January 1, 1970

Abstract: Contrary to much of the literature that depicts him first and foremost as a lifelong foe of communism, Winston Churchill was actually quite pragmatic regarding his opposition to various forms of totalitarianism, a worldview which explains his near-rabid anti-communism following the First World War and also his gradually softening change as he began to see fascist Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to a stable world order in the years before the Second World War.  It is this pragmatism and a basic hostility to tyranny, then, that best explains Churchill’s approach to all forms of totalitarianism.  
—Ted Hutchinson

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.

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, incuding 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.

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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-order crusade. For in his own eyes at least the contest with Soviet Bolshevism was what gave his political life the greatest continuity and meaning.⁸

In this, Carlton more or less follows the “revisionist” theories put forward by Clive Ponting in his highly critical—and highly controversial—1994 biography of Churchill.9 Carlton quotes at length from the animal and medical imagery used by Churchill against the Bolsheviks after 1917, as documented by Ponting. The revision in question bears on the conventional picture of Churchill given by “traditionalist historian[s].”10 Kinvig also indirectly indicts them when he writes in his Introduction: “Churchill’s Russian policy during the twenty-five months he spent at the War Office has received little attention from most of his biographers.” A note indeed gives full statistical details:

Roy Jenkins gave but seven paragraphs to [Russian policy] in the 900-odd pages of his major biography Churchill (2001); Geoffrey Best gave it five paragraphs in his 300-page reflective work A Study in Greatness (2001). John Keegan’s 170-page introductory biography Churchill (2002) and Richard Holmes’s 300-page work, In the Footsteps of Churchill (2005),11 each allot it a single paragraph.12

One favourite target is Roland Quinault, who suggested in 1991 that Churchill was not the hot-headed interventionist in post-revolutionary Russia which his critics denounced, since he considerably reduced the British military presence there when he was Secretary of State for War and Air in 1919.13 For his part, Kinvig refutes this thesis by emphasizing Churchill’s equivocation during his term of office:

Churchill claimed correctly that the key intervention decisions had been taken by the Cabinet and Supreme War Council before he came into office. There is no doubt, however, that he strove, and managed at times, to extend, revise or circumvent them.14

Sir Martin Gilbert and William Manchester are also specifically named among those who perpetuate the Churchill “mythology,” notably the argument that his increasing denunciations of Chamberlain’s refusal to initiate a rapprochement with the Soviet Union from 1938 showed a toning down of his former uncompromising anti-Bolshevik stance.15

Anyone who has read Churchill’s abundant pronouncements on Soviet Communism and relations with the USSR in the inter-war years knows that things are not as simple as that. Surely, an author like Geoffrey Best would be seen as a “traditionalist historian” by Carlton—yet Best adheres to the conception of Churchill as anti-Bolshevik hothead in the years following the First World War, pointing out that “no other person of highest political stature publicised and went on about his dislike of it [Bolshevism] as much as he did.” For Geoffrey Best, Churchill “became worked up and histrionic in much the same way as Edmund Burke had become worked up about the French Revolution.”

As evidence of these histrionics, Geoffrey Best adduces what Churchill wrote in The Aftermath, the fourth volume16 of The World Crisis, looking back in 1929 on the situation in Eastern Europe after the Russian Revolution:

[To the East of Poland] lay the huge mass of Russia—not a wounded Russia only, but a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia, a Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slew the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroyed the health and even the souls of nations.17

In fact, Churchill was only “recycling” almost verbatim an article which contained the stark sub-headings “Shall the Red Flood of Bolshevism Swamp all Europe?” and “The Poison Peril from the East,” which he had published in The Evening News on 28 July 1920.18 Interestingly, this offensive language did not pass unnoticed, even in the Conservative press. Ronald Cohen, who also reproduces the text, notes that it “led to a critical article in The Times of the following day.”19 And this was not the end of the story: Churchill wrote to Lord Northcliffe to complain:

