Stalin's Cold War
(Palgrave, 2008)
Dr. Vesselin Dimitrov’s book, Stalin’s Cold War, won the 2008 Alexander Nove Prize for the best book in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet studies. The Nove Prize, awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, is the most prestigious prize in this field and has been conferred on scholars such as Archie Brown, Geoffrey Hosking and Stephen White.
Dr Dimitrov’s book provides a ground breaking analysis of the emergence of the Cold War and the establishment of communism in Eastern Europe from the perspective of the Soviet Union's secretive leader. Drawing on rich new evidence from Soviet, East European and British archives, the book offers fresh and illuminating insights into the evolution of Stalin's strategy from cooperation with the United States and Britain during the Second World War to ideological and geopolitical confrontation. The book reveals Stalin's efforts to grapple with the dynamic interaction between democratic and communist parties in the domestic politics of European countries in the aftermath of the Second World War, and his key role in the gradual but inexorable shift towards communist monopoly of power in the countries of Eastern Europe.