ABSTRACT
As for Russian behaviour, the great British historian Arnold Toynbee asked retrospectively:
Why was it ... that, even before the Second World War had been won, the Soviet Union began to make a series of moves that progressively wore out the goodwill of her Western allies? Why did she provocatively deprive them of any effective voice in the postwar realignment of those East European countries in which the German occupation or ascendancy was liquidated by Russian arms? ... Why did the Soviet Government choose to flaunt their hostility to the United States so frankly in American faces? If the foremost aim of Russian policy had been to put the Americans on their guard against the Soviet Union and to goad them into militantly opposing Russian designs, the Russians could not have achieved this aim more successfully than by behaving as they did. Yet it was impossible to believe that this could really have been their purpose.'
