By the summer of 1918 it seemed likely that Trotsky himself would stand in the dock, with Kolchak as his hanging judge. On August 6 the Red Army broke and fled from Kazan on the east bank of the upper Volga, over four hundred miles west of Ekaterinburg and the last important strongpoint between the Whites and central Russia. If Kolchak and his Czechs crossed the river there, they could pour across the open plain—that muddy okra-sown countryside grazed by brown, low-slung cows—and take undefended Moscow, which had become the seat of the new government in March. Nothing could stop them; the villages were completely indefensible. The Central Executive of the Soviets declared the regime to be in danger. Trotsky ordered conscription and left for the front aboard a train which would serve as his mobile headquarters for the better part of three years. Arriving in Svyazhsk, a village on the west bank of the Volga, opposite Kazan, he rallied his panicked soldiers with fiery eloquence and led them back to the front. There he boarded a rusty boat and summoned the sailors of Kronstadt to swell his ranks. Leaders who had joined their men in the rout were brought before him and sentenced to death. He issued a proclamation: “If any detachment retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the commissar, the next the commander…. Cowards, scoundrels, and traitors will not escape the bullet—for this I vouch before the whole Red Army.”29 Heavy fighting continued throughout that month and into the next, until, on September 10, the Bolsheviks recaptured Kazan. By the end of the month the entire Volga basin was back in their hands. Moscow had been saved. Trotsky celebrated the victory by executing hostages and launching his first Red Terror against civilians who had not actively supported his troops.
Meanwhile, the White general Anton Denikin was planning an attack with thirty thousand counterrevolutionaries from his base on the Don while a third counterrevolutionary army, under General Nickolay Yudenich, was bearing down on Petrograd, whose Red defenders were led by the Ossetian Joseph Stalin. It was at this point, in mid-1918, that Churchill’s participation in the Russian struggle began to be felt. He was still a junior minister then, and his role was severely limited, but he was the revolution’s most vehement British foe. He had been the first to grasp the strategic significance of the Czechs. At his urging, the cabinet voted to remain in Murmansk and Archangel, recognize the Omsk regime, send munitions to Denikin and the rebels in the Baltic states, occupy the Baku-Batum railway in the Caucasus, and establish a strong British expeditionary force in Siberia.
Winston then set out to warn the British public against what he called the “poison peril” in the East. In Dundee, he said: “Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of barbarism…. The Bolsheviks maintain themselves by bloody and wholesale butcheries and murders…. Civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.” In a memorandum he wrote: “Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a vy large country, a vy old country, a vy disagreeable country inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons & in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off.” He understood England’s yearning for peace. “Unhappily,” he continued, “events are driving in a different direction, and nowadays events are vy powerful things. There never was a time when events were so much stronger than human beings. We may abandon Russia: but Russia will not abandon us. We shall retire & she will follow. The bear is padding on bloody paws across the snows to the Peace Conference.”30
He conferred with the War Cabinet again on December 31 to discuss the government’s Russian policy, but Lloyd George was becoming critical of his hawkish stand. George told Riddell: “Winston… wants to conduct a war against the Bolsheviks. That would cause a revolution!” The prime minister toyed with the idea of opening talks with the Reds. Churchill, hearing of it, rushed to Downing Street and, according to the diary of Mary Borden, Edward Spiers’s wife, “Winston told LG one might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks.” Nevertheless, on the eve of Churchill’s appointment to the War Office, the cabinet, supporting the prime minister, voted against any attempt to topple the Reds by force; British troops already in Russia would be eventually withdrawn. When the Daily Express reported “ominous signs” of a “gigantic campaign” against Russia—and commented that the “frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single British grenadier”—it misread the government’s mood. Backing the counterrevolutionaries in other ways was still possible, however, and the new war minister meant to do it, ignoring, if necessary, the views of his colleagues.31
The immensity of Russia determined the strategy of the civil war. As a theater of military operations it was the antipode of the western front: deep White thrusts into the interior would be followed by Red thrusts, equally deep, toward the country’s outer fringes. Where Haig had measured gains and losses in yards, Trotsky and his enemies thought in terms of hundreds of miles. The conflict was fought out in three theaters bearing the names of their counterrevolutionary commanders, Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich, and was followed by a Polish invasion, which must be considered separately. As of New Year’s Day, 1919, the Whites were being supported by over 180,000 troops from Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Serbia, Japan, the United States, and the Czechoslovaks. Germany’s capitulation had left them with no excuse for intervention, but bolshevism was not a Russian movement; Lenin said again and again that his objective was a world revolution. Moreover, the Reds were committing acts which, even after the horrors of the war just ended, were regarded as unprecedented atrocities. Photographs had been smuggled out; the victims were of both sexes and all ages, and the evidence of extraordinary torture and obscene mutilation was unmistakable. The Red Cross wanted to bring food to the afflicted. Lenin approved. Trotsky refused. “Fools and charlatans” would misunderstand his tactics, he said; he wanted no outsiders to witness what they described as “the burning and scorching” of the “bourgeois.”32 Churchill had acquired copies of the pictures and was trying, without success, to get them published in England.
