September 25, 2024

Finest Hour 201, First Quarter 2023

Page 04

By David Freeman, January 2023

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill famously broadcast to the nation on 1 October 1939, “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” In delivering the inaugural Stephen and Jane Poss Distinguished Churchill Lecture at the 2021 International Churchill Conference, Andrew Roberts identified British national interest as the key to understanding Churchill’s own varying policies towards Russia (see FH 194). This issue looks at several specific examples of Churchill’s dealing with Russia under both Tsarist and Communist rule.

Churchill made a detailed study of Russian history during and immediately after the First World War in his multi-volume work The World Crisis. Nick Lloyd describes the writing of The Eastern Front, the final volume in the series. We follow this with a review of the preceding volume, The Aftermath, written in 1929 by one of the very subjects of the book, Leon Trotsky. Churchill had the final word, however, as seen in an extract from Great Contemporaries.

During his Wilderness Years and into the Second World War, Churchill had close dealings with the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, as David Reynolds documents. And while Churchill may have said during the conflict that he had not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, Sean McMeekin shows that sacrificing the empire was a concession Churchill was quite prepared to make in order to achieve victory.

Professional dealings with the Soviet Union continued for Churchill for a full ten years after the war. Kevin Ruane explains how and why Churchill’s Russian policy changed during the years he was Leader of the Opposition from 1945 and then again Prime Minister starting in 1951. On the lighter side, we take a closer look at the Sword of Stalingrad, which Churchill presented to Stalin during the Teheran Conference in November 1943.

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

Finally, we are pleased to present the text of the second Stephen and Jane Poss Distinguished Churchill Lecture, delivered by Tim Bouverie to the 2022 International Churchill Conference, in which he considers “Churchill, Appeasement, and the Lessons of History.”