Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt Divide Europe

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Bloomsbury Academic, Dec 30, 1990 - Biography & Autobiography - 259 pages

The division of Europe between East and West, born during World War II, not only denied independence to more than 100 million East Europeans, but upset the balance of global power, putting Stalin in a position to threaten Western Europe and planting the seeds of the Cold War and the arms race. This book probes the questions and facts surrounding the division of Europe and offers new insight into how it might have been prevented. Looking beyond the conventional assumption that Stalin simply took over Eastern Europe in the postwar years, Remi Nadeau demonstrates how the Soviet leader, having gained power in Eastern Europe through Red Army occupation, was unrestrained by any prior Allied agreements. The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, which is commonly believed to have occurred in the immediate postwar years, actually came about during the war as the Allies failed to limit Stalin. Nadeau shows how the British, who recognized the Soviet threat, repeatedly tried to block it and how Roosevelt, with a different foreign policy approach, did not support them. But, as the author states in his preface, this is not a story of American wrongdoing, but of American innocence.

Well researched and thorough in its arguments, this book demonstrates how Roosevelt's failure to throw U.S. strength into the political balance was not confined to the Yalta Conference in 1945, but was a consistent U.S. policy in East-West encounters throughout the war. Nadeau shows that Roosevelt did not understand Stalin's intentions and repeatedly failed to support Churchill's attempts to block Stalin with diplomatic bargaining and military preemption. Written in a highly readable style and full of little-known historical detail, this book will appeal to any student of World War II, Eastern Europe, or European history.

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Contents

Desperate Alliance
1
Battle of the Boundaries
13
Second Front Now
29
Copyright

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About the author (1990)

REMI NADEAU, who received a B.A. degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a professional historian who has written seven previous books on American history. Serving as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Air Force in the European theater during World War II, he has travelled extensively in Europe, including trips in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

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