international opinion of a highly organised, Machiavellian and aggressive expansion in the Eastern Bloc by the Soviet Union , the reality was an arduous, slow and improvisatory process as the Soviet Union reacted and anticipated the Western Powers moves. This essay focuses on the period directly after the war in 1945 and attempts to dismantle the opinion that Stalin had a master plan to place the entire of Eastern Europe under total Soviet control and shows that the Soviet Union were firmly in a defensive state