“The Ogre of Europe”

Page 17

Winston Churchill responded to Leon Trotsky’s review of The Aftermath with an article that originally appeared in December 1929 under the title “Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe Whose Fire breathing Days Are Gone Forever.” The article was subsequently revised and expanded for inclusion in Churchill’s 1937 book Great Contemporaries, by which time Trotsky had relocated from Turkey to Mexico. Here follow extracts from the opening paragraphs:

When the usurper and tyrant is reduced to literary controversy, when the Communist instead of bombs produces effusions for the capitalist Press, when the refugee War Lord fights his battles over again, and the discharged executioner becomes chatty and garrulous at the fireside, we may rejoice in the signs that better days are come. I have before me an article that Leon Trotsky alias Bronstein [his surname at birth] has recently contributed to John O’London’s Weekly in which he deals with my descriptions of Lenin, with the Allied intervention in Russia, with Lord Birkenhead and other suggestive topics.

He has written this article from his exile in Turkey while supplicating England, France and Germany to admit him to the civilizations it has been—and still is—the object of his life to destroy. Russia—his own Red Russia—the Russia he had framed and fashioned to his heart’s desire regardless of suffering of others or hazard to himself—has cast him out. All his scheming, all his daring, all his writing, all his harangues, all his atrocities, all his achievements, have led only to this—that another “comrade,” [Stalin] his subordinate in revolutionary rank, his inferior in wit, though not perhaps in crime, rules in his stead, while he, the once triumphant Trotsky whose frown meted death to thousands, sits disconsolate—a skin of malice stranded for a time on the shores of the Black Sea and now washed up in the Gulf of Mexico….

Hence these chatty newspaper articles. Hence these ululations from the Bosphorus. Hence these entreaties to be allowed to visit the British Museum and study its documents, or to drink the waters of Malvern for his rheumatism, or of Nauheim for his heart, or of Homburg for his gout, or of some other place for some other complaint. Hence these broodings in Turkish shades pierced by the searching eye of [President] Mustafa Kemal. Hence these exits from France, from Scandinavia. Hence this last refuge in Mexico.

Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in 1940 by a Soviet agent, who subsequently received the Order of Lenin and was named a Hero of the Soviet Union.

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