January 1, 1970

“The Creeds of the Devil”:

Churchill between the Two Totalitarianisms, 1917-1945

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Antoine Capet

Université de Rouen (France)

Antoine Capet, FRHistS, is Professor of British Studies at the University of Rouen (France).  He has edited a number of collections on Britain’s diplomatic and military policy in the 20th century, the latest being Britain, France and the Entente Cordiale since 1904 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He has been Editor of the “Britain since 1914” section of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography since 2001 and he sits on the International Board of Twentieth Century British History.

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Last March, I was invited to deliver a keynote lecture on “Churchill, Fascism and the Fascists” at the University of Lille (France),¹ and when Dr Michael Kandiah² asked if I were interested in giving a paper at the Cold War Conference which he was organizing,³ I immediately thought of “Churchill and Bolshevism”⁴ as the obverse of the same coin.⁵

The prevailing image of Churchill is that of the “bulldog,” relentlessly resisting and finally defeating the fascist dictators, including of course by their archetype Hitler.⁶ But David Carlton, who has devoted a monograph to the study of Churchill’s attitude to Soviet Communism⁷—or “Bolshevism” as it was better known before the Second World War—argues that Churchill’s real relentless struggle was against the Bolsheviks and Soviet Communists: a protracted one, in fact almost a lifelong task from the 1917 Revolution until his retirement from active politics, with the period from 1941 to 1945 not even constituting the lull which mainstream historians and biographers like to emphasise.

Carlton summed up the gist of his book in a paper which he gave at the Institute of Historical Research in January 2001 and published in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Concluding the paper on a minute sent to Eden on 6 December 1953, in which Churchill addressed the Soviet threat in no uncertain terms, Carlton concludes:

These are not the words of a serious pioneer of détente. For with great certitude they depict the Soviets as unreformable creatures of tireless aggression. In fact they represent the convictions of the visceral anti-Soviet that Churchill had never ceased to be since the first days of the Bolshevik Revolution. In short, his anti-Nazi phase, for which ironically he will always be principally remembered, was for him something of a digression, however necessary, in his extraordinarily long career. Thus, once the Battle of Britain had been won and the Americans had entered the war, the struggle to defeat Germany became for him no more than a second-o