[I]n undertaking to do this, I did not expect to encounter the hostile criticism of the Times. I can quite understand that the Times might not agree with any particular phrase or argument….Criticism of policy is one thing. Criticism on the propriety of my writing an article for the Evening News is another. I confess I feel myself unfairly treated in this respect. No other morning paper that I have read has found it necessary to make any adverse comment, yet the leading paper in your group of papers goes out of its way to attack the propriety of my writing an article which I was strongly pressed to write by another paper in the same group.20

This exchange with Lord Northcliffe shows, if need be, that Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik “histrionics” did not necessarily ingratiate him with senior representatives of the British Right—and that Churchill took no notice of their reservations. It is probably impossible to say when the image of the “maverick” was born, but Churchill’s lone unrelenting anti-Bolshevik campaign in 1918-1919-1920 must have played a significant part in its creation.

*****

For a possible explanation, one should perhaps start with the trauma of the Bolshevik Revolution. “Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease,” Churchill said in the House of Commons on 29 May 1919, adding, “it is not a creed; it is a pestilence,”21 thus starting a long series of highly offensive medical metaphors in his attacks on the Bolsheviks. In June, he described them with the suggestion of mental illness as a “league of failures, the criminals, the morbid, the  deranged and the distraught.”22 A variant was “the vampire which sucks the blood from his victims,” used in the House of Commons on 26 March.23 Later in the year, on 6 November, he took up again his extreme vocabulary of insidious epidemics in his description of Lenin’s journey back from Switzerland in the House of Commons:

Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.24

Slightly modifying his choice of words, he took up the same idea in The Aftermath ten years later, remarking that the Germans “transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.”25 Paul Addison also notes after Norman Rose26 that Churchill spoke of Bolshevism as a “cancer,” and a “horrible form of mental and moral disease.”27 With another version of what must have been his favourite description of Bolshevism in the 1920s, Churchill applied the phrase once again to Trotsky, baptised “The Ogre of Europe” in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine (December 1929): “Like the cancer bacillus, he grew, he fed, he tortured, he slew in fulfilment of his nature.”28

Churchill was Minister of Munitions from 18 July 1917 to 9 January 1919. His perception of the “stab in the back” syndrome was not that of the German Left forcing defeat on an unvanquished army; it was that of the Bolsheviks betraying their Western allies by accepting a separate peace with the Central Powers (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 3 March 1918).

In a speech given at the Connaught Rooms on 11 April 1919, he arraigned them as traitors:

Every British and French soldier killed last year was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky, not in fair war, but by the treacherous desertion of an ally without parallel in the history of the world.29

This was taking up in much stronger terms the regrets expressed when he spoke of the Russian withdrawal from the war in a speech at Bedford on 11 December 1917:

It is this melancholy event which has prolonged the war, that has robbed the French, the British and the Italian armies of the prize that was perhaps almost within their reach this summer; it is this event, and this event alone, that has exposed us to perils and sorrows and sufferings which we have not deserved, which we cannot avoid, but under which we shall not bend.30

Two of the things Churchill most hated were at work in this troubled period: betrayal and the break-up of the social order. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, famously added a more personal consideration: “His ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes in Russia.”31 In his diary, Sir George Riddell noted that Lloyd George had commented upon Churchill’s Connaught Rooms speech in no uncertain terms: “He has Bolshevism on the brain…he is mad for operations in Russia.”32 A few weeks earlier, on 17 February, using the same word “mad,” Lloyd George had personally wired Churchill to warn him against a “purely mad enterprise out of hatred of Bolshevik principles.”33

Still, as Secretary of State for War until 14 February 1921, Churchill embarked on a policy of eradication of what he called “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism” during an official luncheon at the Mansion House on 19 February 1919,34 a policy soon dubbed “Mr. Churchill’s Private War” by the press,35 though with some exaggeration, since Kinvig’s examination of the Parliamentary debates following Churchill’s presentation of the Army Estimates on 3 March show that some Members were equally ready to use abusive language against the Bolsheviks and enthusiastically supported him.36

The fact remains that Churchill’s assimilation of the Bolsheviks to animals became a constant in the inter-war years. Of the Russian revolutionaries a few months earlier, at his Dundee seat on 26 November 1918, during the General Election campaign, Churchill said:

Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism….Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while the Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.37

