There has been a strong historiographical trend in recent years to argue that the Cold War and the division of the post-1945 order that it produced was neither inevitable nor preordained. That the division did emerge was the result of difficult circumstances rather than deliberate intent. Above all, reassessment of Joseph Stalin's role has tried to show a dictator cautious about alienating his wartime allies and hopeful that some kind of collaborative order might be created out of the residue of the Grand Alliance. Norman Naimark's new study of the immediate postwar years conforms to this new pattern. He insists that historians too often read back from the eventual split, rather than reading forward from a European politics that was more fluid and uncertain, in order to explain how the split came about.

To illlustrate his case that Stalin had no preconceived “road map” for Soviet policy in Europe, Naimark takes seven case studies to illustrate the extent to which Stalin and his regime approached the political problems of postwar Europe with a cautious realism rather than ideological zeal, unlike Hitler's overthrown New Order. The studies not only reveal Stalin's central personal involvement in Soviet foreign policy, often down to the smallest detail, but also the wide variety of policy responses to differing circumstances within a framework designed to secure Soviet interests without dangerously antagonizing his former, Western allies. Naimark acknowledges that Stalin and his cabinet certainly entertained ideas about a socialist, Soviet Europe thirty or fifty years down the line, but Stalin wanted slow, politically astute evolution, not a revolutionary spasm that would only invite American intervention.

Naimark's seven case studies, all supported by a wealth of primary and secondary source material, extend from the Danish-Soviet agreement over evacuation of the Baltic island of Bornholm, the crisis in Yugoslav-Albanian relations, Finnish independence, the Italian election of 1948, down to the Berlin Blockade, the end of Władysław Gomułka in Poland, and finally the tangled issue of what to do with postwar Austria. Interestingly, all but one, the Gomułka crisis, ended to the relative disadvantage of the Soviet Union, illustrating well the limits of Soviet power, or rather the degree of self-restraint that Stalin was happy to exercise. In the case of the split with Tito, explored here in terms of Yugoslav-Albanian politics, Stalin's self-restraint itself had limits. Unwilling to prompt American military intervention by precipitous action, he nevertheless condemned Tito to death and instructed the NKVD to assassinate him. It is difficult to judge whether the cautious approach was necessary, given the inability of Britain to intervene with any strength in Europe and America's ambivalent view of its commitment there, but what Stalin did not want was any risk of renewed warfare after the terrible experience of four years of war and the postwar counterinsurgencies waged in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Poland until the early 1950s.

Naimark understands that Stalin's priority was security in East Europe in order to prevent any further encroachment into Eurasia. That meant securing nations “friendly” to Soviet interests, and it is not difficult to understand why. The idea of “people's democracy” was one way to secure the Soviet bloc by encouraging an amalgamation of progressive political forces in establishing the new regimes. Stalin hoped this might extend to Italy, France, even Britain, where parliamentary politics might simply evolve into a variety of socialism compatible with Soviet interests. Naimark focuses on the margins of a Soviet-dominated Europe, but in the core countries—Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia—a rather different story might be told. People's democracy worked as long as it provided what Stalin wanted, but when it became unstuck, his instincts were always authoritarian. Naimark suggests that the turning point was the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Aid, in 1947–1948, but it is difficult to see any other outcome in the cordon sanitaire than communist political domination and subservience to the Soviet hegemon, a process that surely dates from the moment the Red Army entered Poland and Romania in 1944. The Polish Home Army could have written the script of what followed. Only the American and British lack of realism in the Polish case in 1944–1945 created the illusion that a different outcome was possible.

The great strength of Naimark's narrative lies in the detailed discussion from a largely Soviet perspective of key issues in postwar Europe, many of which are little known. But the wider assumption that, somehow or other, a different outcome might have been possible that did not divide West from East Europe is open to question. The constant arguments between the Allies in the last months of the war, the disagreements over the surrenders, the horsetrading over the founding of the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, show two sides with deep distrust and potential hostility between them. The new Labour Government in Britain in 1945 was fiercely anti-communist; American hostility to communism readily resurfaced in 1945 to pick up the threads of 1940. However much the Soviet side talked of peaceful coexistence and popular democracy, the doublespeak of dictatorship was clear. Exposing it provoked deep Soviet resentments. For all the concessions in Denmark, Austria, or Finland, East Europe was never going to be an area where Stalin agreed to any concessions.