Abstract
The Second World War was only partly about the defeat of Nazism. It was also about a geographical conflict between Germany and Russia that had its origins in the nineteenth century. It was about the role that Britain and France might play in restraining or taking advantage of that Germano-Russian conflict. It was about the place of small powers on the continent of Europe. And it was about the role that one extra-European power (the USA) was to play in the affairs of Europe.
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Notes
Djilas, M., Conversations with Stalin, trans. by M. B. Petrovich (New York, 1962) p. 114.
Mastny, V., Russia’s road to the Cold War (New York, 1979) pp. 142–4.
Seton-Watson, H.,The East European Revolution (London, 1950) pp. 170–1.
Campbell, J. C., ‘Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe: An Overview’, in S. M. Terry (ed.), Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe (New York, 1984) P. 3.
Bohlen, C., Witness to history (London, 1973) pp. 153.
See US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943–45, quoted in C. S. Maier, ‘Revisionism and the Interpretation of Cold War origins’, Perspectives in American History, Vol. IV, 1970, p. 314.
The ‘revisionist controversy’ has spawned an extensive literature, both ‘for’ and ‘against’. For the traditional viewpoint see W. H. McNeill, America, Britain and Russia, Their Co-operation and Conflict, 1941–6 (London, 1953);
H. Feis, Roosevelt-Churchill-States (Princeton, NJ, 1957);
A. Ulam, Expansion and Co-existence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–1967 (New York, 1968).
For the ‘revisionist’ thesis (in a number of variations) see inter alia: G. Kolko, The Politics of War: Allied Diplomacy and the World Crisis of 1943–45 (London, 1968);
D. Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, 1977);
G. Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (London, 1966), and Cold War Essays (New York, 1970 );
D. Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign, Policy and the Cold War (London, 1967). Alperowitz, whilst altering some aspects of his thesis, remains committed to its central tenets: see the preface to his revised (1985) version.
See also: O. Riste (ed.), Western Security: The Formative Years: European and Atlantic Security, 1947–53 (Oslo, 1985).
Theocharis, A. G., The Yalta Myths: An Issue in US Politics, 1945–55 (Columbia, Missouri, 1970) especially chapters 2, 4, 8, 11.
Erickson, J., The Road to Berlin (London, 1983) p. 473.
Sherwood, R., Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York, 1948), p. 876.
Thomas, H., Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War 1945–46 (London, 1986) p. 96.
Rees, D., The Age of Containment (London, 1971) p. 12.
Churchill, W. S., Triumph and Tragedy (Vol. VI of his History of the Second World War) (London, 1953) pp. 633–5. Quoted in R. Edmonds ‘Yalta and Potsdam: 40 years on’, International Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 2, Spring 1986, p. 205.
Edmonds, R., Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (London, 1983) p. 206.
Kovrig, B., The Myth of Liberalism: East-Central Europe in US Diplomacy and Politics since 1941 (Baltimore and London, 1973) p. 45.
Kolakowski, L., Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3 The Breakdown (Oxford, 1981) pp. 121–4.
Voslensky, M., Nomenklatura (London, 1984) p. 321.
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© 1991 Royal United Services Institute
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Freeman, J. (1991). Post-War Europe. In: Security and the CSCE Process. RUSI Defence Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10741-4_2
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