Review of International Studies (1999), 25, 655–673 Copyright © British International Studies Association 655 1 The author would like to acknowledge the ﬁnancial assistance of the Arts Faculty of University College Cork, which greatly facilitated the research and writing of this article. Ideology, calculation, and improvisation: spheres of inﬂuence and Soviet foreign policy 1939–1945 GEOFFREY ROBERTS 1 Abstract.This article examines Soviet foreign policy during the Second World War in the light of new evidence from the Russian archives. It highlights the theme of spheres of inﬂuence and the relationship between the pursuit of this goal by the USSR and the outbreak of the Cold War. It argues that the Cold War was the result of an attempt by Moscow to harmonise spheres of inﬂuence and postwar cooperation with Britain and the United States with the ideological project of a people’s democratic Europe. Introduction For the USSR the Second World War was an economic and human catastrophe of gigantic proportions. Politically and militarily, however, the war presented Moscow with a series of opportunities to achieve one of the main foreign goals of the Soviet state: the security of the socialist system. The chosen means to achieve this goal was the establishment of a sphere of inﬂuence in Eastern and Central Europe—a zone of Soviet strategic and political predominance unchallenged by any other great power. If there was one single underlying and persistent theme of Soviet foreign policy during the war it was to create a series of friendly regimes on the USSR’s western ﬂank. Initially this goal was sought in the context of an alliance with Nazi Germany. Following the Nazi attack on the USSR in June 1941, Moscow then attempted to conclude a broad-based, pan-European spheres of inﬂuence agreement with its new British ally. That most famed Soviet spheres of inﬂuence deal—the Churchill-Stalin ‘percentages agreement’ of October 1944—was more mythical than real, but in the middle years of the war Soviet ofﬁcials did formulate grandiose plans for a postwar trilateral global condominium of Great Britain, the USSR and the United States. Nor was there anything imaginary about Soviet insistence at the end of the war on a military and political zone of Soviet security in Eastern Europe. In the event, however, this latter goal was achieved not through diplomacy, but by a combination of force of arms and local communist political mobilisation and manipulation. The culmination of this drive for security through spheres of inﬂuence was, ultimately, a Soviet-dominated and a communist-controlled Eastern Europe. The expansion of Soviet inﬂuence and control in Eastern Europe has appeared to many historians as a purposeful and coherent pattern of territorial and political expansion. But there were a number of different phases of Soviet spheres of