Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  Malone was sentenced to six months in prison for inciting revolt. The British left regarded him as a martyr. Churchill, speaking to his Dundee constituents, said of the Bolsheviks, “I know they have got a few friends here, but it is very lucky for those people that the great mass of the British nation is sensible, solid, and sound, because when it comes to revolutions the revolutionaries are the first to suffer, and when the revolution has come to an end all the most excitable people have been put out of the way, and you have got a great period of reaction, with probably a military dictator at the head of the state.” Replying to MacDonald in the Weekly Review of June 22 he wrote: “Bolshevism means in every country a civil war of the most merciless kind between the discontented, criminal, and mutinous classes on one hand and the contented or law-abiding on the other…. Bolshevism, wherever it manifests itself openly and in concrete form, means war of the most ruthless character, the slaughter of men, women, and children, the burning of homes, and the inviting in of tyranny, pestilence, and famine.” He then wrote a provocative piece for the London Evening News urging Germany and Poland to build a dike against bolshevism. A Labour spokesman called him “sinister and dangerous,” and added: “We repudiate him and his works.” The leftist Robert Smillie sardonically thanked “our comrade Winston Churchill for uniting the British democracy. We could not do it: the people would not believe us. But Winston and his friends have done it.” Ernest Bevin declared that Winston had damaged himself by “appealing to the old enemy—with whom we were never going to speak or trade—to rise to the occasion and defeat Soviet Russia.” Churchill replied that Labour was “quite unfitted for the responsibility of Government.” The spread of bolshevism, he solemnly warned the House, might threaten Britain’s imperial possessions, including India. This was greeted with laughter, but it wasn’t as farfetched as it seemed; Trotsky, according to Isaac Deutscher, had suggested that “the Red Army might find the road to India much shorter and easier than the road to Soviet Hungary…. The revolution’s road to Paris and London might lead through Kabal, Calcutta, and Bombay.”38

  Nothing came of it, because Lenin recognized Trotsky’s proposal for what it was: a cry of anguish, an attempt to sound a note of hope at a time when Communist fortunes were at one of their low points. On the battlefronts the seesaw continued. In the spring of 1919 Kolchak renewed his broad advance toward the Volga, and Moscow once more held its breath. Trotsky now had 500,000 men under arms, but his most reliable troops were fighting elsewhere. Then, in late April, one of his officers, a former colonel on the czar’s general staff, outflanked Kolchak, cut his supply lines, and sent him reeling back toward the Urals. Before the Red Army could celebrate its victory, however, Denikin lunged back into the Ukraine. He met negligible resistance. The peasants greeted his troops as heroes; bolshevism was unpopular here, and it grew more so when bands of defeated Reds crisscrossed the countryside looting, raping, and pillaging. On May 29 Churchill told the House that Denikin “has advanced his whole front, in some places, to a distance of eighty miles, and in this he has been aided by rebellions which have broken out among the people.”39 In Siberia, Kolchak dug in after a 180-mile retreat and threw back Red Army attacks. Meanwhile, the French had evacuated Odessa, the American and Italian expeditionary forces sailed away, and soviets were proclaimed in Hungary and Bavaria. The spring campaigns, in short, were indecisive.

  So was Lloyd George. On this issue he had lost control of his ministers. British warships, he suggested, should be withdrawn from Petrograd waters, and Curzon, supporting him, urged his colleagues to “proceed with caution” because there was “a strong element in the House of Commons that is opposed to intervention.” Nevertheless, the War Cabinet, after hearing Churchill, resolved that “a state of war” existed “between Great Britain and the Bolshevik Government of Russia” and, therefore, that “our Naval forces in Russian waters should be authorized to engage enemy forces by land and sea, when necessary.” Winston wanted supplies and munitions rushed to Denikin. He even proposed building a railroad for him. Yet his support was far from blind. He demanded that the White general adopt a land-reform program, establish “a constituent assembly on a democratic franchise to decide the future form of Russian Government,” and recognize the independence of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. Later he also asked for a written promise to suppress anti-Semitism. Six million Jews lived in Russia. Reports of Ukrainian pogroms had reached London, and British Jews were furious. But Denikin, confident of imminent triumph, ignored all of Churchill’s conditions.40

