The Decline of British Imperialism

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Imperialist Diplomacy in the Middle East

Gritting its teeth, the Berlin government has stepped aside and decided to wait. The more it is forced to seek a rapprochement with the Young Turks the firmer their positions will grow. But there is no doubt that capitalist Germany is just as genuinely prepared to welcome the downfall of constitutional Turkey as she has up till now hypocritically welcomed, its victory. On the other hand the more Turkey weakened Germany’s position in the Balkans, the more noisily Britain demonstrated her friendship towards the new order. In this interminable struggle between the two mighty European states the Young Turks naturally sought support and “friends” on the Thames. But the sore point in Anglo-Turkish relations is Egypt. There can of course be no thought of her voluntary evacuation by Britain: she has too great an interest in ruling the Suez Canal to do this. Would Britain support Turkey in event of military difficulties? Or would she stab her in the back and declare Egypt to be her property? One is as likely as the other depending on circumstances. But in either case it is not sentimental love for liberal Turkey but cold and merciless imperialist calculation that guides the actions of the British government.

From The Balkans, Capitalist Europe and Tsarism

(dated 14th October 1908), Proletarii, 1st November 1908

* * *

Russian diplomacy wishes to gain for its navy a free exit from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean from where it has been barred for over half a century. The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, two sea gateways fortified with artillery, are in the hands of the Turks, the custodians of the straits by virtue of a European mandate. But if Russian warships cannot leave the Black Sea neither can foreign ships enter it. Tsarist diplomacy wants the ban to be lifted only for its own ships. Britain can hardly agree to this. The disarming of the straits is acceptable to her only if it gives her the opportunity of sending her fleet into the Sea of Marmara or the Black Sea. But then Russia with her insignificant naval forces would not gain but lose. And Turkey would lose in either case. Her navy is worthless and the master of Constantinople would be the state that could place its battleships under its walls. Novoe Vremya lashes out at Britain who denies the Tsarist government this right, which has, in view of the weakness of the Black Sea Fleet, a “purely theoretical nature” and yet persuades the Shah’s government to open the gates before Russia while promising in exchange to safeguard Turkey’s rule over the straits from foreign encroachment. While protesting in the name of the Treaty of Berlin against the private agreement between Turkey and Austria, Russia herself wants by means of a private agreement with Turkey to break her European mandate. If she had succeeded in achieving her aim this would present a danger not only to the peaceful development of Turkey but also to the peace of all Europe.

While Izvolsky ties up the knots of diplomatic intrigues in Europe, Colonel Lyakhov shares his work and sets off for Asia to cut some diplomatic knots with a sword. Behind the noise of the Balkan events and behind the patriotic shrieks of the loyalist press, Tsarism is preparing a second offensive of the Cossack boot against the heart of revolutionary Persia. And this is being accomplished not only with the silent complicity of Europe but with the active collaboration of “liberal” Britain too.

The victory of Tabriz, the most considerable city of Persia, over the Shah’s troops, threatened to upset the plans of St. Petersburg and London diplomacy completely. Besides the fact that the final victory of the revolution was pregnant with Persia’s economic and political rebirth, the protracted civil war inflicted immediate damage upon the interests of Russian and British capital ... sentence on Persia had been pronounced. Reporting on the most recent talks between Izvolsky and Grey, the London Foreign Office demonstratively emphasized the complete solidarity of both governments as a guarantee of their “harmonious co-operation” in solving Central Asian problems. And as early as the 11th October six Russian infantry battalions, supported by a corresponding force of artillery and cavalry, crossed the Persian frontier to occupy revolutionary Tabriz. Telegraphic links with the city have been cut for a long time now so that the humane peoples of Europe are spared the necessity of following step by step how Tsarism’s brazen rabble realizes the “harmonious co-operation” of two “Christian” nations amid the smoking ruins of Tabriz ...

From The Balkans, Capitalist Europe and Tsarism

(dated 14th October 1908), Proletarii, 1st November 1908.

The First World War

... By upsetting the European status quo which had been so carefully maintained over the course of four and a half decades, imperialism has once again raised all the old questions which the bourgeois revolution proved powerless to solve. But in the present era these questions lack an independent character. The creation of normal conditions of national life and economic development in the Balkan peninsula is inconceivable alongside the preservation of Tsarism and Austria-Hungary. Tsarism at the present time forms a vital military reserve for the financial imperialism of France and the conservative colonial might of Britain. Austria-Hungary serves as the chief support for Germany’s offensive imperialism. Beginning as a domestic squabble between Serbian nationalist terrorists and the Habsburg political police, the present war rapidly unfolded its fundamental content: a life-and-death struggle between Germany and Britain. While simpletons and hypocrites prate about the defence of national liberty and independence, the Anglo-German war is actually being waged in the name of the liberty of imperialist exploitation of India and Egypt on the one hand, and a new imperialist division of the world’s peoples on the other. Germany, once awakened to capitalist development on a national base, began with the destruction of France’s continental hegemony in 1870-71. Now when the flowering of German industry on her national base has made Germany the primary capitalist force in the world her continued development collides with Britain’s world hegemony.

From War and the International,

Golos, 20th and 21st November and 13th December 1914.

* * *

Sir John French

French soldiers often make the most flattering comments about the British army. Every British soldier taken individually is in himself an officer. They are self-reliant, courageous, resourceful and unbeatable in defence.

At the head of this army formed by a nation free from conscription, a nation of ancient liberties and a nation of sportsmen, stands Sir John Denton Pinkston French. As with some other prominent British admirals and generals French comes from Ireland. He was born into an eminent family from County Galway in the province of Connaught whose head is at present Sir Arthur French. In Ireland, where landlords loom over the land like demigods, there reigns in the ruling layers a most favourable atmosphere for bringing up military leaders of the old “heroic” type. Yet he was to develop his abilities wholly in colonial wars. For over two human generations now Britain has not sent its forces on to the continent of Europe.

The Frenches were a naval family by tradition. The father of today’s field-marshal was a naval officer but he soon resigned the service and went to settle with his family on his inherited estate. Sir John was born there on 28th September 1852. Consequently French is an almost exact contemporary of Joffre. Family traditions urged the young French along the path of a naval career. After leaving preparatory school at the age of thirteen he entered a naval academy at Portsmouth and, while not distinguishing himself especially with brilliant success, he did complete a training voyage as a midshipman on the HMS Britannia in 1866. Four years later he decided on the spur of the moment to abandon serving in the navy and at the age of nineteen he joined the army. He was appointed an officer in the Suffolk Artillery Militia and only in 1874 did he exchange into the regular army as an officer in a Hussar regiment. His biographer says: “It would be a sheer exaggeration to imagine that in this period the young French hankered after books; he preferred foxhunting and steeplechasing far more than the study of strategy and tactics”. At that time his superiors would have trusted him far more readily with breaking in a foursome of the most untameable horses than with an expeditionary force.

Promoted to the rank of captain in 1880 French married an aristocratic lady, having occupied the post of adjutant for a few months, with some territorial forces. In 1882 the Hussar regiment in which French had served was transferred to Egypt and two years later Sir John was sent out to re-join it at his own request. Neither the young officer nor the regiment to which he belonged had at that time any military past behind them. He was now to create for himself a reputation of invincibility in the conditions most favourable to this: those of colonial war. “Napoleon sought officers who had been born under a lucky star” says the same biographer, “and French was always lucky in the critical moments of his life”. For this reason he became known in the army as “Lucky French”. In Egypt he served under the command of Colonel Percy Barrow and took part in the ill-fated Nile expedition under his leadership. A detachment of the 19th Hussars under Barrow’s command and with French as second-in-command formed part of a flying column of a thousand men and two thousand camels under the leadership of General Sir Herbert Stewart. Ten cavalry detachments served as cover while this column was on the move. After a two week march an engagement with the natives took place at Abu Klea which continued with great ferocity for two days. General Stewart was mortally wounded. The campaign ended in failure and the column was forced to commence a difficult retreat during which French’s unit acted as rearguard cover. “These were not soldiers but heroes”, Count Moltke is reputed to have said (not the nephew but the uncle) of the participants in this desert retreat. Here French received his baptism in combat and it was from this point that his interest in military questions and especially those of the cavalry can be dated. In the rank of lieutenant-colonel of the Hussars he returned to Britain and devoted himself to reforms in the 19th Hussars which soon became a model. French receives a command in India where he is on close terms with his immediate superior, the cavalry general George Luck, who admired his brilliant colonel’s views on reforms. Together they organized manoeuvres along the lines of the new “principles” which aroused strong opposition from the army routinists and conservatives. In 1893 Colonel French was placed on half pay. Now French devoted all his spare time to a study of all questions related to the branch of arms he was familiar with. After cavalry manoeuvres in Berkshire, French made serious criticisms of the numerous defects in the organization and training of British cavalry. By this time General Luck had returned to Britain from India and in earnest set about the reforming work whose basis had already been laid in India. Despite stubborn opposition from the routinist party Luck instructs Colonel French to prepare the draft of a new Cavalry Drill Book which was to mark a complete “revolution” in cavalry thinking. In 1895 French entered the War Office as assistant adjutant-general of cavalry to direct the implementation of his new methods in the field. He soon left the War Office to lead the 2nd Cavalry Brigade and to demonstrate during manoeuvres all the advantages of his tactical principles over the obsolete methods of his antagonists. French sustained a victory. His opponents declared it to have been a matter of chance and predicted the innovator’s total rout in a war. A heated polemic broke out in the professional press, which of course did not go beyond a narrow circle of devotees. After all French’s name was at that time quite unknown to broad circles of the public and when British imperialist policy took him to South Africa for a war with the Boers, French’s name was not among those canvassed in the press for the post of senior cavalry commander. “Lucky” Sir John had still to arm himself with patience if only for a little while longer. Buller, the British commander-in-chief, valued him from the days of the Sudan campaign and thanks to his vote French was appointed cavalry commander in Natal. From this moment his ascent began. Ten days after the ultimatum was handed by President Kruger to the British envoy in Pretoria (10th October 1899) French entered Ladysmith. The same day he found himself leading a column which had been instructed to seize a railway station where a British supply train had been halted and captured by the Boers. The success of this engagement, which lasted. two days, was, according to French’s biographer, wholly guaranteed by the cavalry general’s tactical dispositions. He threw back the enemy, took the station, freed the prisoners and cleared the railway line. After this success the British press decorated the name of French with a halo of such qualities as firmness, bravery and sang-froid.

An American correspondent accompanying the British army reported in passing the following episode. Under the Boers’ shells and bullets but without batting an eyelid, French discussed the bad light which prevented the war correspondent from taking photographs. In the general’s coquettish bravado the military leader lay concealed behind the dashing huntsman and daredevil who trusted in his star. And the nickname of “lucky” indeed stuck to him among soldiers now more than ever. After General White’s unfortunate venture at Ladysmith French put his card down va banque and ... he won. The Boers were besieging the town and no one knew whether they had cut the railway Line. If they had not it could only have been through inexperience. In spite of the station commander’s warnings French and his staff commandeered a train and steamed off down the track at full speed. The Boers greeted them with rifle fire but the train broke through and arrived safely at Pietermaritzburg. At the end of November the position of the British army was becoming very tough and only French’s cavalry operations along a sixty-mile front finally stopped the Boers from holding all the positions in the Cape Colony. Lord Roberts was appointed commander-in-chief. He ordered French to relieve beleaguered Kimberley at the head of a cavalry division of 8,500 sabres. To this assignment French replied: “I promise you faithfully that I shall relieve Kimberley at 6 o’clock in the evening of the 15th (February] if I am still alive”. This reply was highly typical of “lucky” John – here one seemed to hear a fiery steeplechaser or Denisov, the dashing partisan. Instead of the promised division French received only 4,800 men. Against him was a considerably stronger enemy but French nevertheless decided to win his bet, i.e. to fulfil the military assignment he had received. He entered Kimberley victoriously on 15th February at seven o’clock in the evening – French was one hour late. But it must also be said that he had been given little more than half the sabres that were stated in the conditions. French’s subsequent role in the Boer War had the same character: one of courage and risk.

In 1902 French returned triumphant to Britain. Soon after his return he was appointed commander-in-chief at Aldershot. Here for the first time in peace he commanded an army unit with all its branches. But, as before, the cavalry attracted his main attention: to this day he preserves a particular affection for this, the most primitive arm. Notwithstanding the enormous technical changes in military science and the strategic and tactical changes that have followed in their wake, the aristocratic huntsman has remained a convinced advocate of the horse, the sabre, the lance and the gallop – in short, of “the cavalry spirit”. In December 1907 French was appointed inspector-general of the forces and in 1912 he was made Chief of Staff, now newly re-organized on the German pattern.

