European politicians seeking to rebuild their ravaged societies in the immediate aftermath of the second world war had their work cut out for them. The conflict had devastated the continent, levelling cities, destroying economies, and uprooting 40 million people. It had spawned a series of civil wars in which occupiers and collaborators fought resistance movements for control of soon-to-be liberated territories. But Europe’s new leaders had to contend with more than just material ruin and blood-soaked politics. The Red Army had won the ground war in Europe and by 1945 its soldiers had liberated Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Vienna and Budapest and were a presence from the Danish island of Bornholm to the Bulgarian littoral of the Black Sea. Looming over the political efforts at stabilisation and reconstruction, amid escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington, was the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Stalin’s ambitions for postwar Europe have been the subject of extensive debate. Some have argued that the Kremlin had a clear ideological commitment to projecting Soviet power as far and as ruthlessly as possible; others have maintained that Soviet policies were made on the hoof – improvised reactions to the introduction in 1947 of the Truman doctrine and the Marshall plan. Norman Naimark cleaves to the second of these views. “There is very little evidence,” he writes, “that Stalin had a preconceived plan for creating a bloc of countries in Europe with a common Soviet-style system.” In Naimark’s account, Stalin was no dogmatic tyrant determined to foist communist dictatorships on hapless and exhausted countries but rather a “hyperrealist”, who was ready to endorse governing coalitions of communists with other parties of the left and even the right just as long as they did not become hostile to the Soviet Union. The cold war emerged because Soviet geopolitical ambitions (and anxieties) were ultimately at loggerheads with those of the western powers.

Beneath the familiar narrative of a continent inexorably pulled apart by mutually hostile superpowers, Naimark zooms in on the political history of seven countries and cities to argue that they were not simply squares on the chessboard on which the Americans and the Soviets competed for supremacy. He shows that, in the years between 1945 and 1949, the future of the continent was also wrought by national politicians who picked their way through the political and diplomatic rubble of their own wartorn societies in a bid to (re)assemble fragile but ultimately enduring governments. These “capable and perspicacious” politicians played their often weak hands remarkably well, skilfully and doggedly resisting or circumventing Soviet influence, as they “sought to protect and, in some cases, strengthen their country’s sovereignty, meaning the right of their nations to govern themselves.”

In the wake of the 1944 armistice between his country and the Soviet Union, the wily 74-year-old Finnish Prime Minister Juha Kusti Paasikivi succeeded in walking a fine line between an inevitably Kremlin-friendly foreign policy and national sovereignty in domestic affairs. He gave in to the Soviet demand that Finnish leaders who had sent their armies to join the German assault on Leningrad be tried as war criminals, but also resolutely insisted on the right of Finns to govern themselves as an independent nation. In Italy, the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, who had spent the war years in Moscow and enjoyed Stalin’s confidence, oversaw the peaceful transformation of an underground army of resistance fighters into a mass political party, steered the country away from the abyss of a civil war, and even entered into coalition governments with the Christian Democrats. If the political dramas in Helsinki, Warsaw, Vienna, Rome and Berlin played out in the shadows cast by Soviet and American power, they were, nevertheless, “European history, in the sense that … the agency of Europeans mattered and mattered a lot”. Berlin was a case in point. When Stalin blockaded allied access to the city in June 1948, the charismatic mayor, Ernst Reuter, emerged as a resourceful and resilient champion of the western Berliners. As the shortages began to bite, he rallied them not to give in to Soviet pressure, declaring “cruel, brutal, aggressive powers will not beat us to our knees”. On the international stage, he cast Berlin as a vital outpost of freedom that had, both morally and strategically, to be defended. Thanks to the ensuing allied airlift, the blockade not only failed but served to rehabilitate the Germans in the eyes of western powers and to destroy any lingering attachment to the idea that the Soviet Union was an ally. At the founding of Nato in 1949, US President Harry Truman declared: “Berlin had been a lesson to us all.”

But even if the Kremlin lacked a clear game plan for Europe, the latitude it was prepared to offer reflected its own strategic priorities. As long as neighbouring Sweden remained a neutral power, Finland was spared the fate of a “frontline nation” and could be allowed to manage its own affairs; Poland, situated directly on the Soviet Union’s western flank and the springboard for two invasions in the first half of the 20th century, could not. So the Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka’s attempts to pursue a “Polish road to socialism” were thwarted by the Kremlin and he found himself arrested for “rightist nationalist deviations” (even if he did go on to enjoy a comeback in the years after Stalin’s death). Postwar statesmen all struggled for sovereignty but on a playing field that was heavily tilted one way or another by Moscow’s commitment to controlling the shape and outcomes of national politics.

Some will find Naimark’s treatment of Soviet policy in Europe rather too selective. He passes over the ruthless Moscow-backed communist takeovers of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, eastern Germany and Romania in favour of states (Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Denmark and Finland) where any Soviet attempts to engineer such a takeover would have faced almost insurmountable political, diplomatic and military obstacles. But he shows convincingly how, in key parts of the continent, Soviet policy was a tentative series of improvisations and concessions to the presence of atomic-powered US military superiority and the shrewd machinations of European politicians.

Stalin and the Fate of Europe details the negotiations, the intrigues, and the showdowns that dominated the febrile politics of the postwar years but at the cost of a wider discussion of the ravaged and divided societies themselves. There are only glimpses into wider political culture: Naimark mentions popular support for the Finnish leaders tried for war crimes and the anti-communist proclamations of the Catholic Church in the crucial Italian elections in 1948, when priests declared the ballot a vote “for or against Christ”, but he has precious little to say about what Finns, Italians, Albanians and Poles themselves actually made of the precarious new architecture of their postwar states.

Stalin’s attempts to constrain the sovereignty of European states in the aftermath of the war inevitably evoke parallels with Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea, backing of insurgents in eastern Ukraine and support for right-wing populist parties across the EU. Those endeavouring to defend the independence of their territories and governments today would do well to look to the pragmatism, dexterity and resourcefulness of the politicians of the late 1940s. The book is a timely and instructive account not merely of our own history but also of our fractious, unsettling present.

• Stalin and the Fate of Europe is published by Harvard (RRP £23.95). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.