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Under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, the United States refrained from intervening during the three major Cold War crises in the Soviet bloc in 1953, 1956, and 1968. The uprisings in the German Democratic Republic and Hungary came at a contentious stage of the Cold War. In 1968 East–West relations were again groping towards detente and, the Czechoslovak Communist Party unleashed an ambitious reform agenda under Alexander Dubcek. On 20 August, a massive military invasion by Warsaw Pact forces squashed the reform spirit. All three challenges to Soviet control on the periphery of its Cold War empire followed power struggles in the Kremlin and intimations of a slackening of the reigns of control in Moscow. Eastern Europe was terra incognita for most Americans, and the United States had never pursued an active policy in Eastern Europe. All three crisis scenarios were overshadowed by crises in other parts of the world—part of larger arcs of crises the superpowers were confronting simultaneously...

Five distinguished scholars offer separate commentaries on the article by Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. All of the commentators reject the broad interpretation and many of the specific arguments put forth by Cox and Kennedy-Pipe. They point out several crucial issues that are omitted from the article and raise questions about the authors' sources, use of evidence, and selective invocation of secondary literature. They regret that Cox and Kennedy Pipe seem to dwell on a large number of the same matters that preoccupied radical revisionist historians in the 1960s. They argue that although Cox and Kennedy-Pipe offer a more sophisticated version of revisionism, their article suffers from many of the same shortcomings. Most of the commentators believe that the Marshall Plan merely reflected a division of Europe that was already well under way rather than being the precipitating cause. In that sense, the debate on the origins of the Cold War needs to go well beyond the issues raised by Cox and Kennedy-Pipe.

The Cold War broke into the open early in Austria as the result of Soviet economic depredations in their zone of occupation and the hardening of the American response during 1946/7. Flush with the success of the Red Army against Hitler’s Third Reich, the Soviet Union stayed on the offensive and built an “empire by coercion”, adding security zones all along its extended periphery. As a response, the United States overcame its isolationist instincts and embarked on containing Soviet expansionism. The outbreak of the Cold War in Europe is best understood as a game of tit-for-tat between Soviet pressure, probing Western weaknesses along its peripheries, and Western responses, containing perceived Soviet aggression.

The Red Army remembered that Austrians had participated in the Wehrmacht’s spoliation of their homeland. When it liberated the Ostmark, in spite of professing to the contrary, it treated Austria like a defeated country. The “liberated” population was humiliated in a ruthless campaign of raping women and looting cities and countryside. Soon special teams began to remove industrial plants from Austria as war booty. The undisciplined behaviour of the raging soldateska left an indelible mark on the Austrian population and eerily reconfirmed the anticommunism preached by Nazi Greuelpropaganda. Large-scale Soviet extraction of reparations from Austria threatened the economic viability of the country. There is no evidence that Stalin planned to incorporate Austria into its extensive postwar security sphere.