By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

In his youthful adolescence Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later to rake the name Stalin, had loved the name Koba. In 1909, Koba is said to have walked behind his wife's coffin, holding his infant son. She "softened my heart," he confided to an old friend. "Now she is dead, and with her passing goes my last drop of feeling for mankind." Placing his hand on his chest, Koba lamented, "Here, in here, everything is empty, unutterably empty."1

In Georgian folklore, Koba had been a romantic revolutionary, a Robin Hood character seeking to kill the tsar. Betrayed by one of his accomplices, Koba killed the betrayer. A few years after his wife's funeral, Iosif gradually changed his name from Koba to Stalin, meaning "man of steel." From romantic hero to man of steel; such was the evolution of Stalin's self-image.2

In 1909, Stalin was thirty-one years old. He was a relatively unknown, dedicated communist revolutionary, in and out of Russian prisons, in and out of labor camps, continually escaping from the police and from internal exile. He had no close friends, no intimate ties with other people, except perhaps his mother and his wife. As a child growing up in Georgia he had been repeatedly beaten and then abandoned by his father. His mother had nurtured him. With the help of others, she had sent the young Stalin to the Gori Church School and to the Tiflis Theological Seminary. He was a devout, intelligent, and ambitious student. His years of education there, the only formal education he ever had, left a significant imprint. Stalin learned to think in absolutes-in dogma, in ritual, and in struggle.3 Yet he despised religion. "Endless prayers and enforced religious training," his daughter, Svetlana, later wrote, brought "extreme skepticism of everything heavenly, of everything sublime."4

The ideology of Marxism-Leninism became Stalin's religious doctrine; his ritualistic practice, the making of revolution. As a teenager in the seminary, he mastered Russian and began secretly reading radical and Marxist literature. In 1899, when he was twenty-one, he left the seminary, aligned himself with small groups of Georgian Marxists, and started agitating among the tiny working class in Tillis and Baku. Stalin never had any real job. His job was revolution.5

What motivated Stalin's decision to become a revolutionary? Little is known, and even his most authoritative biographers have little to say on this subject. A few years after the Bolshevik revolution and long before he reached the pinnacle of power, he answered the question this way: "It is difficult to describe the process. First one becomes convinced that existing conditions are wrong and unjust. Then one resolves to do the best one can to remedy them."6

But, in fact, Stalin wrote and said rather little about injustice. "He had a cold heart," said Sergo Beria, son of one of Stalin's secret police chiefs, a man also with a very cold heart. Stalin's mind, wrote one of his most able Russian biographers, "lacked a single noble feature, a trace of humanitarianism, to say nothing of love of mankind."7 Svetlana poignantly noted that her father joined the revolutionary movement "not as an idealistic dreamer of a beautiful future, like my mother's family ... ; not as an enthusiastic writer like Gorky, who described in romantic hyperboles the coming Revolution .... He chose the way of a revolutionary because in him burned the cold flame of protest against society, in which he himself was at the bottom of the ladder should be given to someone else who might be "more patient, more loyal, more respectful and attentive to the comrades, less capricious and so on."12

Stalin was not removed. He maneuvered deftly and capitalized on the rift between Trotsky and other Bolsheviks such as Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. Stalin initially did not stake out clear positions on how to manage the economy, deal with the peasantry, or rapidly modernize the economy. In 1924, he wrote the most important theoretical tract of his career, "The Foundations of Leninism," but none of his comrades looked to him for theoretical solutions to basic issues. While leftists and rightists in the party argued fiercely over the role of the market, the organization of agriculture, and the pace of industrialization, Stalin shifted his alignments to defeat the Trotskyites and outwit the leftists. He then adopted the latter's program to vanquish Nikolai Bukharin, who was inclined to work with the kulaks, or wealthy peasants, and who envisioned a more peaceful and evolutionary transition to socialism. By 1930, Stalin was the fiercest proponent of rapid industrialization and collectivization.13

What is striking about Stalin and his gradual rise to unquestioned domination in the party and in the Soviet Union is his tactical ambiguity, pragmatic zealotry, and opportunism. "What stands out," writes one of his preeminent biographers, "is his slowness to adapt to crises and changes. His instinct at every key moment was to temporize, think things over, and only then adjust to the new situation." 14 In difficult political situations, a key aide wrote, "he frequently had no idea what to do or how to behave, but was able to disguise his hesitation, often acting after the event rather than providing leadership." 15

One should not be too surprised by these tactical shifts. Stalin was fond of quoting Lenin: "A Marxist must take cognizance of real life," of concrete realities. Marxist-Leninist theory was a science that "does not and cannot stand still." Its "propositions and conclusions are bound to change in the course of time, are bound to be replaced by new conclusions and propositions corresponding to the new historical conditions." 16 Stalin's thinking was always fluid, shifting, tactical, and expedient. But theory and ideology were important to him, notwithstanding the simplicity and flexibility of his ideas. Marxism was the scientific study of history. Society was governed by certain laws. Communism represented the future. Change was inevitable. Struggle was essential. Power had to be seized and maintained.

There could be no revolutionary movement, he believed, without revolutionary theory. Theory and ideology provided a framework for comprehending the world and for interpreting the unfolding of events, a guide for understanding threats and grasping opportunities, a lens through which to see the changing correlation of forces among classes, a means for understanding the actions and machinations of imperial powers.17

Stalin believed that the "fundamental question of every revolution is the question of power." 18 The party had to preserve its power in the Soviet Union. Since the conditions for socialism did not yet exist, the party had to use the state to build socialism, for that alone justified its power.19 "The construction of Socialism in the Soviet Union," Stalin wrote, "would be a momentous turning point in the history of mankind, a victory for the working class and peasantry of the U.S.S.R., marking a new epoch in the history of the world."20

But socialism, as he saw it, was endangered from within and without. Ideology and experience confirmed this view. Bourgeois ideas lingered in the minds of men and women even after the revolution and had to be eradicated. The proletarian state, Stalin said, must use force, unrestricted by law, to suppress the bourgeoisie. But it would take time, an entire historical epoch. In the meantime, the party had to stand at the head of the working class and serve as its general staff. It had to have "unity of will, complete and absolute unity of action. "21

