Listen in on a debate of the events leading up to the Cold War, as featured on the weekly CNN program "Postscript" -- which accompanies the COLD WAR series.

CNN World Affairs Correspondent Ralph Begleiter, Russian historian Vladislav Zubok and American scholars Tom Blanton and Hope Harrison consider a once-popular proposition in the West -- that the United States "gave away the store" to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, allowing him to establish Soviet control over Eastern Europe for decades.

Dr. Vladislav Zubok is one of the leading historians of the Cold War and the author of "Inside the Kremlin's Cold War." He has studied extensively in Soviet and American archives and has taught classes on the Cold War at Amherst College, Ohio University in Athens and Stamford University. In 1993, Zubok was employed by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C., and since then has worked at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and is now a fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington.

Thomas Blanton is executive director for the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. The NSA is a non-governmental research institute providing information from U.S. government and official archives for scholars, journalists, members of Congress, lobbyists and others. Their research teases out documents still classified to give a complete picture of what really happened.

Hope Harrison teaches at Lafayette College and is a research fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. Harrison is working on a study of relations between the Soviet Union and East Germany from Stalin's death in 1953 through the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.