A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award
Winner of the US-Russia Relations Book Prize
"The achievement of a lifetime."
--Stephen Kotkin, author of Stalin
"Naimark has few peers as a scholar of Stalinism, the Soviet Union and
20th-century Europe, and his latest work Stalin and the Fate of Europe
is one of his most original and interesting."
--Financial Times
"A timely and instructive account not merely of our own history but also
of our fractious, unsettling present."
--Daniel Beer, The Guardian
"Adds an abundance of fresh knowledge to a time and place that we think
we know, clarifying the contours of Soviet-American conflict by
skillfully enriching the history of postwar Europe."
--Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands
Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this
powerful reassessment of the postwar order, Norman Naimark suggests that
Stalin was far more open to a settlement than we have thought. Through
revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Finland and
Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans'
fight to determine their future.
With Western occupation forces in central Europe and Soviet forces
controlling most of the continent's eastern half, European leaders had
to nimbly negotiate outside pressures. For some, this meant repelling
Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to
support their aims. Revealing an at times surprisingly flexible Stalin
and showing European leaders deftly managing their nations' interests,
Stalin and the Fate of Europe uncovers the lost potential of an
alternative trajectory before 1949, when the Cold War split became
irreversible.
