Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili aka STALIN. Unlike Churchill and Roosevelt, Joseph wasn’t born into the elite classes of society. His father was a cobbler; his mother, a housemaid. As a young man, he trained to become a priest, but it didn’t take. Soon afterwards he discovered the writings of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, ending up the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.
I’m really enjoying your take on the Cold War.
I’ve got something for you to ponder though. Even if Hitler had managed to roll the Soviets in Barbarossa, do you really think he’d have been able to extend that to the UK and USA (as you suggest)? I feel once captured, subjugating a population/land area the size of Russia would have possibly sucked away almost as many resources as it gained?
Let’s face it, at the height of his power, just after Dunkirk, he could not get his arse across the English channel.
I’m pretty sure the Atlantic would be an ocean too far?
Well the US & UK were worried enough about the USSR overthrowing their way of life in the 50s to justify a massive buildup of nuclear capability. So if Germany had added the USSR to their domain, who knows? As we’ll see though, I think the main concerns of the US & UK wasn’t military, it was economic warfare. They were worried about losing foreign markets to the Germans or the Russians.