THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

The dominant conflict during the forty-five years following the end of World War II was the hostility and competition between the Soviet Union and the West, in particular the United States. It is not surprising, therefore, that the origin of this conflict, the cold war, has occasioned an enormous and varied historiography. As is usually the case, the changes in approach of American historians occurred not because they learned new facts about Soviet Russia, but because American politics, society, and public opinion changed. In the two decades following 1945, American historians were practically unanimous: the cold war was the fault of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, according to this view, was based on the explicit premise of spreading world revolution. Communism, like Nazism, was inherently expansionist, and therefore the West had no choice but to respond to Soviet threats. That response, such as building up military and economic power, the Marshall Plan, and the formation of NATO, was ultimately successful, and Soviet expansion was checked.

For Western scholars, the main evidence of Soviet expansionist designs was the creation of a system of satellites in Eastern Europe. These scholars believed that the Soviet leaders had a blueprint for world conquest in which the incorporation of Eastern Europe was merely the first step. They described a pattern: at first everywhere or almost everywhere in Eastern Europe, the Communists created a genuine coalition government of antifascist parties.