Unity at home was imperative, because even graver dangers lurked in the international arena. Imperial nations aimed to crush the revolution. Already by the mid-1920s, Stalin came to believe that Bolsheviks could not wait for revolution to succeed abroad. They had to "consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country, using it as a base for defeat of imperialism in all countries. "22 For Stalin, capitalist encirclement was an ongoing, mortal danger. Soviet Russia was weak. Indeed, the whole "history of Russia [was] one unbroken record of the beatings she suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her for her backwardness. "23

The immediate task was to strengthen Soviet Russia. Rapid industrialization was urgent. "The industrialization of the country would ensure its economic independence, strengthen its power of defense and create the conditions for the victory of Socialism in the U.S.S.R." In the late 1920s, Stalin claimed that his domestic foes, such as Bukharin, would unwittingly destroy the revolution. Their policies would preserve Soviet Russia as an agrarian nation, producing foodstuffs, exporting raw materials, and importing machinery. Such plans were tantamount to the "economic enslavement of the U.S.S.R. by the industrially developed foreign countries, a plan for the perpetuation of the industrial backwardness of the U.S.S.R. for the benefit of the imperialist sharks of the capitalist countries. "24

Stalin could not tolerate such an approach. The first task of planning, he later explained, was "to ensure the independence of the socialist economy from the capitalist encirclement. This is absolutely the most important task. It is a type of battle with world capitalism. "25 In 1931, he exhorted industrial managers: "The tempo must not be reduced! ... To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten."26 To be beaten would mean the defeat of the inevitable march of history.

To avoid defeat and achieve rapid industrialization, Stalin had to eradicate his enemies. He had, most of all, to crush the kulaks, who the party claimed were withholding food from the cities and thwarting his industrialization program. After Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture in 1928-29, he forced fifteen million people into collective farms; those who protested were arrested, shipped off to labor camps, or killed. Then he demanded even larger grain deliveries to the state. When famine erupted in 1932-34, he cared not a whit. Millions perished from starvation. He demanded silence. Merely to speak of the famine could mean death.27

With his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin was callous and domineering. Depressed, jealous, and suffering from migraine headaches, she committed suicide in 1932. Stalin, mortified, grieved as few had ever seen him grieve. "I can't go on living like this," he lamented. He threatened to resign, and ruminated about killing himself. But he lived and ruled. In fact, he grew more distant, more suspicious, and more paranoid. Ice, writes the historian Robert Service, "entered his soul. "28

Between 1932 and 1938 Stalin extinguished every trace of opposition within the Politburo, the Kremlin's ruling body, although very little existed.

His lust for power was absolute. No longer did it suffice to defeat his foes; Stalin now had to have them executed. They might recant; they might admit they were enemies of the revolution, but they had to die. Tortured, they might acknowledge, falsely, that they conspired against Stalin, or the state, or socialism, but they had to die. They might acknowledge that they had schemed with enemies abroad, but they had to die. His old comrades from the revolution-Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin-were shot. His former allies in the Politburo were shot. His military chieftains were shot. Friends and relatives were shot. The executioners were then shot. During 1937 and 1938, Stalin signed 383 lists, directly sending 40,000 human beings to their deaths. He also catalyzed a reign of terror by subordinate cadres everywhere. Overall, almost a million people died in the purges of 1937-38; millions more were sent to camps in Siberia and the Arctic, to the Gulag, where they died from work, starvation, disease, and despair.29

Top party officials shared Stalin's fears. They were acutely aware that their policies were failing. Millions of peasants and urban proprietors were angry and confused; millions of others had been killed or died of starvation. "Nobody really understood how the economy was working or should work, not even its new directors."3o The party elite in Moscow put the blame on regional leaders; regional leaders accused their local enemies; rank-and-file communists wreaked revenge on local leaders they despised. In 1937-38 the result was mass terror and mass murder, some of it carefully orchestrated from above, some of it unleashed from below. But what united the perpetrators was their insecurity, their fear for the safety of the regime, and their concern for their careers, which they had linked to the success of socialism. In their worldview, "the future of humanity depended on socialism. Socialism in turn depended on the survival of the Soviet revolutionary experiment, which depended on keeping the Bolshevik regime united, tightly disciplined, and in control of a society that frequently exhibited hostility to that regime. "31

Hence, party leaders united around Stalin, the man of steel, who could keep everything in check and preserve the revolution. He, in turn, was certain that his followers needed a tsar, a tsar with a vision of the future that transcended the petty everyday needs of humankind. Even his victims who knew him best did not contest his right to crush the foes of revolution. Facing death, Bukharin wrote a letter to his old comrade, Koba, pleading for his life but also acknowledging, with evident sincerity, that he "knew all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty for me to place the question of my own person on a par with the universal-historical tasks, resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. "32

On Stalin's mind was betrayal in time of war. Stalin and his allies worried that internal dissidents, disillusioned workers, disaffected peasants, and aggrieved minorities might align with a foreign invader. The purges and mass deportations focused on national and social groups that might form a "fifth column" in time of war.33 Many years later, V. M. Molotov, then premier, admitted that many victims of the purges were not, in fact, spies. But they could not be trusted.34

In Moscow, the revival of German power under Hitler generated great anxiety. Stalin expected conflict, and Marxist-Leninist ideology predicted war, but whether it would be a war among the Kremlin's capitalist and fascist adversaries (which might ensnare the Soviet Union) or a direct assault on Soviet Russia was not clear. Ideology offered competing strategic visions and uncertain solutions. Stalin's foreign minister in the 1930s, Maxim Litvinov, advocated formation of popular fronts with bourgeois parties and bourgeois governments willing to collaborate with the Kremlin. Stalin himself embraced this option for a few years, but not with a great deal of conviction. His ardor for it withered as Nazi Germany swallowed Austria in 1938 and the prospective Western allies practiced appeasement at the Munich Conference and relinquished slices of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Worried about Japanese aggression as well, and seeing no indication that Britain was serious about military coordination in opposition to Hitler, Stalin switched directions, made Molotov his foreign minister, and opted for the infamous NonAggression Pact with Germany, signed in August 1939. Stalin "saw two great benefits in the new arrangement: the USSR would avoid immediate involvement in the pan-European war and at the same time it could embark on a search for security through spheres of influence in eastern Europe. "35

