When, on 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill’s public response was immediate and unambiguous: in a broadcast to the nation he proclaimed that ‘any man or state who fights on against Nazism will have our aid ... It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.’ He also referred to his own past as an opponent of Communism: ‘I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it, but all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.’ This seminal broadcast has cast a long shadow both backward and forward from 1941 in its effect on how most historians and biographers have seen Churchill’s attitude to the two principal dictatorships of the twentieth century.