Q: Smuggling Lenin

I listened to Larry Arnn and Hugh Hewitt in the Hillsdale Dialogue on Churchill’s The World Crisis, Part 25. I was shocked to hear that Germany instigated or engineered the Bolshevik Revolution by sending Vladimir Ilyich Lenin like a plague virus into Russia. Did I hear this correctly? What reading do you recommend on the subject? —J.P., Arkansas

A: A “mad, wild-eyed scheme”

Dr. Arnn is quite right: The Imperial German government purposely allowed Lenin to pass through occupied territory to Finland, en route to Russia Mitch Williamson, in Weapons and Warfare, provided a good summary:

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had found a safe refuge in Switzerland, where he continued to coordinate the underground activities of his small Bolshevik Party…. Contact was reduced to occasional courier messages and coded telegrams. So he was stuck, seething with frustration as the hated Czarist government collapsed in March 1917….

Finally, he struck on a plan that had a certain surreal quality to it…. Meeting with the German minister in Bern, Lenin laid out his proposal…that Germany would provide transport across their country and help to smuggle him into Finland. From there he would go into Russia, raise a revolution, seize control of the government, and pull Russia out of the war, freeing Germany to turn its full power to the Western Front.

The German minister in Bern, along with his intelligence advisors, must have had a difficult time concealing his grin of amusement over this mad, wild-eyed scheme…. Nevertheless the decision was made to approve it. At the very least it would provide a bit of consternation for the Western Allies, who were terrified that Russia might bail out of the war and it might even help to trigger further revolts in the Russian army, which was already disintegrating in the confusion resulting from the overthrow of the Czar.

For reference I recommend Martin Gilbert’s Official Biography, volume 4, World in Torment 1916-1922 (Hillsdale College Press, 2008). Also, Sir Martin’s one-volume work, Churchill: A Life (1991, just reissued), adds details not in his biographic volumes.

“A culture of typhoid”

The plan was authorized by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. In a sealed railway car, Lenin and eighteen cohorts traveled over German-occupied or neutral territory to Helsinki. From Vyborg, then on the Finnish side of the border, they entered Russia. Lenin arrived in Petrograd on 16 April 1917. Churchill completes the story:

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.

No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, in Glasgow, in Bern, and other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world, of which he was the high priest and chief.

With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low. She was laid low to the dust.

Ten years later in The Aftermath, Churchill sharpened his analogy:

Full allowance must be made for the desperate stakes to which the German war leaders were already committed…. Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

Poet of Marxism

No less a wordsmith than Churchill could better describe what happened. In a few short months, the obscure dissident became master of the new Soviet state:

Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time…invented the Communist plan of campaign…gave the signal and he led the attack.

Implacable vengeance, rising from a frozen pity in a tranquil, sensible, matter-of-fact, good-humoured integument! His weapon logic; his mood opportunist; his sympathies cold and wide as the Arctic Ocean; his hatreds tight as the hangman’s noose. His purpose to save the world: his method to blow it up. Absolute principles, but readiness to change them.

Apt at once to kill or learn: dooms and afterthoughts: ruffianism and philanthropy. But a good husband; a gentle guest; happy, his biographers assure us, to wash up the dishes or dandle the baby; as mildly amused to stalk a capercailzie as to butcher an Emperor.

“The Grand Repudiator”

His old colleague Sir Colin Coote thought Churchill privately respected Lenin, believing that had he lived, Russia’s fate might have been different. This indeed was suggested in The Aftermath. Lenin, WSC writes,

repudiated God, King, Country, morals, treaties, debts, rents, interest, the laws and customs of centuries, all contracts written or implied, the whole structure—such as it is—of human society. In the end he repudiated himself.

He repudiated the Communist system…. proclaimed the New Economic Policy and recognized private trade. He repudiated what he had slaughtered so many for not believing…and how great is the man who acknowledges his mistake! Back again to wash the dishes and give the child a sweetmeat. Thence once more to the rescue of mankind….

When the subtle acids he had secreted ate through the physical texture of his brain, Lenin mowed the ground…. His body lingered for a space to mock the vanished soul. It is still preserved in pickle for the curiosity of the Moscow public and for the consolation of the faithful.

Lenin’s intellect failed at the moment when its destructive force was exhausted, and when sovereign remedial functions were its quest. He alone could have led Russia into the enchanted quagmire; he alone could have found the way back to the causeway. He saw; he turned; he perished. The strong illuminant that guided him was cut off at the moment when he had turned resolutely for home. The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth: their next worst—his death.

Was Churchill right?

“Plague bacillus” is a chilling description, and Churchill’s view has been contested by historians. John Charmley quoted Lloyd George’s remark that Churchill’s “ducal blood revolted at the wholesale slaughter of Grand Dukes” in Russia. But Charmley also thought that

Churchill’s instincts were perhaps sounder than the legions of the good and the great who imagined that there was necessarily some relationship between Communist rhetoric and practice….

Churchill’s description of [Lenin] is certainly a trifle overblown: “His mind was a remarkable instrument. When its light shone it revealed the whole world, its history, its sorrows, its stupidities, its shams, and above all its wrongs.” But it is hard to quarrel with [Churchill’s] comment that “in the cutting off of the lives of men and women, no Asiatic conqueror, not Tamerlane, not Jengiz Khan, can match his fame.”

The revolution stirred some of Churchill’s deepest instincts: his sense of history was touched by the fall of an ancient empire; the repudiation of treaties by the Bolsheviks and their withdrawal from the war aroused his indignation at treachery, whilst the overthrow of established authority affronted his deeply conservative sense of social order.

Second thoughts

Dr. Charmley offers a fair assessment, but there is one adjunct worth adding. It illustrates a lifetime Churchillian characteristic: magnanimity.

