"Yergin defines this official anti-Soviet dogma as the Riga axioms, named after the Baltic port of Latvia, where United States diplomats gathered information on Bolshevik Russia during the years of non-recognition (1920-1933).
The Riga alumni, who included George F. Kennan, Charles E. Bohlen, Elbridge Durbrow, and Loy W. Henderson, shared the conviction that Soviet foreign policy flowed directly from Marxist-Leninist ideology, that the horrors of Stalinist rule within Russia would produce external policies equally totalitarian in purpose"
[Oh, looky look, isn't this the same age-old argument we have today?]
Ironically, the Truman administration chose to argue with the Soviets over a region which was, in the words of Arthur Bliss Lane, when he was minister to Riga in 1937, “perhaps the least important of all the areas in the world with which the United States had to deal.” Poland became the test case. Stimson argued that geographical propinquity outweighed principle in international affairs, but key adviser W. Averell Harriman declared, “I don’t see how we can afford to stand aside without registering the strongest objections.”
http://www.vqronline.org/cold-war-revis
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