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1945: Year Zero By John Lukacs Doubleday, 322 pp., $8.95 John Lukacs’ newest book is the ultimate in counter-revisionist history. Yet I hasten to add that the overtones of fierceness that tremble about this phrase are not audible in 1945: Year Zero. The Left revisionists, who have been arguing for more than a decade that the war-mongering government of capitalist, imperialist Amerika started the cold war with malice aforethought, fill their books with paramilitary posturings and noisy saber-rattling. But not Lukacs. He proffers his thesis with the graciousness of a Hapsburg prince relinquishing his dance partner at a quiet supper party.

Here was the basis of the cold war. By the end of 1945 Stalin feared that the Americans, who won the war with relative ease, and who established themselves as the dominant power in Western Europe, were ready to challenge the Russian domination of Eastern Europe. The government of the United States, at the same time, was beginning to fear that after the establishment of victorious Communism in Eastern Europe, the Red Flood would threaten to engulf Western Europe. In reality, neither was the case. It was a gigantic misunderstanding. Not until the autumn of 1956, after the Hungarian Revolution, did the Russians realize that the United States had no real intention of intervening in Eastern Europe, of correcting the division of the continent that had been arranged in 1945. By that time Stalin was dead, Nikita Khrushchev was in power, who was inclined to get on good terms with Americans anyway.

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1945: Year Zero By John Lukacs Doubleday, 322 pp., $8.95 John Lukacs’ newest book is the ultimate in counter-revisionist history. Yet I hasten to add that the overtones of fierceness that tremble about this phrase are not audible in 1945: Year Zero. The Left revisionists, who have been arguing for more than a decade that the war-mongering government of capitalist, imperialist Amerika started the cold war with malice aforethought, fill their books with paramilitary posturings and noisy saber-rattling. But not Lukacs. He proffers his thesis with the graciousness of a Hapsburg prince relinquishing his dance partner at a quiet supper party.

Here was the basis of the cold war. By the end of 1945 Stalin feared that the Americans, who won the war with relative ease, and who established themselves as the dominant power in Western Europe, were ready to challenge the Russian domination of Eastern Europe. The government of the United States, at the same time, was beginning to fear that after the establishment of victorious Communism in Eastern Europe, the Red Flood would threaten to engulf Western Europe. In reality, neither was the case. It was a gigantic misunderstanding. Not until the autumn of 1956, after the Hungarian Revolution, did the Russians realize that the United States had no real intention of intervening in Eastern Europe, of correcting the division of the continent that had been arranged in 1945. By that time Stalin was dead, Nikita Khrushchev was in power, who was inclined to get on good terms with Americans anyway.