Books, Arts & Manners: The Cold War, Down Cold

Stalin’s Drive to the West, 1938— 1945: The Origins of the Cold War, by R. C. Raack (Stanford, 265 pp., $45)

THIS is one of the most important books so far on the origins of the Cold War. Drawing on unprecedented access to liberated archives in Russia, the former East Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, an American academic has painted an illuminating picture of Josef Stalin’s machinations in Poland and Germany dating back to even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in August 1939. The author demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the long premeditation behind Soviet actions in the immediate postwar period. The effect is to explode any lingering notions that Western leaders bore any significant responsibility for Stalin’s expansionism in Central Europe—other than by the naïveté of their acquiescence.

Stalin’s Drive to the West, 1938— 1945: The Origins of the Cold War, by R. C. Raack (Stanford, 265 pp., $45)

THIS is one of the most important books so far on the origins of the Cold War. Drawing on unprecedented access to liberated archives in Russia, the former East Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, an American academic has painted an illuminating picture of Josef Stalin’s machinations in Poland and Germany dating back to even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in August 1939. The author demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the long premeditation behind Soviet actions in the immediate postwar period. The effect is to explode any lingering notions that Western leaders bore any significant responsibility for Stalin’s expansionism in Central Europe—other than by the naïveté of their acquiescence.