French never adopted clear-cut positions on politics, at least not publicly, for he considered that the army must remain outside politics. He did however become for a short time a “victim” of politics. When, in connection with the unrest of Ulster Protestants which led to Colonel Seely’s resignation, ferment began in the British officer caste, General French, as Chief of General Staff, left his post in solidarity. He was to spend all of four months in retirement. The war broke out and French, now a Field-Marshal, was placed in command of the British Expeditionary Force with Joffre as his commander-in-chief.

Kievskaya Mysl, 13th January 1915

* * *

In our last letter we attempted to explain once more that the plan to “starve out” Germany would be at least as exhausting for France as for her enemy. The “supreme effort” which is due in the spring, promises to counterpose approximately equal forces on either side and this will not open any paths to a solution. The only possibility of breaking the enemy lies in achieving a decisive numerical superiority over him by adding a million fresh soldiers to the French army. But where can she get them from? I have already written of France’s dissatisfaction with Britain. Here in France it has become even more well-defined now that the limited effect of the naval blockade has become evident. Why doesn’t Britain give us more forces? Because she wants at the moment of the war’s liquidation to preserve her old army intact as far as possible: herein lies the old “national egoism” of the island power. The other day an official explanation of the position was given by British ruling circles. Dissatisfaction with Britain’s tardiness, says the statement, can be explained only by a fundamental lack of information with regard to what is happening in Britain. To date over a million men have shown their willingness to fight in the ranks of the allied army. But this figure in itself has for the moment only a secondary character. The main task now consists of military training, arming and the overall provision of supplies for Kitchener’s first army. Until the present war nobody in Britain had entertained the possibility of organizing a colossal expeditionary army at a minimum of notice. Neither the military apparatus nor the state of British industry was prepared for such a task. It is necessary to produce from scratch the entire equipment for an army of 500,000 men: rifles, artillery, ammunition, clothing, etc., etc. She has to supplement the extremely inadequate equipment of the territorial army. She has to guarantee everything necessary to those troops already fighting not only in France but also in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Finally, she has to supply the allies with everything that their industry, half-paralysed by the mobilization, cannot provide at the present moment. To be equal to these tasks, working day and night in existing plants is insufficient: new plants have to be built, new machines installed and thousands of fresh workers brought together. Many of the plants now under construction will only be in operation in early spring. Consequently: the allies have to wait. Only upon the foundation of such a systematic preparation is it possible to assure a decisive intervention by a new British army in the course of a continental war. Impatience must not prevent one taking account of the actual state of affairs. Forming an army of a million and a half men in under a year when the standing army does not exceed 300,000 is a task that Britain alone can set herself and solve.

From From Pontius to Pilate, dated 16th January 1915

and first published in 1927 in Works Volume 9.

* * *

In this war Britain is fighting for the preservation of her colonial domains. Meanwhile if she goes too far to meet Japanese claims she will undermine her own position in Australia and Canada. The readiness with which these two colonies have come to the aid of the metropolis with ships, material and men was for them dictated in the first instance by their urgent desire to reduce Japan’s role in this war to a minimum. The Japanese would not be satisfied with compensation in the form of favourable tariff agreements, territorial concessions or loans but will demand above all the right to free settlement and equal citizenship rights in all the British colonies: this would threaten to make them masters of the situation on the shores of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. There is no need to mention how hostilely the United States would treat a plan for the solemn inclusion of Japan into the so-called “family” of civilized great powers. now destroying: each other. The spectre of Japanese intervention alarms the Dutch to: the extreme who fear for the fate of their colonial possessions. “Java was lost the moment Japan landed on the Marshall Islands”. The Dutch, as is well known, justify the tendency of their neutrality in favour of the USA by the Japanese danger.

Britain’s viewpoint in this matter is more flexible and qualified than that of her colonies. If the Japanese in case of necessity had to take over the discharge of order in India and if they defended the Suez Canal from the Turks this would be permissible from the British standpoint. She could even reconcile herself to Japanese intervention over Constantinople. But thus far and no further. If the yellow armies encroached upon the soil of Germany this would at once produce a decisive shift in the public opinion of the neutral states of Europe and even more in the United States. The direct danger of Japanese expansion would be aggravated by the final collapse of the prestige of the great powers in the Asiatic and African colonies. All these preoccupations and fears find their expression in the question of compensation. Who will pay the Japanese? Obviously, the country which needs Japanese aid most but which can gain the least in the event of a victorious outcome to the war – France. As we have already reported, half-veiled agitation was earlier conducted in the press with the object of softening public opinion to the idea that Indo-China will have to be given to the Japanese. This qualified suggestion not only met a natural opposition in France but ran into stubborn resistance from Britain. With control of Indo-China the Japanese would be able directly to threaten Southern China, the chief sphere of British “influence” in the Far East, just as today their rule over Kiaochow makes them masters in Northern China. “The main objections” insists L’Éclair, “come as before from London whence there comes distrust, almost ill-will tantamount to an unwillingness to act”.

From From Pontius to Pilate dated 16th January 1915

and first published in 1927 in Works Volume 9.

* * *

British pacifists, and especially the International Defence League, have in recent days drafted a number of schemes aimed at putting an end to wars. There always lies at the bottom of these projects the idea of a Court of Arbitration or a supreme “Council of Nations” whose decisions have a mandatory force. But how do you enforce them? Some propose to place an “international” army and navy at the disposal of the Court of Arbitration so that it can enforce the observance of the international rulings. But others more modestly allow each nation its own national army as before but “on the condition” that this army is employed only against those who transgress the international law and the rulings of the Court of Arbitration. Thus to guarantee an eternal peace we can see that” just” wars will be necessary from time to time.

An international military force, says Cromer, formed as an instrument for the enforcement of the rulings of the Court of Arbitration “almost necessarily connotes the whole or partial disappearance of purely national military or naval forces”. But Britain, according to the author, would never agree to weaken her navy in which she sees her chief defence, i.e. the defence of her imperialist rule over the seas and colonies. If Britain argues like this over the navy then it would be hard to imagine, says L’Éclair, that continental powers would argue any differently over their armies. Moreover, how is the Court of Arbitration to be constituted? Surely every nation would have a equal voting right? Cromer feels sure that mighty Britain would never agree to that. Can one suppose that vessels contributed by Britain would execute a sentence against the same Britain? And if Britain refused to abide by a decision of the Court of Arbitration do you think that British soldiers incorporated in an international army would take up arms to compel their own country to submit? Cromer doubts so. In justification of his doubts he quotes one very lucid historical example: Britain’s war against the Boers. “It is highly probable”, he says, “that a decision of an International Court would be adverse to Great Britain”, But he says that Britain would most probably … not recognize the Court of Arbitration.

From A “Guarantee” of Peace,

Nashe Slovo, 1st and 2nd September 1916

* * *

... On November 13th, 1914, Sir George Buchanan (according to Paléologue) declared to Sazonov: “The Government of his Britannic Majesty has recognized that the question of the Straits and Constantinople must be settled according to Russian aspirations. It gives me pleasure to announce this to you”. Thus was laid down the programme of the war of right, justice, and national self-determination,

Four days later Buchanan declared to Sazonov: “The British government will be compelled to annex Egypt. It trusts that the Russian government will not offer any opposition to this”. Sazonov was not slow in giving his consent. Three days after that Paléologue “reminded” Nikolai II that Syria and Palestine were bound to France by a wealth of historic recollections and also by moral and material interests. He, Paléologue, hoped that His Majesty would approve of the measures which the government of the republic (the same democratic republic) deemed it necessary to take, in order to safeguard these interests.

“Oui certes”, (“Yes, certainly”), was His Majesty’s reply. Finally, on March 12th, 1915, Buchanan demanded that in return for Constantinople and the Straits, Russia should cede to Great Britain the neutral part of Persia (that part as yet up-partitioned). Sazonov answered “C’est entendu” (“That is understood”).

So two democracies in conjunction with Tsarism, which at that period shone with the reflected democratic light emanating from the Entente, settled the fate of Constantinople, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Persia. Sir George Buchanan was as worthy a representative of the British democracy as Paléologue of the French. Buchanan remained at his post after the downfall of Nikolai II. Henderson, a minister of His Majesty, and, if we are not mistaken, a British socialist, came to Petrograd during the Kerensky regime, in order to take Buchanan’s place (should this be necessary), because someone in the British government had imagined that they should speak in a different tone to Kerensky than to Rasputin. Buchanan was the right man in the right place as the representative of British democracy. Buchanan undoubtedly held the same opinion of Henderson, the socialist.

Paléologue exhibited “his” Socialists as an example to the restive Tsarist dignitaries. In connection with the Court “agitation” of Count Witte the speedy conclusion of the war, Paléologue declared to Sazonov: “Look at our Socialists and their correct attitude”. This summing up by Paléologue of Messrs. Renaudel, Longuet, Vandervelde, and all their followers, is rather startling even now, after all we have gone through. Paléologue, having received and respectfully acknowledged Rasputin’s admonitions, in his turn expressed to the Tsarist minister his patronizing appreciation of the French socialists, and recognized the correctness of their attitude. These words: “voyez mes socialistes – ils sont impeccables” (“Look at my socialists – they are beyond reproach”) should form a device for the banner of the Second International, from which the words: “Workers of the world unite” should have been removed long ago. This latter device suits Henderson as much as the Phrygian cap suits Paléologue.

The Hendersons consider the domination of the Anglo-Saxon race over the other races as a natural fact ensuring the spread of civilization. For them the question of national self-determination begins only beyond the confines of the British Empire. This national arrogance is the chief link between the western social-patriots and their bourgeoisie, viz., it makes them the slaves of their bourgeoisie.

From Chapter 10 of Between Red and White (1921)

* * *

Only an insignificant part of the documents which contain the secret treaties of the capitalists have yet been published. Much, much more of the secrets will become public as we proceed with the dismantling of the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where damning evidence against imperialist diplomacy, which of course never anticipated its publication nor conceived the possibility of the victory of the proletarian revolution, is preserved.

The plan for the seizure of territories laid down by the Russian bourgeoisie and its “allies” has been unmasked in its main features. “Britain” and “France” have reserved themselves the right “freely” i.e. at their own discretion, to determine the western frontiers of Germany and Austria, conceding the same right to “Russia” in exchange for these seizures by leaving to her discretion the fixing of the eastern frontiers of Austria and Germany. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is the first principle of the politics of imperialist piracy.

The project of annexations in Europe did not stop here. “Russia” i.e. the Sazonovs and Tereshchenkos had been assured, as is well known, the annexation of Constantinople. But it emerges from the treaties that the Russian bourgeoisie was to gain not only Constantinople but all of European Turkey. The agreement on the Balkans has not yet been published, but from the “notes” on Russo-Rumanian relations published today both the fraudulent policy of the Rumanian government which is seizing territories with a purely Slav population, and the policy of deceit which Russian diplomacy intended to implement at a convenient moment by breaking the treaty with Rumania, become abundantly clear. But the most far-reaching plans of seizure relate to Asiatic Turkey. To a considerable degree the whole of the present war is a war for the partition of the “Turkish Legacy”, for the “re-partition” of Turkish lands between the banks, industrialists and merchants of the strongest capitalist powers. According to the agreement which we publish today Asiatic Turkey would he subject to a share-out among all the “allies”.

Only a “rump” of Turkey would remain – a region of small dimensions surrounded on all sides by the possessions of the lucky men who have prospered at her expense. Italy and Greece will receive comparatively little. France will receive a solid prize in the form of the Syrian coast and the lands north of the Mediterranean coast. This zone allocated to France will border on a zone which will be given to Russia and will include part of the Black Sea coast (as far as a point west of Trabzon) and the lands lying to the south of it. Meeting the Russian and French zones from the east will be a British zone, running in a tapering strip to the Persian Gulf and embracing all Mesopotamia, including Baghdad. Besides these three major slices of the Turkish pie to be handed out openly to the “powers”, the agreement envisaged in addition the formation of an “independent” Arab federation, subject, however, to demarcation into “spheres of influence”.

“Spheres of influence” is a diplomatic term which in everyday language means “areas of domination”. The Arab “independent” federation divided in advance into “areas of domination” would in point of fact be “independent” only of the Arabs and wholly dependent upon the bosses of international capital.

