages when he left Europe with many others to fight in General Washington's rag-tag volunteer army. After he arrived in Philadelphia in 1776, Benjamin Franklin interviewed him and recommended him as an engineer in the Continental Army. Over the next few years, he played central roles in the world-changing American victory at Saratoga, the construction of impregnable fortifications at West Point, and in Nathanial Greene’s brilliant fight-and-run campaign through the Carolinas that led to a British surrender at Yorktown. He was the polar opposite of Benedict Arnold, the blood-and-glory hero of the Continental Army before he sold Kosciuszko’s West Point plans to the British for a general’s commission in their army. Arnold would also be unbelievable if someone had just made him up. So why did Arnold turn traitor? What made Kosciuszko the secret weapon of the Continental Army? How did Washington and his generals feel about this quiet Polish genius? How did he manage a close friendship with Thomas Jefferson while criticizing his slave-holding? How is Kosciuszko’s name pronounced? How about his impossible birthplace of Mereczowszczyzna? Why do few Americans know of his successful role in securing their independence while Poles revere him despite his failure to free their country?

     Yurii Mikhailovich Ustin, author of Labyrinths of Freedom, was born in 1959 in Minsk, the capitol of the Republic of Belarus (then the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic). In 1983 he graduated with honors from a police academy and until 1990 served in various assignments as a police officer. In 1990 he graduated from the Belorusian State University in Minsk with a law degree and resigned from police work. Since that time he has been employed as a lawyer and has founded his own law firm.
     In 2007 Ustin read the biography of Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Inspired by this legendary man, he wrote a movie script which he completed in 2011. However, after failing to find funding to produce a film, he used the script as the basis for his historical novel that was published in Russian in 2014 in Minsk. 
    Yurii Ustin is a member of the organization "Minsk Descendants of Nobility," and participates in activities dedicated to the memory of Tadeusz Kosciuszko in Poland and in Belarus, collaborating with the Polish Kosciuszko Foundation. In addition, he initiates activities in Minsk dedicated to the memory of Kosciuszko.
     Ustin is preparing material for a new book that is a logical continuation of the first: a history of Europe, Russia, and Poland up to the end of the Nineteenth Century. 
     He is married, the father of two children, a permanent resident of Minsk, and is involved in insurance and real estate business.