Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain

The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a "global Cold War" are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.

Mark Kramer is director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, where he is also a Senior Fellow.
Vit Smetana is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Republic's Academy of Sciences and teaches modern international history at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague.

Introduction
By Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana
Part 1. Central Europe and the Onset of the Iron Curtain
Chapter 1. Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Establishment of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1941-1949
By Mark Kramer
Chapter 2. The United States and Eastern Europe, 1943-1948
By Michael F. Hopkins
Chapter 3. Concessions or Conviction? Czechoslovakia's Road to the Cold War and the Soviet Bloc
By Vít Smetana
Chapter 4. Hungary's Role in the Soviet Bloc, 1945-1956
By László Borhi
Chapter 5. Stalin, the Split with Yugoslavia, and Soviet-East European Efforts to Reassert Control, 1948-1953
By Mark Kramer
Chapter 6. Austria, Germany, and the Cold War, 1945-1955
By Rolf Steininger
Chapter 7. Neutrality for Germany or Stabilizing the Eastern Bloc? New Evidence on the Decision-Making Process of the Stalin Note
By Peter Ruggenthaler
Part 2. The German Question and Intra-Bloc Politics in the Post-Stalin Era
Chapter 8. The Berlin Wall: Looking Back on the History of the Wall Twenty Years after Its Fa