In light of all this, as World War II drew to a close, even a paranoid like Stalin might be reasonably forgiven for nurturing another of his conspiracy theories: that his wartime allies were holding back, nibbling away at the margins of things before swooping in to take over once an exhausted Red Army was bled dry. To forestall that, and to avoid a future catastrophe along the lines of what she had just endured, the Soviet Union needed to have full control of its frontiers, to have a defensive bulwark in Eastern Europe against its historical enemies to the west. Romania became the first
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