Understanding Stalin's foreign policy requires examining his shifting approach to the unfolding Cold War. Up until 1945, he sought great power cooperation in Europe, but later rejected compromise with the United States for fear of exposing Soviet weakness. Stalin’s failed gambit for influence in Iran and Turkey showed the limitations of heavy-handed bullying of neighboring countries: in both cases, he had to retreat and retrench. Meanwhile, in Greece, Stalin shifted opportunistically from a cautious noninvolvement to increasing support for the Communist insurgency. But his Balkan strategy was complicated by an unexpected quarrel with Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, fueled by Stalin’s jealousy and mistrust. Stalin’s realization in 1947 that left-leaning coalitions that he sponsored across Eastern Europe were not electable marked a turning point towards confrontation with the West. Stalin began to prioritize security over legitimacy. This logic led him towards an attempt to dislodge the Allies from divided Berlin, resulting, by 1949, in a complete division of Europe.

We discuss the important – but rarely scrutinized – role of archaeology in the constitution of Greece and Israel as contemporary crypto-colonized states, defined by Herzfeld as countries with a strong national sentiment that serve as buffer zones and whose political independence is accompanied by massive economic dependency. We elaborate on what this crypto-colonizing process means for the two societies.

This chapter explores the genocidal intersection between political history and ethnographic geography in European or near-European regions where the traditional continental empires met the emerging hegemony of Western nation-states. In particular it considers how and why the introduction of nationalism proved toxic in these multicultural ‘rimlands’, with Macedonia and Thrace as illustrative examples. Here the wartime shattering of empires (1912-1948) and their succession by fiercely nationalist competitors resulted in repeated spasms of extreme zero-sum violence whose key outcome was the ‘unmixing of peoples’ by mass deportation, and/or annihilation.