From What the Secret Treaties State,

Pravda, 25th November 1917

* * *

America joined the war over a year ago and promised to finish it within the next few months. What did America seek by her intervention? At first she patiently observed Germany over there across the ocean fighting against Britain. And then she intervened. Why? What does America need? America needs Germany to exhaust Britain and Britain to exhaust Germany. And then American capital will appear as the heir who will plunder the world.

When America noticed that Britain was bowed down and bent to the ground while Germany was standing upright she said: “No, I must support Britain – like the rope supporting a hanging man – just so that they will exhaust each other completely and so that European capital will be completely deprived of the possibility of ever getting to its feet again”.

From a speech to a workers’ meeting, 14th April 1918

(A Word to Russian Workers and Peasants on Our Friends and Enemies

and How to Preserve and Strengthen the Soviet Republic)

* * *

The major roles in this war belong, as you know, to the two dominant countries in Europe. Germany and Britain. Britain has always played first fiddle in the world market and the British bourgeoisie and the British capitalists have grown used to treating all the other weaker nations as people who are summoned to enrich Britain. That was how Britain treated India, whose population lay under the yoke of British capital; that was how she thought about Egypt and the countries of America; she maintained that British capitalism and only British capitalism had the right to exploit all the remaining countries. The younger and highly powerful German capitalism came in the opposite direction to meet British capitalism. In Britain with its older culture and industry, old methods, old devices and old technique are retained. German industry is younger and more revolutionary; operating with the last word in science and technology it has started to produce more cheaply than British industry; it has thrown its products out onto the world market, including the British colonies, and pushed out British ones. Here is the soil and basis for the war. British capitalism is guarding its purse and so is German capitalism; the Germans say: it is time to give British rule in India a push. The British say: it is time to contain Germany which is squeezing all of Europe. That is the basis of the struggle between two mighty profiteers and plunderers who cannot share their profits from their exploitation of the world.

Many fine words have been said about all this and many ideas and schemes have been drawn up: some assure us that Germany is fighting for the freedom of peoples, while others say that Britain is fighting for the weak and oppressed – thus speak the journalists, professors and priests in every country. Each at his own post, whether in the churches, the universities or the schools, and each in his own language justified his master and his national capitalism. In the first period of the war it was said that this war would be unlike all other wars: it would not be a destructive war but a liberating war. The Germans were to liberate all the colonies. Britain promised to liberate Egypt. Thus each country strove to “liberate” the slaves from the rule of others so as to turn them into its own slaves; and there were dozens, thousands and millions among workers who sincerely believed this deception; Russian workers believed that the Russian Tsar wanted to give freedom to Serbia; German workers believed that the Kaiser was only defending himself, Tsarism was attacking from one side, the British capitalists pressing down on the other side and so on. But this blindness was only temporary.

From a lecture read in the Sergiev People’s House, Voronezh, 16th June 1918

(The International Situation and Organization of the Red Army)

* * *

British diplomacy did not lift its visor of secrecy up to the very outbreak of war. The government of the City obviously feared to reveal its intention of entering the war on the side of the Entente lest the Berlin government take fright and be compelled to eschew war. In London they wanted war. That is why they conducted themselves in such a way as to raise hopes in Berlin and Vienna that Britain would remain neutral, while Paris and Petrograd firmly counted on Britain’s intervention.

Prepared by the entire course of development over a number of decades, the war was unleashed through the direct and conscious provocation of Great Britain. The British government thereby calculated on extending just enough aid to Russia and France, while they became exhausted, to exhaust Britain’s mortal enemy, Germany. But the might of German militarism proved far too formidable, and demanded of Britain not token but actual intervention in the war, The role of a gleeful third partner to which Great Britain, following her ancient tradition. aspired, fell to the lot of the United States.

The Washington government became all the more easily reconciled to the British blockade which one-sidedly restricted American stock market speculation in European blood, because the countries of the Entente reimbursed the American bourgeoisie with lush profits for violations of “international law”. However, the Washington government was likewise constrained by the enormous military superiority of Germany to drop its fictitious neutrality. In relation to Europe as a whole the United States assumed the role which Britain had taken in previous wars and which she tried to take in the last war in relation to the continent, namely: weakening one camp by playing it against another, intervening in military operations only to such an extent as to guarantee her all the advantages of the situation, According to American standards of gambling, Wilson’s stake was not very high, but it was the final stake, and consequently assured his winning the prize.

From the Manifesto of the Communist International: To the Workers of the World,

drafted by Trotsky and adopted at the First World Congress

of the Communist International, 6th March 1919.

Against the Russian Revolution

The publication of the documents relating to my month-long captivity by the British now appears to me to be a matter of political necessity. The bourgeois press, the very same which spread the most Black Hundred slanders against the political exiles who found themselves compelled to return through Germany, has acted dumb as soon as it came up against Britain’s piratical raid on Russian exiles returning home across the Atlantic Ocean. The social-patriotic press, and today the government press – which is at their service – operates little more honestly: it too has no interest in explaining the embarrassing fact that the socialist ministers, fresh off the peg and who still for the moment address themselves with the deepest respect to the exiled “teachers”, prove to be the closest and most immediate allies of Lloyd George, who seizes these same “teachers” by the collar on the Atlantic highway. In this tragi-comic episode we have a sufficiently convincing revelation of the attitude of ruling Britain towards the Russian revolution, as well as the general meaning of that holy alliance whose service Citizens Tsereteli, Chernov and Skobelev have now entered.

For, whatever statements the “left” government parties and groups make, the socialist ministers bear entire responsibility for the government of which they form a part. The government of Lvovs and Tereshchenkos maintains an alliance not with British revolutionary socialists like Maclean, Askew and others, but with their jailers Lloyd George and Henderson.

From Captive of the British (1917)

* * *

On March 25 I called at the office of the Russian Consul-General in New York. By that time the portrait of Tsar Nikolai had been removed from the wall, but the heavy atmosphere of a Russian police station under the old regime still hung about the place. After the usual delays and arguments, the Consul-General ordered that papers be issued to me for the passage to Russia. In the British consulate, as well, they told me, when I filled out the questionnaire, that the British authorities would put no obstacles in the way of my return to Russia. Everything was in good order.

I sailed with my family and a few other Russians on the Norwegian boat Christianiafjord on the twenty-seventh of March. We had been sent off in a deluge of flowers and speeches, for we were going to the country of the revolution. We had passports and visas. Revolution, flowers and visas were balm to our nomad souls. At Halifax the British naval authorities inspected the steamer, and police officers made a perfunctory examination of the papers of the American, Norwegian and Dutch passengers. They subjected the Russians, however, to a downright cross-examination, asking us about our convictions, our political plans, and so forth. I absolutely refused to enter into a discussion of such matters with them. “You may have all the information you want as to my identity, but nothing else”. Russian politics were not yet under the control of the British naval police. But that did not prevent the detectives, Machen and Westwood, from making inquiries about me among the other passengers after the double attempt to cross-examine me had proved futile. They insisted that I was a dangerous socialist.

The whole business was so offensive, so clearly a discrimination against the Russian revolutionaries, in contrast to the treatment accorded other passengers not so unfortunate as to belong to a nation allied to England, that some of the Russians sent a violent protest to the British authorities. I did not join with them because I saw little use in complaining to Beelzebub about Satan. But at the time we did not foresee the future.

On April 3, British officers, accompanied by bluejackets, came aboard the Christianiafjord and demanded, in the name of the local admiral, that I, my family, and five other passengers leave the boat. We were assured that the whole incident would be cleared up in Halifax. We declared that the order was illegal and refused to obey, whereupon armed bluejackets pounced on us, and amid shouts of “shame” from a large part of the passengers, carried us bodily to a naval cutter, which delivered us in Halifax under the convoy of a cruiser. While a group of sailors were holding me fast, my older boy ran to help me and struck an officer with his little fist. “Shall I hit him again, papa?” he shouted. He was eleven then, and it was his first lesson in British democracy.

The police left my wife and children in Halifax; the rest of us were taken by train to Amherst, a camp for German prisoners. And there, in the office, we were put through an examination the like of which I had never before experienced, even in the Peter-Paul fortress. For in the Tsar’s fortress the police stripped me and searched me in privacy, whereas here our democratic allies subjected us to this shameful humiliation before a dozen men. I still remember Sergeant Olsen, a Swedish-Canadian with a red head of the criminal-police type, who was the leader of the search. The canaille who had arranged all this from a distance knew well enough that we were irreproachable Russian revolutionaries returning to our country, liberated by the revolution.

Not until the next morning did the camp commander, Colonel Morris, in answer to our repeated demands and protests, tell us the official reason for the arrest. “You are dangerous to the present Russian government”, he said briefly. The colonel, obviously not a man of eloquence, had worn an air of rather suspicious excitement since early morning. “But the New York agents of the Russian government issued us passports into Russia”, we protested, “and after all the Russian government should be allowed to take care of itself.” Colonel Morris thought for a while, moving his jaws, then added, “You are dangerous to the Allies in general”.

No written orders for our arrest were ever produced. But, speaking for himself, the colonel explained that since we were political emigrants who obviously had left the country for good reason, we ought not to be surprised at what had happened. For him the Russian revolution simply did not exist. We tried to explain that the Tsar’s ministers, who in their day had made us political emigrants, were themselves now in prison, excepting those who had escaped to other countries. But this was too complicated for the colonel, who had made his career in the British colonies and in the Boer war. I did not show proper respect when I spoke to him, which made him growl behind my back, “If I only had him on the South African coast.” That was his pet expression.

The relations between the rank-and-file and the officers, some of whom, even in prison, were still keeping a sort of conduct book for their men, were hostile. The officers ended by complaining to the camp commander, Colonel Morris, about my anti-patriotic propaganda. The British colonel instantly sided with the Hohenzollern patriots and forbade me to make any more public speeches. But this did not happen until the last few days of our stay at the camp, and served only to cement my friendship with the sailors and workers, who responded to the colonel’s order by a written protest bearing five hundred and thirty signatures. A plebiscite like this, carried out in the very face of Sergeant Olsen’s heavy-handed supervision, was more than ample compensation for all the hardships of the Amherst imprisonment.

All the time we were confined in the camp, the authorities steadfastly refused us the right to communicate with the Russian government. Our telegrams to Petrograd were not forwarded. We made an attempt to cable Lloyd George, the British prime minister, protesting against this prohibition, but the cable was held up. Colonel Morris had become accustomed to a simplified form of “habeas corpus” in the colonies. The war gave him still more protection. He went so far as to stipulate that I refrain from trying to communicate through my wife, with the Russian consul before he would let me meet her again. That may sound incredible, but it is true. On such a condition, I declined to meet my wife. Of course, the consul was in no hurry to help us, either. He was waiting for instructions, and the instructions, it seemed, were slow in coming.

I must admit that even today the secret machinery of our arrest and our release is not clear to me. The British government must have put me on its black-list when I was still active in France. It did everything it could to help the Tsar’s government oust me from Europe, and it must have been on the strength of this blacklist, supported by reports of my anti-patriotic activities in America, that the British arrested me in Halifax. When the news of my arrest found its way into the revolutionary Russian press, the British embassy in Petrograd, which apparently was not expecting my early return, issued an official statement to the Petrograd press that the Russians who had been arrested in Canada were travelling “under a subsidy from the German embassy, to overthrow the Russian Provisional government”. This, at least, was plain speaking. The Pravda, which was published under Lenin’s direction, answered Buchanan on April 16, doubtless by Lenin’s own hand: “Can one even for a moment believe the trustworthiness of the statement that Trotsky, the chairman of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in St. Petersburg in 1905 – a revolutionary who has sacrificed years to a disinterested service of revolution – that this man had anything to do with a scheme subsidized by the German government? This is a patent, unheard-of, and malicious slander of a revolutionary. From whom did you get your information, Mr. Buchanan? Why don’t you disclose that? Six men dragged Comrade Trotsky away by his legs and arms, all in the name of friendship for the Russian Provisional government!”

Buchanan in his memoirs says that “Trotsky and other Russian refugees were being detained at Halifax until the wishes of the Provisional Government with regard to them had been ascertained”. According to the British ambassador, Milyukov was immediately informed of our arrest. As early as April 8th the British ambassador claims he conveyed Milyukov’s request for our release to his government. Two days later, however, the same Milyukov withdrew his request and expressed the hope that our stay in Halifax would be prolonged. “It was the Provisional government, therefore”, concludes Buchanan, “that was responsible for their further detention”. This all sounds very much like the truth. The only thing that Buchanan forgot to explain in his memoirs is: What became of the German subsidy that I was supposed to have accepted to overthrow the Provisional government? And no wonder – for as soon as I arrived in Petrograd, Buchanan was forced to state in the press that he knew nothing at all about the subsidy. Never before did people he as much as they did during the “great war for liberty”. If lies could explode, our planet would have been blown to dust long before the treaty of Versailles.