Stalin used the alliance with Nazi Germany to act opportunistically. He invaded eastern Poland, annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and fought Finland to achieve greater defense in depth. He had long believed that "to destroy the danger of foreign capitalist intervention, the capitalist encirclement would have to be destroyed."36

The fate of the peoples living in these countries was sorrowful. Stalinism now replicated itself in eastern Poland and the Baltic. Land was expropriated, property nationalized, local officials and businesspeople shot or imprisoned. Two million Poles were deported to some of the bleakest parts of Siberia. About twenty thousand Polish officers were rounded up on Stalin's personal orders and systematically shot in the tranquil forest around Katyn and in other areas. No potential Polish resistance to Soviet control would be tolerated.37

Stalin knew he would have to fight a war with Germany, although he tried to delay it as long as possible. He dramatically accelerated his rearmament efforts and staked out an ambitious claim for a sphere of influence in southeastern Europe, Iran, and Turkey. His new vision of security encompassed the Balkans, the Turkish Straits, and the Persian Gulf. But he was not prepared to launch a preemptive attack or a war of aggression, as some writers have suggested.38

Stalin wanted to buy time, capitalizing as much as he could on what he regarded as the intracapitalist conflict in the West, the war long contemplated by Leninist theory. Meanwhile, he sought to appease Hitler, knowing that it was just a matter of time until war erupted. Having decimated his officer corps in the purges, Stalin knew his new commanders required time to train their troops, to plan, and to configure their forces effectively. He worked assiduously to avoid provocations that might justify a German attack. In the spring of 1941, he disregarded warning after warning that an invasion was imminent. When a German soldier deserted on the eve of battle and warned the Soviet Union that the attack would occur the next day, Stalin ordered that he be shot. Until the very end, Stalin calculated that Hitler would not attack until he had defeated his capitalist-imperialist rivals, or with the forces he then had available, or so late in the spring, when only a few months remained for an offensive campaign before winter arrived.39

On 22 June 1941, 146 German divisions attacked the Soviet Union across a very broad front. Hitler's aim was to make Stalin's socialist commonwealth a slave state, yet Stalin failed utterly to comprehend this.4o Ideology distorted his view of his adversaries. Now, however, "revolutionary patriotism," meaning the preservation of the Soviet state, was his main foreign policy goa1.41

Little more than a year after the German invasion, on 14 August 1942, Pravda printed a typical article, "Death to the Baby-Killers," and the next day the article reappeared in many local newspapers throughout the Soviet Union. The history of war, the article began, had never known such cruel acts as those being perpetrated by Hitler's fascist scoundrels and two-legged beasts. Everywhere in the lands they occupied, vile oppressors raped women, tormented old men, tortured paws, and abused innocent children. Read these lines, comrades, the story went on; read this letter to a Red Army soldier from his sisters in the Smolensk region.

Vera and Zina wrote to their brother, Kolya, that it was hard to describe what they were enduring. Hitler's butchers had seized Valya Ivanova, secretary of the local soviet, wanting her to reveal the names of local partisans. They tied her hands, brought in her children, and cut off their right ears. Then they pitted out the right eye of her son and chopped off five fingers of her daughter's hand. Watching the torture of her children, Valya died of a heart attack. The Nazi cannibals then marched to the neighboring village, seized more children and the elderly, forced them into a shed, and set it ablaze.

The article ended with a long exhortation. We must endure; we must fight on; we must exterminate the German fascists. Kill the Germans; kill the child-devouring beasts. Either we defeat the German hordes, or they annihilate us and our children. Soviet soldiers, not a step backward! Save us, warriors of the Red Army, defenders of the Don and Kuban rivers. Save us! The blood of our children demands revenge; death to the baby-killers!42

Suffering. Grief. Death. They were everywhere. On the battlefields and in German concentration camps, the Nazis killed nine million Soviet soldiers. Beyond the battlefields, the Nazis murdered, crushed, tormented, and enslaved. For them, as one of their own generals unabashedly stated, it "was an ideological war of extermination. "43

In the Soviet lands they occupied, the Germans destroyed more than 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages, leaving more than 25 million people homeless. In these occupied areas, they murdered 7 million civilians and allowed 4 million additional people to die of hunger, disease, and indifference. The Germans captured and deported as slave labor another 5 million adults.

Overall, wartime deaths on the Soviet side amounted to 9 million soldiers and 26-27 million human beings in toto (these included several million killed on Stalin's orders). But such cold figures hardly begin to describe the personal tragedy that afflicted and beleaguered almost every human being in the Soviet Union. Even with the new documents, diaries, memoirs, and oral accounts, we can still scarcely imagine the sorrow and challenges of those years. "Virtually every individual had been involved in the war effort and was traumatized by the war experience. "44

But along with the grief came a burning desire for revenge, icious revenge. "If you haven't killed a German in the course of a day, your day has been wasted," wrote llya Ehrenburg, one of the most famous Soviet wartime correspondents and postwar writers. "If you have killed one German, kill another: nothing gives us so much joy as German corpses. Your mother says to you: kill the German! Your children beg of you: kill the German! Your country groans and whispers: kill the German! Don't miss him! Don't let him escape! Kill!"45

Mass murder was nothing new to Stalin. But now his socialist experiment was imperiled, his personal power threatened, his country's very existence at risk. He had misjudged his enemy_ He fas humiliated and infuriated. Hearing reports of the relentless advance of Hitler's armies during the first days of the attack, he muttered, "Lenin founded our state, and we've fucked it up. "46 During those terrible days in late June 1941, Stalin labored to organize the battlefront and sustain the homefront, but the news was devastating.46 Hundreds of Soviet divisions were annihilated. Nazi troops headed toward Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. Their method of waging war immediately became clear; prisoners of war, Jews, and civilian members of the Communist Party were slaughtered.

