The Origins of the Cold War: Stalin, Churchill and the Formation of the Grand Alliance
Author(s)
Gorodetsky, G.
Abstract
This article tries to set out and redefine the roots of the cold war in chronological, geographical, and ideological terms. It challenges the commonly held views that the cold war and the emergence the Soviet Union as an expansionist superpower after World War II were either the realization of a blueprint conceived by Stalin as early as the 1920s or an ad hoc consequence of the closing stages of the war. The major conferences at the end of the war, the focal point of most diplomatic histories of the war, only belatedly sought to define war aims and European reconstruction. Most of the contentious issues at the end of the war were in fact serious impediments to collaboration from the very outset.
