It is hard to recover any sense of open-endedness and possibility in the early phase of the Cold War: the Red Army had its boots on the ground in Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, and Berlin, and Stalinist rhetoric rose to a new pitch of “anticosmopolitan” xenophobia. But Naimark, with great perspicacity, insists on a more complex picture. He draws a portrait of a “hyperrealist” Stalin, who had no interest in provoking the Western allies and declined to press the local communist cause in places (notably Greece) where it seemed to have chances of success. The ideological rigidity of the late Stalin era was belied by the flexibility and pragmatism Stalin showed in the international arena. He distinguished between core and peripheral areas of Soviet interest, and even in the core understood that it was preferable to bring about “people's democracy” by something other than naked violence. The Danish island of Bornholm...
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