A Likely Third Argument Is That Stalin Was Prone To Hide His Expansionist

A likely third argument is that Stalin was prone to hide his expansionist policy under the guise of security interests, and that, in fact, as he would have understood it, there was no real difference at all between the extension of communist rule throughout Eastern Europe and the securing of Soviet security issues. The revisionist school, mentioned above, would hold that Stalin was in fact open to dialogue with the West, but it was only after his mistreatment by America that he adopted an iron curtain policy.
Stalin was, to an extent, the captive of an ideology which led him to regard the capitalist west as an unappeasably hostile adversary, intent on ending communism everywhere; but he was also a cold political realist who weighed every interaction with the west in power terms.
In terms of the security question in Eastern Europe: the Soviets were ideologically opposed to the west, and vise versa; and both tended to see plots and security issues everywhere during the years of the cold war. As far as the Soviets were concerned, Russia had been invaded and devastated by a western power, Germany; and had at that time been caught virtually unprepared. This was a situation that Stalin could never allow to happen again. The Western powers had demonstrated, through the fire bombing of Dresden and the use of atomic weapons that they too could devastate Russia is they chose. Russia, on this analysis was, therefore forced to maintain a significant standing army and to follow the Americans in developing nuclear weapons as soon as was possible, she was also forced to treat the territories of Eastern Europe as a Western front in waiting and maintain large forces there. The reality of the situation was, however, that the security risk from the Western powers was probably quite slight, as was the threat to the west from Russia; the perception at the time from both however was quite another story: Each say a clear and present danger from the other which led, inevitably to the cold war.
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