When Stalin was the lesser of two evils

00:00 04:15

Iain MacGregor has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime… Any man or state who fights against Nazism will have our aid.’ These words were spoken by Winston Churchill in a BBC radio broadcast to the nation from Chequers on the evening of 22 June 1941.

That morning, Operation Barbarossa had begun, with Hitler’s armed forces launching the biggest invasion in modern history into the heart of a country whose very existence Churchill detested: the Soviet Union. This cataclysmic invasion by the Nazi regime, however, created an ally the British leader had never envisioned.

For the previous 22 months, Great Britain’s war with Nazi Germany had not gone well. The countries of western Europe had fallen, one by one, to his seemingly unstoppable armies, forcing Britain to stand alone. Britain held out through the tenacity of the Royal Air Force, which had won the Battle of Britain the summer before, the supremacy of its navy, which was then the largest in the world, and the supply shipments coming across the Atlantic from the United States.

Ironically, Hitler’s mechanised juggernaut had only been able to sweep across Europe in 1940 because of its close ties with the Soviet Union. The signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact days before Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939 nullified any threat the Führer feared of an attack from the east. He was free to overrun Poland, and then turn his focus west on Britain and France. German panzers and planes ran on Soviet-supplied fuel, transported by train from the Caucasus. So essential was this level of support, it convinced Stalin that the Soviet Union was safe from any attack in the foreseeable future.