In 1918-1919 Mr. Churchill attempted to overthrow Lenin by force of arms. In 1929 he attempts a psychological and political portraiture of him in his book, The Aftermath (Thornton Butterworth 30s). Perhaps he was hoping thereby to secure some sort of literary revenge for his unsuccessful appeal to the sword. But his methods are no less inadequate in the second mode of attack than they were in the first.
“His (Lenin’s) sympathies cold and wide as the Arctic Ocean. His hatreds tight as the hangman’s noose”, writes Mr. Churchill. Verily, he juggles with antitheses as an athlete with dumb-bells. But the observant eye soon notices that the dumb-bells are painted cardboard, and the bulging biceps are eked out with padding.
The true Lenin was instinct with moral force—a force whose main characteristic was its absolute simplicity. To try to assess him in terms of stage athletics was bound to spell failure.
Mr. Churchill’s facts are miserably inaccurate. Consider his dates, for instance. He repeats a sentence, which he has read somewhere or other, referring to the morbid influence exercised on Lenin’s evolution by the execution of his elder brother. He refers the fact to the year 1894. But actually the attempt against Alexander III’s life was organized by Alexander Ulianof (Lenin’s brother) on March 1st, 1887. [1] Mr. Churchill avers that in 1894 Lenin was sixteen years of age. In point of fact, he was then twenty-four, and in charge of the secret organization at Petersburg. At the time of the October revolution he was not thirty-nine, as Mr. Churchill would have it, but forty-seven years old. Mr. Churchill’s errors in chronology show how confusedly he visualizes the period and people of which he writes.
But when from the point of view of chronology and fisticuffs we turn to that of the philosophy of history, what we see is even more lamentable.
Mr. Churchill tells us that discipline in the Russian army was destroyed, after the February revolution, by the order abolishing the salute to officers. This was the point of view of discontented old generals and ambitious young subalterns; otherwise, it is merely absurd. The old army stood for the supremacy of the old classes “ and was destroyed by the revolution. When peasants had taken away the landowners’ property, the peasants’ sons could hardly continue to serve under officers who were sons of landowners. The army is no mere technical organization, associated only with marching and promotion, but a moral organization, founded on a definite scheme of mutual relations between individuals and classes. When a scheme of this kind is upset by a revolution, the army unavoidably collapses. It was always thus ...
Mr. Churchill grants that Lenin had a powerful mind and will. According to Lord Birkenhead [2], Lenin was purely and simply non-existent: what really exists is a Lenin myth (see his letter in The Times, February 26th, 1929). The real Lenin was a nonentity upon which the colleagues of Arnold Bennett’s Lord Raingo [3] could look down contemptuously. But despite this one difference in their appraisement of Lenin, both Tories are exactly alike in their utter incapacity to under stand Lenin’s writings on economy, on politics and on philosophy—writings that fill over twenty volumes.
I suspect that Mr. Churchill did not even deign to take the trouble carefully to read the article on Lenin which I wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1926. If he had, he would not have committed those crude, glaring errors of dates which throw everything out of perspective.
One thing Lenin could not tolerate was muddled thought. He had lived in all European countries, mastered many languages, had read and studied and listened and observed and compared and generalized. When he became the head of a revolutionary country, he did not fail to avail himself of this opportunity to learn, conscientiously and carefully. He did not cease to follow the life of all other countries. He could read and speak fluently English, German and French. He could read Italian and a number of Slavonic languages. During the last years of his life, though overburdened with work, he devoted every spare minute to studying the grammar of the Czech language in order to have access, without intermediaries, to the inner life of Czechoslovakia.
What can Mr. Churchill and Lord Birkenhead know of the workings of this forceful, piercing, tireless mind of his, with its capacity to translate everything that was superficial, accidental, external into terms of the general and fundamental? Lord Birkenhead, in blissful ignorance, imagines that Lenin never had thought of the password: “Power to the Soviets” before the revolution of February 1917. But the problem of the Soviets and of their possible functions was the very central theme of the work of Lenin and of his companions from 1905 onwards, and even earlier.