From Chapter 23 of My Life (1930)

* * *

... By publishing the secret treaties we would win enemies for ourselves in the shape of heads of state, but the support of their peoples will be with us. It is not a diplomatic peace we will conclude but a people’s peace, a soldiers’ peace, a trench peace! [stormy applause]. And the results of this frank policy have shown themselves: Judson appeared in the Smolny Institute and decl]ared on behalf of America that its protest to Dukhonin’s staff against the new authorities was a misunderstanding and that America does not at all wish to interfere in Russia’s internal affairs. Thus the question of America has been settled.

Another conflict is as yet unsettled and I wish to give you a report on it. In their struggle for peace, the British government has arrested and holds in its concentration camp Georgi Chicherin, who has contributed his wealth and knowledge to the peoples of Russia, Britain, Germany and France, and the bold agitator among British workers, the exile Petrov. I sent a letter to the British embassy where I pointed out that, as Russia is tolerating the presence of many rich British people who are in conspiracy with the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, we can even less allow Russian citizens to be imprisoned in British jails, and consequently those against whom no criminal charges have been made must be immediately released. Non-compliance with this demand will entail the refusal of passports to British citizens wishing to leave Russia. People’s Soviet power is responsible for the interests of all its citizens; wherever each one may find himself he is under its protection. Kerensky may have addressed the allies like a steward to his master, but we have to show them that we can live with them only on an equal footing. We are here stating once and for all that whoever wishes to count on the support and friendship of the free and independent Russian people must treat its human dignity with respect.

From a report on the work of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government,

3rd December 1917

* * *

The German imperialists have in words renounced claims to indemnities but they have presented a whole number of demands whose satisfaction would on our reckoning require four to eight thousand million from us. German imperialism’s Shylockian account has not yet been presented to us, but we feel convinced that they will not stint themselves an assessment of all the losses from confiscations and requisitions and so on, crimes of the war period which had been committed by the Tsarist government and Kerensky government. In our firm conviction, the account as well as the terms to be put by the German annexationists have been tacitly approved in London. British imperialism well knows that it is in no state to beat Germany and thus allow her the compensation at Russia’s expense which German imperialism needs to be given to make it more amenable at negotiations with its British and French colleagues. This diabolical plan emerges from a very superficial analysis of one of Lloyd George’s speeches, where he could not conceal this common account of world imperialism for the Russian revolution. Similarly pointing in this direction is the whole of world imperialism’s policy in the Ukraine, Rumania and all the regions where imperialism borders on the Russian revolution.

From a speech to the 3rd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 23rd January 1918

Fighting Soviet Russia

At the beginning of April the Japanese made a landing at Vladivostok. The subsequent intentions of the Japanese were not known. Consequently it could not be known whether the Czechoslovaks would be able to embark at Vladivostok. In accordance with instructions from the government I held up the movement of the Czechoslovak echelons, and I explained to the representatives of the French military mission and also to representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council who had come to me, that the halting of the movement of the Czechoslovak echelons in no way represented a measure hostile to the Czechoslovaks but was motivated solely by the new political and strategic situation in the Far East. I proposed moreover to the representatives of the National Council, Messrs. Max and Cermak, to urge the British and French governments to officially declare their readiness to take the Czechoslovaks on their vessels at Archangel and Murmansk. For my part I committed myself to a definite date, to be established by means of negotiations, by which to transport the Czechoslovaks there. In spite of the fact that Messrs. Max and Cermak promised me they would obtain an official statement to this effect from the interested governments of Britain and France in the next few days, I received no such notification. In the course of a private exchange of views with Mr. Lockhart, the British plenipotentiary, I indicated to him the need for the British and French governments to make a specific decision with regard to the Czechoslovaks, as it was absolutely impossible to keep men in echelons for a period of months especially during summer time. Mr. Lockhart could give no reply and merely pointed out that the problem of available tonnage was very acute and he did not know whether the British government considered it feasible to send the necessary number of ships. Thus the question was left quite undefined not through any fault of the Soviet government but entirely as a result of on the one hand, the Japanese landing in V1adivostok and on the other the absence of any definite statements on the part of the governments of Britain and France.

From an interview given to Vyacheslav Neubert, a representative of the Czechoslovak Corps, 31st May 1918

* * *

The capture of Kazan! How should we assess this gladdening event?

The internal class struggle in the Soviet Republic has become complicated and taken on the form of a drawn out and just war, owing to the fact that the resistance of the Russian bourgeoisie has been combined with the military intervention, invasion and incursion of foreign imperialism in the shape of the European-American landing and a network of conspiracies. For a start, having landed an expeditionary force of two to three thousand British and French at Murmansk and Archangel, the imperialist raiders had reckoned that broad masses of the people would start rallying to them. They did not at all count upon the resistance of the revolution when they saw the harsh conditions of Russian workers. But the carrier of the revolution, the hungry proletariat of Moscow and Petrograd, said to them: “I’ve got two ounces to eat today and nothing tomorrow, but I can tighten my belt a bit more and say openly: I have taken power and I will never give that power up!” So that no sooner had the imperialists encountered their first rebuff after their unexpected onslaught on Archangel, than cries went up throughout the bourgeois press of Britain and France that the whole undertaking in the North was an adventure.

From a speech in the Kazan theatre, 12th September 1918

(The Significance of the Capture of Kazan for the Course of the Civil War)

* * *

The revolution was not only temporarily deprived of Baku, but it also lost for ever many of its best sons. In September 1918, almost at the very time when Gegechkori was negotiating with Denikin, twenty-six Bolsheviks, the leaders of the Baku proletariat, headed by Comrade Shaumyan, a member of the Central Committee of our party, and by Alexei Japaridze, were shot at a lonely Transcaspian station.

You can get full information on this matter, Mr. Henderson, from your own General Thompson, the commander in this war of liberation: his agents acted as the executioners.

Thus neither Shaumyan nor Japaridze were in a position to hear about the jubiliation of Zhordania on the fall of Soviet Baku. But nevertheless, they took with them into the grave a burning hatred towards the Menshevik abettors of the executioners.

The manuscript of this book had been completed, when I received a new book by Vadim Chaikin, a Socialist-Revolutionary and member of the Constituent Assembly, entitled: A Contribution to the History of the Russian Revolution: The Execution of 26 Baku Commissars, and published by Grzebin, Moscow. This book, consisting mostly of documents of which the more important ones are reproduced in facsimile, narrates the story of the murder of 26 Baku commissars by order of the British military authorities, without the least pretence of a public trial. The direct practical organizer of the massacre was the chief of the British Military Mission at Ashkhabad, Reginald Teague-Jones. General Thompson was cognizant of the whole case, and Teague-Jones, as the evidence shows, acted with the consent of the gallant general. After the consummation of the slaying of 26 unarmed men at a station, where they had been taken under the pretence of exiling them to India, General Thompson aided the escape of one of the leading perpetrators of the crime, the hired scoundrel Druzhkin. The appeals of Vadim Chaikin, by no means a Bolshevik, but a Socialist-Revolutionary and a member of the Constituent Assembly, to the British General Malcolm and to the British General Milne were left unheeded. On the contrary, all these gentlemen demonstrated their solidarity in aiding and abetting the crime and the criminals and in the fabrication of false statements.

This book shows with documentary evidence that Gegechkori, at the insistence of Chaikin, promised to prevent the escape of the criminal scoundrel Druzhkin from Georgia. Yet, in collusion with the British General Thompson, he gave Druzhkin every facility to escape from trial and justice. While the committees of Russian and Georgian Socialist-Revolutionaries and of the Russian Transcaspian Mensheviks, after an investigation of all the facts of the case, signed a declaration testifying to the criminal manner in which the British military authorities had acted, the committee of the Georgian Mensheviks, although as the other Committees arriving at the same conclusion, refused to sign the document for fear of displeasing the British authorities. The telegraph officer of the Menshevik Georgian government refused to accept for transmission the telegrams of Vadim Chaikin which exposed the murderous activities of the British authorities. If nothing more were known about the Georgian Mensheviks except what is established by indisputable and irrefutable documents in Chaikin’s book, it would be quite sufficient to imprint for all time the brand of shame and dishonour upon these gentlemen, upon their “democracy”, their protectors and apologists.

We do not entertain the least hope that after the direct, exact, and irrefutable evidence furnished by Chaikin’s book, either Mr. Henderson, or Mr. MacDonald, or Mr. J.R. Clynes, Mr. Jimmy Sexton, or Mr. William Adamson, Mr. John Hodge, Mr. Frank Rose, Mr. C.W. Bowerman, Mr. Robert Young, or Mr. Benjamin Spoor will – as Labour MPs – deem it now their duty to investigate the case frankly and honestly and make these representatives of Great Britain, who in Transcaucasia were so gloriously defending democracy, civilization, justice, religion and morality against Bolshevik barbarism, answerable for their conduct.

The international Mrs. Snowdens have denied the co-operation of the Georgian Mensheviks with the counter-revolutionary organizations and armies, basing this on the two following circumstances. First, that the Mensheviks themselves complained to the British socialists about the Entente, which had, so to speak, forced them to support the counter-revolution; second, that there was friction between Georgia and the Whites, which at that time assumed the character of armed conflict.

The British General Walker shook his fist in the face of the premier Zhordania, and threatened to close down immediately the central Menshevik organ, if it dared to publish a paragraph which might give umbrage to the Entente. A British lieutenant violently struck the table of the Georgian Attorney-General with his sword and demanded the immediate release of all those arrested people whom he, lieutenant by the grace of God, designated. Generally speaking, the British military authorities, according to the documents, conducted themselves even more insolently than the German. Of course, in such cases, Zhordania most respectfully mentioned Georgia’s semi-independence, and complained to MacDonald about the violation of Georgia’s semi-neutrality. This was necessitated by ordinary caution. When Denikin was robbing Georgia of the Sukhumi area, the Mensheviks complained about Denikin to General Walker. Now they complained about General Walker to Henderson – in both instances with the same success.

If these complaints and frictions had not occurred it would have simply meant that the Mensheviks did not differ in the least from Denikin. But this would be as erroneous as to say that Henderson did not differ in the least from Churchill. The range of petty-bourgeois vacillations during the revolutionary period extends from supporting the proletariat to a formal union with the landlords” counter-revolution. The less the petty-bourgeois politicians are independent, the louder they talk of their complete independence and of their absolute neutrality. From this viewpoint it is very difficult to follow the history of the Mensheviks and the Right and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in the course of the revolution. They have never been neutral or independent. Their “neutrality” has always been a critical point in the movement from the right to the left, or from the left to the right. In supporting the Bolsheviks (as did the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the anarchists), or in supporting the Tsarist generals (as did the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks), the petty-bourgeois parties frequently took fright at the decisive moment of the impending victory of their ally, and even more frequently deserted him in the moment of his greatest peril. One must certainly admit that if, during the revolutionary period, the petty-bourgeois parties bear their share of all the drawbacks of defeat, they seldom benefit by the advantages of victory. After having consolidated its power with the help of “democracy”, the monarchist counter-revolution in the East (in the person of Kolchak), in the North and West (in the person of Yudenich, Miller and the British generals), and in the South (in the person of Denikin) always treated its aiders and abettors with the utmost arrogance and severity.

From Chapter 2 of Between Red and White (1921)

* * *

Lloyd George not long ago stated that it was dangerous to take the offensive against our country for, as a result of an offensive, peasant millions would rally around Soviet power to safeguard their country with all their might. The American President Wilson according to newspaper reports now considers the offensive of Messrs. “Allies” against Archangel was a mistake. After our capture of Shenkursk there followed the demoralization of British and American soldiers who abandoned their positions by withdrawing into Archangel. There was open unrest in Murmansk. On the Odessa Front, according to available information, French troops are demanding to be sent home and the black colonial troops cannot endure the climate and have already been withdrawn to their country. Wilson and Lloyd George are beginning to realize that they have made a mistake …

From a report in the Hall of Columns, Moscow, 24th February 1919

(At the Fronts)

* * *

The commander of the British troops in Western Transcaucasia, General Forester Walker, on January 4th, 1919, explained to Zhordania, both orally and in writing, that the enemy of the Entente in the Caucasus is “Bolshevism, which the Great Powers have resolved to destroy wherever and whenever it should make its appearance. In connection with this, a fortnight afterwards, Zhordania declared to the British General Milne: “General Walker … proved to be the first person that understood the state of affairs in our country.” General Milne himself summarized his agreement with Zhordania in the following manner: “You and we have common foes – they are the Germans and the Bolsheviks.” All these circumstances together furnished of course, the most favourable conditions for the fullest liberty of action” for the Bolsheviks.

