Problems of Post-War Construction in Soviet Foreign Policy Conceptions during World War II

Abstract

The question of how the Soviet leadership conceived of the post-war world is one of the most disputed and least investigated in historiography. In our country there prevailed for a long time a scheme according to which the USSR’s war-aims were consistently democratic, were directed against interference in the internal affairs of other countries and peoples, and were opposed to the West’s plans to divide the world into spheres of influence and partition Germany.¹ Western writers, on the other hand, wrote that the USSR planned ‘the export of revolution’, if not into the whole of Europe, at least into a considerable part of it, and accordingly its policy aimed at dividing Europe into hostile blocs.² Sometimes Soviet policy was seen as being guided by a mixture of motives and positions, with persons like Molotov and Dekanozov, viewed as exponents of a ‘hard line’, counterposed to the representatives of a soft line (with Litvinov alone named) who had less influence on the key decision-maker, Stalin.³