By way of completing and correcting Mr. Churchill, Lord Birkenhead avers that if Kerensky [4] had been gifted with a single ounce of intelligence and courage, the Soviets would never have come into power. Here is, indeed, a philosophy of history that is conducive to comfort. The army falls to pieces in consequence of the soldiers having decided not to salute the officers whom they meet. The contents of the cranium of a Radical barrister happen to have been one ounce short, and this deficiency is enough to lead to the destruction of a pious and civilized community! But what indeed can a civilization be worth which at the time of dire need is unable to supply the needful ounce of brain!
Besides, Kerensky did not stand alone. Around him was a whole circle of Entente officials. [5] Why were they unable to instruct and inspire him, or if need was, replace him? To this query Mr. Churchill can find but this reply: “The Statesmen of the Allied nations affected to believe that all was for the best, and that the Revolution constituted a notable advantage for the common cause”—which means that the officials in question were utterly incapable of understanding the Russian revolution—or, in other words, did not substantially differ from Kerensky himself.
Today, Lord Birkenhead is incapable of seeing that Lenin, in signing the Brest-Litovsk peace [6], had shown any particular foresight. [7] He considers, today, that the peace was then inevitable. In his own words, “only hysterical fools” could have imagined that the Bolsheviks were capable of fighting Germany: a very remarkable, though tardy, acknowledgement!
The British Government of 1918, and, indeed, all the Entente Governments of that time, categorically insisted on our fighting Germany, and when we refused to do so replied by blockade of, and intervention in, our country. He may well ask, in the energetic language of the Conservative politician himself: Where were, at that moment, the hysterical fools? Was it not they who decided the fate of Europe? Lord Birkenhead’s view would have been very far-seeing in 1917: but I must confess that I, for one, have little use for far-sight which asserts itself twelve years after the time when it could have been of use.
Mr. Churchill brings up against Lenin—and it is the very keystone of his article—statistics of the casualties of the civil war. These statistics are quite fantastic. This, however, is not the main point. The victims were many on either side. Mr. Churchill expressly specifies that he includes neither the deaths from starvation nor the deaths from epidemics. In his would-be athletic language he declares that neither Tamerlane nor Genghis Khan [8] were as reckless as Lenin in expenditure of human lives. Judging by the order he adopts, one would hold that Mr. Churchill considers Tamerlane more reckless than Genghis Khan. In this he is wrong ... statistical and chronological figures are certainly not the strong point of this Finance Minister. But this is by the way.
In order to find examples of mass expenditure of human life, Mr. Churchill must needs go to the history of Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The great European war of 1914-1918, in which ten million men were killed and twenty million crippled, appears to have entirely escaped his memory. The campaigns of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane were child’s play in comparison with the doings of civilized nations from 1914 to 1918. But it is in a tone of lofty moral indignation that Mr. Churchill speaks of the victims of civil war in Russia—forgetting Ireland, and India, and other countries.
In short, the question is not so much the victims as it is the duties and the objects for which war was waged. Mr. Churchill wishes to make clear that all sacrifices, in all parts of the world, are permissible and right so long as the object is the power and sovereignty of the British Empire—that is, of its governing classes. But the incomparably lesser sacrifices are wrong which result from the struggle of peoples attempting to alter the conditions under which they exist—as occurred in England in the seventeenth century, in France at the end of the eighteenth, in the United States twice (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), in Russia in the twentieth century, and as will occur more than once in the future.
It is vainly that Mr. Churchill seeks assistance in the evocation of the two Asiatic warrior chiefs, who both fought in the interests of nomadic aristocracies, but yet aristocracies coveting new territories and more slaves—in which respect their dealings were in accordance with Mr. Churchill’s principles, but certainly not with Lenin’s. Indeed, we may recall that Anatole France [9], the last of the great humanists, often expressed the idea that of all kinds of the bloodthirsty insanity called war, the least insane was civil war, because at least the people who waged it did so of their own accord and not by order.
