Eighty years ago, blacked out British roads kill more people than the Luftwaffe

Stalin continued in his attempts to remake European diplomacy in the wake of his partition of Poland in partnership with Hitler. His largest move met with a resounding failure. He might have abandoned his old Bolshevist heritage in many ways, but he retained a near-paranoid suspicion of Britain as the most vigorous military enemy of the Russian Revolution. He tried to browbeat Turkey into agreeing to come to the Soviet Union’s assistance should Britain and France attack. The Turks, though, understood that the Soviet Union posed a far greater threat than the western powers and signed a mutual assistance pact with Britain and France. This provided one of the bedrocks of Turkish neutrality through the war which ultimately worked firmly to the benefit of both sides. Stalin’s demands to Finland met with an equally cold response. A Finnish delegation left Moscow after a stay of barely hours after they had been presented with a catalogue of territories that they were expected to s