May 8, 1945. Europe erupts in celebration at the defeat of Nazi Germany. Jubilant crowds take to the streets from Paris to London, revelling in the seemingly final victory of a long and brutal war. But even as the cheers echo, an unsettling question lingers: Will the fragile peace last, or can the weapons of war thunder again? British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, harbouring a deep mistrust of the Soviet Union, believes that a new threat looms on the horizon. His concerns culminate in the secret development of “Operation Unthinkable”—a plan that envisioned the once-unthinkable prospect of waging war against the Soviet Union. In truth, Churchill’s apprehensions about the Soviet Union were rooted in his longstanding hostility to Bolshevism. From the moment Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Churchill saw the new Soviet state as an existential menace to Europe. During the Russian Civil War, he advocated for Western military intervention on the side of the anti-Bolshevik Whites, bluntly denouncing Bolshevism as a tyranny more oppressive and dangerous than any seen before. This unyielding perspective persisted throughout the interwar years. Even when World War II forced Britain into an uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler, Churchill never fully abandoned his view of Stalin as a ruthless, expansionist dictator whose ideological ambitions clashed with Western democratic principles.Yet it was not just Churchill’s ideological reservations that shaped his alarm; practical geopolitics played an equally significant role. The uneasy cooperation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before June 1941 underscored the unpredictable nature of Stalin’s regime. Through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which was signed on 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin briefly found common cause, dividing Poland between them. The pact allowed both dictators to pursue territorial gains almost unopposed, with the Red Army marching into eastern Poland while Nazi forces advanced from the west. This agreement, which shocked the world, also set in motion a wave of Soviet atrocities against Poles.
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