“Baboons” reappeared in a conversation with H.A.L. Fisher on 8 April 191938 and three days later, in the Connaught Rooms speech, he denounced “that foul combination of criminality and animalism which constitutes the Bolshevik regime.”39 The criminal/animal analogy was again used in “Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe”:

He had raised the poor against the rich. He had raised the penniless against the poor. He had raised the criminal against the penniless….Nothing lower than the Communist criminal class could be found. In vain he turned his gaze upon the wild beasts. The apes could not appreciate his eloquence. He could not mobilize the wolves, whose numbers had so notably increased during his administration. So the criminals he had installed stood together, and put him outside.40

Churchill did not only use the imagery of wolves and baboons. In “Mass Effects in Modern Life” (1931), he rhetorically considered what other animal metaphors would be appropriate:

Sub-human goals and ideals are set before these Asiatic millions. The Beehive? No, for there must be no queen and honey, or at least no honey for others. In Soviet Russia we have a society which seeks to model itself upon the Ant. There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the White Ant.41

The allusion to “sub-human goals” and  “these Asiatic millions”—also found in the Trotsky article, in which Churchill speaks of “a vast process of Asiatic liquefaction”42—naturally remind us of the worst excesses of Hitler’s “Aryan” vocabulary.

Indeed, at some stage, Churchill was very near to speaking, like the German Nazis a few years later, of Judaeo-Bolshevism. Not that Churchill was a rabid antisemite—on the contrary, it can be argued that he was a philosemite all his life43—but in a remarkable article entitled “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” published in 1920, he distinguished between the good Jews, the “National Jews” like those of Britain who were perfectly assimilated, or the Zionist Jews prepared to re-people their “home” in Palestine, and the evil “International Jews”:

Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.

The link between Jewry and Bolshevism—the Judaeo-Bolshevism of Hitler—is provided by the leadership of the Russian Revolution:

With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek—all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.

Even worse, the leadership of World Revolution as fomented by the Bolsheviks is also provided by these “International Jews”:

The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.44

But Kinvig fails to notice the ambiguities in Churchill’s vocabulary when he wrote about the “International Jews”: when Kinvig argues that “there was no trace of anti-Semitism in Churchill’s make-up,” rightly adducing the example of his opposition to the pogroms and wholesale executions on the part of the White45 Russians,46 he seems to neglect Churchill’s notorious “Zionism versus Bolshevism” 1920 article. Conversely, Carlton has a case when he writes that the “extent to which Churchill “lost his balance” on the subject of the early Soviet Union is, then, too little recognised.”47

Churchill also seems to have “lost his balance” in his evaluation of the comparative demerits of Germany (from which it was widely considered that Prussian militarism had not been eradicated by the defeat of 1918) and Russia (now in the hands of the Bolsheviks). In a remarkable letter to Lloyd George, written on 24 March 1920, he notably wrote: “Since the armistice my policy w[oul]d have been ‘Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny.’ Willingly or unavoidably, you have followed something vy near the reverse.”48

This hypothetical policy may have been derived from his assessment of the two dangers—a sort of “first things first” line of conduct which we will have occasion to discuss later. Already, in the Connaught Rooms speech of 11 April 1919, Churchill compared the two threats—to the Soviets’ disadvantage:

Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading. It is sheer humbug to pretend that it is not far worse than German militarism. [Its atrocities are] incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale, and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser is responsible.49

Considering the list of atrocities then attributed to the Germans during the Great War (the rape of Belgian nuns, etc.), this was no small accusation at the time. In fact, in the secrecy of the War Cabinet, he had adumbrated a reversal, if not of alliances, at least of the policy followed since the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale in the 1900s, on the eve of the 1918 Armistice, declaring that “[W]e might have to build up the German army, as it was important to get Germany on its legs again for fear of the spread of Bolshevism.”50

Whatever the scepticism which may be attached to the reliabilty of reminiscences published fifty years after the event, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in conversation with Sir Martin Gilbert, said that Churchill had explained his policy to her in terms of “Kill the Bolshie, Kiss the Hun.”51 Coming as it did after the Armistice, this has the ring of truth. This is borne out by WSC’s slightly more careful words to Lloyd George in April 1919: “Feed Germany; fight Bolshevism; make Germany fight Bolshevism.”52

