> Growing up in Hungary does not give you some magic insight into the views of the Soviet leadership; it's simply irrelevant to the question.

No, not really. My claims are not based on my "credentials" as someone who grew up in the Eastern Block, just as yours aren't based on growing up in Norway during the cold war.

> We know from the actual people involved that the Soviet leadership believed a US first strike was not just possible, but likely, and that they had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it.

This is indeed well-studied. We know from the documents and testimonies released by actual people involved with the Warsaw Pact armies (e.g. Gen. Szucs [3], who was head of Hungarian military intelligence between 1957 and 1989), as well as from documents leaked from Voroshilov Academy, what the actual Soviet battle plans were and what they assumed. There's extensive Hungarian literature on Soviet war plans during the sixties, seventies and beyond (in the off-chance that whoever sees this can read Hungarian, some good starting points on the subject are article [1] and book [2]).

Apart from this direct evidence, we have plenty of indirect evidence of Soviet intentions. Just an example: the known Soviet war plans never consider Austria's neutrality (Vienna being a major target of Hungarian forces), but all of them assume that NATO forces would not be present there when the war breaks out. This does not make sense unless they assume a WP first strike: Soviet intelligence plans are known to have considered NATO forces violating Austria's territory to be the most reliable predictor of an imminent NATO first strike.

> It's not surprising, and not relevant to the question of whether or not either side was prepared to fight an open war over Europe.

The proxy wars were part of the general political situation: there is no reason to dismiss them as irrelevant to the question of war in Europe.

Again, the destabilizing effects of an affluent market-liberal Western Europe on the Soviet Union are well-understood, and outlined in my previous comment. Subjugating WE was a natural geopolitical goal for the Soviet Union, and one we have overwhelming evidence they actively pursued.

> even perhaps a decade or so after "Socialism in One Country" became policy in 1925 there might have been reason to fear that it was a temporary change to regroup

Interesting. You conveniently forget about that part when Stalin conspired with the Nazis to get rid of the buffer zone between their respective empires and greatly expand their respective territories.

> convenient pawns creating a buffer for a terrified leadership with a bunker mentality that saw the Soviet Union itself as what mattered.

Portraying the Soviet Union as a victim of Imperialist aggression, playing the "help, we're being surrounded" card, etc. has always been a staple of the Soviet (and now modern Russian) propaganda playbook (as outlined in [4], an actual textbook in used in the legal successor to the Soviet Union's Voroshilov Academy) intended to prevent the world's public opinion from uniting against them.

The SU maintained an extensive spy network all across Europe and the U.S. (remember that time when they stole the secrets of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and then did it again with the thermonuclear weapons program?); they knew U.S. society and understood American geopolitcal goals really well. One would have to be extremely gullible to think that the Cold War was a misunderstanding on their part. It's not just contrary to evidence, but would not be realistic at all even if we had good evidence for it (which we don't): sorta how you wouldn't conclude that the Sun exploded just because one detector said so [5].

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As an aside, let me note that "heroes in their own stories seeing the other as cartoon villains" is an incredibly poor model of states and governments; states tend not to make that kind of mistake [6] (I encourage you to try to come up with a clear-cut example of such heroes-and-villains thinking from before the 20th century; as emotional impact dulls, and people can analyze situations with detachment, they realize that there are no such examples).

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[1] M. Horvath: OTKA-49465 Final Report. http://real.mtak.hu/1979/1/49465_ZJ1.pdf, 2009

[2] V. Kovacs: Hungary in the shadow of Nuclear War. ISBN 9789633276587, Zrinyi Kiado Budapest, 2016.

[3] F. Szucs: A nemzetközi helyzet általános jellemzése, a NATO fegyveres erok fejlesztésének helyzete és tendenciái. Honvédelem, vol. 6, 1982.

[4] A. Dugin: Foundations of Geopolitics. 1997.

[5] https://xkcd.com/1132/

[6] J. C. Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. ISBN 978-0-30007016-3, Yale University Press, 1998