On 27 June, "Stalin abruptly stopped ruling." Sulking, he retreated alone to his dacha at Kuntsevo. When members of the Politburo came to the dacha on 30 June, Stalin appeared thin, haggard, and indecisive. Half expecting they were coming to arrest him, he queried, "Why have you come?" In fact, they had come to urge him to take command of the armed forces and to rally the people. They knew nobody but Stalin had the capacity to salvage the socialist experiment, now on the verge of extinction.48

On 3 July, Stalin addressed the nation. Invoking patriotism rather than communism, he told his listeners, whom he called "friends" and "brothers and sisters," that the country had been attacked without provocation. The homeland was endangered. Patriotism demanded sacrifice. The enemy was fierce but could be defeated. It would not be an ordinary war; it would be a total war. The next day Pravda called it a "Fatherland war."49

But words could not stop the Nazi armies. They pushed forward on three fronts, besieging Leningrad and advancing hundreds of miles toward Moscow. There was chaos at the battlefronts and panic behind them. Stalin ordered the capital evacuated. Women and children fled the city. Looters took over. Stalin told his dead wife's sisters, "Things are very bad! Get yourself evacuated. One can't stay in Moscow." To them, Stalin seemed confused, even crushed.50 During these first six months of war, 2.6 million Red Army soldiers were killed in action, almost 3.5 million were taken prisoner, and 500,000 were shot.51

And the civilian suffering never ceased. In Minsk, the Nazis imposed a regime of "permanent terror." Spontaneous acts of murder were the norm. Around Leningrad, the Nazis stopped the inflow of food and fuel. In that beleaguered city, thousands began to die every day from starvation. In the countryside, the Nazis systematically slaughtered Jews and partisans.52

But Stalin did mobilize his iron will. He was, after all, the man of steel. He did not leave Moscow, and he personally assumed overall command of the war effort. For those weaker than he, he had no mercy. He ordered that soldiers not retreat; should they do so, they were to be shot. He ordered that soldiers not surrender; should they do so, they would never be forgiven. If officers allowed themselves to be captured, their wives would be arrested. When Stalin's own son, that infant whom he carried in his arms on the day of his first wife's burial, and whom he immediately abandoned to the care of others, was captured by the Germans, Stalin refused to make a prisoner exchange. His son's wife was arrested and sent to a labor camp for two years.53

Stalin purged and shot the officers whom he regarded as responsible for the Soviet tragedy. He arrested and deported millions of ethnic Germans, Tatars, and other minorities whose loyalty he suspected. Though he placed the fate of the Red Army and the defense of Leningrad and Moscow in the hands of the young general Georgi Zhukov-a soldier of genius: tough, courageous, flexible, and demanding-he never fully trusted him and feared Zhukov's growing esteem. But Stalin was shrewd enough to realize that he had found a commander of determination and imagination. In December 1941, Zhukov organized a counteroffensive outside Moscow. He rallied his men, brought in additional divisions from the Far East, and capitalized on the frigid conditions and heavy snows that beleaguered the enemy. His soldiers fought fiercely and heroically, knowing the very existence of their country was at stake. And as soon as they advanced a few miles into the towns occupied by the Germans, they witnessed the legacy of Nazi barbarity: burned houses, starving children, raped women. Partisans were often found hanging from trees, their mutilated bodies frozen and dangling in the wind.54

Stalin looked to the British to open a second front in western Europe to divert Nazi forces and lift the pressure on Russian armies. At the same time, he looked to the United States for vast supplies of munitions, trucks, and food. In September 1941, Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal emissary, visited Moscow and talked with Stalin. In December, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden did the same. Many of their countrymen did not expect the Soviet Union to survive the Nazi onslaught. Most assumed that the Russians would capitulate as had the Poles and the Dutch, the Czechs and the French. Stalin was a defiant supplicant. He desperately needed Western help, but he also recognized that they desperately needed him to continue fighting.

From the outset, Stalin made clear to the British and Americans that notwithstanding his desire for material aid and a second front, in any postwar settlement he intended to incorporate into the Soviet Union the parts of eastern Poland and the Baltic states that he had annexed in 1939 and 1940. With the Germans marauding his country, seizing its assets, and threatening his power, his concern with the security of his socialist state mounted. He was determined to establish secure frontiers through territorial gains, but he also aspired to an enduring alliance with his wartime allies. In June 1942, Stalin ordered Foreign Minister Molotov to tell Roosevelt that he shared the American president's views: "It would be impossible to maintain peace in future without creating a united military force by Britain, the USA and the USSR capable of preventing aggression. "55

But plans for a future peace gave way to the exigencies of war. Whether Soviet peoples would fight was much in doubt. In Poland and the Baltic states, as well as in Ukraine, the Crin1ea, and Soviet Russia, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million, Soviet citizens deserted or rebelled or colluded with the enemy. Still, the vast majority fought stoically, defiantly, heroically. Throughout, they were inspired by their passion to regain their land, their homes, their country, and by their lust for revenge. Contemporary reports, memoirs and recollections, poetry and literature attest to the depths of despair and the allure of revenge. "Great and enduring is the Russian people," wrote Konstantin Simonov, another prominent wartime journalist. "Great and enduring but at the same time fearful in anger. I have driven along devastated roads, through burned-out villages, through places where the cup of suffering is overflmving, and all the same I have seen few tears. When one hates very much, one has few tears. "56

Even as he gained considerable notoriety as the chair of the Senate committee investigating the defense industry, his simple lifestyle and modest sense of self never changed. He disdained luxury and hated pretense. He woke early, worked hard, and often ate at the local Hot Shoppe.99 He never ceased writing loving letters to his wife and daughter, who were often back in Independence, Missouri, while he was in Washington. He missed them, and he waited expectantly for their return letters. Yet he loved being a politician, close to the people, seemingly representing their views and getting the government to serve their needs. Once in the Senate, he did not strive for further high office; he did not seek the vice presidency or yearn to occupy the White House. He had already accomplished more than he expected. He loved politics and liked the legislative infighting. He enjoyed a card game with friends and a glass (or two) of bourbon in the evening.

