One of the great Allied advantages over Nazi Germany during World War II was their ability to regularly intercept and read otherwise encoded German communications. Though this capability was not comprehensive, with changes to the German code settings throwing the Allies off at repeated times during the war, it proved of significant assistance to the Allied war effort. Some believe Allied code-breaking efforts were so consequential as to have decisively altered the course of the war.

The central location for Allied code breaking efforts was at Bletchley Park, northwest of London.

If in 1919 the question arose regarding which of the Great European Powers stood destined to drive Europe’s twentieth century fortunes, few candidates would have stood out as more unlikely than the Soviet Union. Russia had not only been forced into the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk, but had been occupied by a foreign power from 1917-1921, was in the throes of a Civil War that would kill between three and five million Russian citizens, and had foreign armies again fighting on its soil far beyond the First World War’s end. Then, in 1922 Josef Stalin.