Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [47]
Churchill, Britain’s secretary of state for war during the Peace Conference, was one of the few to grasp that Lenin’s Bolshevism was something new on the political scene, that beneath the Marxist rhetoric was a highly disciplined, highly centralized party grasping at every lever of power it could secure. Motivated by the distant goal of a perfect world, it did not care what methods it used. “The essence of Bolshevism as opposed to many other forms of visionary political thought,” Churchill asserted, “is that it can only be propagated and maintained by violence.” Lenin and his colleagues were prepared to destroy whatever stood in the way of that vision, whether the institutions of Russian society or the Russians themselves. “Of all tyrannies in history,” Churchill told an audience in London, “the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading.” Lloyd George was unkind about Churchill’s motives: “His ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes in Russia.” Others, and they included many of his colleagues and the British public, wrote Churchill off as erratic and unreliable. The shadow of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign still hung over him, and his florid language sounded hysterical. “Civilisation,” he said in an election speech in November 1918, “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.” After one outburst in cabinet Balfour told him coolly, “I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth.”9
While most Western liberals in 1919 were inclined to give the Bolsheviks the benefit of the doubt, the revolutionists’ seizure of power from a democratically elected assembly, their murders—most notoriously of the tsar and his family—and their repudiation of Russia’s foreign debts shocked public opinion. (The French were particularly irritated by the debt issue because a great many among the middle classes had bought Russian government bonds.) But, as good liberals reminded themselves, both the United States and France were the products of revolution. Wilson initially thought that Bolshevism was about curbing the power of big business and big government to provide greater freedom for the individual. His personal doctor, Grayson, noted that Wilson found much to approve of in the Bolshevik program: “Of course, he declared, their campaign of murder, confiscation and complete disregard for law, merits the utmost condemnation. However, some of their doctrines have been developed entirely through the pressures of the capitalists, who have disregarded the rights of the workers everywhere, and he warned all of his colleagues that if the Bolsheviks should become sane and agree to a policy of law and order they would soon spread all over Europe, overturning existing governments.” Progressive thinkers such as himself and Wilson, said Lloyd George, thought that the old order—“inept, profligate and tyrannical”—deserved what it had got: “it had been guilty of exactions and oppressions which were accountable for the ferocity displayed by the Revolutionaries.” There was still something, too, in Lloyd George of the bold young solicitor in north Wales who had taken on the powerful local interests. “The trouble with the P.M.,” Curzon complained to Balfour, “is that he is a bit of a Bolshevist himself. One feels that he sees Trotsky as the only congenial figure on the international scene.”10
The Russian Bolsheviks would, many believed, eventually settle down and become bourgeois. If Bolshevik ideas were permeating Western societies, it was because people were fed up. Remove the causes of Bolshevism, both Wilson and Lloyd George argued, and you would take away its oxygen. Farmers without land, workers without jobs, ordinary men and women without hope, all were fodder for visionaries promising the earth. There was a