While Truman was serving his second term in the Senate and gaining the esteem of his colleagues and the attention of the public, the United States moved from depression to war. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 killed several thousand Americans, but the continental United States was unscathed by enemy attack. After Hitler declared war on America a few days later, the nation found itself fighting all three Axis powers Germany, Japan, and Italy-yet fighting them far from America's shores. The American wartime experience was thus vastly different from that endured by any of the other major combatants. Young children and old men were not slaughtered by enemy occupation; sisters, daughters, and mothers were not raped. Homes were not bombed; villages and cities were not ruined.

Hard times ended. After a decade of depression, writes the historian Michael Adams, the "war inaugurated the greatest era of prosperity in human history." American gross national product increased 60 percent during the war; total earnings 50 percent. There was social unrest, labor agitation, racial conflict, and teenage vandalism, but life in America was unimaginably different from life in war-torn Europe and Asia. "Many Americans for the first time in history had more money than they knew what to do with." The numbers of middle-class Americans grew rapidly, as did home ownership. Despite rationing or perhaps because of it, people had more discretionary income than ever before. They bought washers and dryers, jewelry and cigarettes. Average department store purchases soared fivefold, from two to ten dollars, during the war. "Never in the history of human conflict," commented the economist John Kenneth Galbraitb, "has there been so much talk of sacrifice and so little sacrifice." Teens, in particular, relished the opportunity to find jobs, make money, and spend it. They were beginning to shape a postwar consumer culture that would become the envy of the world, but nobody then was quite aware of its significance.100

Like most Americans during the war, Truman focused his attention on the spectacular rise in America's defense production, industrial capability, and strategic power. By the end of 1942, the United States was producing more arms than all the Axis states together. During 1943 it made almost three times as many armaments as did Soviet Russia. During the remainder of the conflict, the United States turned out two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment used in the war: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, 2 million army trucks. By the end of the war, it had the capability to produce almost 100,000 planes and 30,000 tanks a year. In four years, overall industrial production doubled; the machine-tool industry trebled. In 1945, the United States had two-thirds of the world's gold reserves, three-fourths of its invested capital, half of its shipping vessels, and half of its manufacturing capacity. Its gross national product was three times that of the Soviet Union and more than five times that of Great Britain. It was also nearing completion of the atomic bomb, a technological and production feat of huge costs and proportions.101

Truman went to the Potsdam Conference knowing these facts. He was not eager to cross the ocean to meet his wartime allies, Churchill and Stalin. "How I hate this trip," he confided in his diary. "But I have to make it ... and we must win."l02 The war in Europe was over, and it was critical to begin talking about postwar settlements for Germany and eastern Europe. It was even more critical to talk to Stalin about the war in the Pacific. Truman wanted Stalin to make good on his promise at Yalta to declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's defeat. If Russians attacked Japanese troops on the Chinese mainland, the Japanese emperor would have fewer troops to kill Americans when they invaded the home islands. This was of utmost importance to Truman, as his plans for the Potsdam Conference were made before the atomic bomb was secretly and successfully tested in New Mexico on 16 July.

Yet Truman was not comfortable fighting wars and planning peace. He knew little of these matters. He read report after report, memo after memo, but diplomacy baffled him. He was inexperienced, and he knew it. "I was so scared," he wrote Bess from Potsdam. "I didn't know whether things were going according to Hoyle or not."I03 His closest associates recognized that he was nervous, uneasy, and insecure. Sometimes he answered so quickly, almost before they finished their questions.104 At such points, Truman thought he was demonstrating strength, but he was revealing weakness, at least to those who cared most about him.

Truman wanted to get along with Stalin. Some advisers, such as W. Averell Harriman, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union; Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal; and Admiral William Leahy, the wartime chief of staff, wanted him to take a tough stand against the Soviet Union. They told Truman that the Russians were looting eastern Germany and imposing communist regimes in eastern Europe. But Truman felt no passion about these matters, no deep empathy for peoples he neither knew nor understood. Stalin was a dictator, for sure, but one who, Truman felt, had the support of the Russian people. If not, they would not have fought so tenaciously; so let's get along, he jotted in his diary. Truman knew the Soviets were looting eastern Europe, but they had also been "thoroughly looted by the Germans over and over again and you can hardly blame them for their attitude." Truman knew the Soviets were seeking to set up police governments, but he felt that Stalin would eventually bow to American pressure on this issue. He had seen the Kremlin make concessions on the eve of Potsdam. "Yesterday was a hectic day," he wrote to his wife on 7 June 1945. "Had both good news and bad. Stalin agreed to our interpretation of the veto at San Francisco and a reconsideration of the Polish question, but we lost the election in Montana and the Republicans are jubilant over it." 105

Equating the travail of the Polish people with the disappointment of Democrats in Montana, as he did, he was perfectly well disposed to deal with Stalin. "I want you to understand," he told his good friend Joseph Davies, the pro-Soviet former U.S. ambassador to the Kremlin, "that I am trying my best to save peace and to follow out Roosevelt's plan." 106 The plan was to sustain cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union and to avoid a postwar rift. But Truman's gut instincts demanded that agreement be on American terms. He told Harriman, "We could not, of course, expect to get 100 percent of what we wanted but ... on important matters ... we should be able to get 85 percent." 107 Truman intended to protect American interests, even if he didn't have a precise definition of them. He had no particular sense of gratitude to the Russians for their war losses, no particular reverence for Churchill or the British for their heroism, no particular empathy for the plight of European peoples engulfed by the Depression and war. After several days of meetings at Potsdam with Stalin and Churchill, he wrote, rather proudly, to his wife:

We had a tough meeting yesterday. I reared up on my hind legs and told' em where to get off and they got off. I have to make it perfectly plain to them at least once a day that so far as this president is concerned Santa Claus is dead and that my first interest is U.S.A., then I want the J ap War won and I want' em both in it. Then I want peace-world peace and will do what can be done by us to get it. But certainly am not going to set up another [illegible] here in Europe, pay reparations, feed the world, and get nothing for it but a nose thumbing. They are beginning to awake to the fact that I mean business.108
Business meant getting along with the Russians and protecting U.S. interests. "I like Stalin," he wrote his wife. "He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can't get it." 109 Differences over important issues were to be expected. Truman felt no outrage about Stalin's record of repression. Not all the horror of Stalin's rule, of course, was then known, but the purges and killing of high party officials were a matter of public record, as was the ruthless suppression of kulaks and other opponents of the regime. Yet none of this mattered too much to the president. Even many years later, he acknowledged that at the time "I liked him a lot .... Stalin was a very gracious host, and at the table, he would grasp what was going on as quickly as anybody I ever came in contact with."110 Those who believe the Cold War was inevitable because of Western horror at Stalin's cruelty are disregarding the contemporary record; those who believe that Truman immediately started the Cold War because of the advice and pressure of anti-Soviet advisers are mistaken. Stalin, Truman thought, was someone you could deal with. He would respect American power. Agreement was still possible.
 

