Leon
Trotsky: Churchill as Biographer and Historian
March
23, 1929
[Leon
Trotsky on Literature and Art, New York ²1972, p. 167-173,
different titles: “Mr. Churchill is wrong”, “Two
Tories on a Revolutionary”]
In
1918-19 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.
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 antithesis as an athlete with dumbbells. But the
observant eye soon notices that the dumbbells 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 Ill's
life was organized by Alexander Ulyanov (Lenin's brother) on March 1,
1887. 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 landowner's 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, Lenin was purely and simply nonexistent: what
really exists is a Lenin myth (see his letter in The
Times,
February 26, 1929). The real Lenin was a nonentity upon which the
colleagues of Arnold Bennett's Lord Raingo could look down
contemptuously. But despite this one difference in their appraisal of
Lenin, both Tories are exactly alike in their utter incapacity to
understand 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
Encyclopedia
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 Slavic 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 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 happens 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. 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, had shown any particular foresight. (I do not
insist upon the fact that Lord Birkenhead represents me as in favor
of war with Germany in 1918, The honorable Conservative, on this
point, follows far too docilely the utterances of historians of the
Stalin school.) 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, acknowledgment!
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. We may well ask, in the energetic language of the
Conservative politician himself: Who 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 farseeing in 1917; but I
must confess that I, for one, have little use for foresight 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 describes
that neither Tamerlane nor Genghis Khan were as reckless as Lenin in
expenditure of human lives. Judging by the order he adopts, one would
think Churchill holds 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 1914-18, 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 in vain 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, 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 falling
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. The French ambassador Noulens
organized the resistance at Yaroslavl. Another foreign representative
organized deeds of terror and an attempt to cut off the water supply
of Petersburg. Mr. Churchill encourages and finances Savinkov; he is
behind Yudenich. He determines the exact dates on which Petersburg
and Moscow are to fall. He supports Denikin and Wrangel. 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 a 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, 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
honorable Conservative's outlook. We cannot foretell how many errors,
how many setbacks, will mark the course of history; but to see, amid
the obstacles and deviations and setbacks 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.