Stalin's Foreign Policy Analysis

2096 Words9 Pages
Stalin’s post-war foreign policy was one of hesitance and reactionism. Rather than cold war 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 of paranoia in the years after the war but did envision an international global communist revolution. They just didn’t know how it would be achieved.…show more content…
The two schools of thought on Stalin’s foreign policy are a Machiavellian, calculating and highly organised view of Stalin’s post war foreign policy and a view that is much more improvisatory, reactionist and unarranged. Examples of scholars in favour of the Soviet Union being a political mastermind that can control and manipulate nations without detection would be Hugh Seton Watson. Hugh Seton-Watson constructing the three-stage model of Soviet absorption of a nation. The first stage is coalition, then bogus coalition and then total Soviet control. The evidence debunking Hugh Seton-Watsons three stage scheme is that much of Stalin’s foreign policy in these countries was unintentional. For instance in Hungary the failure of the communist party in the general election of 1945 was not planned and would have been an embarrassment for the Soviet Union , only then did they decide to arrange the communist party into key positions of government. Obviously the belief in the organic development of communist revolution had to be weighed against the need to expand and create a buffer zone. It wasn’t until 1947 that the Soviet Union decided to begin influencing the party. This is two years after the communist movement had gained momentum. Stalin created the Cominform in order to influence these satellite governments. Also how would the first coalition ever truly be a ‘genuine’…show more content…
Gillette’s Motivational-Ideational Analysis of Stalin's Foreign Policy. Clearly we can see from this quote that Stalin saw in the writings of Lenin a message which he understood to mean expansion in order to influence the global Communist revolt. The only countries that Stalin knew the Soviet Union could expand into without risking war where those on the Eastern

More about Stalin's Foreign Policy Analysis

Open Document