Abstract
Hitherto, in respective British and Soviet histories, the Anglo-Soviet relationship has been described mainly as one of unredeemed conflict, typified in Soviet eyes by the Allied Intervention of 1919 when Churchill had hoped to ‘crush Bolshevism at its birth’, and for the British by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, which seemed a betrayal of the threatened forces of democracy, even by a non-democracy. Yet from the first month of the Second World War, at the very moment of the German-Soviet partition of Poland, there were those in Britain who understood the complexities of Soviet weakness, of Soviet territorial needs, and of the ultimate conflict between Nazism and all those who stood in the path of its limitless and cruel ambitions.
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© 1993 International Council for Soviet and East European Studies, and John and Carol Garrard 1993
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Gilbert, M. (1993). Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union, 1939-45. In: Garrard, J., Garrard, C. (eds) World War 2 and the Soviet People. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22796-9_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22796-9_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22796-9
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