1.   Quoted in Roman Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 73. The same quotation, with slight differences in translation, appears in Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 70; and Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2005), 18.

2.   Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York: Penguin, 1991), 14; Alfred J. Rieber, "Stalin, Man of the Borderlands," American Historical Review 106 (December 2001): 1651-91.

3.   For the young Stalin and the impact of these religious schools, see Service, Stalin, 13-31; Kuromiya, Stalin, 207; Conquest, Stalin, 16--26; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York:
Grove Weidenfeld, 1988),7,229.

4.   Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One Year (London: Hutchinson, 1969),341.

5.   Service, Stalin, 13-101; Kuromiya, Stalin, 1-25; Conquest, Stalin, 16-49; Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 16--126.

6.   Conquest, Stalin, 22; Kuromiya, Stalin, 6.

7.   Sergo Beria, Beria: My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin, ed. by Fran,oise Thorn, trans. by Brian Pearce (London: Gerald Duckworth, 2001), 148; Volkogonov, Stalin, 235.

8.   Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 341; also see Kuromiya, Stalin, 7.

9.     Service, Stalin, 43-112; Volkogonov, Stalin, 5-12, 225-36; Conquest, Stalin, 27-57; Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 45; Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, ed. by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005), 19-20.

10.   Service, Stalin, 113-53; Ulam, Stalin, 47-157; Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 27-57.

11.   Service, Stalin, 150---85; Ulam, Stalin, 167-91; Conquest, Stalin, 72-95.

12.   Volkogonov, Stalin, 78---82; for strong antipathy between Lenin and Stalin, see Lewin, Soviet Century, 12-18; for a more nuanced view of their relationship, see Service, Stalin, 190-218.

13.   Service, Stalin, 219-50; Kuromiya, Stalin, 50-100; Conquest, Stalin, 96-170; Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: W. W Norton, 1990),25-145; Ulam, Stalin, 192-358.

14.    Conquest, Stalin, 69; for a more praiseworthy view that also stresses his zealotry and pragmatism, see Service, Stalin, 94.

15.   Quoted in Roy A. Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979),34.

16.   Central Committee of the CPSU (B), History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik): Short Course (New York: International Publishers, 1939),355-58; Stalin, "The Foundations of Leninism," in Bruce Franklin, ed., The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905-1952 (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 102-105.

17.   Stalin, "Foundations of Leninism," 104-106; Service, Stalin, 93-94.

18.   Stalin, "Foundations of Leninism," 121.

19.   John Gooding, Socialism in Russia: Lenin and his Legacy, 1890-1991 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002),

142; Lewin, Soviet Century, 37.

20.   CPSU, Short Course, 273.

21.   Stalin, "Foundations of Leninism," 122-26, 172---83.

22.  Ibid., 157.

23.   CPSU, Short Course, 314.

24.  Ibid., 276-77; Service, Stalin, 253--M; Kuromiya, Stalin, 74-100.

25.   Ethan Pollock, "Conversations with Stalin on Questions of Political Economy," Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Working Paper No. 33 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center, 2001),6.

26.    CPSU, Short Course, 314.

27.   Kuromiya, Stalin, 101-17; Volkogonov, Stalin, 159-73; Conquest, Stalin, 156-65.

28.   Service, Stalin, 297; for a superb account of the death of Stalin's wife and the dictator's reaction, see Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), 1-18; the quotation is on page 18. See also Rosamond Richardson, Stalin's Shadow: Inside the FamIly of One of the World's Greatest Tyrants (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 119-35.

29.   Conquest, Stalin, 171-209; Kuromiya, Stalin, 122-28; Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 68-72,103-18; Hugh Ragsdale, "Comparative Historiography of the Social History of Revolutions: English, French, and Russian," Journal of the Historical Society 3 (SummerlFall2003): 348-52.

30.    J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolshe-
viks, 1932-39 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999),573.

31.  Ibid., 11.

32.  Ibid., 557.

33.   See the essays by Oleg Khlevniuk, "The Reasons for the 'Great Terror': the Foreign-Political Aspect"; Geoffrey Roberts, "The Fascist War Threat and Soviet Politics in the 1930s"; and Andrea Romano, "Permanent War Scare: Mobilisation, Militarisation and Peasant War," in Silvio Pons and Andrea Romano, eds., Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914-1945 (Milan, Italy: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2000); Kuromiya, Stalin, 121-28; Service, Stalin, 346-56.

34.   Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 447,490; Albert Resis, ed., Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 1993),256,265,339.

35.   Richard Overy, Russia's War (London: Penguin, 1997),34-72; Silvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936-1941 (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 180-81,222-23, quotation on 181; Lennart Samuelson, "Wartime Perspectives and Economic Planning: T ukhachevsky and the Military-Industrial Complex, 1925-1937," in Pons and Romano, Russia in the Age of Wars, 207~1O.

36.   CPSU, Short Course, 274; Service, Stalin, 399-409; Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 3~0.

37.   Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, N.}.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Overy, Russia's War, 52-53; Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin and the Katyn Massacre," in Stalin and His Times, ed. by Geoffrey Roberts (Cork:
Irish Association for Russian and East European Studies, 2005); also see Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 27--89; Geoff Swain, Between Stalin and Hitler: Class War and Race War on the Dvina (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).

38.   Overy, Russia's War, 34-72; for the most definitive account, see Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1999); for a not altogether convincing argument stressing preemption, see Constantine Pleshakov, Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Days of World War II on the Eastern Front (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 56-57, 81-83; for a fine historiographical essay, see Teddy J. Uldricks, "The Icebreaker Controversy: Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler?" Slavic Review 58 (Fall 1999): 626-43; for recent syntheses, Service, Stalin, 406-14; Roberts, Stalin's Wars, 61--81; John Lukacs, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).

