Word: russias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Churchill was no hero to the House of Commons, though. Conservative regulars mistrusted him for his 20-year defection to the Liberals, while liberals blamed him for the ill-fated British intervention in Russia in 1918-19. He had a large ego and a sharp tongue, and he drank too much brandy, but he also had qualities that were to prove indispensable -- courage, eloquence, energy and a passionate determination to save British democracy. No sooner had the Germans invaded Poland than Chamberlain reluctantly invited his chief critic to No. 10 Downing Street and asked him to join the Cabinet; Churchill...
...contrast to France, where the Germans had surprised everyone by being relatively "correct," the conquest of Russia was to be even more ruthless than that of Poland. "This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences," Hitler told his generals, "and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies." More specifically, Hitler announced that he was assigning Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, to carry out "special tasks" in the "liquidation" of all "commissars," meaning anyone in a leadership position. Beyond that, Hitler planned to plunder...
Hitler's impulsive attack on Yugoslavia had delayed his invasion of Russia by a month -- which was to become critically important when the first snows began to fall. But the Germans expected little trouble when they rescheduled Operation Barbarossa for June...
...provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Hitler saw this as a threat to his access to Rumania's rich oil fields, but for the time being he was too preoccupied to counterattack. And then Hitler finally became a victim of his own successes. He could not believe that backward Russia, which had had trouble subduing Finland, could resist the invincible Wehrmacht...
...Hitler's moment of supreme triumph, in the spring of 1941, he boldly made his supreme error, the error that was to destroy him. He decided to invade Soviet Russia. Exactly why he made this catastrophic miscalculation will never be known for sure. In part it was ideology. He had begun his political career by attacking the Bolsheviks, and he dreamed of Germany's finding Lebensraum by colonizing the vast lands to the east. He had written in Mein Kampf: "When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states...