Kazan/HUAC

[Brad De Long]

>We have no idea of how Europe would have turned out in the early post-WW II
>years had it not been for the Cold War and U.S. resolve to destroy the
>USSR. U.S. policy helped create the repressive monster its propaganda
>condemned - starting not in 1945 but 1917.

I would agree with you if Stalin had died in the spring of 1945, and had
been succeeded by Khrushchev--then I think there would have been a real
genuine possibility for a relaxation of tensions. But as long as Stalin
remained in power (or if he had died and been succeeded by someone like
Beria or Zhdanov) it seems to me that the inner dynamics of the Soviet
system and its leaders' psychology were driving toward the internal
outcomes we saw in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between 1945 and
1990.

After all, at various times during the 1920s and 1930s, Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Radek, Bukharin, and Kirov had thought that peaceful coexistence with
Stalin was attainable...

Brad DeLong