Churchill and the Soviet Union

This work focuses on Winston Churchill’s changing attitudes towards the Soviet Union. In the first four decades after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he oscillated in a seemingly bewildering fashion between enmity and apparent friendship with the Soviets. Taking the Bolshevik Revolution as its starting point, this is a study of Churchill’s relationship with the USSR until his retirement in 1955. Initially Churchill achieved a high profile as a tireless advocate of Allied intervention in Russia to eliminate the Bolshevik regime; by the late 1930s he was urging Britain to forge a Grand Alliance with the Soviets against Nazi Germany; during the winter of 1939-40, he was apparently willing to see Great Britain come to the assistance of Finland in its war with the Soviet Union; in June 1941 he eagerly embraced the Soviet Union as a worthy ally against Nazi Germany; after the latter’s defeat he rapidly moved to proposing a common Anglo-American front against the Soviet Union and global communism. How can we understand this Churchillian enigma? How was it that Churchill’s relationship with the Soviet Union was so inconsistent?