Yet despite this internal trauma, according to Crankshaw, "the appearance of immediate strength has nevertheless enabled the Kremlin to get its way in Eastern Europe." [24] Referring to the Churchill-Stalin Percentages Agreement (October 9th, 1944) that envisaged a Soviet 'sphere-of-influence', Theodor Draper suggested that Winston Churchill helped facilitate this immediate strength: America would withdraw into isolationism, leaving Russia and Britain as the two key superpowers. [25] Draper argued that such early Cold War history was frequently revised to attack American liberals. [26]

David S. Foglesong perceptively noted that Russia was depicted as 'oriental' by foreigners, and had no middle class. [27] This unique structural defect helped the Cominform seize power, argued Dennis Healey: "an accurate evaluation of the Cominform demands knowledge of the evolution of world communism over thirty years." [28]

"The Communist elite," claimed Healey, "was a secret army of intelligent and courageous robots, a religious society without God, in which rationalization replaced rationality, the organized replaced the organic." [29]

In this dangerous transition, Alexei Bogaturov and Konstantin Pleshakov contended that Russian leadership fell prey to the illusionary Expectation Syndrome: "communities that had attained prosperity or said they had – thought in terms of the need to preserve what they had achieved, interpreting this very broadly as territory, national wealth, ethnic and cultural values." [30]

Preserving threatened values would drive Russia to install Poland's puppet Lubin regime, [31] push for Israel's recognition as a sovereign nation-state, and defend territorial interests of Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. [32] Russia would place direct pressure upon Turkey (June 1945) and Iran (1946). [33]

Early electoral successes in France and Italy would lead Cominform to attempt reform from within Western Europe, not 'export' revolution from without. Noted scholar John Lewis Gaddis described this mindset: "the people of Western Europe and Japan . . . might become so demoralised by the combined dislocations of war and reconstruction as to make themselves vulnerable through sheer lack of self-confidence to communist-led coups, or even to communist victories in free elections." [34]

This strategy failed, whereas in Eastern Europe, direct Soviet intervention changed the balance of power. Consequently, the US retained military forces in Eastern Europe to encourage Titoism – defined by Gaddis as "tension between European communists and the Kremlin." [35]

"Western efforts to ostracise and ultimately destroy the Soviet Union, as well as to turn the Hitlerian threat away from the West and toward Russia," argued Spanier, "were considered the primary reasons for the existence of Soviet hostility." [36]

Concurring, Foglesong noted that not only was Russia viewed as non-Western, but also that it was the battleground for a despotic versus potentially democratic government. [37]

US Anti-Communism and Purity Crusades For 'Liberation'

US Anti-Communism is usually presented as the inevitable outcome of rapidly historical events: Harry S. Truman succeeding Franklin Delano Roosevelt as US President (April 12, 1945), the bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945), the Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947), and the loss of China to Mao Zedong's forces (1949), which led to a perception of a combined Sino-Soviet bloc. But this worldview fails to account for responses to both macro-systemic changes, and Soviet reaction to US diplomacy style. [38]

"World War II was a triangular war," contended Paul Seabury, "among the liberal democracies, the Nazi totalitarians, and the Leninist totalitarians." [39] This 'deep' structure created systemic outcomes (the transformation between 1940-42 of Stalin from absolute dictator to "Uncle Joe"), and complex psycho-historical motives (Roosevelt may have needed Soviet support to fight Japan after V.E. Day, and was willing to lose Eastern Europe to achieve this aim). [40]

Alluding to the Monroe Doctrine, Brian Thomas believed that "the Soviet Union was permitted the same latitude in Central and Eastern Europe . . . as the United States in Latin America . . . what Yalta did was make democracy there a Soviet option rather than a Soviet commitment." [41]

However, Alexei Bogaturov and Konstantin Pleshakov trace the US-Russian feedback loops to the 1917 Russian Revolution: "As early as the 1920s, Britain, France, the United States began developing a mechanism making it possible to maintain stability by continuously renewing the pillars of society, not by conserving them. One factor for this was fear of social cataclysms after the October Revolution in Russia . . . the Russian example played the role of a powerful catalyst." [42]

Fear of Russia was shaped by America's evolving 'Open Door' diplomatic policy: "that American domestic wellbeing depended on and derived from continuous overseas expansion." [43] This fear distorted the "absolute and relative power relationship between the two countries." [44] Revisionist explanations featured 'economic coercion' (notably, America ending a Lend-Lease agreement in May 1945), and 'atomic diplomacy' as standard themes. [45]

Although this explains US anti-Communism as a de-facto state religion (the core propaganda that drove containment and roll-back doctrines, thus affecting Soviet strategies), it obscures the fact that American religious beliefs and faith in racial capacities were deployed as psychological warfare.

David S. Foglesong summed up the ideological battlefield succinctly: "the crusade for 'liberation' should be seen not only as a by-product of the confrontation with Stalinism, but also as part of a century-long American drive to penetrate, open, and reshape Russia." [46] This crusade embraced covert action, for the CIA "funded Radio Liberation broadcasts to the USSR." [47] Anti-Communism as a religiopolitical creed was crucial: it "had to pervade everyday life as well as foreign policy." [48]

US anti-Communism was shaped by historical mind-sets, Puritan religious beliefs, and a perception that Russia was the battleground between Slavic and Asiastic racialist characteristics, but was ultimately a good Christian nation. [49] This debate flourished in the wake of Wilsonian ideals, notably in the fields of immigration and ethnology.