Alex Levine’s Reviews > The Cold War: A New History > Status Update

The Soviets operated at least three separate, successful spy operations at Los Alamos during the war; important as an indication of Stalin’s distrust of his allies.

Soviet management of the Eastern European communist states (particularly Poland) also led the Western occupying powers to govern their portions of Germany more collaboratively to ensure their stability and prevent any Soviet infringement.

Stalin agreed to what amounted to an unfavorable division of Germany in large part because he assumed the western portions would eventually turn communist and unite with the east. Also, the Soviet portion would have been larger had he not apportioned large parts of what had then been eastern Germany to the new Polish state.

The “roots of the Cold War” lay in the Allied Powers/Big Three’s failure to “reconcile divergent political objectives, even as they pursued a common military task.”

Important point that Stalin ended WWII completely determined to secure his personal position, and that of the USSR - with little regard for communist movements abroad, when they could spur cold or hot wars with the US. In the immediate post-war years, the USSR was too weak to achieve its strategic objectives if it ran into pronounced American opposition.

World War II yielded so quickly into the Cold War because “the war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war, ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily, with one another.”