Before History Had an End

If Joseph Stalin had hired a pollster to assess his standing with the American public in 1941, the Soviet leader would have learned that he had a problem with his negatives. As head of a totalitarian state founded on an ideology anathema to the vast majority of Americans, Stalin personified betrayal and deceit. If the horrors of collectivization and the purges with their gruesome show trials had not been enough, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the invasion of tiny Finland in 1939 confirmed Stalin's image in the American mind. According to Edward M. Bennett, President Franklin D. Roosevelt shared the public's view of Stalin as “shrewd and ruthless” but remained unsure about the Georgian's ideological zeal (p. xxii). Roosevelt needed to learn the strength of Stalin's commitment to Soviet expansionism once Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 created an opportunity for the president to construct the American-British-Soviet entente that had eluded him several years earlier. The pursuit of victory, as Bennett reminds his readers, was no simple matter and the outcome was not preordained. Even more difficult, however, was the task of reconciling FDR's second goal, the creation and preservation of peace through cooperation with Stalin, with Soviet objectives and interests

Economic history · Expansionism · Georgian · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Victory · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy

• Beyond Bipolarity in Space and Time

  David Reynolds, David O Reynolds•Diplomatic History•1992

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