Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

Churchill's historical meaning cannot be reduced to his anti-fascist wartime leadership. He was an imperialist who regarded preserving the British Empire as a condition of national greatness, and he strongly opposed constitutional reform and expanded self-government in India. During the controversy over the Government of India Act 1935, his opposition combined faith in empire with a struggle for influence inside the Conservative Party. That position sought to restrain colonised peoples' demands for self-determination, and his rhetoric of imperial defence continued after Indian independence. His statements and relief policy during the Bengal famine of the Second World War also drew criticism for placing imperial war priorities and racial hierarchy above the lives of colonial subjects. The famine had multiple causes, including war, the loss of rice supplies from Burma, natural disaster, and failures of administration and markets, but Churchill's indifference and responsibility remain central questions in assessing his record. His legacy is therefore clearest when his contribution to defeating fascism in Europe is held together with his record as a defender of colonial rule.

Churchill's anti-Soviet line did not begin with the Cold War. Immediately after the First World War he was outspoken against Lenin's Bolshevik government and cautioned against demobilising the German Army, warning that it might be needed as a bulwark against Soviet Russia.

The strand continued after his wartime premiership. In May 1945 Churchill commissioned the Chiefs of Staff Committee to study a possible military campaign against the USSR, code-named Operation Unthinkable. One plan assumed a surprise attack on Soviet troops in Germany to impose 'the will of the United States and the British Empire' upon Russia, with a hypothetical start date of 1 July 1945. The assessment signed 9 June 1945 concluded that 'it would be beyond our power to win a quick but limited success and we would be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds', and the offensive was judged 'hazardous'. A second, defensive plan written on Churchill's instruction of 10 June 1945 examined the security of the British Isles in a war with Russia. The plans were never implemented and remained top secret until 1998, though the spy Guy Burgess had passed details to Soviet intelligence at the time.

On 5 March 1946 Churchill delivered a 46-minute lecture titled 'The Sinews of Peace' at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, to about 1,500 listeners, with President Truman present. Some regard it as signalling the beginning of the Cold War. He was not prime minister at the time: after the Conservative defeat in the July 1945 election he was Leader of the Opposition and was in the United States as a private citizen on vacation. This makes the period a distinct phase from the wartime premiership. The central passage ran 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent', with those cities and their populations lying in 'what I must call the Soviet sphere' and subject to 'a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow'. Churchill coupled this with the 'fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples', a special relationship between the Commonwealth and Empire and the United States within the framework of the UN Charter. In the same speech he acknowledged Soviet security concerns on its western frontiers and expressed admiration for the Russian people and for Stalin as a wartime comrade. The context included Soviet claims on Turkey, delayed withdrawal from Iran, and the Greek civil war, while in liberal and socialist circles the USSR's claims were still seen as legitimate security concerns.

The 1947 nuclear-strike advocacy is not established fact. A memorandum in the FBI's archives alleges that Churchill urged the United States to conduct a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union while it still had no atomic bomb, reportedly asking Senator Styles Bridges to persuade Truman to 'declare Russia to be imperiling world peace and attack Russia' and destroy the Kremlin. His personal physician Lord Moran separately recalled that he had already advocated a nuclear strike in a 1946 conversation. This is an allegation in a memorandum, not a documented decision, and the USSR did not obtain the atomic bomb until 1949; both languages must carry that uncertainty.

In post-war diplomacy Churchill used his memoirs as an instrument. Yalta in February 1945 produced the secret reciprocal agreements on prisoners of war and displaced persons that formed the basis for the later forced repatriations, including Operation Keelhaul in 1946-47. Churchill pressed on Poland as a test case for Eastern Europe but was criticised for the resulting agreement, with 27 Tory MPs voting against him in the Commons debate. Between the premierships he produced the six-volume The Second World War (1948-1953), in which he published his own account of the October 1944 percentages episode at Moscow. In 1948 speeches he made clear that his warning about appeasing dictators referred to Stalin as much as Hitler. After Stalin's death on 5 March 1953 he proposed a summit with the Soviets, which Eisenhower and Dulles discouraged, and he continued to press for Anglo-American 'special relationship' cooperation as the basis for peace.