Yalta Appeasement II

Reading the book, "Armed Truce" [by Hugh Thomas, published by Atheneum 1987], which is a thorough history of the 1945-1946 period when the post World War II landscape was being created, I found statements by two high level foreign affairs officials of the Soviet Union that support my theory that US and British appeasement of Stalin created or worsened the Cold War. [See post of August 4, 2007 for the original posting of the theory.]

Maxim Litvinov was Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1946, working directly for Molotov who had been at Stalin's side since the 1920s. From page 57-58 of "Armed Truce" -

"[Litvinov] asked the United States journalist, Edgar Snow, author of that most influential of books, 'Red Star over China', 'Why did you Americans wait until now [fall 1945] to begin opposing us in the Balkans and Eastern Europe? ... You should have done this three years ago. Now it's too late, and your complaints only arouse suspicions here' ... In 1946, Litvinov suggested that Stalin might have acted with more restraint in East Europe if the West had been firmer and less equivocal.
...
"The views of Litvinov appear to have been shared by others: the bleak Soviet ambassador to London in the last years of the war, Gusev, also apparently said that if the West had taken a stronger position, the regimes of Eastern Europe might have been saved from Communism."

Nothing is certain in the affairs of man, but the appeasement of Stalin before and at Yalta certainly opened the door for his expansion in Eastern Europe and created favorable conditions for Stalin to restart the totalitarian movement for world domination that had been deferred during World War II.