The defeat of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians also meant the withdrawal of their armies westward. That left a vast vacuum in central Europe. Trotsky wanted to fill it with the Red Army, but the defense of the homeland came first. His troops were tied down by Kolchak in the Urals and Denikin in the south. Petrograd was Stalin’s problem; Trotsky was in no hurry to solve it for him. Lenin could not be ignored, however. Now that Kolchak had been stopped in his tracks, Lenin wanted to clear the Don and the northern Caucasus of the enemy. Trotsky thought the Ukraine more tempting; he believed new foreign expeditions would soon land on the Black Sea beaches. The debate became academic when Kolchak, reinforced by peasant farmers who revered the czar’s memory, broke through the Red defenses and captured Ufa and Perm. This was a crisis; a linkup of Kolchak and Denikin on the Volga seemed imminent. Red counterattacks flung Kolchak back. Then twelve thousand French poilus—Clemenceau’s antibolshevism was far more ardent than Lloyd George’s or President Wilson’s—arrived from the Black Sea, as Trotsky had feared, and took Odessa and Nikolayev. Unfortunately Clemenceau had forgotten the Nivelle disaster and its impact on the morale of French soldiers. The poilus resented their mission. Bolshevik agitators infiltrated their ranks and found them receptive. They rebelled, and the entire French expeditionary force had to be evacuated. Simultaneously, Bolshevik guerrillas and the Red Guards in the Ukraine, who had been scorned by Lenin and Trotsky, surprised them by seizing Kharkov, in the eastern Ukraine, on February 3. Everything had happened and nothing had happened. Neither side was strong enough to subdue the other. But leaders on both sides were discouraged. Clemenceau and Foch began assembling a new force of French infantry. And in Whitehall, Winston Churchill had moved into the War Office with the authority and determination to deal the Bolsheviks savage blows.
Churchill did not rejoin the inner cabinet until November 1919, but as secretary of state
for war and air he frequently appeared before it, and there, six weeks after the Armistice, he first raised the Bolshevik issue with the government’s highest council. England had two options, he said; it could either permit Russians “to murder each other without let or hindrance” or intervene “thoroughly with large forces, abundantly supplied with mechanical appliances.” He proposed to reinforce the troops already there with as many as thirty divisions. The prime minister wanted no part of it. Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “Winston all against Bolshevism and therefore, in this, against Lloyd George.” A week later the two clashed again. Churchill urged the dispatch of an Allied army “to restore the situation and set up a democratic government”; the Reds, he believed, “represent a mere fraction of the population, and would be exposed and swept away by a General Election held under Allied auspices.” George vehemently disagreed; he was “definitely opposed to military intervention.” Yet he was equally reluctant to abandon Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich. He said he thought it best that the Russians settle their differences among themselves, but he agreed to keep the British battalions in Murmansk and Archangel until the dust had settled. The fact is that the old champion of social reform had never felt comfortable with foreign affairs. He was vacillating, always an alarming symptom in a national leader and one which, in this case, threatened the very survival of the Liberal party. The coalition still ruled, but Tories dominated it. They were siding with Churchill. Balfour told Winston: “I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth.” When Churchill attacked Lenin and Trotsky in the House, the loudest cheers came from the Conservative benches.33
Squaring off against his party’s prime minister was not, however, good politics. Neither was it wise. He was repeating his mistakes of 1914 and 1915. He had been right about Antwerp and the Dardanelles, but wrong in trying to direct the campaigns from the Admiralty. Only the man at No. 10 Downing Street could make policy. Churchill had lacked the power to override doubters then, and he lacked it now. And now, as then, his high profile guaranteed that, should the attempt to destroy the new masters of the Kremlin fail, he would be blamed. Nevertheless, he persevered. The emergence of Communists as leaders of a great nation aroused his powerful aggressive instincts. Not until Hitler showed his fist would Winston again be so vehement. As a monarchist he had been shocked by the brutal murder of the Romanovs; Lloyd George said that “his ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes.” Yet he never advocated a restoration of the Russian monarchy. Instead, he proposed a social democratic regime in Moscow. It was the Red dictatorship which outraged him. Its atrocities and pogroms were, he believed, the inevitable consequence of Marxism in action. To him they represented a new barbarism. As a conservative in the purest sense—a defender of freedom, justice, and the great achievements of the past—he saw civilization gravely endangered. Bolshevism, he said, was “a ghoul descending from a pile of skulls.” He told the House: “It is not a policy; it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence.” The Red Executive Committee was “subhuman.” Lenin “was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”*34
