The first whiff of tension between Russia and the West was felt in the air during the time of the Bolshevik revolution. While the Ottoman Empire was in its death's throes, Russia grabbed the opportunity to annex large territories in Europe. This brought the country in direct confrontation with the other powers, notably Britain, France and Austria, which used tactics such as intervention in the Civil War in Russia to discomfiture the latter. Bolshevism came to be seen as a threat to the world. The rise of Nazism in the inter-war years was seen as a bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism. Gradually, the U.S. joined the Western powers against Russia.

Chris Freville writes about when Nazi Germany began its expansion spree, the West stood by while Russia fought the Reich's armies, most likely with the hope that the two will destroy each other. Russia's own expansionism was viewed with suspicion, and the treatment of small countries at the hands of Stalin further exacerbated the cold war sentiments against the country.

Indeed, the case of Poland exemplifies the treatment meted out by Russia to all the countries it brought under its control. Poland's boundaries had to be redrawn after WWII, because Stalin refused to let go off tracts of land of eastern Poland that his country had acquired as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on 8 October 1939. As compensation, the Western Powers padded Poland on its west side with tracts of land of German territory. Stalin did not stop at that: he also wanted a say in which government rules in Poland. He recognized the Communist-dominated Lublin committee as the true government of Poland, blatantly dismissing the body that had been elected by popular vote in 1945. In the 1947 election, the Communists came to power by dubious means.

This same pattern was observed in other small Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as Chris Freville observed when researching his work. Germany continued to be a cause of disagreement. The issue was resolved by the two superpowers dividing the country into two: East Germany came under the control of Russia, while West Germany followed the democratic structure of the West.

The cold war found yet another peak in Greece. During the occupation of Greece in WWII, an attempt was made to raise a guerrilla army (called ELAS), that would bring about a communist revolution. When Britain liberated Athens from German occupation in October 1944, it had to contend with this internal uprising. When a truce was called in February 12, 1945, a big chunk of Greece went in the hands of communists.

As Chris Freville correctly observed, the U.S. found itself in center-stage, eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Russia, when Britain turned to it for help, because it found it difficult to quell the civil war in Greece after the March 1946 elections. Adopting the famous Truman Doctrine, the U.S. abandoned its isolation and displaced Britain from its leadership position in Mediterranean as well as in the Middle East. From then on, the cold war began touching ever new highs.

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