‘Was the Cold War Avoidable? Did the West Seek to Win It?: A Contribution to the Debate’ Igor Lukes Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA ABSTRACT This article tackles two of the major questions in later twentieth- century international history, the origins and the end of the Cold War. Historians traditionally assumed that Moscow was deter- mined from the outset to Sovietise Eastern Europe, once liber- ated from Nazism, and that this made the later confrontation with the Western powers inevitable. It will be shown here that the idea to install Moscow-friendly regimes in a Europe destroyed by war had been formulated by Kremlin ofcials already a decade earlier. The article also argues that the Western alliance became comfortable with the status quo it had previously denounced, and that it was reluctant to upset the East-West equilibrium of later years. In the aftermath of 1989, several Western politicians have claimed the laurels of victory over Communism, but it was the Soviet bloc countries who liberated themselves, despite pleas of ofcials in London, Washington, Paris, and Bonn to slow down or even suspend their reforms. Was Moscow determined in 1945 to Sovietise the lands liberated from Nazism? Was the Cold War inevitable? Iosif Stalin most likely did not have a frm plan to force his style of government upon the region within a short horizon. Yet, East Central Europe and the Balkans fell under his control in less than three years. How did this happen? I will contend that the Red Army commissars and NKVD and SMERSH ofcers did not need formal directives to impose Moscow-friendly regimes as they marched to Berlin. They knew what was expected of them. The article presents previously overlooked testimony of Karlo Štajner, a Vienna-born Croatian Comintern ofcial, that the idea to install Soviet-style regimes in a Europe destroyed by a prolonged war had been formulated by the Kremlin already a decade before, in 1935. Štajner’s evidence fts neatly within the overall pattern of Soviet thinking following the rise of Adolf Hitler. It disturbs the cosy assumption that Moscow was forced to sign the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact because of uncooperative Franco-British anti-Communists. Concluding the frst section of the paper, I take the view that Moscow’s CONTACT Igor Lukes lukes@bu.edu 28 Howe Street, Wellesley, MA 02482. DIPLOMACY & STATECRAFT https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2021.1913361 © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC