It was not, as Lenin imagined, the revolutionary threat posed by Communism that brought down upon his regime the intervention by the Entente, Japan and the United States. The scenario that haunted the Allies and impelled them to action was a ghostly premonition of the future. But what was on their mind was not the spectre of revolution or an anticipation of the Cold War, but a foretaste of the summer of 1941 when the military triumphs of the Wehrmacht threatened to extend Hitler’s slave empire throughout Eurasia.
