Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874 –1965)

Author(s):  
Alexandra Gerena Cubbon

Winston Churchill was British Prime Minister twice during his eventful political career. Churchill initially served the British Empire as a soldier in the Caribbean, India, and Africa during the imperial wars of the 1890s. His political service began in Parliament in May 1904 when he joined the Liberal Party and became undersecretary at the Colonial Office (1905). Prime Minister Herbert Asquith promoted Churchill to the Home Office and, in 1911, appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. After briefly resigning from politics, Churchill returned in 1917 as an ardent anti-communist, joining the Conservatives in 1924, the year he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty following the outbreak of World War II and became Prime Minister for the first time in May 1940. As Prime Minister during the war, Churchill relied on vigorous nationalist rhetoric to rouse his compatriots against Germany. Although defeated in the general election of 1945, he continued to speak and publish, delivering his famous "iron curtain" speech at Fulton College in Missouri on March 5, 1946. A lifelong anti-communist, he used this particular speech to emphasize the ideological gulf between the democratic, liberty-embracing West and the Soviet Union. Churchill again served as Prime Minister from 1951 until 1955.

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. E7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohaid Ali ◽  
Ian D. Connolly ◽  
Amy Li ◽  
Omar A. Choudhri ◽  
Arjun V. Pendharkar ◽  
...  

From February 4 to 11, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met near Yalta in Crimea to discuss how post–World War II (WWII) Europe should be organized. Within 2 decades of this conference, all 3 men had died. President Roosevelt died 2 months after the Yalta Conference due to a hemorrhagic stroke. Premier Stalin died 8 years later, also due to a hemorrhagic stroke. Finally, Prime Minister Churchill died 20 years after the conference because of complications due to stroke. At the time of Yalta, these 3 men were the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world. The subsequent deterioration of their health and eventual death had varying degrees of historical significance. Churchill's illness forced him to resign as British prime minister, and the events that unfolded immediately after his resignation included Britain's mismanagement of the Egyptian Suez Crisis and also a period of mistrust with the United States. Furthermore, Roosevelt was still president and Stalin was still premier at their times of passing, so their deaths carried huge political ramifications not only for their respective countries but also for international relations. The early death of Roosevelt, in particular, may have exacerbated post-WWII miscommunication between America and the Soviet Union—miscommunication that may have helped precipitate the Cold War.


2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Margaret Siriol Colley

AbstractA short biography of Gareth Jones, Foreign Aff airs Adviser to British Prime Minister Lloyd George and an early visitor to the Soviet Union, who exposed the Ukrainian famine and daily life under communist rule, Fragments of his letters and a 1930 article in the New Chronicle are included.


Author(s):  
Otto Kircheimer

This chapter focuses on the “Statement on Atrocities,” which contains a joint declaration concerning war crimes and war criminals. Issued by the Tripartite Conference over the signatures of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, the report details that the declaration constitutes the first common announcement of intentions on the part of all three major powers. The chapter considers parallel statements issued on October 25, 1941, by Roosevelt and Churchill, which drew the attention of the world to the shooting of hostages during World War II and announced that retribution would be exacted from the guilty. It also addresses the question of the effect of the Moscow Declaration on Germany and the use which can be made of it in psychological warfare operations.


1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Paul

If Conservative Party leader Winston Churchill fought World War II determined not to be the prime minister who lost the Empire, Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and Herbert Morrison, who as Labour members of the Coalition government served with him, were equally determined to hold on to Empire once peace was won. The Empire/Commonwealth offered both political and economic benefits to Labour. Politically, the Commonwealth provided substance for Britain's pretensions to a world power role equal in stature to the new superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. For this claim to be effective, however, the Commonwealth needed to be demographically strong and firmly united under British leadership. Economically, imperial preferences and the sterling area offered a financial buffer against Britain's true plight of accumulated wartime debts and major infrastructural damage and neglect. Receiving over 40 percent of British exports and providing substantial, and in the case of Australia and New Zealand, dollar-free imports of meat, wheat, timber, and dairy produce, the Commonwealth seemed a logical body on which the United Kingdom could draw for financial support. In short, postwar policy makers believed preservation of the Empire/Commonwealth to be a necessary first step in domestic and foreign reconstruction.Yet in 1945, a variety of circumstances combined to make the task of imperial preservation one of reconstitution rather than simple maintenance. First, it seemed that, just at the moment when Britain needed them most, some of the strongest and oldest members of the Commonwealth appeared to be moving away.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-321
Author(s):  
Vasile Rotaru

The 2008 Georgia war represented a turning point in Russian foreign policy. It was for the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Moscow invaded an independent country and for the first time when two members of the Council of Europe fought against each other. A premiere for Russian post-Soviet foreign policy was registered in 2014 too. The annexation of Crimea represented the first incorporation of foreign territories by Moscow since World War II. These two events generated the West's protest and blatantly contradict Russia's proclaimed foreign policy discourse centered around the respect for states' sovereignty and equality of actors in the international system. Starting from the assertion that the formulation of Russia's foreign policy is determined by the West's international behavior — Moscow looking whether to emulate or to find alternatives to it; the present paper will compare Russia's legitimization arguments for the 2008 war and the 2014 annexation of Crimea trying to assess how Moscow answers Western criticism and whether there is a continuity in Russian official legitimization narratives.


