Intelligence and Stalin's Two Crucial Decisions in the Winter War, 1939–40

In 1939–40, the fierce Winter War was waged between the Soviet Union and Finland. This article analyses Stalin's two main decisions, to attack and to make peace, and the intelligence behind those decisions. Already at the outbreak, it was obvious that the attack was based on a serious misjudgement. The Soviets did not foresee that the action would become a real war, very different from the occupation of eastern Poland in September. It will be shown that this was due more to Stalin's miscalculation of consequences than to any major failure of intelligence collection. As to why Stalin made peace at the very moment when the Red Army finally began winning, and with the Finnish government he had declared non-existent, this seems to be connected with defective assessment of intelligence from London and Paris. Even the Cambridge Five were discarded. Both real and perceived threats of Allied intervention weighed heavily in Stalin's decisions, in particular the southern threat against Baku and the Caucasus. The analysis will contribute to scholarly discussion on Stalin's foreign policy and the role of intelligence in Soviet decision-making. New evidence is mainly provided by intelligence and security documents released by the Central Archives of the Russian Federal Security Service.     

Italian anti-Fascism in London, 1922–1934

Between the end of the Great War and the start of the Second World War, various Italians living in London, who for the most part had migrated there around the start of the twentieth century, started their own particular determined opposition to Fascism. Their initial aim was to counter Fascist monopolisation of London’s Italian community, contesting control of the community’s main associations, institutes and cultural bodies by the Fascio, which had been established in London in 1921. Subsequently, these anti-Fascists also sought contacts outside London’s Little Italy, on the one hand with British political bodies and the British press, and on the other with anti-Fascists in other countries. While strong links were formed with the latter, British society showed only a muted interest. This is in part explained by the positive response to the Fascist experience by the Conservative press and various eminent British politicians, at least until the mid-1930s.