:Stalin and the Cold War in Europe: The Emergence and Development of East‐West Conflict, 1939–1953.(The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series.)

Abstract

A distinguished German historian, Gerhard Wettig has written a solid and important study on the Soviet road to the Cold War. His book summarizes archival findings in Moscow and Berlin as well as literature in German and Russian. Wettig disagrees with those who take the United States and Great Britain to task as the initiators of Germany's division and depict Joseph Stalin as a vacillating, indecisive, and even marginal decision maker. The book contributes to the growing consensus that one cannot understand the Cold War's origins without considering Stalin's personality and policies, his intentions and miscalculations. The Kremlin leader is central to the book and Wettig's version of the Cold War. Stalin emerges as a control-obsessed leader, mistrustful of anybody and bent on “forceful territorial expansion” for ideological, but mostly imperial, motives. Stalin “saw himself as a Russian leader who had inherited the tsars' empire and would follow in their footsteps” (pp. 10–11). In 1939–1941, Stalin preferred to deal with Adolf Hitler, who seemed initially willing to share his appetite for aggrandizement. After Hitler's attack on the USSR, when the grand alliance emerged, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins did not oppose Stalin's desire to turn Eastern Europe into a “security belt” to protect the USSR. Stalin soothed U.S. concerns by verbally pledging to respect principles of national independence, non-intervention, and democratic freedom. This, according to Wettig, was just a mask. Stalin's design was from the start the systemic transformation of Eastern Europe. After a brief period of multiparty “people's democracy” to sooth Western fears, Stalinization would follow. Stalin did not anticipate any serious resistance from his temporary capitalist partners, expecting them to be engulfed in internecine struggle and postwar economic problems.