Russia

From: larry.r.trout

'Dmitri Medvedev in an interview with Izvestia from May 6, 2010: "If we speak honestly, the regime that was built in the Soviet Union cannot be called anything other than totalitarian."'

'Georgi Dimitrov, last head of the Communist International, is quoted to the effect that as early as January 1945 Stalin declared at a reception in his dacha outside Moscow that although Russia was allied with one capitalist faction (the United States and Great Britain) against another (the Nazis), it would soon fight its present allies too. Stalin believed that as a result of a postwar capitalist economic crisis, and conflicts between the Western allies, America would be compelled to withdraw its forces from Europe, which would enable the USSR not just to dominate Eastern Europe but to extend its influence to all of Germany as well as France and Italy. But as the Russian study notes with evident disbelief and perhaps even amusement, Western politicians continued to put their trust in the peaceful intentions of  "Uncle Joe" and "simply did not want to believe in Soviet expansionism" until a more sober approach began to prevail in the West (which only happened after Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, which this volume reprints in full). Further stages in the unleashing of the Cold War were the Berlin Blockade provoked by Stalin, the Soviet takeover of Prague in 1948, and the rapid Sovietization of Eastern Europe.

The study further notes that Soviet military doctrine in the early 1950s was—according to Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, chief of the Soviet General Staff—based on a powerful belief that Soviet tank divisions that would occupy Western Europe as far as the Atlantic. As for the outbreak of the Korean War, the initiative came from Kim Il Sung, but Stalin gave him the green light and provided enormous quantities of military equipment and "fully consciously [soznatelno] attempted to draw America [into] a new conflict which could eventually lead to a third world war." In brief, according to this volume, Stalin was a monster and eventually a disaster for Russia even more than for the rest of the world.'

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2010-NovDec/full-Laqueur-ND-2010.html