Churchill and Trotsky

[Carey Stronach]

In his recent book, "In Defense Of Leon Trotsky," David North quotes WSC as saying of Trotsky in 1937, "Like the cancer bacillus he grew, he fed, he tortured, he slew in fulfillment of his nature."

Was Churchill on the mark with these comments, or was he mistaken, possibly grossly mistaken (as North claims)? The Russian revolution was terribly bloody, but many, perhaps most, of the atrocities were committed on the orders of others, Lenin, Stalin and the NKVD.

It's a fascinating, but ultimately frustrating, game to construct alternative  histories. Trotsky lost the power struggle with Stalin in 1927 and left the Soviet Union in fear of his life in 1929. (He was eventually murdered in Mexico by a Stalinist thug in 1940.) The worst horrors of the Soviet regime lay in the future, the Ukrainian famine of 1931-33, and the great purge of 1937-38. The book "Bloodlands," by Timothy Snyder, documents these terrors in excruciating detail, as does the historical novel "Everything Flows," by Vasily Grossman.

Let us assume for the moment that Trotsky had defeated Stalin in the 1920s. Would the Soviet people have accepted a Jewish leader? Would the USSR have morphed into a social democracy along the lines of a Slavic Sweden? Or would there have been a coup, perhaps led by the army, that might have brought a right-wing dictatorship to power? If Trotsky had prevailed, World War II might never have happened, at least not along the lines of what actually took place. This is because a Trotsky - Hitler pact would have been utterly unthinkable, indeed laughable in its absurdity. Then Britain and Churchill would not have had to endure the supreme challenge of 1940-41, and WSC might have ended his career as a relatively unknown back bencher.

This chat group has been relatively quiet recently. I know that there are a number of distinguished scholars present, from both right and left. Maybe this topic will draw out some interesting and divergent opinions. 

CES

[Stan A. Orchard]

There is an on-line interview/discussion about Trotsky at http://fora.tv/2009/07/28/Uncommon_Knowledge_Christopher_Hitchens__Robert_Service that I found quite interesting.  Churchill is hardly mentioned, but the discussion delves into assessing the character, actions, motivations and legacy of Trotsky.  To this extent it addresses the question: Was Churchill on the mark with his comments?  

 

Stan   

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[Editor, Finest Hour]

I am working on a pastiche, based on WSC's droll What-If, "If Lee Had
Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg".....Mine is, "If Churchill Had Not
Won the 1945 Election." (Everything turns out just fine, of course).
The last paragraph:

"Things might have been different. We might have had a divided
Europe;
genocide in India; a stand-off with the Soviets and fifty years of
Cold War; a nuclear arms race; a communist China, and surrogate-
regimes with nuclear arms in places like Cuba; a war in Korea; a
crisis over Suez; eternal strife in the Middle East, the shattering
of
the world economy. All these events might easily have come to pass—if
Churchill had not won the 1945 election."

Finest Hour would run Churchill's Trotsky piece from GREAT
CONTEMPORARIES (new edition edited by Muller/Courtenay due out from
ISI shortly), together with a thoughtful article on whether or not he
was
right, from anyone who might like to submit it.

[Anthony Calabrese]

The Red Army was in many ways the creation of Trotsky.  Would they have accepted a Jewish leader?  Why not any less then a primarily Russian empire accepting a Georgian leader.  In any event, I have always thought that Trotsky would have been worse.  During the 1930s, for all of Stalin's infiltration of the Western establishment (people who he never really trusted, many of his spy masters ended up on the wrong end of an NKVD pistol), I think Trotsky would have pushed much further.  One could imagine if during the Depression the western establishment was in full revolt, instead of the mild playing at communism you saw at Oxbridge or the Ivy Leagues. 
 
One can never really answer the "IF" question, but something to me says that if Trotsky had won, the result would have been something like ;ate Weimar Germany writ large, with the result of Trotskyite terror or fascist takeovers.



 


 

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Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:12:52 +0000
From: cestr...@comcast.net
To: Church...@googlegroups.com

Subject: [ChurchillChat] Churchill and Trotsky

[Antoine Capet]

Churchill in fact used the phrase "Like the cancer bacillus he grew, he fed, he tortured, he slew in fulfillment of his nature"
first in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine (December 1929). “Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe” was later reprinted in Great Contemporaries.

In the same year, 1929, he also remarked in _The Aftermath_ that the Germans “transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague
bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.”

See my discussion, “The Creeds of the Devil”: Churchill between the Two Totalitarianisms, 1917-1945, on the Churchill Centre site:

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-churchill-centre/publications/finest-hour-online/725-the-creeds-of-the-devil-churchill-between-the-two-totalitarianisms-1917-1945

Professor Antoine CAPET, FRHistS
Head of British Studies
University of Rouen
76821 Mont-Saint-Aignan
France
antoin...@univ-rouen.fr

'Britain since 1914' Section Editor
Royal Historical Society Bibliography

Reviews Editor of CERCLES
http://www.cercles.com/review/reviews.html
================================================

-----Message d'origine-----
From: Carey Stronach
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2011 6:12 AM
To: ChurchillChat

Subject: [ChurchillChat] Churchill and Trotsky

CES

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[Jon Lellenberg]

Here is a review addressing those points about Trotsky, the great historian of Russia Richard Pipes reviewing the new biography Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life by Joshua Rubenstein, who also seems to think Trotsky rising to the top would have meant a kinder, gentler Bolshevik Revolution.  Pipes (Jewish like Leon Trotsky) disagrees, and spells out why ("In view of the murderous paranoia of Stalin, it is tempting to gloss over Trotsky’s own ruthlessness and to depict him as a humane counterpart to his rival. This is quite unwarranted.")  http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/80739/trotsky-the-jew/

Someone else who did not have such sunny views about Trotsky and how things would have gone if he'd risen to the top was the one-time Soviet general turned historian, Dmitri Volkogonov, who was able to work in Soviet archives not then open to the public, and who is, I think, the only person who succeeded in writing substantial biographies of all three, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky.  In the latter case, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, trans. by Harold Shukman (Free Press, 1996).  His view is developed and documented in great detail, but summed up in the judgment that "Trotsky had declared intellectual war on virtually everyone.."

(In short, WSC was surely right about Trotsky too.)