  Events in the early fall of 1919 seemed to confirm Denikin. Kiev, the capital city of the Ukraine, had fallen to him on the last day of August. He swiftly retook Kharkov, took Odessa and Rostov-on-Don, and was pressing the Reds’ weak center, toward Kursk and Voronezh, along the shortest line to Moscow. Simultaneously, Yudenich, armed by Churchill and supported by the Royal Navy, fought his way into the outskirts of Petrograd. Lenin, telegraphing that “the fate of the entire Revolution is in question,” ordered that positions be defended “to the last drop of blood.” Trotsky retorted that weapons and ammunition which he had been promised had not arrived, and attempts to suppress White marauders roaming behind Red Army lines had “up to now yielded almost no result.” Lenin proposed abandonment of the city and withdrawal of all Red Army units from all fronts for a circle-the-wagons defense of Moscow. If that were lost, he said, they would retreat to the Urals. Trotsky protested. Petrograd, he told the Politburo, was “the cradle of the Revolution.”41 Stalin agreed; the loss of Russia’s two great cities, he said, could not be borne. Boarding a train to take personal command of Petrograd’s defenses, Trotsky was handed a copy of a Churchill statement claiming that troops from fourteen nations would soon join in an anti-Soviet crusade. He dismissed it with a scornful laugh and said he would defend the beleaguered city house by house and, if necessary, room by room. Bad news awaited him on arrival. Yudenich had seized Krasnoe Selo, the last strongpoint between him and the center of the city. His drive was spearheaded by British tanks, newly arrived from Churchill. Their appearance had panicked the defenders.

  This was Trotsky’s hour. Improvising armored cars in Petrograd factories, he inspired the Red troops, and, in a week, threw the Whites back. Lenin wired him: “It is damnably important to us to finish off Yudenich…. If the offensive is to be launched, cannot a further 20 thousand or so Petrograd workers be mobilized, plus 10 thousand or so of the bourgeoisie, machine guns to be posted to the rear of them, a few hundred shot and a real mass assault on Yudenich assured?” His commissar of war had anticipated him; it had been done. Trotsky then turned to the southern theater. Believing the Whites there were overextended, he ordered a counterattack, and Denikin fell back in confusion on Kiev, Poltava, and Kharkov. Then Kolchak’s army was crushed in Siberia. The three great counterrevolutionary armies had been defeated in just three weeks—this time for good. By December the Red Army was back in Petropavlovsk and Omsk. Denikin had been beaten back to Kursk, eighty miles south of Orel. Yudenich was retreating toward the Estonian border. Kolchak’s headquarters were in remote Irkutsk, fifteen hundred miles east of Omsk. The British expedition had been evacuated. Sir Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “So ends in practical disaster another of Winston’s military attempts. Antwerp, Dardanelles, Denikin. His judgment is always at fault, & he is hopeless when in power.” Churchill himself wrote: “There seems to be very little doubt of the complete victory of the Bolsheviks in the near future. The Japanese will no doubt hold up to Lake Baikal…. Everywhere else we must look for a complete smash up.” Lloyd George’s vacillation was over. On the day Kharkov fell, he and Clemenceau met at No. 10 and agreed not to “enter into any further commitments as to furnishing assistance to the anti-Bolshevik elements in Russia, whether in the form of troops, war material or financial aid.” They added that “a strong Poland” was “in the interests of the Entente powers.”42

  The blunt truth is that a strong Poland was in the interests of Poland and no on
e else. Since the split of its ancient kingdom in 1138 the country had been partitioned and repartitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary, and between 1795 and the proclamation of a Polish republic by General Józef Pilsudski in 1918, it could be found on no map. Pilsudski was the archetypal Polish patriot. He had been exiled to Siberia by the czar and jailed by the Germans, and he had fought with the Austrians between 1914 and 1916, when he had left the field to nurse his dream of an independent nation. Now that dream had been realized, but, like most of his countrymen, he was less interested in peace than in acquiring adjacent territories occupied by Russians. In September 1919 Ignace Paderewski, the republic’s premier, asked the Allies to finance a drive toward the Soviet capital by 500,000 Poles. Churchill disapproved, as did Wilson, and for the same reason: “I quite agree with you that it would be madness for us to advise Paderewski, and to support him in any attempt to occupy Moscow. If anything could combine all Russia into a whole, it would be a march of the Poles on Moscow. I can almost conceive Denikin and Lenin joining hands to defeat such an object.”43

