Norman M. Naimark. Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty.

• Author: Holm, Michael

Norman M. Naimark. Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty. Harvard University Press, 2019. Hardcover, $29.95. Paperback, 2023, $ 19.95.

For decades, the intellectual debate over the early Cold War principally concerned the question of culpability. Accordig to the so-called traditionalist interpretation, Josef Stalin's Soviet Union appeared determined to overrun Western Europe by any means necessity. This threat both necessitated and justified the American involvement that led to the Truman Doctrine, the European Recovery Program, NATO, and everything that followed. By the late 1950s and especially following the outbreak of the Vietnam War, left-leaning Cold War revisionists challenged this interpretation insisting instead that the Soviet Union had possessed no ill intentions towards the West. According to the revisionist interpretation, Moscow's security measures were made necessary by an aggressive even imperialistic American postwar agenda. This intense scholarly debate played out at conferences, in books, and in academic journals and book reviews. While other more nuanced arguments emerged that sought a middle ground between these two schools of thought, a continued consequence was a tendency to distill the Cold War to an inevitable East-West conflict.

In Stalin and the Fate of Europe, the distinguished historian and Hoover Institute fellow, Norman Naimark, presents a more complex and multifaceted story of the immediate postwar world order in Europe. Broadly speaking Naimark identifies three separate but interconnected vectors that he considers critical to the European story: the role of Josef Stalin in Soviet foreign policymaking; Central and Western European nations' pursuit of national sovereignty amid postwar chaos and uncertainty; and the emerging Cold War. He connects these approaches to seven country-specific case studies which enable him to tell highly effective stories of the challenges local political leaders faced as they dug their nations out of the wartime rubble and fought to establish sovereign control of their territory and politics. The result is a series of engaging chapters--most of which could be read independently--that grants both autonomy and agency to local officials. While topics such as the Berlin Blockade and the 1948 Italian elections are well-trodden by scholars, Naimark deserves particular credit for his emphasis on the politicians of smaller nations that have often been...