ABSTRACT
The official view of the origins of the Cold War—which was best presented, implicitly at least, in Dean Acheson's modestly titled book Present at the Creation—is that, on the whole, the Cold War began because of bad Soviet behavior. Revisionists also often concentrate on the immediate prewar years—in particular, on the impact Munich had on the Soviet Union, which felt itself rejected by the powers of Western Europe despite its offers to join in anti-Nazi collective security. Insofar as they examine the wartime behavior of the Soviet Union, revisionists view it as essentially defensive and nationalist. The Soviet Union saw the United States as being for more deliberate and far more vigilant than the United States actually was. The American scheme for an open international society, with majority rule and no veto, was seen as a grand design to suppress revolution and to subvert the Soviet Union.
