September 25, 2024

Churchill’s Writings and Russia

Finest Hour 201, First Quarter 2023

Page 34

By Ronald I. Cohen

Ronald I. Cohen CM MBE is author of A Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (2006).

While Churchill himself was of course well known to Russians, particularly during the Second World War, his writings were not as accessible in the Soviet Union as they were in Scandinavia or the Romance language countries of Europe, or even Germany. In fact, only three of Churchill’s volume length works were ever published in Russia, certainly a curious fact for one of the leading political figures of the twentieth century.

The wartime relations between the United Kingdom and the USSR, in addition to Churchill’s personal views on Stalin and Bolshevism, led to some interesting circumstances in the Russian translations that were made of Churchill’s work. Additionally, there are some intriguing issues in the substance of a related monograph, as well as some undisclosed revisions to the text of Churchill’s first volume of war speeches.

The Translations

The first translation of one of Winston Churchill’s books was published in 1916, by which date he had written eleven books (in thirteen volumes). Curiously, the Finnish publisher’s choice was Savrola, Churchill’s third work and only novel. Published as Kansa Nousee (translated as “The People Will Rise”) in a less significant city than one might expect, Hämeenlinna, rather than a more obvious choice like Helsinki, Turku, or Tampere, it began an expansive tradition, which has resulted in the translation of Churchill’s books or pamphlets into thirty one languages. Coincidentally, the most recent translated work I have received is also Savrola, which appeared for the first time in Italian in July of last year.

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The most frequent languages into which Churchill’s works have been translated are Swedish (23 works), German (22), Spanish (20), and French (19), with the Russian total fairly far behind at just 13, enough to give it eighth place overall, although five of the thirteen were speech pamphlets, rather than volume-length works.

Of the volumes, the first Russian edition was Мировой Кризис 1918–1925, the abridged version of The World Crisis. That initial Russian-language translation was published by Госидарственное in Moscow in 1932. A new edition of the work was published in Moscow in 2014 by URSS. Indeed, from 1932 until the 1990s, none of the Russian translations of Churchill’s writings was published in Russia at all.

The next volume of Russian translated Churchill works was published in England in 1945 when the Soviet Relations Division of the Ministry of Information decided to make available to the Russian market a selection from three volumes of Churchill’s speeches already published in Britain as Into Battle, The Unrelenting Struggle, and the then as yet unnamed The End of the Beginning. This was done under the title Избранные Речи 1938–1943 (“Selected Speeches 1938–1943.”) The Ministry had advised Churchill’s secretary Kathleen Hill by letter on 5 April 1943 of its intention to create that collection, which, they explained, would be printed in London “and shipped to Russia for free distribution and/or sale.”

The next translation into Russian was the Second World War (Вторая Мировая Война), which, once again, was published far from Russia, this time in New York City by the Chekhov Publishing House in 1954–55. Not unlike the Turkish edition of the war memoirs, but for different reasons, the set was ultimately incomplete. Only six card wrapped Russian books, each representing one book from the twelve-book, six-volume Cassell edition, ever appeared. As to the Chekhov Publishing House, which had been established in 1952 by the East European Fund, aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation, its life was rather short. From 1952 through 1956, however, their list of publications was actually quite large, ultimately including more than 150 titles. The limited time frame of the Chekhov House’s existence may explain why the final six books (three volumes) were never published.

For the curious, the Turkish Second World War (Çörçil Anlatiyor—translated roughly as “Churchill Describes” or “Churchill Explains”) only reached the second of the six volumes, i.e., Book 4, since, as Wendy Reves, the widow of Churchill’s literary agent, explained to me, the Turkish publisher never paid the agreed fee for the rights to the first four books and so was cut off from any subsequent volumes of the memoirs.

The second edition of Вторая Мировая Война was published in Moscow in 1991 by Воениздат, and the third Russian edition, bearing the same title, was also published there in 1997–98 by «ТЕРРА» – «TERRA» «Книжня Лавка–РТР».