When President Wilson proposed a Russian armistice and the withdrawal of all Allied forces, Churchill replied that this would mean “the destruction of all non-Bolshevik armies in Russia” and “an interminable vista of violence and misery.” He said: “The theories of Lenin and Trotsky… have driven man from the civilization of the twentieth century into a condition of barbarism worse than the Stone Age and left him the most awful and pitiable spectacle in human experience, devoured by vermin, racked by pestilence, and deprived of hope.” Allied intervention was only temporary, he said: “There are now good reasons for believing that the tyranny will soon be overthrown by the Russian nation. We have steadfastly adhered to our principles that Russia must be saved by Russian manhood.” No conscripts would be sent to Murmansk and Archangel, he assured the House, and the families of British soldiers killed there would be told “what purpose these men are serving,” but the effort must be made. If Lloyd George recognized the Soviet regime, he hinted, he would resign. The repatriation of Russian prisoners of war from German camps angered him; instead of being returned to Moscow, he said, they should have been recruited by the counterrevolutionary armies. “Of all tyrannies in history,” he declared in April 1919, “the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading.” In his view it was far viler than the kaiser’s Second Reich. His nightmare was a military alliance between a hostile Russia and a vengeful Germany. Instead, he suggested the Germans be encouraged to invade Russia—or, as he put it to Violet Asquith, to “Kill the Bolshie and Kiss the Hun.” Exceeding his authority, he sent howitzers to Kolchak and Denikin and appealed to British volunteers who would join a “Slavo-British Legion,” serving as a rear guard when Murmansk and Archangel were evacuated. A whole generation of Englishmen knew nothing but fighting, and over eight thousand actually enlisted.35
“Churchill’s eloquence, enthusiasm, and personality,” Hankey noted, produced “an electrical effect.” They also triggered a reaction. Even in the War Cabinet his supporters were a minority. Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary that “neither LG nor the Cabinet would throw their hearts into beating the Bolsheviks…. I am all in favour of declaring war on the Bolsheviks, but the others, except Winston, won’t.” Curzon, the foreign secretary, described the White Russian situation as one of “complete failure.” Austen Chamberlain at the Exchequer was doubtful of “any good results” because the Whites were “completely untrustworthy,” the British forces were “very tired,” and even the Czechs were “less willing to fight.” All in all, he concluded, the intervention was “hopeless.” Lloyd George came down on one side, then the other. He observed enigmatically that although England was “at war” with the Bolsheviks, the country had decided “not to make war.” Then he strengthened the naval blockade of Petrograd. Swinging back again, he complained that the first six months of intervention had cost the government £73,000,000 “for our military forces alone, including transport,” and if naval expenditures were included the figure would be twice that—for what, he said, “were after all very insignificant operations.” Next he raised the figure to £100,000,000 but wrote Churchill: “If Russia were anxious to overthrow Bolshevik rule, the help we have given her would have provided her with a full opportunity. We have discharged faithfully our honourable obligations to Denikin and to Kolchak. We have never entered into any with Yudenitch and I hope we shall not do so. The British public will not tolerate the throwing away of more millions on foolish military enterprises…. Let us therefore attend to our own business and leave Russia to look after hers.” The prime minister’s thinking, Winston observed, stopped “short of a definite character on which a policy, or even a provisional policy,” could be based.36
Readers of British newspapers had the impression that Churchill was acting alone. The press headlined the fighting in Russia as “Mr Churchill’s Private War.” The Daily Express declared: “The country is absolutely unwilling to make a great war in Russia…. Let us have done with the megalomania of Mr Winston Churchill, the military gamester. Let us bring our men back—if we can.” The strongest opposition, however, came from the Labour party, which in these months was quietly making converts of thousands of Liberals disillusioned with Lloyd George’s postwar drifting, and thereby reshaping Britain’s political future. Lenin and Trotsky had assumed that the Russian revolution would be followed by a “German October,” a “French October,” and an “English October.” Although they were to be disappointed, the war had thickened socialist ranks everywhere, and the new left did not share Churchill’s hatred of the Soviet Union. Sir David Shackleton, a civil servant, warned the government that British socialists deeply resented the intervention in Siberia. In June 1919 a Labour party conference at Southport unanimously pas
sed a resolution condemning “the war in the interests of financial capitalism” and calling for “the unreserved use… of political and industrial power” to end all British opposition to the Communists “whether by force of arms, by supply of munitions, by financial subsidies, or by commercial blockade.” At the London docks longshoremen refused to load munitions on the Jolly George when they learned that the cargo was destined for White enemies of the Bolsheviks. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour party leader, wrote in the Socialist Review: “Churchill pursues his mad adventure as though he were Emperor of these Isles… delighting his militarists and capitalists.” MacDonald predicted “new offensives, new bogus governments, new military captains as allies.” In the Albert Hall one Colonel C. J. L’Estrange Malone, a disillusioned officer, spoke glowingly of the Red achievements and urged his audience to overthrow Parliament. “What are a few Churchills and Curzons on lamp posts,” he asked, “compared to the massacre of thousands of human beings?”37