  Pilsudski struck in the first week of March, seized Kiev and Vilna, and occupied most of the Ukraine. But his triumph was a brief, doomed flicker. As Churchill and Wilson had foretold, the invasion of Mother Russia deeply stirred her masses. To followers of the Greek Orthodox faith this was a struggle with Roman Catholic heretics, and to men who still cherished loyalty to the Romanovs, a fight with a hereditary enemy—“a truly Russian war,” as Deutscher put it, “even though waged by Bolshevik internationalists.” Aleksei Brusilov, the late czar’s commander in chief, put his sword at Trotsky’s disposal. Ukrainians found the Poles even more lawless than the Reds and Whites and expelled them. On June 12 Kiev was retaken. By August 14 the Red Army, now five million strong, had reached the outskirts of Warsaw. “Nothing can save Poland now,” Churchill wrote gloomily and left London to play polo at Rugby.44 Curzon offered to mediate the dispute; Lloyd George gave both sides ultimata, but the days were past when British statesmen could settle foreign quarrels by fiat. Salvation reached Warsaw in the form of General Maxime Weygand and a French military mission. The Poles and the poilus rallied on the Vistula. The Reds retreated; Pilsudski, unchastened by his rout, marched on the Caucasus. A provisional peace was signed on October 12 at Riga, though fighting between Russians and Poles, supported by Rumanian allies, continued until late in the 1920s.

  Disaster having been averted, Winston, relieved, wrote: “Poland has saved herself by her exertions & will I trust save Europe by her example.” Yet in some obscure way the Polish adventure had damaged him. The British press depicted the Bolsheviks as victims of aggression—worse, aggression that failed—and Churchill was England’s most vigorous anti-Bolshevik. Every Red victory was a blow to his prestige, and, now that the tide had turned, the pins representing counterrevolutionary forces on the War Office’s map of Russia were being plucked out one by one. By February 7 Kolchak had been captured and executed by Bolsheviks in Irkutsk. Yudenich had fled to England. On March 27 Denikin, abandoning hope, turned his command over to Baron Pëtr von Wrangel and sailed for France. Because the Red Army was busy fighting Poles, Wrangel, driving north from his base on the Sea of Azov, overran much of southern Russia, but after Riga the Reds wheeled and hurled him back into the Crimea. Churchill begged the inner cabinet to support Wrangel. Their response was icy. One minister wrote in his diary: “At the Cabinet this morning the PM gave Winston a dressing down about Russia. Winston had been complaining that we have no policy. This the PM described as ridiculous. Our policy was to try to escape the results of the evil policy which Winston had persuaded the Cabinet to adopt.” Another diarist wrote: “Churchill bumbles on about Russia.” On November 1 Wrangel evacuated his army to Constantinople. Two weeks later the Bolsheviks were in Constantinople, and tens of thousands of White refugees boarded French ships and vanished into permanent exile.45

  Churchill wouldn’t quit. His defiance in defeat, which would thrill England twenty years later, embarrassed his colleagues now. British officers in Berlin informed London that Ludendorff wanted to confer with Churchill about the Bolshevik menace. To the astonishment of his fellow cabinet members, Winston expressed interest. H. A. L. Fisher, minister for education, wrote Lloyd George that he was “alarmed.” He was convinced that Ludendorff’s goals were sinister. Churchill didn’t see it that way. “In my view,” he wrote in a minute, “the objective wh we shd pursue at the present time is the building up of a strong but peaceful Germany wh will not attack our French allies, but will at the same time act as a moral bulwark against the Bolshevism of Russia.” He added that “the advice of the WO throughout the last 15 months has constantly tended to that recovery, stability, & tranquilisation of Europe, wh wd enable Britain to enjoy the fruits of victory. It is a pity it has fallen on deaf ears.”46

  Certainly the cabinet was deaf to his proposals that he confer with the Second Reich’s discredited warlord, and after reflection he dropped the idea. Thus the Russian epic was played out without further British intrusions. The Bolsheviks still faced obstacles. Japanese troops remained in Vladivostok after all the other Allies had left, drove off a Soviet attack, inflicting heavy losses, and did not leave Russian soil until the autumn of 1922. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania retained their freedom until 1940. Extending Red control over the Caucasus was a slow, exasperating business. Long after Wrangel had left, Georgia continued to be ruled by Mensheviks. Trotsky had agreed to leave the Georgians alone, but in 1921, while he was absent on an inspection tour of the Urals, the Red Army invaded the republic and, after severe fighting, seized Tiflis, its capital. The man who had done this, sabotaging Trotsky’s promise to Georgia, was himself a native Georgian. He hated Trotsky even more than he hated Churchill for intervening, and he was Joseph Stalin.

