A thorough and good article about the blame game…

Blaming America for Russian Aggression, Then and Now - The Bulwark

Though many of these intellectuals have rejected the “who started it” paradigm altogether, viewing a Cold War between two ideologically opposed superpowers as essentially inevitable, their work still sheds light on Soviet hegemonic aspirations in Europe and the developing world—a glaring omission in revisionist works. Not only have the post-revisionists convincingly refuted the New Left argument that the Sovietization of Eastern Europe was “not predetermined,” but they also illustrate that Stalin and other Soviet leaders expected a “crisis of capitalism” in Western Europe to eventually trigger Communist revolutions and opportunities for Soviet subversion in the American sphere of influence (though they felt that assisting such revolutions could wait until after the USSR had fully recovered from the war).