What Winston Churchill’s Relations with Russia Can Teach Us for Today

What Winston Churchill’s Relations with Russia Can Teach Us for Today

Thursday, October 29, 2020
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

“If only I could dine with Stalin once a week,” Winston Churchill said with unusual naïveté during the Second World War, “then there would be no trouble at all.” When it came to dealing with Russia, Churchill went through five distinct phases of engagement, of which the most dangerous was thinking that Stalin was a normal statesman for whom personal relations mattered, rather than a hardened Russian ideologue and nationalist for whom only Realpolitik mattered. Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts will explore how Churchill’s experience can help the West in its dealings with Vladimir Putin.

Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College. He has written over a dozen books including Salisbury: Victorian Titan, Napoleon the Great, and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which was a New York Times Bestseller and won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and the National Army Museum, and received his PhD from Cambridge University.

ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUP

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This interview is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.