Re: Why Russia didn't invade the rest of Europe

Well, there's a much more basic reason involved here than this:  the
Soviet
Union was very simply exhausted from the drawn-out fight against
Germany.
25 _million_ Soviets were killed during that fight.  Granted, this had a
lot
to do with the fact that the main Soviet strategy in using their
manpower
was to confront superior-quality German units with as many lower-quality
troops with lower-quality equipment as possible, but there it is.  To
continue to fight over the rest of the European continent would have
required them to keep throwing lives away when they didn't really need
to.

Stalin, ultimately, was probably not treated very fairly by Western
politicians in describing his motives for his actions after World War
II.
It _is_ true that he didn't really trust the West, after having seen
Russia
invaded about three times in the last fourty years by various Western
powers.  However, after World War II he had about what he really needed
to
prevent that from happening again.  He had his tendrils throughout the
United States' atomic bomb projects, to a degree that he would need more
than four years to take away the American nuclear advantage.  And
against
conventional invasion, he had all of Eastern Europe to serve as a giant
buffer zone.  As such, there was no real strategic need on his part to
continue a war effort after the Soviet Union had already paid so dearly
for
providing the brunt of the ground action against the Germans.

E