It's all here: perfidious Communists, the scheming Stalin, noble-but-doomed anti-Communists, a morally confused West doing too little too late. It's all familiar ground, and leaves questions begged as much as answered.



I do not disrespect Professor Rothschild's scholarship. He is a worthy successor to Hugh Seton-Watson, his mentor. Professor Rothschild's work added new information on the course of Communist East Europe, especially in its latter phases. What is lacking is an appreciation of why the USSR moved into this region as it did, insisting on Soviet control by any means necessary.



Cold war Western historians largely slight the trauma suffered by Russia and the constituent Soviet republics during World War II, but it's hard to overstate the wanton brutality and devastation the Nazis dealt to the Eastern Front, with the help of East European Axis satellites and collaborators. It is quite understandable why Moscow would seek to ensure this never happened again, by closing off these border nations to any future aggressor. This fact, untidy as it is, receives scant attention in Professor Rothschild's work. But it is not a slight of his alone, but of the whole school of cold war historiography of which this is, admittedly, one of the better products.



Also left hanging is the question of why the Soviet Bloc is singled out as an example of cold war aggression, as opposed to U.S. manipulation of French and Italian elections, U.S. and U.K. provocation of the Greek civil war, the U.S. and U.K. creation of West Germany, and the rehabilitation of ex-Nazis and Franco's Spain. The left half of postwar Western Europe was buried as thoroughly as the right half in the East, but one process is considered necessary, the other reprehensible when done by the enemy.



As to his charges of the West's evading "its responsibility" in the East, one wonders what more could have been done than what was done. Demanding that the "captive nations go free," and saber-rattling at Moscow, only played into post-war Soviet trauma and ensured the Iron Curtain's survival for two generations.