Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union 1940-45 PDF

Between 1941 and 1945, Great Britain and the Soviet Union were allies in a life-and-death struggle that neither could win without the other.

For Britain's leaders, this posed somedifficult questions.

Could there be any meaningful cooperation with the 'Bolsheviks'?

Was it worth seeking the continuance of the wartime alliance into the postwar world?

The answer lay in the nature of the Soviet Union and the character, aims and motivations of its leader, Joseph Stalin.

This book uses neglected material showing British analyses of the Soviet internal situation and interweaves it with evidence of views of Soviet foreign policy to produce a new perspective on British wartime policy to the USSR.

Modifying their existing attitudes through a mixture of observation, analysis and guesswork, Churchill and his colleagues came to the conclusion that within certain limitations, cooperation was indeed possible and could be achieved by skilful British policy.

As this book goes on to show, formulating and executing such a policy was a different matter.