On February 18th, General Walker gives the following order, No.99/6, to the Georgian government: “All Bolsheviks entering Georgia must be imprisoned only in the Mskhet (the jail of Tbilisi), and put under a strong guard.” The reference is to those Bolsheviks who were seeking refuge from Denikin. But, already, on February 25th, in Order No. 99/9, Walker wrote: “Arising out of the conversation I had on the 20th inst., with his Excellency M. Zhordania, I have come to the conclusion that it will be necessary in the future to prevent the entrance of Bolsheviks into Georgia by the main road.’ The imprisonment of the Bolshevik refugees in the Mskhet at least preserved their lives for a time. Walker had “come to the conclusion” that it was best to bar their way of escape, thus throwing them back into the hands of Denikin’s executioners. If Arthur Henderson has a few moments to spare from his labours in exposing the cruelties of the Soviet Government, and from his Brotherhood services, he should have an exchange of views with Forester Walker upon this subject.

From Chapter 3 of Between Red and White (1921)

* * *

We were menaced by the claws of Anglo-French imperialism and there was a moment when these claws seemed to threaten to crush us in a deadly embrace. After their victory over Germany there was no limit to the omnipotence of the British and the French. Moreover the German bourgeoisie itself, including Hindenburg, readily entered the service of France and Britain to put down the Bolsheviks. I have here some recent German papers where it is openly stated in a number of leading articles: “In the West (i.e., on the frontier between Germany and France) iron and concrete walls and fortresses are being erected the walls of the old national hatred between France and Germany are being put up. But all this is insignificant compared to the abyss that separates us in the East. We must somehow or other come to an agreement with France, but with the Bolsheviks and Soviet power – never. Theirs is a different world order, they deny – and they say this openly – they deny the whole basis of economic life and private property.” And let us add ourselves, the order on which most holy profits are based. The struggle against Britain and France, the old forts of Belfort and Verdun, is insignificant compared to the hatred we inspire in unified European capital. Such is the admission of the German bourgeoisie, crushed down, humiliated, plundered but which even now, while reeling under the boot of the French and British bourgeoisie, says: “but all the same you are closer and more kindred to me than that horrible Soviet communist republic.” That’s the feeling they harbour towards us in Germany, France, Britain and everywhere else.

You can of course say that when Britain and France proposed a trip to the Prinkipo Islands, Soviet power agreed to such a trip and it agreed then as it had done at Brest-Litovsk because we were ready to seize any opportunity to stand down our front, win an armistice and a respite, and lighten the burden on our Red Army and all the working people. It stands to reason that we would have gone to the Prinkipo Islands as we went to Brest-Litovsk, not out of sympathy, respect or trust for Clemenceau, Lloyd George and that old transatlantic Tartuffian hypocrite Wilson, no comrades, on that score Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson, like the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs before them, are not for a single minute mistaken, for they know that we harbour the same feelings for them as they do for us. We are joined to them by an intimate hatred, an intimate mortal enmity, and any agreement with them will only be dictated by cold calculation and form by its very nature a temporary armistice, after which the struggle will inevitably break out again with renewed force.

It had seemed before that they were strangling us; then they offered us the Prinkipo Islands and then they stopped talking about them. Why? Because Kolchak, Denikin, Krasnov and Mannerheim in Finland declared to the imperialist stock exchange, “give us a time limit, give us two or three more spring months: Soviet power will be strangled and you will not need to negotiate with it on the Prinkipo Islands.” To this Lloyd George replied: “you made that promise a long time ago. First of all Milyukov did, then Kerensky, Skoropadsky in the Ukraine, and then Krasnov; now Krasnov has fled from Rostov and Bogaevsky has replaced him, you all made that promise. Kolchak promised America long ago. We shall no longer give you assistance with troops; our position in the north and the south is becoming worse and worse.” Then Kolchak, Denikin and the others answered: “We ask you and beg you to give us just a little while longer to finish off Soviet power. But don’t have talks with them, don’t strengthen their position. We are preparing a wide offensive for the spring.”

And so they had their offensive – that spring offensive – and we are now surviving it. Throughout the winter the allies gave money and shells. They did not give manpower as they were afraid of getting too mixed up in our affairs and getting bogged down in our Soviet plain, for they realized from Germany’s experience that the imperialists” troops enter our Russia under the tricolour of imperialism and violence, but the same troops leave Soviet Russia under the red banner of communism.

They agreed to provide arms, money, rifles and pieces of silver but they withdrew their soldiers.

In France the leading newspaper, Temps and the paper of the same name, The Times, in Britain, openly say that the French troops are being withdrawn from Odessa because “since the occupation of Nikolaev and Kherson” ... the position of the expeditionary force in Odessa has been “critical”. They talk about this quite frankly in the European press. I have a telegram here received today or yesterday dealing with the position of the allied armies in the north of Russia – I do not know whether it was published in the press: “America, radio from Paris for Canada. The involuntary anxiety gripping British circles concerning the grave risk of destruction threatening the Archangel expedition only confirms the opinion of the American military expressed many months ago. Stark new facts have been added namely: the mutiny of Finnish troops in Archangel.”

The Americans and British had mobilized or rather attracted round themselves Finnish forces when German forces were occupying Finland, as the British presented themselves as Finnish liberators from German imperialism. Now the American wireless reports publicly from Paris on the mutiny of Finnish soldiers incorporated in the Anglo-American army on our northern shore: “The mutiny of Finnish troops threatens to cut off the only road for our soldiers, and the Bolsheviks’ concentration of warships on the Dvina and the Vaga indicates their readiness for an attack ... Men from Canada form the main part of the detachment in this area. Official figures admit that there is not the slightest hope of reinforcing their effectives before a Bolshevik assault.”

The London Daily Mail says in a leading article: “responsibility for this danger ... rests upon the Allies ... The eyes of the whole world are upon them. if they should fall into the hands of that enemy their fate baffles description” and so on and so forth. This of course is a blatant lie. If they fall into our hands we shall treat them as we treated those hundreds and now possibly thousands of French, British and Americans who were captured by us in the Ukraine and the north. We sat them on school benches and gave them teachers, French and English communists, and they were most successful.

Not long ago a bourgeois MP asked the Naval Minister whether it was true that some Englishman called Price was conducting criminal Bolshevik agitation on the Murmansk coast, and whether it was true that there had been an uprising in a British battalion which then had to be withdrawn. The British Naval Minister was forced to confirm that yes, this Price had previously been a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, a British democratic newspaper, became a communist at a school here, set out from Moscow for the north and there conducted agitation with great success, and that there was an uprising of more than one battalion there and that these troops had to be brought back home ...

From a speech to the Samara Provincial Executive Committee of the RCP and trade union representatives, 6th April 1919 (The Eastern Front)

* * *

... Anglo-French imperialism is still not only alive but dangerous.

For our part we are ready to repeat Brest-Litovsk negotiations with new Anglo-French partners; history has shown that we did not emerge the loser from the first Brest. But for precisely this reason the bourgeois classes of the Entente, after all their hesitations, waverings and pondering, finally rejected negotiations with the government of the Bolsheviks. In this refusal there is an extremely valuable historical admission, both of the correctness of our policy at Brest-Litovsk and of our increased strength. German imperialism had entered negotiations with us because it hoped to settle us with ease. Anglo-French imperialism does not trust itself and thus fears us. Although history required a Brest stage in order to overthrow Austro-German imperialism, this does not in any way mean that the Anglo-French plunderers will, by avoiding a Brest, avoid their downfall. History is resourceful and it has at its disposal many methods and means, while we are not dogmatic and will gladly accept the downfall of our enemies, irrespective of the torm in which it crashes down on their heads.

From The Brest Stage: Foreword (dated 1st August 1919) to

Protocols of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Talks: volume I (1920)

* * *

Churchill Threatens But We Are Not Afraid

Churchill does not rank among those politicians whose words should be taken for the genuine article. But for the impolite and numbskulled petty-bourgeois rabble to which Churchill speaks, the figure of “fourteen states” entering the battle against Russia must make a big impression. Critically-thinking workers of Great Britain will say that it appears that the affairs of victorious British imperialism cannot be in a very brilliant state, if the champion of capitalist violence has to boast noisily about the number of his small – militarily speaking, insignificant – allies in the struggle against the Red Army, Kolchak would be immeasurably more pleased with fourteen divisions than fourteen geographical terms.

That the artificially installed bourgeois governments of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and so on are hostile to Soviet Power we had no doubt, as we have had no doubt that sooner or later the working class of these countries will settle accounts with their bourgeoisie as soon as the proletariat of Britain and France put a rein on the violence of Entente imperialism against small and weak nations.

Ambitions of conquest are wholly and totally alien to Soviet policy, which is clear to any sane person who is informed as to the objects and tasks of Soviet power and the whole past of the party that guides the life of our country. That is why the order was given to our forces operating on our Western Front not to cross the frontiers of the little states which had announced their secession from the former Tsarist empire. But this does not of course mean that subsequent attempts by Finland and Estonia upon Petrograd will go unpunished.

If you believe Churchill (and that is not obligatory) then the hesitations of the Finnish and Estonian bourgeoisies have been now resolved in favour of a military invasion. Without doubt such a decision (if it was made) would have been aided by our retreat on the Western Front and Denikin’s temporary successes.

As you know we had regarded the Western Front as of third-rate importance in comparison with the Eastern and Southern Fronts. Now after we have moved our Kolchak Front some six hundred miles eastwards and are advancing further every day, and when we have halted Denikin’s onslaught and gone over to a victorious offensive along the whole Southern Front, we are in a position to pay adequate attention to the Western Front. All the necessary measures have been taken so that even without any kind warning from Churchill we would not have been caught off guard.

As previously we have no motives for launching hostile operations against Finland and Estonia. But we do know full well that the lines which have been laid down by Churchill and others for an offensive against Petrograd lead in the opposite direction to Helsinki and Tallin. You can rest assured that our Red soldiers can find that road.

With regard to Churchill’s generous promise: in the event of the failure of the offensive by fourteen states against Soviet power, we for our part have not the slightest doubt that, following the inevitable collapse of a new onslaught on Soviet Russia, absolutely friendly relations will be established between the latter on the one hand, and Britain, France and their allies on the other. One can, however, assume that such a lesson will not pass without effect on Great Britain’s internal life. By that time, the British proletariat will have given Churchill and his friends and allies sufficient free time to draw a comparison between his current policy and the behaviour of the Dickensian character who tried to keep back the waves with a broom.

An interview dated 29th August 1919

first published in 1926 in Works: Volume 17 Part 2.

* * *

Further to my report of August I consider it essential to raise the following points.

The Truce between Afghanistan and Britain may, according to certain evidence, wholly rebound against us. According to reports from our people in Turkestan, Britain is actively at work uniting Persia, Bukhara, Khiva and Afghanistan against Soviet Turkestan. It would be incredible if she were not to do so. Britain is now attempting to form a chain of States to the East just as she did on our Western Borders. The above work offers in turn far fewer difficulties than there are in the West, The whole question now is who will be first in the race.

Our successful advance on Turkestan and the destruction of Kolchak’s Southern Army create conditions in which we can come first in the race. But from this it follows that while conducting an entirely correct policy of biding our time, tactical adjustment, avoiding engagement, and concession in the West, we must switch to a policy of resolute and dynamic action in the East.

We can forthwith thwart Britain’s efforts to rally the Asian States against us by setting up a major military base in Turkestan, for which there are already adequate elements. A feasible line of direction for a thrust needs to be immediately selected and one out of the chain of States which Britain is ranging against us confronted with immediate attack, presented with an ultimatum to conclude a peace treaty, and made to comply with our bidding or subjected to attack.

From this there follow:

1. the need to send someone to Turkestan armed with exceptionally broad powers and furnished with instructions that would provide a guarantee that the comrade in question would not take to sidestepping the issue in the East with the already traditional defensive evasiveness that is forced on us in the West.
2. that the Military Revolutionary Council of the Republic should be instructed to concentrate in Turkestan the material wherewithal and personnel for our launching a possible offensive from Turkestan southwards.

A letter to the Central Committee of the RCP dated 20th September 1919.

