ABSTRACT
Joseph Stalin remains something of an enigma for historians studying his policies in Europe after World War II. Not only that, Stalin shared the postwar proclivities of national majorities in these newly constituted countries to expel their minorities. There is also no reason to doubt Stalin’s repeated injunctions that Germany should be independent and united, though early on in the war Stalin was perfectly willing to go along with Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt’s ruminations about carving up Germany into various territorial units. In Stalin’s scheme of things, Austria would be independent, in part as a way to deny her to a potentially greater Germany, in part because he thought that a small and weak Austria would be easier to influence and to dominate. Only Nikita Khrushchev’s determination to act on the State Treaty after Stalin’s death ended the anomaly of the unwanted and counterproductive occupation.
