Book: Stalin’s backfiring diplomacy led to the Iron Curtain

Many historians consider the division of Europe in the aftermath of World War II inevitable, because, they believe, Soviet leader Josef Stalin was eager for communism to sweep the continent. But historian Norman Naimark disagrees.

Stalin didn’t plan to have an Iron Curtain descend across Europe, says Naimark, professor in Eastern European studies at Stanford University. Instead, the Soviet premier sought a more open and flexible approach to his foreign policy, even with neighboring countries such as Finland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

But Stalin’s diplomacy failed as often as it succeeded, says Naimark who has recently published a new book reassessing Stalin’s postwar foreign policies, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (Belknap Press, 2019).

And it was the failures that brought down the Iron Curtain.

Here, Naimark explains his research on the postwar order in Europe:

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