It was first published in The Trotsky Papers edited by J.Meijer

and published by the International Institute for Social History

by whose kind permission it is here reproduced.

* * *

For us the most secure position has been created on the Northern Front, where there are now no large-scale military operations but only minor and partial clashes. This can be explained by the international situation that has developed, the internal difficulties of British imperialism and the British command’s withdrawal of forces from Archangel and Baku which can be considered as final.

Churchill, who not so long ago spoke of fourteen powers preparing an offensive against Soviet Russia, speaks now not only of the withdrawal of British forces from the Russian North but also that Britain must grant asylum to the Archangel White Guard “Chaikovskyites” whom she had led into temptation.

On this front two roads are possible: either the enemy win reinforce themselves along a narrower front and replace regular British units by volunteer White Guard units, or Archangel will be evacuated even before the onset of winter. But these are essentially two stages of one and the same path.

From a speech to the all-city conference

of the Moscow organizations of the RCP, 24th September 1919

The Two Britains

ORDER

Of the Chairman of the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic and the People’s Commissar for War and Naval Affairs to the Red Army and the Red Navy.

24th October 1919/No.159/Detskoe Selo (formerly Tsarskoe)

Red Warriors! On all fronts you are encountering the hostile machinations of Britain. Counter-revolutionary forces are firing on you from British artillery. In the dumps at Shenkursk and Onega and on the Southern and Western Fronts you are finding supplies of British manufacture. Prisoners that you have taken wear British uniforms. Women and children of Archangel and Astrakhan are being killed by British pilots using British dynamite. British vessels bombard our coastline. British gold sows depravity by corrupting dishonest elements on the front and in the rear. British wireless lies and slanders our workers” and peasants” Russia day in and day out and attempts to poison the whole world with its lies.

Soldiers! Sailors! Your hearts have on many occasions overflowed with hate for predatory, lying, hypocritical bloody Britain. And your hate is just and sacred. It will multiply your energies in the struggle against the enemy tenfold.

Yet even now at the moment of our ferocious battles against Britain’s hireling Yudenich I demand of you: never forget that two Britains exist. Alongside the Britain of profit, violence, corruption and bloodthirstiness there exists the Britain of labour, intellectual might, and great ideals of international solidarity. Against us fights arrogant and dishonest stock-exchange Britain. Labouring people’s Britain is behind us. We firmly believe that the latter will soon raise itself to its full height and put a strait-jacket on the criminals who are currently leading plots against the toiling masses of Russia. Driven on by this unshakeable confidence let us shout in the fire and smoke of the struggle: Death to the plunderers of imperialism! Long live workers” and labouring people’s Britain!

Order No.159,

published in Pravda and Izvestia, 25th October 1919

* * *

The advantages that the bourgeois counter-revolution had in the struggle against us came down to the fact that they were guaranteed, absolutely everything necessary, and of course on the technical side, they had greater possibilities than we had. Who transported those, legions from Archangel? The British Navy of course. Tanks came into”, Yudenich’s hands. Who brought these tanks? Britain. Who drove these tanks? British specialists trained in military science. Who bombarded Krasnaya Gorka with heavy artillery? British vessels and monitors armed with 15-inch guns – the last word in naval artillery technique, only introduced in 1916. Our sailors defended Krasnaya Gorka under fire from those terrible shells. I have in my hands a wireless communiqué stating that Krasnaya Gorka must be taken today or tomorrow, and there is a communiqué stating that Kronstadt had fallen under the blows from British monitors. They thought that our sailors could not withstand bombardment from 15-inch artillery, but our sailors held out and Krasnaya Gorka and Kronstadt are more firmly in our hands than ever before.

Let me repeat: they had prepared for this campaign, they had awaited this decisive moment. In the first days of October, even before Yudenich’s thrust against Yamburg, one of the bourgeois papers wrote that Yudenich’s offensive against Petrograd was imminent in a few days and it would be decisive – this did not reach us at the time for we received the newspaper late. Obviously the British newspaper had given away a military secret, but they were so impatient to promise and propose the toppling of Soviet power that they did this even when it meant damaging their own military interests. British imperialists of the Churchill type had tied their fate too closely to the fate of intervention, and the desperate bourgeoisie put pressure on Churchill and said: “you have squandered over two thousand million francs on the campaigns of the Russian bourgeoisie – and that is merely the military expenditure of British imperialism – this expenditure has brought us nothing except the strengthening of the military might of the Russian Red Army”. He, Churchill answered: “just wait a bit, another week or two or three and General Yudenich will do what that deceitful Kolchak didn’t do and Denikin couldn’t manage. He will take Petrograd and in Petrograd his first job will be to form a mighty army for an offensive deep into Russia.” A Swedish paper had spoken of this plan before the start of the campaign: a short decisive blow at Petrograd, the seizure of Petrograd, securing bases, regrouping and then a thrust from Petrograd to Moscow. Everything had been carefully planned.

Certainly Britain had wanted the thrust to come simultaneously from two sides, from Estonia and from Finland. And throughout October the whole British Press was goading on Finland: for example the British newspaper The Times wrote in its leading article about “the moral duty” of Finland to take part in a robber campaign and that this would raise her international prestige. Mighty Britain, in whose hands lie all favours and all retribution, applied the whole force of concrete threats and bribes in order to involve Finland in an adventure in support of Yudenich. Finland. all the while hesitated and wavered and she has not to date made up her mind, and the explanation of this indecision we find in the Finnish bourgeois press. I have here the most interesting evidence of the growth and rebirth of the communist movement in Finland. This is what the paper Karjala says: “Until recently, Bolshevik newspapers have been distributed here underground, the publications coming from Petrograd, but over the last months our own workers” press has taken on a purely Bolshevik tone. There are a whole number of legal publications which would directly and openly threaten us with revolution in the event of an offensive against Soviet Russia.’

From a report to the Central Executive Committee, 7th November 1919

* * *

This evening’s radio brought us a document which we have long awaited, a document which expresses the attitude of the Entente imperialists towards the Soviet government. You will know that over the last weeks and even months the governments of the Entente countries have been discussing the question of their attitude towards the Soviet government. They came to the conclusion that this attitude must be changed and that Soviet Russia could not be squashed by the military force of Kolchak, Yudenich and Denikin. Millerand, a one-time socialist, the successor to the French prime minister Clemenceau and an advocate of a ruthless armed struggle against Soviet Russia, appeared to tend towards the viewpoint of the British prime minister Lloyd George who has come to the conclusion that a deal with the Soviet government is necessary ... I shall read you this literary work written in the intricate language of bourgeois diplomacy which, it was said long ago, possesses language designed to conceal or distort its original thoughts. This what the memorandum says: The Allied powers have come to an agreement regarding the following points: If the states which hay been formed on the frontiers of Soviet Russia – i.e. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, whose independence is recognized de facto (i.e. in practice) by the Allied powers ask the latter (i.e., Britain and France) what their policy should be” relation to Soviet Russia, then the Allied governments will reply that they cannot take on the responsibility of advising them to continue a war whose outcome could damage their vital interests in the extreme.

That is the intricate beginning to an intricate document. Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Nitti and other, lesser ones who are with them say: if Poland, if Latvia and if Finland ask us how they should act with regard to Soviet Russia, then we Britain, France, Italy now are unable to give the advice: go to war! No, now we will say to them: don’t go to war, for a war will threaten your vital interests.

What a turnabout, in the name of heaven! Britain and France did not make war on us, they gave “advice” to Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, the Estonians, White Latvia, the White Finns and the White Rumanians, saying to them: we advise you to rob Soviet Russia of Bessarabia; they said to Yudenich, Denikin and Kolchak: we advise you to put down the workers and peasants. And in order that the advice was not too “lean” they spiced it up with money, artillery, machine-guns and all the necessary war supplies. It was no secret to any of us – the British minister Churchill spoke about this for all to hear – that Britain was mobilizing fourteen nations against us. He stated as much: “fourteen nations under Britain’s leadership are at present in action against Soviet Russia. Now not a trace of this talk is left. Of course Britain neither mobilized, armed nor incited anyone against us but merely gave advice. Now she gives different advice: she says that war against Soviet Russia can damage their vital interests, i.e. the Red Army has become sufficiently powerful for the stock merchants of all countries to realize that a war by Poland against us would mark the death of the Polish landlord, the death of the Polish bourgeoisie and consequently great damage to the interests of the ruling class.

Thus the Anglo-French stock exchange says: don’t make war! We all try to approach the matter from another angle. Which angle? The document states further on: “The Allied powers cannot, in view of (their) past experiences, enter into diplomatic relations with the government of the Soviets until they can be certain that the Bolshevik outrages have ended and the Moscow government feels prepared to make its conduct conform to the conduct of all civilized governments.”

Isn’t that good? They are telling us: ’we will not enter diplomatic relations with the Soviet government because it has bad manners, a bad character and a bad education. But if it was like us, diplomats of Britain and France, if it corrected itself in that direction and drew closer to the methods of the governments of the ‘civilized’ nations, we would enter diplomatic relations with it. Thus they are looking at us both ways: at present we won’t enter into relations with you, but if you correct yourself in the course of time, have a wash and comb your hair, then we will enter into relations with you.”

We are grateful for the kindness. So they recommend that we make our conduct conform to the conduct of all civilized governments. Here it should be said that the experiences that Britain and France had here in Russia were very unpleasant. Many of you have probably forgotten these experiences. We had a British representative here. I must admit I’ve forgotten his name, although in his time he often visited the Commissariat for War. This gentleman, (we cannot say “character” for we must be polite, as they demand of us) this gentleman organized nothing less than a conspiracy (in which the former SR Savinkov played first fiddle) which had the aim of destroying bridges, cutting railway lines, staging an insurrection in the Kremlin and killing Lenin and other officials of Soviet power. They were acting in accordance with the methods of civilized nations but we were acting like barbarians: we caught them red-handed with all their papers giving precise and detailed documentary evidence. In Petrograd one of the agents of this criminal band (I beg you not to record the phrase “criminal band” for Lloyd George might be offended) at the moment of, arrest one of the agents of this band put up armed resistance and was killed in the hotel were he was living …

They have suggested that the British and Swiss governments found themselves compelled to expel the representatives of the Soviet government from their territory because they abused their privileges. Thus Litvinovwho was in London as a semi-official envoy of the Soviet government maintained open contact with revolutionary working class organizations, for which he was deported.

But let me repeat: these gentlemen are silent about the fact that their own representatives here in our country tossed out gold right and, left to organizers of counter-revolutionary mutinies.

But we can reconcile ourselves to that. It is still not so long ago that first the German and then the Anglo-French imperialists promised, not only promised but actually prepared to crush us. This was a little more serious than Churchill’s chatter about fourteen armies being mobilized against us or Britain’s intention to crown Kolchak. This was a little more serious than the phrase about us having “bad manners”. Of course they would have come to like us more if we were nice and black. But we are red. Won’t you deign to prefer us nice and red? For we are not going to change our colour.

From a speech in Ekaterinburg, 28th February 1920

(The General Position of the Republic and the Tasks of the First Labour Army)

* * *

The Western Front forms a passive front. Standing against us there are little states which had split off from the former Tsarist empire. They now form vassals of the Entente: Britain and France. At, the present moment they reflect all the fluctuations in our military successes on the one hand, and the policies of Britain, France and to some extent America on the other. You all recall how Estonia offered us peace talks and while our peace delegation was preparing to set out (that was at the beginning of October), Estonian forces made a thrust for Petrograd. Now after they have been thrown back and we are drawing close to Narva, they are holding armistice negotiations. Latvia, Poland and Finland are conducting basically the same policy with slight variations. We are, of course, as ready today as we were at the beginning of October to meet them in any negotiations. You will know that Comrade Litvinov has just left for negotiations which could take on a very great importance. In Copenhagen he met a British trade unionist, O’Grady by name. This British social-chauvinist, who is playing the role of an agent of the imperialist government, is at the same time a trade unionist, the leader of a workers” organization. He is thus a most suitable man for the British government, for on the one hand he is an agent of the government, and on the other a workers” leader whose words can be disowned on the grounds that he did not say them as a representative of the British government. So Britain has found a suitable person. The talks must deal only with the question of hostages and prisoners of war, i.e. not a matter of primary political importance. It is clear however that in embarking on these negotiations Britain is pursuing some other object, for she has so far regarded the fate of the hostages quite calmly yet now she suddenly begins to be interested in this question. Lloyd George’s statement, now familiar to you, replaced Churchill’s statement.

