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Following the entry of the USSR into the Second World War in June 1941, images of Soviet women proliferated in Britain. Official propaganda, parliamentary debate, and popular culture positioned self-sacrificing Soviet woman as models for British women’s behaviour in wartime: their wartime citizenship. The example of the Soviet woman also offered an opportunity for British to claim the full range rights of rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These ranged from arguments for better provision of childcare to, most controversially, the right to bear arms in the event of German invasion. These public protests came to nothing. Under pressure from the post-war repudiation of the gains women made during the war, the viability of pro-Soviet rhetoric was then fatally undermined by the advent of the Cold War. Nonetheless, women’s public and private admiration for their Soviet contemporaries aided the project of refashioning citizenship’s boundaries across the public and private spheres. Evidence from these contests also points to new ways of approaching questions about British political culture from the 1930s through to the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the debate precipitated by the Thatcher government's (unsuccessful) attempt to secure a British boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Aware that it faced a struggle to win over the autonomous British Olympic Association, but with Thatcher in particular keen to support the United States, the government's case that the invasion required a specific response in the form of a boycott was steadily overshadowed as the public debate increasingly focused on arguments over human rights and détente and the use of state power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The British Government never recognized the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States in June 1940, but almost did so early in 1942 and was ready to do so again in 1944, when it took at face value Stalin's revision of the Soviet constitution. The result was ‘trouble’ from the Baltic ambassadors in London, particularly the Latvian ambassador. The British Government changed its stance in autumn 1945 when the revisions to the Soviet constitution proved to be sham. Thereafter British policy amounted to procrastination, as the developing Cold War prevented a final post-war settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article begins with an outline of how the Norwegian government in exile perceived its position towards its great power allies in the final year of the war: a feeling of uncertainty if not outright abandonment, as Britain and the United States failed to understand or share Norwegian concerns at being left alone to face a possible Soviet ‘liberation’ of northern Norway. After the end of the war Norway's interim solution to its security dilemma was to put its trust in the United Nations while seeking to develop practical military cooperation with the United Kingdom. Seeking to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, Norway tried to stall Molotov's claims for shared sovereignty over Svalbard before finally rejecting the proposals in February 1947. That combination of formal non-alignment and informal ties with the United Kingdom broke down under the pressure of events beginning with the coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Initial moves to seek reassurance of Western support, in parallel with ultimately unsuccessful attempts to construct a Swedish-inspired Nordic defence alliance, ended with Norway joining the Atlantic Pact in April 1949. The documentary evidence now at hand, in the volume just published, suggests that it took quite some time before the British government came to understand and share Norway's concerns. Initially swayed by the self-fulfilling prophecy of a Norwegian return to isolationism and pacifism, a realization of Norway's determination to stand and be counted against the Soviet challenge only gradually began to emerge through 1947. Yet Britain's own inability to offer substantial security assistance to the Scandinavian region meant that any reassurance of Western support had to await a political commitment from the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]