  Winston had one arrow left in his anti-Bolshevik quiver. Lloyd George had been a radical young parliamentarian, but now, like all British prime ministers, he was dedicated to expansion of British trade, and when a Soviet trade mission arrived in London after the counterrevolutionaries had been overwhelmed, the prime minister saw to it that they were provided with every comfort. There was no alternative to peaceful coexistence with them, George told the House; it had become “perfectly clear now to every unprejudiced observer that you cannot crush Bolshevism by force of arms.” But Churchill was not an unprejudiced observer. He refused to “grasp the hairy paw of the baboon.” Commercial ties with England would strengthen Lenin’s regime, he said, and “as long as any portion of this nest of vipers is left intact, it will continue to breed and swarm.” Besides, he asked Lloyd George, how would the Reds pay for British goods? The answer outraged him. The Russians planned to barter with gold and precious stones taken from the czarist nobility. “This treasure does not belong to the Russian Bolshevik Government,” he said at a cabinet meeting. “It has been forcibly seized by these usurpers…. The jewels have been stolen from their owners in Russia and in many cases from their corpses.” The gold was similarly “bloodstained.” England would be giving the Reds “a special title to this plundered gold in order that with it they may make purchases in the British market. It seems to me that this is a very serious step to take.”47

  Nevertheless, the government took it a few minutes later. Winston almost resigned on the spot. He was “so upset by the decision,” Hankey noted in his diary, “that he declared himself unequal to discussing other items on the Agenda affecting the army. He was quite pale and did not speak again during the meeting.” As it broke up he glowered at the prime minister and inquired heavily whether any minister would now be “fettered” if he wished to deliver anti-Communist speeches. Assured that he was free to say what he pleased, he drove to Oxford that evening and addressed the Oxford Union. Flaying the Lenin government, he said he believed “that all the harm and misery in Russia has arisen out of the wickedness and folly of the Bolshevists and that there will be no recovery of any kind in Russia or in Eastern Europe while these wicked m
en, this vile group of cosmopolitan fanatics, hold the Russian nation by the hair of its head and tyrannize over its great population…. The policy I will always advocate is the overthrow and destruction of that criminal regime.”48

  He had been candid, he had been prophetic, and he paid a price. Men who had forgotten the Dardanelles remembered it now and felt their earlier assessment of him confirmed. A new rift had opened between him and Lloyd George. The growing delegation of Labour MPs marked him as their chief enemy. In some instances their enmity did him honor; it was later found, for example, that the Daily Herald, a Labour newspaper, was subsidized by Russian money. But his bitterness and his isolation from old friends were curiously at variance with his usual generosity of spirit. H. G. Wells, returning from Russia, declared that Red excesses had been necessary to “establish a new social order” and that the British naval blockade had been partly responsible for Russian starvation. Churchill, replying in the Sunday Express, wrote: “We see the Bolshevik cancer eating into the flesh of the wretched being; we see the monstrous growth swelling and thriving upon the emaciated body of his victim. And now Mr Wells, that philosophical romancer, comes forward with the proposition that the cancer is the only thing that can pull the body round; that we must feed and cultivate that. After all, it is another form of life. It is ‘a new social order.’ Why be so narrow-minded as to draw the line between health and disease, still less between right and wrong? Adopt an impartial attitude. Put your money on the disease if you think it is going to win.” Wells struck back with asperity. He had known Churchill for years, he wrote in the next week’s Sunday Express. He liked him and admired him. “But,” he said, “I will confess that it distresses me that he should hold any public office at this time…. I want to see him out of any position of public responsibility whatever.” Winston’s retirement and his return to private life, he suggested, would not “be a tragic fall…. Mr Churchill has many resources. He would, for instance, be a brilliant painter.”49