Churchill represents the extreme, rabid wing of the British imperialists. He spoke of the fourteen countries that Britain was mobilizing against us and predicted the inevitable fall of Petrograd in a week or two. After Yudenich had faltered he also stated that a new factor would soon appear which would upset the balance at Petrograd. This factor remains as yet a secret of Churchill but his speech was highly typical in the period of our tough military position. Now Churchill seems to have fallen silent while the sly old fox Lloyd George takes over, making two or three extremely expressive statements to the effect that he maintains his old opinion or conviction that Soviet power cannot be crushed by force of arms. We shall not inquire how this ties up with the whole past policy of the government headed by Lloyd George, but he has now put it before the British parliament; moreover, in the last statement to reach us, he said that Denikin had seized tens of thousands of square miles but was still unable to create a proper state- administration. This is, as it were, an open dethronement, not only of Kolchak but also of Denikin, a refusal to place a stake on his card. Lloyd George’s statement has for us, of course, a colossal importance. The watershed in British imperialism’s policy is at this moment reflected in the behaviour of the little states which live on our western fringe. To be sure they intend no good towards us, but they are in themselves incapable of great ill.

From a report to the 16th Moscow Provincial Conference of the Russian Communist Party, 25th March 1920

(The Party Faced with New Economic Tasks)

The Soviet-Polish war

On a Speech by Bonar Law

In his speech in the House of Commons on 29th May, Bonar Law justified the aid that Britain is giving to Poland by referring in passing to a message from Comrade Trotsky to French soldiers which said: “We can watch this temporary advance of the feeble Polish troops without being too alarmed; when we have finished with Denikin and the day is near we will throw ourselves on that front with overwhelming reserves”. Seeing in these words a threat to Poland’s independence, the government of Great Britain bound itself by a commitment to assist her and is now fulfilling that commitment.

I have not written any letters to French soldiers, but a phrase similar to one quoted by Mr. Bonar Law was contained in my letter to Comrade Loriot, a leader of the French communists. The letter was written on 1st September last year during the period of Denikin’s closest approach to Moscow. The threat from Yudenich’s quarter was no reason for the unhindered movement of White Guard Polish forces into areas which in no way could be allocated to Poland. French comrades, like honest workers throughout the world, were at that time anxiously watching the development of military operations on our west and south-west. In my letter I explained that the operations by the Polish forces could not have a decisive importance, that the main enemy was Denikin and that after his rout we could switch sufficient reserves to the western front to safeguard the Soviet Republic from an onslaught by White Guard Poland. To see in those words the proclamation of a future offensive by us against Poland is trebly absurd. First, these sort of intentions are not being announced in the press, yet my letter had been printed in Kommunisticheskii Internatsional No.5 on page 511; secondly a statement of this kind would in no event be addressed to French communists; thirdly it would run counter to the whole policy of Soviet power.

Mr. Bonar Law would very likely have been clear about this had he taken the trouble to think, but there is no cause for him to take such an exercise. Like all countries Britain is today divided into two parts: the honest majority of the people which wants peace with Russia, wants to understand the whole dishonesty and villainy of Poland’s assault upon her and the support given by the Entente, and a predatory minority which approves and supports any ill caused to the Russian people dictated by whatever motives. As the policy of intervention rests upon this minority, Mr. Bonar Law has no need to be over-scrupulous in his choice of arguments.

Izvestia, 13th June 1920.

* * *

1) It seems to me that it would be essential to find out at once whether Curzon’s ultimatum is known in Britain and what the reaction of the press is to it. In general to sound out, so far as this is possible through Klyshko, Rothstein and others, the attitude to the ultimatum in government and opposition circles.

2) Qua answer we might adopt, as it seems to me, the following fundamentals:

a. Poland is an independent state, whose inviolability we have never encroached on. We agree to accept the mediation of Britain and to guarantee the inviolability of the frontier of Poland as it is projected by the Allies, without finally predetermining the question of these frontiers, since this is a question of the self-determination if nations.

b. As for the Crimea: we reject the intervention of Great Britain on the basis, of the fundamental premises put forward by the government of Lloyd George and accepted by us: obligatory non-intervention in internal affairs. The Crimea is not an independent state.

We could permit the intervention of Britain in questions of the Crimea only on a basis of reciprocity: that is on the the basis of our putting forward demands in relation to Ireland. To this question must be added the fact that Ireland represents a nation, while in no case do Wrangel’s White Guards constitute any specific nationality.

c. The week that we have at our disposal must be used to give effect to the old decree of the Politburo of the Central Committee on the subject of acquainting the working masses with the policy of Great Britain in relation to the Crimea. Even people like Rosmer, for instance, who know what the rule of Britain is like, are greatly impressed by a straightforward account of the facts of British policy “in relation to the Crimea.

d. It must be stipulated, in one form or another, that we do accept the mediation of Britain: of Britain, that is, and not of the League of Nations; that we agree to negotiations in London, but demand for our delegates the same rights as the delegates of all free, independent countries have: that is, the right to give interviews, to contact whoever they choose, etc., etc.

e. It seems to me that a refusal on our part to accept British intervention in our internal affairs is an absolute must. This refusal cannot give rise to major complications, since there is virtually no chalice of rousing up anyone or anything against us on this score, especially so provided that we agree at the same time to accept mediation with regard to Poland.

f. It is essential to commence negotiations with Rumania at the same time.

g. In view of the fact that it may prove inconvenient to modify or revoke the decision of the Council of People’s Commissars on questions of the ultimatum, it seems essential to call an emergency session of the Central Executive Committee, or even a Congress of Soviets.

A letter to members of the Politburo dated 13th July 1920,

first published in The Trotsky Papers edited by J. Meijer

and published by the International Institute for Social History,

by whose kind permission it is reproduced here.

* * *

To all workers, peasants and all honest citizens of Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine:

On the 11th July the British government approached us with a proposal for ending the war with Poland and sending our representatives to London for peace talks with Poland and other border states. In addition Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, reported that in the event of an armistice being concluded the Polish forces will retreat to the frontier which was laid down for Poland at the peace conference in December of last year. In the same note it proposed that we do not touch Wrangel in his Crimean “sanctuary”.

To this offer of mediation by the British government we, the Council of People’s Commissars, replied in the negative. And in explaining this action of ours to the Russian and Ukrainian peoples may we express our firm conviction that our words will also reach the Polish people.

The People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs has issued a Red Book in Russian and foreign languages on Russo-Polish relations, where specific documents reveal day by day on the one hand the energetic, sincere and honest efforts of Soviet power to secure peace with Poland even at the price of big concessions, and on the other the stubborn, malicious and predatory ambitions of bourgeois-landlord Poland to inflict at the Entente’s instigation a mortal blow on Soviet Russia. If Britain had not wanted the war she could easily have prevented it. It would have been sufficient to refuse Poland war supplies and money. But Britain wanted the war. While holding talks with us in order to lull the working masses, she was at the same time continuously sending war material to Pilsudski and Wrangel against the Russian workers and peasants. Britain caused the Polish War and Britain is responsible for it.

Lord Curzon refers to the League of Nations on whose behalf he is presenting his proposal. But Poland, who has launched a campaign of robbery and plunder against us, is a member of this League of Nations. Another member of that League of Nations is rapacious imperial Japan, which is currently conducting monstrous outrages in the Far Eastern Republic under the cover of her allies. If the task of the League of Nations was to assist the cause of peace then it ought to have prevented Poland from starting the war, and demanded that Japan evacuate Eastern Siberia. But there was none of that. All the members of the League of Nations, and especially France, Britain and America, are linked by a collective guarantee in the matter of provoking a war by Poland against the Ukraine and Russia. The most powerful League of Nations members have been and are helping Poland as much as they can. They did not even reply to us when we approached them in April with an appeal to restrain the hand of the Pilsudski government which was already poised to strike. Yet now, when cruel blows have been dealt to the White Guard Polish forces by the Red Army, the League of Nations which is responsible for this comes forward with an olive branch in its hands – or rather, Britain, under the cover of the League over which she rules, offers us her mediation in reconciling us with Poland and the other border states and invites us to send peace delegates for this purpose to London: the very centre where all the snares are set against the Soviet Republic and from where the order was given to Poland to launch her offensive against the Ukraine and Russia.

No, Britain has not been called upon to act as intermediary and peacemaker in the bloody struggle which her criminal bourgeoisie conceived and feeds.

But the British government as we have seen already does not confine itself to the question of Poland. Lord Curzon in his same note of 11th July proposes to us nothing more or less than ending the war with Baron Wrangel if, in exchange, he promises to withdraw his bands south of the isthmus in order to establish himself within the limits of the Crimean peninsula which Britain has placed at his disposal. just a few days ago the same Lord Curzon stated on behalf of the British government that the pre-condition for commercial relations was the mutual obligation of Russia and Great Britain to non-interference in each others” internal affairs; but hardly had the British government time to acknowledge the receipt of Soviet Russis’s agreement to this condition than Lord Curzon considered himself called upon not only to interfere in Russis’s internal affairs, but also to donate a part of federal Soviet territory to private bandits acting in the service of British imperialism.

It is not the first time that the British government has manifested an interest in Baron Wrangel in the Crimea. When the Red forces which had routed Denikin were preparing to step over the Crimean threshold in order to mop up Wrangel’s remnants of Denikin’s army, Lord Curzon came forward with the same olive branch in hand and offered us the complete capitulation of Wrangel and his forces on condition of an amnesty. We agreed, and upon the insistence of the British government we halted the offensive immediately. Whereupon Lord Curzon at once changed the conditions and began to talk, instead of Wrangel’s capitulation, of our non-incursion over the boundaries of the Crimea. At the same time the War and Naval departments of Great Britain were vigorously working to arm and supply Wrangel’s forces. The outcome of this co-ordinated collaboration of Curzon, Churchill and Wrangel was a new offensive by the White Guard forces northwards from the Crimea at the beginning of June. It was quite evident that the offensive by Baron Wrangel, for whom Lord Curzon had previously requested the amnesty, was mapped and planned to supplement White Guard Poland’s offensive and consequently was dictated from the same London centre. Yet now the British Foreign Secretary again proposes that we abandon the offensive action against Wrangel, and prepares to set up his hireling on Russian territory just as if nothing had happened before.

No, neither Lord Curzon, the British government as a whole nor the League of Nations which it commands are called upon to interfere in the internal affairs of the Russian Soviet Federation and to act as peacemakers over a civil war which they themselves have caused and inflamed.

All the previous work of the British government, its allies and helpmates bear witness to the fact that their mediation pursues at the present time a single goal: to save Pilsudski and Wrangel, whom they had set against us, from their deserved rout, and to gain for them an opportunity to recover, re-form, re-equip and re-arm, and to commence a fresh campaign against workers’ and peasants’ Russia.

We have rejected League of Nations mediation in our war against White Poland and her accomplice Wrangel. But this does not of course mean that we are refusing to continue our negotiations with Britain and other countries, whether members of the League of Nations or not. Our policy of peace remains unaltered. While turning down Lord Curzon’s mediation, we are ready at any moment to enter into trading relations with British industrialists and merchants as well as with the capitalists of other countries. In justification of his policy, Lloyd George recently explained to the House of Commons that in Africa Britain had frequently to trade with cannibals. On this question we have common ground with Lloyd George and his government, inasmuch as we consider that until Europe and America become communist Soviet Russia must, in the interests of economic development, enter into trading relations with capitalist cannibals. We merely deny them the right to come forward as the saviours of small nations and the peacemakers of civil war. We know them too well to trust them. Let us warn the toiling masses of France, Britain, Poland and all countries against trusting the incorrigibly greedy, incurably base and indefatigably criminal bourgeois governments ...

An appeal issued by the Council of People’s Commissars,

first published in Pravda and Izvestia 21st July 1920.

* * *

According to all the information we have from various sources, Great Britain has possibly not since the age of Chartism lived through such a period of working-class re-awakening of interests and strivings to action as she does now in connection with the Russo-Polish War and the Russo-Polish peace negotiations. For the notes that are sent us by British diplomacy form but a reflection, a caricatured shadow, a faint image of the profound events and realities which are now taking place in British life. This is first and foremost the influence of the British working class. However much Lloyd George and Curzon might chatter, had there not been a congress in London to which two thousand delegates from throughout the country had come, not a letter of our replies would have been read.

