My research confirmed that Stalin was an old-style national leader who wanted, at all costs, to protect the homeland and home base of communism, which is why he was so desirous of controlling the Eastern Europe countries and Baltic states as part of the Soviet empire. They would serve as a protective buffer between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, from whence three European leaders' armies invaded Mother Russia: Napoleon, then Kaiser Wilhelm, and then Hitler.
Whenever confronted elsewhere, Stalin tended to back away, abandoning local Communist Parties to the tender mercies of their enemies, the example of the Greek Communist Party being a case in point. (My Master's thesis, by the way, was on the Greek Civil War of that period.)
There was so much misunderstanding, misreading, among the Allies that led to so much Cold War misery when WWII was over. And we're repeating the pattern today. Just one contextual episode, which I've written about previously.
Stalin couldn't understand why Truman and other Western leaders were screaming so loudly about his harsh treatment of the Eastern Europeans absorbed into his satellite-states buffer zone after the end of the war. After all, he reasoned, the Americans and British had recognized his right to control those states in the so-called "percentages agreement" or "spheres of influence" agreement worked out in a secret Moscow meeting in October 1944.
The "Percentages Agreement"
Short history: At that meeting, Churchill gave Stalin a piece of paper on which he had written percentages of which allies in the post-war period would control which countries in their "sphere of influence." Since the Red Army was (or soon would be) effectively in control of most of Eastern Europe, and neither the Americans nor Brits had the wherewithall (or desire) to fight another massive war right after defeating the Germans, they recognized the reality of Soviet boots on the ground and gave Stalin 90% control of Rumania and so on, while the Brits got 90% control in Greece, Yugoslavia was 50-50, etc. Stalin began acting under this agreement during the final year of the war, and the Americans and Brits likewise honored the percentages pact, seemingly unconcerned about the brutal way Stalin was absorbing Eastern Europe into the Soviet empire.
Upon the death of FDR, President Truman took over. After war ended and with anti-communism affecting domestic politics, Truman began objecting to the Soviet Union's harsh behavior in Eastern Europe. Stalin interpreted the strong Western reaction to his unbridled use of power in that "sphere-of-influence" region as reneging on a solemn agreement; his paranoia convinced him that the West was out to try to overthrow him, so he conceded that the "percentages agreement" was no longer in place and began making life more difficult for America elsewhere in the world.
So there was that gross misunderstanding from the Soviet side. What about the U.S.? Americans, including most government officials, had just fought a war against one set of totalitarians and now were confronted with another, in the form of Stalin's Soviet Union. They tended to see this movement as monolithic and as aimed at world domination, so anything the Soviets did was interpreted in that light.
"Nationalist Communism"
The Soviets talked such a good game about "international communism," centrally directed from Moscow, that the Americans had no inkling that something called "nationalist communism" existed, or even could exist. If they had, they might have altered their foreign policy accordingly, recognizing that Tito's communism in Yugoslavia was distinctly different from Stalin's in Russia, from Mao's in China or from Ho Chi Minh's in Vietnam. Antagonisms among and between Communist regimes abounded, and nationalism almost always was stronger than a monolithic ideology. (An analogous distortion today would be America viewing radical Islam through the lens of a monolithic Al-Qaida, supposedly pulling all the militant and terrorist strings around the world. If it ever was, it's not that way now.)
After communism imploded in the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the late-1980s, Russia went into a decade-long psychological and economic tailspin. But Russia has climbed back, economically and militarily stronger and determined to re-assert what it considers its rightful superpower status in its "sphere of influence" and in the world. And, once again, it sees its major threats coming from the West, engineered mainly by the United States.
Russia Nervous About Missiles, NATO
The U.S., for example, is luring former Soviet-satellite countries (Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, etc.) toward the European Union and, especially frightening to Russia, into NATO, the military pact originally set up to stop the Soviet Union from even thinking about moving westwards. Putin, like Stalin, sees his country's "sphere of influence" being violated, with Russia being ringed by potentially hostile enemies, effectively controlled by the U.S. and other Western powers.
This growing split between Russia and the U.S. has been building since the early 1990s, with Putin, for example, warning the U.S. not to position its missile-defense system in the former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europe. But just the other day, Poland signed an agreement to do just that (as did the Czechs earlier) and the Russians are furious. The U.S. claims that the system is aimed at stopping incoming missiles from rogue states like Iran, but few believe that unlikely rationale. The Russians, not unrealistically, are convinced that the missile-defense system is aimed at them, and is provocative in the extreme, placed as it is right next to its borders. (Look how freaked out the U.S. got in the early-1960s - ready to go to war - when the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the American coast.)
When President Saakashvili ordered Georgian troops into South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two ethnic-Russian regions inside Georgia that wished to break away and be annexed by their Russian neighbor, Putin and Russian president Medvedev ordered their "peacekeeping" troops (there under a U.N. resolution) to resist and sent tanks and troops across the Georgian border to occupy large parts of Georgia. Putin said he's convinced that the Americans approved of their ally Saakashvili's invasion since the U.S. has been building up Georgia for years with military weapons and training.
Hit the Bear on the Nose
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