Who Was To Blame For The Cold War?

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of the tsars that preceded him, or worse, spreading
communism across the world now that his “one-state” notion had been fulfilled.
It also must be mentioned that Stalin is seen as wanting “unchalleged personal
power and a rebuilt Russia strong enough to withstand ‘caplitalist
encirclement.'”1

Admittedly, the first view of Stalin, as an imperialist leader, may be
skewed. The Russians claim, and have always claimed, that Stalin's motives were
purely defensive. Stalin's wished to create a buffer zone of Communist states
around him to protect Soviet Russia from the capitalist West. In this sense,
his moves were not aggressive at all -- they were truly defensive moves to
protect the Soviet system. His suspicions of Western hostility were not
unfounded: the British and U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918-
1920) were still fresh in Stalin's memory when he took power. Furthermore,
Stalin was bitter because he was not informed of U.S. nuclear capabilities until
shortly ...

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of the secret assurances of security
Roosevelt had made to Stalin. His policy towards Soviet Russia, then, was much
more severe than that of Roosevelt. He was quoted as saying “We must stand up
to the Russians...We have been too easy with them.”4 Both Truman and Churchill
were annoyed because Germany east of the Rivers Oder and Neisse were being
occupied by Russian troops and were being run by the pro-communist Polish
government, who expelled over five million Germans. This went directly against
the agreements made at Yalta earlier in the year. The west viewed this as an
act of aggression on the part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union responded
with a statement saying “Poland ...

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