To a degree that few Western statesmen at the time wished to acknowledge, the future dispensation of postwar Europe was not going to hinge on a philosophy or ideology or even a geopolitical strategy, so much as on the whims and fevered calculations of a single man. His name was Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, but he was better known by the nom de guerre he had bestowed upon himself and that derived from the Russian word for steel: Stalin.
