Churchill and Russia

A timely, magisterial new history of Churchills life and politics, focusing on his dealings with Russia and the Soviet Union. After his finest hour, winning the Second World War, Winston Churchill and his allies Joseph Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt carved up Eastern Europe. The settlement they reached, later referred to by Churchill as the Iron Curtain, would utterly change the course of the twentieth century, creating a world of two competing superpowers, which led to the so-called Cold War. One question is vital to understanding the course of that century why did Winston Churchill and the allies allow Russia to become a dominant superpower, free to threaten the USA and the Western World for the next 40 years? Foremost Churchill scholar Warren Dockter looks afresh at Churchills relationship with Russia. He investigates the great mans Victorian education and his inheritance of his fathers politics, which dominated his worldview with respect to Russia. This is a wide-ranging biography of Churchill's upbringing and the events that have shaped him, woven around his view of the world and of Russia his great enemy and, as Dockter argues, in many ways the key player in his international political life. This book uncovers a new side to the Churchill story that has some great contemporary relevance, as the 'Russia problem' promises to define politics over the next decade.