In March 1918, to Allied consternation, Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, taking Russia out of the war. A month later, Churchill and Lloyd George were in France, pondering with the French how to bring Russia back in. In 1991 Martin Gilbert revealed WSC’s astounding proposal:

Churchill felt that if the former American President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was then in Paris, or the former French Minister of War, Albert Thomas, “were with [Soviet Military Commissar Leon] Trotsky at the inevitable moment when war is again declared between Germany and Russia, a rallying point might be created sufficiently prominent for all Russians to fix their gaze upon.

“Some general formula, such as ‘safeguarding the permanent fruits of the Revolution,’ might be devised which would render common action possible having regard to the cruel and increasing pressure of the Germans.” The Entente representative might become “an integral part of the Russian Government.”

Sir Martin learned of Churchill’s surprise suggestion after writing the Official Biography. Though WSC made it long before he learned of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s later depredations, it was still remarkable. Yet it was not atypical of Churchill’s attitude.

“I first revealed this in the late 1980s, to a roomful of Soviet dignitaries at a Moscow lecture,” Sir Martin told me. “You could have heard a pin drop.”

Related reading

“The Zinoviev Letter and the Red Scare, 1924: Was Churchill Involved?” 2024.

“Zionism, Bolshevism, and Enemies of Civilization: What Churchill Said,” 2021.

“Churchill, Henry Ford and Sidney Reilly: Anti-Bolshevik Collaborators?” 2022.

“Churchill and the White Russians: The Russian Civil War, 1919,” 2019.

“Loud cheers rent the welkin”

Winston Churchill was not a hater, with the singular exception of Hitler—“and that,” as he said, “is professional.” Churchill also loved the theatre, and ipso facto the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was a left-wing polemicist who in 1931 visited and praised Stalin’s Russia. Churchill laughed off Shaw’s politics while acknowledging his literary genius.

Shaw was as enthusiastic about the Soviet Union as Churchill was censorious. Churchill compared Lenin to a typhoid bacillus; Shaw called him “the one really interesting statesman in Europe.” In 1931, Shaw joined a party led by Nancy Astor on a well-publicized Soviet tour. Shaw described Stalin as “a Georgian gentleman.” At a Moscow dinner he declared: “I have seen the ‘terrors’ and I was terribly pleased by them.”

This was too much for Churchill, who despised hypocrisy. Shaw, after all, had made a fortune in capitalist Britain. Shaw, Churchill wrote, was “the world’s most famous intellectual Clown and Pantaloon.” His description of Shaw’s Moscow reception was classic:

The Russians have always been fond of circuses and travelling shows. Since they had imprisoned, shot or starved most of their best comedians, their visitors might fill for a space a noticeable void…. Multitudes of well-drilled demonstrators were served out with their red scarves and flags. The massed bands blared. Loud cheers from sturdy proletarians rent the welkin….

Commissar Litvinoff, unmindful of the food queues in the back-streets, prepared a sumptuous banquet; and arch-Commissar Stalin, “the man of steel,” flung open the closely guarded sanctuaries of the Kremlin and, pushing aside his morning’s budget of death warrants and lettres de cachet, received his guests with smiles of overflowing comradeship.

Exchanges and ripostes

Shaw for his part enjoyed needling Churchill in equable spirit. In 1928 he sent WSC his magnum opus, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. In 1934, Shaw wrote to praise Churchill’s Marlborough as “very good reading [but] badly damaged in places by [excess] Macaulayisms.” Cutting back on Macaulay “is easily within your grasp,” he wrote WSC. “And forgive me for meddling; but the book interested me so much I could not keep quiet.”

In 1937, Churchill reprised a 1929 sketch of Shaw in Great Contemporaries, and Shaw apparently enjoyed it. (It is certainly worth the reading today—Churchill at his literary best.) Shaw liked it, but Churchill had described “The Red Flag” (Labour Party hymn) as “the burial march of a monkey.” Not so, Shaw protested. “The Red Flag” was actually “the funeral march of a fried eel.”

An exchange of barbs denied by both sides

We are constantly asked to verify a famous exchange. Shaw writes: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.” Churchill replies: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.”

Though it’s lovely repartee, both of them denied it.

Five years ago Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, blew the story apart. In the Churchill Papers he found a set of letters (CHUR 2/165/66,68) in which both Shaw and Churchill denied the exchange. The play in question was “Buoyant Billions” (1948).

Adamant denials

On 15 September 1949 Derek Tatham, representing the London booksellers Alfred Wilson, wrote to Shaw: “Intend to use the following story—have you any objections?” Tatham gave a slightly different version of Churchill’s reply. He says he will attend the opening performance and give the other ticket to a friend for the second performance, “if there was one.”

An outraged Shaw scrawled on Tatham’s enclosure in his own hand: “The above is not only a flat lie but a political libel which may possibly damage me. Publish it at your peril, whether in assertion or contradiction.”

Undaunted, Tatham wrote to Churchill, saying he intended to publish the story, “together with this typical Shavianism, in facsimile,” in a new magazine devoted to books and literary topics. Did Mr. Churchill have any comment?

Churchill’s secretary, Elizabeth Gilliatt, replied emphatically on the 16th: “I am desired by Mr. Churchill…to inform you that he considers Mr. Bernard Shaw is quite right in calling the incident to which you refer ‘a flat lie.’”

We have found nothing further on Derek Tatham (H.D.S.P. Tatham). There is no evidence of the literary magazine he planned ever being published. There is no other contemporary appearance of the Shaw-Churchill exchange. This has not prevented it from being widely accepted for years. A Google search for “bring a friend, if you have one” nets 77,000 hits. We have not searched all 77,000.