To the editors:

I am glad to respond briefly to Silvio Pons’s review of my study Stalin and the Fate of Europe. Pons is an eminent European scholar of Soviet foreign policy and the history of the Cold War, and it is particularly gratifying to read his sophisticated, accurate, and sympathetic rendition of the arguments I make in the book. I have very little to add to his presentation of the seven case studies I examine to understand the interaction of Soviet policy and European domestic politics in the immediate postwar period. At the end of the review, he suggests, no doubt correctly, that I could have added further case studies to the book and states that Czechoslovakia, in particular, would have “provided another example of the dynamics by which sovereignty was affirmed and lost.” I could not agree more. The case of the Czechoslovak coup d’état of February 1948, as Pons also notes, was extremely important and had widespread reverberations across Europe. Historians understand reasonably well the Czechoslovak communist party’s actions during its successful strike for power. But a great deal still remains unknown about Soviet intentions and behavior during the coup. This could well be the subject of a major monograph.