Churchill and Russia: fascination, fear and fatalism

Tuesday 20 January 2026

Winston Churchill’s attitude towards Russia was never simple. It shifted with circumstance, hardened with experience and was ultimately framed by a bleak understanding of power. Across half a century of public life he oscillated between hostility and tactical cooperation, between admiration for Russian endurance and distrust of Russian governance. What unified these positions was not inconsistency but realism. Churchill’s view of Russia was governed by her behaviour, not by sentiment.

Early hostility and imperial suspicion

Churchill’s earliest encounters with Russia were shaped by the politics of empire. As a young officer and journalist, and later as a Liberal politician, he viewed Tsarist Russia as an autocracy whose expansion threatened British interests from the Balkans to Central Asia. The so-called Great Game still cast a long shadow. Russia was to Churchill a continental power with little regard for constitutional restraint, and therefore a natural rival of Britain’s maritime order.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 deepened this hostility. Churchill regarded Bolshevism not merely as a Russian phenomenon but as a universal ideological contagion. As Secretary of State for War he supported Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, urging resistance to what he saw as a barbarous tyranny. His language in this period was apocalyptic. Bolshevism, he argued, represented a civilisational regression. Russia, in his mind, had exchanged one form of despotism for another, more ruthless still.

War and the necessity of alliance

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 forced Churchill into one of the most dramatic reversals of tone in modern political history. Overnight the Soviet Union became an ally. Churchill’s broadcast on the day of the invasion made clear that this was not an ideological conversion. He loathed communism as much as ever, but he understood that Nazi Germany was the immediate and mortal threat. If Hitler invaded Hell, he famously remarked, he would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia during the Second World War was therefore pragmatic rather than warm. He admired the resilience of the Russian people and the scale of their sacrifice. He spoke with genuine respect of the Red Army’s capacity to absorb punishment and continue fighting. Yet he never trusted the Soviet system, nor its leadership. His dealings with Joseph Stalin were marked by a mixture of bluntness and calculation. Churchill sought to charm and cajole, but he was under no illusion as to Stalin’s methods or ambitions.

The limits of trust

As the war progressed and Allied victory became inevitable, Churchill’s suspicion of Russian intentions returned to the fore. He worried deeply about Eastern Europe. Poland, for which Britain had gone to war in 1939, was now falling under Soviet domination. Churchill understood the imbalance of power on the ground. The Red Army occupied the territories she intended to control. Diplomacy could soften the edges but could not reverse the facts.

At Yalta and later Potsdam, Churchill attempted to secure guarantees for pluralism and sovereignty in Central and Eastern Europe. His efforts were largely unsuccessful. The United States, under Roosevelt and later Truman, oscillated between optimism and firmness. Churchill alone consistently warned that Russian promises, however sincerely given in the moment, were subordinate to strategic interest.

This was not Russophobia in the crude sense. Churchill distinguished carefully between Russia as a nation and communism as a system. He spoke often of the courage and suffering of the Russian people, and of their historical vulnerability to invasion. Yet he believed that Russia’s rulers, whether Tsarist or Soviet, were driven by security anxieties that expressed themselves in expansion and control.

The Iron Curtain

Churchill’s post-war assessment of Russia is most famously encapsulated in his 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which he declared that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe. This was not a call to war, but a warning. Russia, he argued, respected strength and despised weakness. Peace would be preserved not through concessions but through clarity and deterrence.

In this period Churchill accepted the permanence of Russian power. He did not advocate rollback or crusade. Instead he urged unity amongst Western democracies and a balance that would constrain Soviet ambitions. His attitude was therefore neither conciliatory nor hysterical. It was sombre, shaped by long memory and hard experience.

Conclusion

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia was the product of a lifetime spent confronting great powers. He neither demonised her blindly nor trusted her sentimentally. Russia, in his view, was a formidable and often tragic nation, capable of immense endurance but governed by systems that encouraged repression and expansion. Ideology mattered, but power mattered more.

Above all, Churchill understood that Russia would act as she perceived her interests to require. The task of statesmanship was not to wish her otherwise, but to deal with her as she was. That insight, forged in war and tested in peace, remains one of his most enduring legacies.