AS with many aspects of his career, Churchill’s attitude towards the Soviet Union and Communism has generated considerable debate. The same statesman who urged war on the Bolshevik regime in 1919 – likening it to ‘troops of ferocious baboons’ or ‘a culture of typhoid’ – also urged co-operation with Stalin in the 1930s; he spent his last years in office calling for a summit meeting to reduce Cold War tensions, having himself stirred up those tensions with the 1946 Fulton Speech, where he coined the term ‘Iron Curtain’. Where one historian has concluded that ‘ideologically- based anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism were Churchill’s most abiding obsession for some forty years’, placing emphasis on the rhetoric of the intervention period; another historian recognises that Churchill’s language never reached such intensity again, that he sought to work with Stalin despite the latter’s purges and that even the Fulton Speech praised the Soviet war effort, welcoming ‘Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world’.