stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and the French suffering heavy losses meant that its low birth rate would give it trouble, while Germany was mostly undamaged and still with a higher birth rate. So he reasoned that the future would bring German domination if Versailles were revised in Germany's favour, and it was madness for Britain to press France to do so. In 1924, Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as "Bolshevism without bullets". He believed that Labour was a communist front organisation, and "excited orders and instructions from Moscow" would expose Labour as such to the British people. Kipling's views were on the right. Though he admired Benito Mussolini to some extent in the 1920s, he was against fascism, calling Oswald Mosley "a bounder and an arriviste". By 1935, he was calling Mussolini a deranged and dangerous egomaniac and in 1933 wrote, "The Hitlerites are out for blood". Despite his anti-communism, the first major translations of Kipling into Russian took place under Lenin's rule in the early 1920s, and Kipling was popular with Russian readers in the interwar period. Many younger Russian poets and writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, were influenced by him. Kipling's clarity of style, use of colloquial language and employment of rhythm and rhyme were seen as major innovations in poetry that appealed to many younger Russian poets. Though it was obligatory for Soviet journals to begin translations of Kipling with an attack on him as a "fascist" and an "imperialist", such was Kipling's popularity with Russian readers that his works were not banned in the Soviet Union until 1939, with the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The ban was lifted in 1941 after Operation Barbarossa, when Britain become a Soviet ally, but imposed for good with the Cold War in 1946. Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling's books have a swastika printed on the cover, associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower, reflecting the influence of Indian culture. Kipling's use of the swastika was based on the Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and the Sanskrit word meaning "fortunate" or "well-being". He used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time. In a note to Edward Bok after the death of Lockwood Kipling in 1911, Rudyard said: "I am sending