*****

It is only with the utmost reluctance that Churchill bowed to reality and accepted the Bolshevik take-over of Russia as accomplished fact in 1920. Kinvig also argues, with some plausibility, that “Churchill’s attention became increasingly diverted to Ireland, where the first IRA campaign was gathering intensity.”53 Initially, of course, the war against Bolshevism had not been a “cold” one but a “hot” one, with British troops aiding the White Russians to fight the Reds.54

Sir Martin Gilbert has given us a superbly documented account of “Mr. Churchill’s Private War” against Bolshevism—a war which he lost in the Cabinet as much as in Eastern Europe.55 But as Quinault pointedly reminds us, “Churchill was not personally responsible for the British military intervention in Russia, which was part of a collective Allied military strategy.”56 The fact remains that the British intervention gave rise to at least two unfortunate episodes in Churchill’s long career: his dubious phraseology over the “International Jews” and his imprudent prescription of gas as “the right medicine for the Bolshevist.” Kinvig in fact explains that the gas in question was not of a lethal nature, only temporarily incapacitating the enemy57—but of course the harm was done, and the phrase has stuck,58 much to Churchill’s disrepute.59

By the early 1920s it was clear that “there was something almost visceral about Churchill’s hatred,”60 and his reputation as the arch-enemy of “the enemies of the human race,” who “must be put down at any cost,”61 was therefore well established, and Ramsay MacDonald, the Leader, declared in connection with Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik campaigns, “If the Labour Party can’t fight this, it can fight nothing.”62

Technically, however, Churchill was still a Liberal. He only crossed the Floor of the House again in 1924, standing as an Independent Anti-Socialist candidate at a by-election in March, in which he was narrowly defeated by the official Conservative candidate, and as a Constitutionalist candidate at the October General Election, with official Conservative backing. He won the seat of Epping, which he kept until 1964. In November 1924, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative Government led by Baldwin. The following year he officially rejoined the Conservative Party.

In May 1926 he was at the forefront of the Government’s efforts to defeat the General Strike, notably editing the British Gazette, the official Government newspaper in the absence of the usual commercial newspapers. Churchill emerged from the episode with a reinforced reputation as the enemy of the working man, the more so as he initially opposed the distribution of welfare payments to the coalminers who continued with the strike until the autumn. He was presented as the extremist of the General Strike, not without justification.63

His image as a man of the authoritarian Right was made even worse by his disastrous public pronouncements following his trip to Rome in January 1927, when he met the Pope and Mussolini. In fact he had already expressed his admiration for Mussolini in January 1926, in a speech before Treasury officials :

Italy is a country which is prepared to face the realities of post-war reconstruction. It possesses a Government under the commanding leadership of Signor Mussolini which does not shrink from the logical consequences of economic facts and which has the courage to impose the financial remedies required to secure and to stabilise the national recovery.64

This is what we could call the “classic” defence of Fascism—its economic efficiency at a time when the democracies were at a loss to find a coherent economic policy. Oswald Mosley was to put it more concisely later when he repeated that he and his fellow British Fascists wanted to turn Parliament “from a talk-shop to a work-shop.” When Churchill praised Mussolini’s Italy for its economic realism, it was of course the British Chancellor of the Exchequer envying the Fascist dictator for the room for manoeuvre which the absence of an effective opposition gave him.

The offensive declarations of January 1927 were of a different nature, in that they clearly justified the introduction of Fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism: “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”65

This argument was to be repeated ten years later, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, in a slightly different form—though the old assimilation with animals was not taken up: I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism.66

But then one must introduce a capital factor into the equation. In all these cases, Churchill was talking from the point of view of the Italians, the Spanish and the Germans. Thanks to Britain’s superior institutions and traditions, summed up by the well-known popular phrase, “it could not happen here,” the British were fortunately protected from these impossible choices.

In his approval of the Italian Fascists” in January 1927, Churchill was ca