2020 ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
Alan D. Roe

The Samara Bend region on the Volga River experienced rapid industrial growth in the two decades after World War II. Uncertain about the future of the Zhiguli Zapovednik after the government had twice eliminated it (it was re-established after being eliminated the first time) and wanting to expand the area of Samara Bend under protection, some environmentally concerned citizens conceived a national park that they hoped would transform the regional economy. From its establishment in 1984, Samara Bend National Park was mired in conflicts with local populations whose uses of the land were made illegal and industries that had long operated in the park’s territory. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a young radical environmentalist named Sergei Fomichev staged a protest against continued illegal mining and gained the support of many of the park’s supporters who had become deeply frustrated about what they saw as the indifference of government officials to the park.


2019 ◽  
pp. 169-206
Author(s):  
John Mulqueen

The Irish minister for justice, Patrick Cooney, in 1976 identified two threats to the state: the ‘Sino-Hibernian’ Official republican movement and the Provisional IRA. ‘Harsh laws’ to counter subversion would be widely welcomed, he claimed. The Official movement’s leadership now openly endorsed the Soviets’ agenda. This chapter focuses on the Official IRA’s determination to build a political party that stayed close to the Soviet Union but opposed its support for the Provisionals’ ‘prison war’ – the campaign to restore ‘political status’ for newly-convicted paramilitary prisoners. Now advocating ‘peace, work and class politics’ as the solution to the northern crisis, the Official movement’s political creation, Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party (SFWP), abandoned the traditional left-wing republican ‘anti-imperialist’ position. Ironically, this involved the party analysing the situation in the north along the same lines as the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.


2021 ◽  
pp. 593-602
Author(s):  
Anton N. Uchaev ◽  
◽  
Elena I. Demidova ◽  
Natalia A. Uchaeva ◽  
◽  
...  

The article analyzes the specificity of the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s attitude to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. The study analyzes the frequency of the Prime Minister referencing the USSR in his diary from September 1, 1939 to September 2, 1945, as well as his reaction to a number of the most significant events of the Second World War associated with the Soviet Union: the German attack on the USSR, the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Canada, the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the victory over Germany. In the course of work, both general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, inductive method, comparative method) and special methods (historical-chronological and content analysis) have been used to study the materials of the diary. The use of the historical-chronological method is due to the need to correlate information from the diary with the overall historical picture of the studied period, and the use of content analysis helps to create a more reliable picture of Canadian Prime Minister’s perception of the Soviet participation in World War II. The article has made allowances for the fact that Mackenzie King sought to create his own positive image in his diaries, planning their posthumous publication. But, since the USSR was not a key topic for the Prime Minister (as evidenced by keywords statistics), it can be stated that the leader of the Canadian liberals was quite frank, at least as frank as a person who, in his lifetime, was known as an extremely cautious politician could be. It is clear, that King was well aware of the significance of the events on the Eastern Front. But throughout the war he retained both a negatively neutral attitude towards the USSR (due to its communist nature) and his perception of the Soviet Union as part of Asia and thus a step below the Anglo-Saxon world, which had a higher level of culture and moral principles. The objective reality, i.e. absence of hostilities in Canada, its maneuvering between Great Britain and the United States, and priority of economic and domestic policy for King, explains that a lesser part of his attention was paid to the events in the USSR in comparison with processes associated with England and the United States.


1968 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 1093-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merle Fainsod

As World War II drew to a close, the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition—Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill—assembled at Yalta to ponder the future. Already, sharp clashes at the conference table over the future fate of Poland and Eastern Europe cast a sombre spell over the proceedings. But the necessities of the alliance still served to suppress differences and to emphasize a search for consensus. At a tripartite dinner meeting on 8 February 1945, President Roosevelt, ever hopeful, described the relations of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States “as that of a family” and spoke of a future in which their common objectives would be “to give to every man, woman, and child on this earth the possibility of security and well-being.” Marshal Stalin, perhaps more realistic, “remarked that it was not so difficult to keep unity in time of war since there was a joint aim to defeat the common enemy which was clear to everyone. … the difficult task came after the war when diverse interests tended to divide the allies.” Nevertheless, he expressed himself as “confident that the present alliance would meet this test also and that it was our duty to see that it would, and that our relations in peacetime should be as strong as they had been in war.” Prime Minister Churchill somewhat grandiloquently spoke of “standing on the crest of a hill with the glories of future possibilities stretching before us.


Author(s):  
Sam Brewitt-Taylor

Like all transformative revolutions, Britain’s Sixties was an episode of highly influential myth-making. This book delves behind the mythology of inexorable ‘secularization’ to recover, for the first time, the cultural origins of Britain’s moral revolution. In a radical departure from conventional teleologies, it argues that British secularity is a specific cultural invention of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was introduced most influentially by radical utopian Christians during this most desperate episode of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Britain’s predominantly Christian moral culture had marginalized ‘secular’ moral arguments by arguing that they created societies like the Soviet Union; but the rapid acceptance of ‘secularization’ teleologies in the early 1960s abruptly normalized ‘secular’ attitudes and behaviours, thus prompting the slow social revolution that unfolded during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. By tracing the evolving thought of radical Anglicans—uniquely positioned in the late 1950s and early 1960s as simultaneously moral radicals and authoritative moral insiders—this book reveals crucial and unexpected intellectual links between radical Christianity and the wider invention of Britain’s new secular morality, in areas as diverse as globalism, anti-authoritarianism, sexual liberation, and revolutionary egalitarianism. From the mid-1960s, British secularity began to be developed by a much wider range of groups, and radical Anglicans faded into the cultural background. Yet by disseminating the deeply ideological metanarrative of ‘secularization’ in the early 1960s, and by influentially discussing its implications, they had made crucial contributions to the nature and existence of Britain’s secular revolution.


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