Another collection of war speeches was published in Moscow in 2002 by Зксмо Прес under the publisher-chosen title Мускулы мира (“Sinews of Peace,” but the work is not a Russian translation of the Cassell book of postwar speeches of the same name). The collection is primarily from Into Battle and The Unrelenting Struggle, but it does include other speeches from The End of the Beginning, Onwards to Victory, The Dawn of Liberation, Victory, and Sinews of Peace.

Thereafter, only the first volume of A History of the English Speaking Peoples (The Birth of Britain) was translated into Russian. Рождение Британйи was published by Русич in Smolensk in 2007. I may be speculating, but it appears to me that the publisher’s blurb for the volume explains its rationale for confining its publication of HESP to this volume of the set because it enabled them to omit from the Russian market the narrative about the other significant English-speaking people:

The Birth of Britain is a look at the history of Great Britain not only by a prominent statesman, but also by a patriot of his country. Written in a lively, exciting way, this book will no doubt be of interest not only to specialists, but also to a wide range of readers.

There were also five speech pamphlets published in Russian, including Речь по радио 10 Мая 1942 (Churchill’s speech of 10 May 1942, published in Moscow by Государственное Издательство Политической Литературы), and then four more pamphlets, all of which were published by the British Embassy in Moscow: Вперёд, К Победё! (Churchill’s address of 22 February 1944 in the House of Commons), Обзор Военных Событий (Churchill’s address of 2 August 1944 on the war situation in the House of Commons), Отчет Народу (another address on the war situation in the House, this one of 28 September 1944) and Крымская конференция (Churchill’s address of 27 February opening the debate on the government motion approving the proposals of the Crimea Conference).

Rare Monograph

One of the most unusual collections of Churchill’s spoken or written words with a Russian focus was not actually published in Russian. While not written or assembled by Churchill, the text consists of his words. Its English title, My Ally, was intended as a sardonic thrust at the wartime triumvirate of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt with a singular focus on Churchill’s change of attitude toward Stalin, the Communists, and Russia. It is a monograph composed of “nothing but utterances and writings by Winston Churchill on the subject of Bolshevism during the last quarter of a century,” explains the Preface. Of these there are fifty, all declared by the unnamed editor of the book to be faithfully extracted and quoted from speeches, broadcasts, articles, chapters, and other writings of Churchill’s between 1919 and 1940. (My preliminary random review of these indicates that they are accurately quoted.)

So, while each of these passages is by Churchill, none of them has been selected by Churchill for inclusion in this work, which I have also found in Croatian, French, German, Norwegian, and Swedish translations, but not, as I noted above, for obvious reasons, in Russian, although the book has a Russian focus.

Accompanying each of the texts that appear on the even numbered pages are editorial cartoons on the facing odd numbered pages taken exclusively from “original pictures published in English and American papers and magazines.” All of these depict a murderous Stalin or Red Army oppressing neighbouring peoples. No publisher or date is given, but likely the book is from 1942 and of German origin.

Undisclosed Changes

As a final note regarding the effect of the Nazi invasion of Russia on Churchill’s writings, I should draw the reader’s attention to the first volume of the war speeches, Into Battle, which was published in February 1941. Churchill’s son Randolph was the compiler of that collection, and, in his Introduction to the volume, he stated:

There are few public men who would care to have their speeches printed without alteration within two or three years of their delivery. But as in ‘Arms and the Covenant,’ I have not altered even a phrase on the grounds of political expediency, and, except for the excision of certain passages which are no longer of much general interest, and occasional compressions to allow for the difference between the spoken and the written word, these speeches are printed as they were delivered.

Despite that prefatory statement, in the ninth printing of the volume (in January 1942), the major improvement in Anglo Russian relations resulted in significant editorial changes to the content of the text of the famous broadcast address of 20 January 1940, “A House of Many Mansions,” which was reduced from 1,747 words in the first through eighth printings to 1,553 words in the ninth printing. The words “by some deal between Moscow and Berlin” and “Bolshevik” were dropped “and an entire paragraph of almost 200 words praising the Finns and criticizing the Russians” was excised.