<P> The Soviets were able to use a well - organized ring of spies in the United States, to gain critical advantages during meetings with representatives of Britain and the United States . Several of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's advisors and cabinet members regularly reported their activities to NKVD handlers . </P> <P> There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalism and socialism . Each vindicated in 1945 by previous disasters, those contrasts had been simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life . Conflicting models of democratic centralism versus liberal democracy, of state planning against free enterprise, of full or partial employment, of equality versus economic freedom, were to compete for the allegiance of the developing and developed world in the postwar years . </P> <P> Even so, the basic structures and tensions that marked the cold war were not yet in place in 1945--46 . Despite the necessary means of the United States to advance a different vision of postwar Europe, Joseph Stalin viewed the re-emergence of Germany and Japan as the Soviet Union's chief threats, not the United States . At the time, the prospects of an Anglo - American front against the USSR seemed slim from Stalin's standpoint . Economic advisers such as Eugen Varga reinforced this view, predicting a postwar crisis of overproduction in capitalist countries which would culminate by 1947--48 in another great depression . For one, Stalin assumed that the capitalist camp would soon resume its internal rivalry over colonies and trade and not pose a threat to the Soviet Union . </P> <P> Varga's analysis was partly based on trends in U.S. federal expenditures . Due to the war effort mostly, in the first peacetime year of 1946, federal spending still amounted to $62 billion, or 30% of GDP, up from 3% of GDP in 1929, before the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War . Thus, Stalin assumed that the Americans would need to look to the Soviet Union, to maintain the same level of exports and state expenditures . </P>

The first concern of the soviet union in 1945 was to
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