Mr. Churchill has committed yet another mistake, a very important one and, indeed, from his own point of view, a fatal one. He forgot that in civil wars, as in all wars, there are two sides; and that in this particular case, if he had not come in on the side of a very small minority, the number of the victims would have been considerably less. In October, we conquered power almost without a fight. Kerensky’s attempt to reconquer it evaporated as a dewdrop failing on a red-hot stone. So mighty was the driving power of the masses, that the older classes hardly dared attempt to resist.
When did the civil war, with its companion, the Red Terror, really start? Mr. Churchill being weak in the matter of chronology, let us help him. The turning point was the middle of 1918. Led by the Entente diplomatists and officers, the Czechoslovakians got hold of the railway line leading to the East. [10] The French ambassador, Noullens, organized the resistance at Yaroslavl. [11] Another foreign representative organized deeds of terror and an attempt to cut off the water supply of Petersburg. Mr. Churchill encourages and finances Savinkov. [12] he is behind Yudenich. [13] He determines the exact dates on which Petersburg and Moscow are to fall. He supports Denikin [14] and Wrangel. [15] The monitors of the British fleet bombard our coast. Mr. Churchill proclaims the coming of “fourteen nations”. He is the inspirer, the organizer, the financial backer, the prophet of civil war: a generous backer, a mediocre organizer, and very bad prophet.
He had been better advised not to recall the memories of those times. The number of the victims would have been not ten times, but a hundred or a thousand times smaller but for British guineas, British monitors, British tanks, British officers, and British food supplies.
Mr. Churchill understands neither Lenin nor the duties that lay before him. His lack of comprehension is at its worst when he attempts to deal with the inception of the new economic policy. For him, Lenin thereby gave himself the lie. Lord Birkenhead adds that in ten years the very principles of the October revolution were bankrupt. Yes: he who in ten years failed to do away with the miners’ unemployment, or to palliate it [16], expects that in ten years we Russians can build up a new community without committing one mistake, without one flaw, without one setback; a wonderful expectation which gives us the measure of the primitive and purely theoretical quality of the honourable Conservative’s outlook. We cannot foretell how many errors, how many set-backs, will mark the course of history; but to see, amid the obstacles and deviations and set-backs of all kinds, the straight line of historical evolution was the achievement of Lenin’s genius. And had the Restoration been successful at the time, the need for radical changes in the organization of the community would have remained as great.
When the Stuarts came back to power, they had far better reasons to think of a bankruptcy of Cromwell’s principles. Yet, despite the triumphant Restoration, despite the many ebbs and flows of the following periods, the contest between Whigs and Tories, Freetraders and Protectionists, it was the Cromwellian leaven that gave rise to the new England. [17] And it is only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that this ferment began to lose its potency, whence the unavoidable decrease of the part played by England in the world’s affairs.
John O’London’s Weekly, Saturday, April 20, 1929
1. Alexander Ulyanov (1866-1887), Russian revolutionary and older brother of Lenin; became member of the terrorist faction of narodnaya Volya in 1886; one of the authors of its programme, which was strongly influenced by marxism; arrested while preparing an assassination attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander III in early 1887 and executed.
2. F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead (1872-1930), British Conservative politician and lawyer.
3. Lord Raingo is a satirical novel published in 1926 by the English writer Arnold Bennett (1867-1931). Raingo, a self-made millionaire become Cabinet Minister, is supposed to represent the “new men” who were beginning to replace the established leaders of the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie.
4. Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky (1881-1970), the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary leader, took an extreme chauvinist position during the war and after the February Revolution in 1917 took office in the Provisional Government, becoming Prime Minister in July. Having failed to wipe out the Bolsheviks and disarm the working class in the face of reaction, his government was overthrown in the October Revolution. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain power in alliance with Krasnov he fled into exile in the United States.