39.   Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 150-85; Overy, Russia's War, 34-72.

40.   Stalin's errors are described in David E. Murphy, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Pleshakov, Stalin's Folly; for an excellent short synthesis, see Kuromiya, Stalin, 133-52.

41.   Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 175--81; Erik Van Ree, The Political Thought ofJoseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 211; David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

42.   "Fmert' detoubiytsam" ["Death to the Baby-Killers"], Pravda, 14 August 1942. My appreciation to Dmitry Pobedash and Tatiana Leonova for bringing this article to my attention. The article also appeared in provincial newspapers, such as Uralskiy Rabochiy [The Uralian Worker], the following day, 15 August 1942.

43.   Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth Century Russia (New York:
Vintage, 2001), 227-28; Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

44.   Anna Krylova, "Healers of Wounded Souls: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944-1946," Journal of Modern History 73 (June 2001): 308-309; Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War:
Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, ed. and trans., A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005); Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin:
Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, N.}.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 163; Elena Zubkova, translated and edited by Hugh Ragsdale, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 201

45.   Quoted in Merridale, Night of Stone, 222-23.

46.   Quoted in Overy, Russia's War, 78-79; Volkogonov, Stalin, 405-12.

47.    For a very critical day-by-day accounting, see Pleshakov, Stalin's Folly.

48.   Overy, Russia's War, 78-80; Kuromiya, Stalin, 152.

49.    Overy, Russia's War, 79.

50.   Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 352.

51.    Overy, Russia's War, 117; Merridale, Night of Stone, 227.

52.   Uwe Garternschlager, "Living and Surviving in Occupied Minsk," in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, The People's War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 21; Overy, Russia's War, 107.

53.   Svetlana Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, trans. by Priscilla Johnson McMillan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 185; Overy, Russia's War, 80-81; Kuromiya, Stalin, 152-54.

54.   Overy, Russia's War, 73-124; Roberts, Stalin's Wars, 82-117; for Stalin and Zhukov, see also Pleshakov, Stalin's Folly, 188-89,250-53.

55.   Oleg A. Rzheshevsky, ed., War and Diplomacy: The Making of the Grand Alliance: Documents from Stalin's Archives (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996),204; Geoffrey Roberts, "Ideology, Calculation, and Improvisation: Spheres of Influence and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1939-1945," Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 657-65.

56.   Quoted in Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 170; Richard Stites, "Soviet Russian Culture: Freedom and Control, Spontaneity and Consciousness," in Thurston and Bonwetsch, People's War, 180-82.

57.   Stalin's speech on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution, 6 November 1943, in Franklin, Essential Stalin, 401-402.

58.   V O. Pechatnov, "Averell Harriman's Mission to Moscow," Ham'man Review 14 (July 2003): 26--27; also see Kuromiya, Stalin, 159-63

59.   Stalin's speech, 6 November 1943, in Franklin, Essential Stalin, 403.

60.   "Record of the Conversation of Comrade 1. V. Stalin and Comrade V M. Molotov with the Polish Professor Lange," 17 May 1944, in "Conversations with Stalin," document collection disseminated by CWIHP at conference at Yale University, "Stalin and the Cold War, 1945-1953" (New Haven, Conn.:, September 1999), 16--17. These documents can be located at the CWIHP (Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, D.C.); "Account of General De Gaulle's Meeting with Marshall Stalin," 2 December 1944, ibtd., 88; for the theme of cooperation, see Roberts, Stalin's WIlrs, 165-91.

61.   Silvio Pons, "In the Aftermath of the Age of Wars: The Impact of World War II on Soviet Security Policy," in Pons and Romano, Russia in the Age of Wars, 277-307; V O. Pechatnov, "The Big Three After World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking About Post-War Relations with the United States and Great Britain," CWIHP Working Paper No. 13 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center, 1995); Roberts, "Ideology, Calculation, and Improvisation," 665-73.

62.   Pons, "In the Aftermath of the Age of Wars," 305; also see Kuromiya, Stalin, 180-91; Roberts, Stalin's Wars, 118-253; for Stalin's operating procedures, also see Jonathan Haslam, "The Making of Foreign Policy Under Stalin," in Empire and Society: New Approaches to Russian History, ed. by Teruyulri Hara and Kirnitaka Matsuzato (Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 1997), 167-79.

63.   Quoted in Ree, Political Thought ofJoseph Stalin, 211-12.

64.   For an excellent example of this process, see Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).

65.   Ulam, Stalin, 358-62. These themes emerge clearly in the most recent analysis of Soviet policy in Bulgaria. See Vesselin Dimitrov, Stalin's Cold War: Soviet Foreign Policy, Democracy, and Communism in Bulgaria, 1941-1948 (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

66.   Quoted in Eduard Mark, "Revolution by Degrees: Stalin's National Front Strategy for Europe, 1941-47," CWIHP Working Paper No. 31 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center, 2001), 22; "Record of the Conversation of Comrade LV. Stalin with the General Secretary of the CC French Communist Parry, Comrade Thorez," 19 November 1944, "Conversations with Stalin," 84, CWIHP; Ivo Banac, ed., The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 350-51; Silvio Pons, "Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe," Journal of Cold War Studies 3 (Spring 2001): 3-27; also see Kuromiya, Stalin, 182-84; Norman M. Naimark, "Cold War Studies and New Archival Materials on Stalin," The Russian Review 61 (January 2002): 5-6: Dimitrov, Stalin's Cold War.

67.   "From the Record of I. V. Stalin's Conversation with A. Hebrang," 9 January 1945, Cold War His· tory 1 (April 2001): 161-62.

