Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War.

THIS is one of the most important books so far on the origins of the Cold War. Drawing on unprecedented access to liberated archives in Russia, the former East Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, an American academic has painted an illuminating picture of Josef Stalin's machinations in Poland and Germany dating back to even before the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact was signed in August 1939. The author demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the long premeditation behind Soviet actions in the immediate postwar period. The effect is to explode any lingering notions that Western leaders bore any significant responsibility for Stalin's expansionism in Central Europe -- other than by the naivete of their acquiescence.

R. C. Raack is emeritus professor of history at California State University at Hayward. He has long labored in the vineyard of European scholarship, in the academic journals and university presses. His latest deserves wider notice.

The essence of the matter is twofold. In Poland, Raack demonstrates, Stalin's aim from the beginning was pure and simple: to reincorporate, after the war, all the territories ceded to him in the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact. Indeed, the hope was to recover as much as possible of the historic Russian imperium. Once the pact had been signed, Stalin and Molotov, exulting privately in their success in having already reset a large portion of East Central Europe's clocks to Moscow time, invoked Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as their inspiration. In the section of Poland that was occupied by the Red Army under the terms of the pact, the Soviets imposed the entire totalitarian apparatus with which we were later to become familiar, from nationalization of property to political dictatorship to forced-labor camps. When the Red Army swallowed up all of Poland in 1944, there was not the slightest chance that Stalin would permit any outcome other than total control. Stalin once told Milovan Djilas that a conqueror always imposes his own social system. Cujus regio, ejus religio. Here are the plans in detail.

With respect to Germany, Raack's research reveals the scope of Stalin's plotting with German Communists to impose the same totalitarian apparatus on any portion of defeated Germany that the Soviets would eventually occupy, and to go as far as they could to do the same in the Western occupation zones. As soon as they got off the plane from Moscow at the end of the war, the German Communists linked up with the Red Army Political Administration and launched their program of ensuring a monopoly of the media, economic and cultural institutions, and administrative bodies at all levels in eastern Germany to guarantee their top-to-bottom control. Similarly, Soviet and German Communist agents exploited their toehold in Berlin to organize their cohorts throughout the western sectors of Germany in the early years, long before the democratic allies got around to organizing the Federal Republic.

Much of this was known, or long suspected. Now it is documented. The upshot is that many once-fashionable notions are demolished forever: the idea that Stalin's motives in post-1944 Poland were defensive, that his moves in post-1945 Germany were provoked by Western actions. As early as the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, was telling Czech President Eduard Benes that postwar Germany would be "revolutionary and socialist."

Sometimes Professor Raack stretches a bit. His attempt to portray Stalin as a closet Trotskyist all along is probably overstated. Some of his documentation consists of Comintern pep-talks by Molotov to boost the sagging morale of East European Communists in wartime exile; these are not the same as strategy blueprints.

Nonetheless, it's an impressive piece of work. The author's knowledge of Russian, German, Czech, and Polish sources puts to shame the onanistic obsessions of American intellectuals who pore over American sources in search of untoward motives. Contrary to their imaginings, nothing the U.S. could have done differently in 1944 or 1945 -- certainly not the Hiroshima bombing, for heaven's sake -- would have deflected the Soviet plans by a millimeter (except a policy of resisting them more forcefully). The division of Europe, the breakdown of the wartime agreements, and the East -West confrontation over Central Europe were inevitable, given Stalin's plans. Raack modestly reminds us that much East Bloc archival material still remains unliberated, and that the historical record is still incomplete. But the truth is now clearer than ever.