5. The Entente powers which fought the First World War against the Axis of Germany and Austria-Hungary were France and Britain, later joined by Italy, Rumania, Portugal, the United States, and until October 1917, Russia. Particularly influential with Kerensky were Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, and the French Ambassador.
6. The Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty was signed on 3rd March, 1918 after three months of negotiations in which the Soviet delegation was led by Trotsky. The policy was carried through by Lenin and Trotsky against the opposition of Bukharin and the “Left Communists”. This faction wished to make it a principle to carry on a “revolutionary war” in the face of threats that German imperialism would renew the offensive after talks were broken off at one point. Trotsky deals with the Stalinist distortion of this history in The Stalin School of Falsification.
7. I do not insist upon the fact that Lord Birkenhead represents me as in favour of war with Germany in 1918. The honourable Conservative, on this point, follows far too docilely the utterances of the historians of the Stalin school.—L.D.T.
8. Genghis Khan (1167-1227) was the founder of the Mongol world empire, won through sweeping military campaigns against China and throughout Asia, in the course of which the Tartars were exterminated. Tamerlane (1336-1405) was a Mongol ruler and conqueror who carried out some of the most ambitious military campaigns in history, leading expeditions into Persia, Iran, Turkey, the Tigris, the Arabian and Caspian Sea areas, Central Asia and India. Won historical notoriety for his massacres, in one instance of 100,000 Indian prisoners.
9. The pseudonym of Jacques Thibault (1844-1924), the French novelist. His most famous work is perhaps Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). He supported Dreyfus against persecution by the French legal and military hierarchy and towards the end of his life appeared on socialist platforms but spoke generally from an individualist and not from a class standpoint. Trotsky had been re-reading his works on the journey into exile, in the weeks before the writing of this article (see My Life, p.546).
10. The Czechoslovaks were prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian Army who were formed into a legion to fight on the Allied side. The officers were bourgeois nationalists hostile to Austrian rule but also to Bolshevism. For a period during 1918 they held Kazan and other strategic points on the route from Moscow to the East. The recapture of Kazan in September was the first victory of the newly formed Red Army and marked a turning point in the fight to beat back the imperialist invasion.
11. A rising of White Guards in the summer of 1918. Noulens was aided by the British agent Bruce Lockhart in instigating it. Yaroslavl is only 160 miles North-East of Moscow
12. Boris Savinkov (1879-1925) was a member of the terrorist wing of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Expelled for supporting Kornilov during 1917, he was in fact one of Kerensky’s closest collaborators and military allies during the period of the Provisional Government and in the attempts at counter-revolution which followed the October Revolution. He led the Yaroslavl rising and the Socialist-Revolutionaries’ attempts to seize power during the July 1918 Congress of Soviets. He received financial backing also from the French military attach in Moscow. Later he carried on various military and terrorist attacks on the Soviet Union from Polish territory.
13. Nikolai Nikolaevich Yudenich (1862-1933), Commander of the counter-revolutionary White Army in the Baltic area of Russia, which was poised to take Petrograd in August and September 1919.
14. Anton Antonovich Denikin (1972-1947), organizer and commander of the counter-revolutionary Volunteer Army in South Russia, 1918-1920.
15. Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel (1878-1928), White Guard leader who re-grouped the remnants of Denikin’s defeated Volunteer Army in the Crimean Peninsula, and with substantial aid from Britain and France, attacked Soviet Russia from the south. His army was defeated by the end of 1920 and he was forced to flee with the remnants to Turkey and the Balkans.
16. In his years as a minister of the successive Tory governments of the 1920s.
17. Though Cromwell’s death was followed by the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and Cromwell’s up body was up dug up to be hung, drawn and quartered, the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century was by then accomplished. Capital ruled while permitting the aristocracy to govern. The revolution of 1640 was what laid the basis for Britain’s industrial supremacy in the 19th century.
Last updated on: 2.7.2007