I have been working on this project on and off for more than twenty years and have been interested in the immediate postwar period in Europe, including the Soviet Union and east central Europe, since the mid-1980s, when I started the research for The Russians in Germany (Harvard University Press, 1995), a book about the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. This makes the important task of thanking those colleagues and institutions that have helped me at various times over those decades very difficult indeed. Relying on memory, as historians understand all too well, can be treacherous and leave important gaps. I recognize at the outset that I will omit some important people and institutions, while trying, as best I can, to give proper credit to individual members of the collegium of historical scholarship for their important help and support.
Let me start with Stanford University, which has been the primary home for this work since I was hired in 1988. My colleagues in and the staff of the Department of History could not have been more supportive of my teaching and scholarship. The Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), housed at the Freeman-Spogli Institute (FSI), has provided a wonderfully conducive environment for research, writing, and scholarly interchange. Thanks to Tracy Hill of CISAC for her ineffably gracious help. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to the Hoover Institution and especially the Library and Archives, now superbly directed by Eric Wakin, for decades of interest in and support of my research. Archivists at Hoover, too many to name, have been critical advisors on this project, as have archivists in many locations in Russia, Europe, and the United States. My ongoing associations with Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and the Europe Center (TEC) have also redounded to the benefit of this book.
My close friend and colleague David Holloway introduced me to CISAC, shared his ideas about my subject, and has put up with my laments over the years about the problems of “finishing” this book. My History Department colleague, friend, and long-time interlocutor, Amir Weiner, discussed this work with me dozens of times and maybe more. I was fortunate to spend a total of two-and-a-half years of sabbatical time at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), working episodically on this study, as well as on projects in the field of genocide studies. In residence himself at CASBS for a year, Ronald G. Suny of the University of Michigan has been a long-time intellectual and emotional compadre. The bulk of the manuscript was finished up during a blissful year, 2016–17, at the Stanford Humanities Center, skillfully led by my colleague Caroline Winterer. At all of these Stanford institutions, I have had priceless opportunities to discuss my work in both formal and informal settings.
The American Academy in Berlin was home to this work and my family for an unusually comfortable and stimulating six months, as was, for shorter periods, the Potsdam Zentrum für zeithistorische Forschung, and the Vienna Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. I value and miss the close academic partnership over many years with Jochen Laufer of the Potsdam center. He unexpectedly died on March 16, 2016, having finished the fourth and final volume of his superbly edited and annotated document collection on Soviet-German relations. Both the Department of East European History of the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, of which I am now a foreign corresponding member, also provided welcome support and collegial input into the project. Here I am particularly grateful for the ongoing friendship of and discussions about postwar European and especially Austrian history with Arnold Suppan and Wolfgang Mueller. I would also like to thank my Italian friend and colleague, Silvio Pons, for his help and his interest in this project, including, but not limited to, sponsoring my visit to the Gramsci Institute Archives, of which he is the Director.
My Moscow home, more than any other, has been the apartment of Nina Petrova and Leonid Gibianskii of the Institute for Slavic and Balkan Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. My friendship and collegial relationship with Gibianskii go back to the early 1990s, when we organized a conference together at the Academy on the establishment of communist regimes in postwar eastern Europe, and subsequently co-edited a book on the subject. Since that time, at Stanford, in Moscow, and at various locations in Europe, including the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, where we held a joint grant, we have talked and argued about Soviet policy in Europe in the postwar period. Perhaps more than any other single scholar, Gibianskii’s work and thinking, which are not at all confined to his academic specialty, Yugoslav history and the Balkans, have influenced my own. But in his case, like the other scholars I mention in these acknowledgments, there are many points where he would disagree with my rendition of postwar European developments. Gennadii Bordiugov, another Moscow historian, has also been an important part of this long-term project, and I owe him and his wife Ira a great debt for their friendship and help over the years.
These and other friends and colleagues took their precious time and made the effort to read and comment on the manuscript in part or in whole. Those who read individual chapters include: Leonid Gibianskii, Erik Kulavig, Wolfgang Mueller, Daniel Perez, Silvio Pons, and Anita Prazmowska. Alfred J. Rieber and Ronald G. Suny read and commented on the entire manuscript, as did my Stanford History Department colleague and friend, James J. Sheehan. Both of the readers for Harvard University Press were also very helpful in this connection. Especially Mark Kramer’s incisive criticisms were extremely important in sharpening my approach to several conceptual issues in the manuscript. Many of the readers above responded willingly to the questions and issues I placed before them in response to their suggestions and critiques. I trust the book is better as a result. Many thanks also go to Kathleen McDermott, Executive Editor at Harvard University Press, who—from the time she received the manuscript—has been an enthusiastic and engaged partner in this endeavor.
Over the years I have had numerous student research assistants, both graduate and undergraduate, who have contributed to this project. The undergraduates usually worked with me on the Soviet Union and postwar Europe as part of the International Relations Summer Research College. I thank the Director of Stanford’s International Relations Program and Summer Research College over the past several years, Michael Tomz, as a way to express my gratitude both to him for the opportunity to participate in the program, but also to the many summer college students who contributed to this book. The undergraduates in my spring 2016 freshman seminar on Stalin and Europe helped me re-gear my thinking about the project. Let me also express my gratitude to present and past Stanford Ph.D. students in East European and Soviet History who have contributed in various ways to the completion of this work: Jelena Batinic, Lukas Dovern, Kristo Nurmis, Daniel Perez, and Beata Szymkow. I am beholden in particular to Simon Ertz, a former Ph.D. student, who did yeoman work in reading, editing, and commenting extensively on the entire manuscript. Natalia Reshetova of the Hoover Institution provided important research assistance on various issues. These younger Stanford scholars and others, whom I have undoubtedly left out, took this work seriously, collected materials, asked thought-provoking questions, and participated in its execution.
Two document collections and one compendium that I co-edited with Austrian, German, and Russian colleagues make their appearance in the footnotes of this study. I also authored several articles and dictionary and encyclopedia pieces that articulate some of the ideas and use some of the material that make up parts of the book. Perhaps most centrally, I wrote a general article on Stalin and Europe an embarrassingly long time ago that set out some of the ideas and the case study approach I follow in this book: Norman M. Naimark, “Stalin and Europe in the Postwar Period, 1945–53: Issues and Problems,” Journal of Modern European History, vol. 2, no. 1 (2004): 28–57. I thank the editors and publisher of that journal for their interest in that piece. Since the early 1990s, my thinking about early postwar Europe has been nurtured by the conferences and publications of The Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. I am indebted to the Center, to the National Security Archive located at George Washington University, as well as to the community of Cold War historians—John Gaddis, Mark Kramer, Melvyn Leffler, Vojtech Mastny, Christian Ostermann, Silvio Pons, Arne Westad, and Vlad Zubok, among others—for including me in their endeavors.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife and fellow historian Katherine Jolluck and my son Ben, for putting up with the frequent absences from home on research trips and the long weekend hours in my office on campus. Katherine has followed this work almost from the beginning, read much of it in draft, and contributed to the completion of the manuscript in countless ways. I have been extremely fortunate in having such supportive friends and family, including my now adult daughters, Sarah and Anna. No one has been more important in my life and work than my spectacularly loving mother, Selma Carra, who died on September 5, 2017, at the age of ninety-six, when I was teaching and finishing up the Italian chapter in Florence. This book is dedicated to her memory.