68.   "Notes of V. Kolarov from a Meeting with]. Stalin," 28 January 1945, "Conversations with Stalin," 130, CWIHP; "Notes on Stalin's Statement from a Meeting with a Bulgarian Delegation," [late August 1945], ibid., 247-48; "Report of the Labor Party on its Goodwill Mission to the USSR," [late July 1946], ibid., 330-31; "Report to Central Committee of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on Meeting with Stalin," 26 September 1946, CWIHP Collection; Roberts, "Ideology, Calculation, Improvisation"; Norman M. Naimark, "The Soviets and the Christian Democrats: The Challenge of a 'Bourgeois' Party in Eastern Germany, 1945-1949," East European Politics and Society 9 (Fall 1995): 369-92.

69.   Pons, "Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe," 15; Dimitrov, Stalin's Cold War.

70.   "Notes of Stalin's Speech during a Reception at the Kremlin to Celebrate the Achievement of the Agreement to Create the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity," 23 June 1944, "Conversations with Stalin," 21, CWIHP.

71.   "Notes of V. Kolarov," 28 January 1945, ibid., 130; "Notes of Stalin's Speech during a Reception at the Kremlin," 23 June 1944, ibid., 21; "Record of a Conversation of Comrade I. V. Stalin and Comrade V. M. Molotov with the Polish Professor Lange," 17 May 1944, ibid., 15; for Stalin's preoccupation with Germany, see Roberts, Stalin's Wars, 165-91.

72.   "Record of a Conversation of Comrade I. V. Stalin and Comrade V. M. Molotov with the Polish Professor Lange," 17 May 1944, ibid., 18.

73.   Quoted in Mark Kramer, "The Soviet Union and the Founding of the German Democratic Republic: 50 Years Later-A Review Article," Europe-Asia 51 (1999): 1097-98.

74.   John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001),198.

75.   Georgi Arbatov, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), 168. Most historians examining the Soviet archives agree. In the complex mix of Bolshevism and nationalism, the nationalist component grew. See, for example, Pons, "In the Aftermath of the Age of Wars"; Roberts, "Ideology, Calculation, and Improvisation"; Brandenberger, National Bolshevism; Kuromiya, Stalin, 180-87; Dimitrov, Stalin's Cold War.

76.   "Record of Meeting between T. Soong and Stalin," 30 June 1945; 2, 7,9, 11 July 1945; 10 August 1945; "Conversations with Stalin," 207,145,148,157,173,179,207,225, CWIHP.

77.   For Stalin's objectives in eastern Europe, based on new archival materials, see Mark, "Revolution by Degrees"; Roberts, Stalin's wars; Vojtech Mastny, The Cold war and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11-29; Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons, eds., The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997); Odd Arne Westad, Sven Holsmark, and Iver B. Neumann, eds., The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994); for the emphasis on security, see Tony Judt's recent survey, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 117-21; for a recent assessment of Stalin and the Greek communists, see John O. Iatrides, "Revolution or Self-Defense: Communist Goals, Strategy, and Tactics in the Greek Civil War," Journal of Cold War Studies 7 (Summer 2005): 3-33.

78.   Ree, Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 243; for recent analyses, see Kuromiya, Stalin, 169-200; Roberts, Stalin's Wars; Dimitrov, Stalin's Cold War.

79.   Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 114-16.

80.   llya Ehrenburg, The War, 1941-1945 (London: McGibbon & Kee, 1964), 187-88.

81.   Overy, Russia's War, 280; Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-
Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s (London: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 297-98.

82.   Ehrenburg, The War, 187-92.

83.   S. Beria, Beria, 142-43; Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 205; Service, Stalin, 438, 461--68.

84.   Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 162--63; Alliluyeva, 20 Letters, 199-207; Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 49; Montefiore, Stalin, 454-71.

85.   S. Beria, Beria, 145-46; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace; Montefiore, Stalin, 435-577; Service, Stalin, 521-40.

86.   Montefiore, Stalin, 455; Kuromiya, Stalin, 184.

87.   These contradictions appear in the many conversations assembled by the CWIHP. See the collection "Conversations with Stalin," for example, pp. 272, 248; for Stalin's inscrutable nature and ambiguous language, also see Steven Kotkin, "A Conspiracy So Immense," New Republic 234 (13 February 2006): 28-34; also see Dimitrov, Stalin's Cold War.

88.   Overy, Russia's War, 312; also see Service, Stalin, 478-87.

89.   Roberts, Stalin's Wars, especially chap. 7; Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 207; Arbatov, The System, 35-36; Service, Stalin, 467--68.

90.   The emphasis on Stalin's trying to reconcile security and cooperation has emerged in the writings of many who have seen the new Russian documents. See, for example, Roberts, Stalin's Wars; Marks, "Revolution by Degree"; Pons, "In the Aftermath of the Age of Wars"; Kuromiya, Stalin, 161; Dimitrov, Stalin's Cold War.

91.   Margaret Truman, ed., Letters from Father: The Truman Family's Personal Correspondence (New York: Arbor House, 1981), 106; Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 16.

92.   For the quotation, see Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Ltle of Harry S. Truman (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995),293.

93.   Robert H. Ferrell, Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959 (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1983),213,215; Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002),9.

94.   Offner, Truman, 9.

95.   For influential books on Truman, see Hamby, Man of the People; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Robert Ferrell, Truman and Pendergast (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1999); Offner, Another Such Victory.

96.   Ferrell, Dear Bess, 293, 285; for the most recent assessment, see Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007),1-33.

97.   Ibid., 277.

98.   Harry S. Truman, Truman Speaks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960),32.

99.   Ferrell, Dear Bess, 451.

100.  Michael C Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 114, 131, 136, 126-27; for the astounding prosperity that no one anticipated, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in the Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),785-86.

101.  Richard J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 192; Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987),357-58,369.

102.  Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper & Row, 1980),49; Ferrell, Dear Bess, 516, 518.

103.  Ferrell, Dear Bess, 519; Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 87-96.

104.  See, for example, John M. Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1973),437,440-41, 448-51.

105.  Ferrell, Dear Bess, 515, 522.

106.  Davies Diary, 15 and 16 July 1945, box 18, Joseph Davies Papers, Library of Congress, Washing-
ton, D.C

107.  Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: 1945, Year of Decisions (New York: Signet, 1955),72.

108.  Ferrell, Dear Bess, 520.

109.  Ibid., 522; for the emphasis on continuing Roosevelt's policies and getting along with the Russians, see Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman.

110.  Truman, Truman Speaks, 67-68.

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