Also lost in the swirling passions was the circumstance that Stalin was the would-be centralizer in Eurasia, but Lenin was the centralizer globally. He had wanted during the Polish War not just to Sovietize but also to incorporate a number of states on the heels of a Red Army sweep westward into Europe. Stalin had responded that “for the nations that formed part of old Russia, we can and should consider our (Soviet) type of federation as an appropriate path to international unity,” but not so for “a future Soviet Germany, Poland, Hungary, Finland. These peoples . . . would scarcely agree to
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