Given such a serious factor as the will of the awakening British working class, we can say that our diplomatic work has now a great point of support in Great Britain. Some reports say that in France also, where the situation is less promising as regards the state of the labour movement, an upsurge is observable and that the federation of metalworkers’ and masons’ unions has already backed the British Council of Action and has proclaimed the necessity for a general strike should France not go to the peace talks. Thus our diplomatic position, which is a result of our military position, has improved because our Red forces stand twelve miles from Warsaw. It is for this reason that Comrade Kamenev’s and Comrade Krasin’s work in London has turned out so favourably.

From a report to the Moscow Soviet, 17th August 1920

(On the Wrangel Front)

* * *

Of all the villainies of world imperialism whose full measure has been displayed over recent years, Poland’s invasion of our country is still a fact which is exceptional in its enormity.

It is essential that every Russian peasant man and woman knows of all the steps which we have undertaken to avoid the war (report the basic facts). France’s role:

1. Her publication of a telegram in March of a purported offensive by us against Poland.
2. The stubborn repetition of these lies until the present time.

Britain’s conduct:

1. Supplying ammunition to Poland through an agreement concluded last autumn.
2. Bonar Law’s reference in parliament to my letter to French soldiers as grounds for concluding this treaty.
3. Britain’s conduct in relation to Wrangel.
4. Curzon’s first note in April.
5. Our immediate agreement.
6. Curzon’s prolonged silence and then threat.
7. Alteration of the conditions in the note.
8. A fresh pause.
9. Proposal to send a mediator.
10. We were all the while constrained.
11. Wrangel’s blow.
12. The responsibility for it lies with Curzon.
13. Lloyd George’s statement to Krasin.

The bourgeois press had prepared for Poland’s offensive by means of lies about an offensive by us. By means of false references to a preparation by us for an offensive, Bonar Law deceives public opinion to justify military aid to Poland.

By means of diplomatic mediation, Curzon is assisting Wrangel to concentrate his forces for a thrust against us.

From personal notes on the proletariat and peasantry in the revolution and the Soviet-Polish War,

written in 1920 and first published in Works, Volume 17 part 2.

The Post-War Crisis

Let us pass now to Great Britain, the richest and most powerful country in Europe. During the war we grew accustomed to saying that Britain was getting rich from the war, that the British bourgeoisie had plunged Europe into war and was feathering its nest. This was true, but only within certain limits. Britain made profits in the initial period of the war but began to suffer losses in the second period. The impoverishment of Europe, especially of Central Europe, acted to disrupt trade relations between Britain and the rest of the continent. In the last analysis this had to hurt and did hurt Britain’s industry and finances. Moreover, Britain herself was compelled to shoulder enormous war expenditures. Today Britain is in a state of decline, and this decline is becoming more and more precipitous. This fact may be illustrated by industrial and commercial indices which I shall presently cite, but the fact itself is incontestable and is corroborated by a whole series of public and wholly official declarations by the most eminent British bankers and industrialists. During the months of March, April and May, the respective British publications carried the annual reports of corporations, banks, and so on. These authoritative gatherings, where the leaders of the various enterprises make their reports, assessing the general state of affairs in the country or in their own particular branch of industry, provide exceptionally instructive material. I have gathered a whole file of such reports. All of them bear out one and the same thing: Britain’s national income, i.e., the aggregate income of all her citizens and the state, has dropped considerably below the pre-war total.

Britain is poorer. The productivity of labour has fallen. Her world trade for 1920 has, in comparison to the last year before the war, declined by at least one-third, and in some of the most important branches, even more. Especially sudden is the change undergone by the coal industry which used to be the main branch of British economy, or more precisely, the root and trunk on which Britain’s entire world economic system rested. For the coal monopoly was the root of the power, vigour and prosperity of all other branches of British industry. Not a trace of this monopoly remains today. Here are the basic factual data on the state of British economy. In 1913 Britain’s coal industry supplied 287 million tons of coal; in 1920 – 233 million tons, i.e. 20 per cent less. In 1913, the production of iron amounted to 10.4 million tons; in 1920 – a little more than 8 million tons, i.e., again 20 per cent less. The export of coal in 1913 amounted to 73 million tons; in 1920 – all told only 25 million tons, i.e., one-third of the pre-war total. But during the current year, 1921, the slump in the coal industry and coal exports took on absolutely abnormal proportions. In January the coal output was 19 million tons (i.e. below the 1920 monthly average); in February – 17; in March – 16. And then the general strike erupted and the coat output verged on nil. For the first five months of 1921 the exports are 6 times below what they were for the same period in 1913. Expressed in prices, Britain’s entire export for May of this year is three times below that of May of last year. As of August 1, 1914, Britain’s national. debt was £700 million: on June 4 of this year – £7,709 million, i.e., an elevenfold increase. The budget has swelled threefold.

If you thumb through the reports of the directories of banks and industrial enterprises far March and April you will find that Britain’s national income has declined one-third or one-quarter as against the pre-war period. That is how matters stand in Britain, the richest country in Europe, a country which suffered the least from military operations and gained the most from the war in its initial period.

The most graphic proof of the decline of British economic life lies in the fact that the British pound sterling is no longer a pound sterling; that is, it is no longer equivalent to the set of figures which once exercised their sway everywhere and which are still imprinted on it. Today it is only 76 per cent of what it pretends to be. As against the incumbent sovereign of the money market – the US dollar – the pound has lost 24 per cent of its nominal magnitude. What could better characterize the instability of our epoch than the fact that the most stable, absolute and incontestable thing in the whole world – the British sovereign (in English this word signifies both “pound sterling” and “ruler”) – has lost its former position and has become transfigured into a relative magnitude! Considering nowadays in Germany the sphere of philosophy has become activated over relativity – and I refer here to Einstein’s philosophy – one ought perhaps to interpret German philosophy as an act of revenge against British economics, inasmuch as the British pound sterling has finally become – relative. Incidentally, it has always been the custom in Germany to reply to economic poverty by exacting revenge in the field of philosophy.

From the report to the Third World Congress of the Communist International on

The World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Third International, 23rd June 1921.

* * *

The growth of France’s influence in Europe, and partly in the world as well, during the past year, is due not to the strengthening of France but to the patent progressive weakening of Britain.

Great Britain has conquered Germany. This was the chief issue settled by the last war. And in essence the war was not a world war but a European war, even though the struggle between the two mightiest European states – Britain and Germany – was resolved with the participation of the forces and resources of the entire world. Britain has conquered Germany. But today, Britain is much weaker in the world market, and generally in the world situation, than she was before the war. The United States has grown at Britain’s expense much more than Britain has at the expense of Germany.

America is battering Britain down, first of all by the more rationalized and more progressive character of its industry. The productivity of an American worker is 150 per cent above the productivity of a British worker. In other words, two American workers produce, thanks to a more perfectly equipped industry, as much as five British workers. This fact alone, established by British statistical researches, testifies that Britain is doomed in a struggle with America; and this alone suffices to push Britain towards a war with America, so long as the British fleet maintains its preponderance on the oceans.

American coal is crowding out British coal throughout the world and even in Europe. Yet, Britain’s world trade has been based primarily on her export of coal. In addition, oil is now of decisive significance for industry and defence; oil not only runs motor cars, tractors, submarines, aeroplanes, but is greatly superior to coal even for the big ocean liners. Up to 70 per cent of the world’s oil is produced within the boundaries of the United States. Consequently, in the event of war all this oil would be in the hands of Washington. In addition America holds in her hands Mexican oil, which supplies up to 12 per cent of the world output. True, Americans are accusing Britain of having cornered, outside the United States borders, up to 90 per cent of the world oil sources and of shutting off the Americans from access to them, while American oil fields face exhaustion within the next few years. But all these geological and statistical computations are quite dubious and arbitrary. They are compiled in order so as to justify American pretensions to the oil of Mexico, Mesopotamia, and so on. But were the danger of exhaustion of American oil fields actually to prove real, it would constitute one more reason for speeding up the war between the United States and Britain.

Europe’s indebtedness to America is a touchy question. The debts on the whole amount to $18 billion. The United States always has the opportunity of creating the greatest difficulties in the British money market by presenting its demands for payment. As is well known, Britain has even proposed that America cancel British debts, promising in turn to cancel Europe’s debt to Britain. Since Britain owes America much more than the continental countries of the Entente owe her, she stands to profit from such a transaction. America has refused. The capitalist Yankees showed no inclination to finance with their own funds Great Britain’s preparations for war with the United States.

The alliance between Britain and Japan, which is fighting America for preponderance on the Asiatic continent, has likewise aggravated in the extreme the relations between the United States and Britain.

But most acute in character, in view of all the indicated circumstances, is the question of the navy, Wilson’s Government, upon running up against Britain’s opposition in world affairs, launched a gigantic programme of naval construction. Harding’s government has taken this programme over from its predecessor and this programme is being rushed through at top speed. By 1924 the US navy will not only be far more powerful than that of Britain, but also superior to the British and Japanese fleets put together, if not in tonnage, then in firing power.

What does this mean from the British point of view? It means that by 1924 Britain must either accept the challenge and try to destroy the military, naval and economic might of the United States by taking advantage of her present superiority, or she must passively become converted into a power of the second or third order, surrendering once and for all domination of the oceans and seas to the United States. Thus the last slaughter of the peoples, which “settled” in its own way the European question, has for this very reason raised in all its scope the world question, namely: Will Britain or the United States rule the world? The preparations for the new world war are proceeding full speed ahead. The expenditures for the army and the navy have grown extraordinarily as compared with pre-war times. The British military budget has increased threefold, the American – three and a half times.

The contradictions between Britain and America are being transformed into a process of automatic proliferation, an automatic approach closer and closer to tomorrow’s sanguinary conflict. Here we actually are dealing with automatism.

From the report to the Third World Congress of the Communist International on

The World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International, 23rd June 1921.

* * *

Economically, the strongest country and the one least damaged by the war in Europe is Britain. Nevertheless, even with regard to this country one cannot say that capitalist equilibrium has been restored after the war. True, thanks to her world organization and her position as victor, Britain has attained certain commercial and financial successes after the war: she has improved her trade balance and has raised the exchange rate of the pound and has recorded a fictitious surplus in her budget. But in the sphere of industry Britain has since the war moved backwards not forwards. Both the productivity of labour in Britain and her national income are far below the pre-war levels. The situation of the basic branch of her industry, the coal industry, is getting worse and worse, pulling down all other branches of her economy. The incessant paroxysms caused by strikes are not the cause but the consequence of the decline of British economy ...

The British Empire is today at the peak of its power. It has retained all its old dominions and has acquired new ones. But it is precisely the present moment that reveals that Britain’s dominant world position stands in contradiction to her actual economic decline. Germany, with her capitalism incomparably more progressive in respect to technology and organization, has been crushed by force of arms. But in the person of the United States, which economically subjected both Americas, there has now arisen a triumphant rival, even more menacing than Germany. Thanks to its superior organization and technology, the productivity of labour in US industry is far above that of Britain. Within the territories of the United States 65-70 per cent of the world’s petroleum is being produced, upon which depends the motor industry, tractor production, the navy and the air force. Britain’s age-old monopoly in the coal market has been completely undermined; America has taken first place; her exports to Europe are increasing ominously. In the field of the merchant navy America has almost caught up with Britain. The United States is no longer content to put up with Britain’s world overseas cable monopoly. In the field of industry Great Britain has gone over to the defensive, and under the pretext of combating “unwholesome” German competition is now arming herself with protectionist measures against the United States. Finally, while Britain’s navy,, comprising a large number of outdated units, has come to a standstill in its development, the Harding administration has taken over from Wilson’s administration the programme of naval construction intended to secure the preponderance of the American flag on the high seas within the next two or three years.

The situation is such that either Britain will be automatically pushed back and, despite her victory over Germany, become a second-rate power or she will be constrained in the near future to stake in mortal combat with the United States her entire power gained in former years.

That is just the reason why Britain is maintaining her alliance with Japan and is making concessions to France in order to secure the latter’s assistance or at least neutrality. The growth of the international role of the latter country – within the confines of the European continent – during the last year has been caused not by a strengthening of France but by the international weakening of Britain.

Germany’s capitulation in May on the question of indemnities signifies, however, a temporary victory for Britain and is the warrant of the further economic disintegration of Central Europe, without at all excluding the occupation of the Ruhr and Upper Silesian basins by France in the immediate future.

From The Theses on the International Situation and the Tasks of the Communist International,

drafted by Trotsky and adopted by the Third World Congress

of the Communist International, 4th July 1921.

* * *

Briand left for Washington hoping for success in a diplomatic game resembling one he had played more than once in the French Parliament. To the proposal to limit land armies Briand replied in the negative. He pointed out that the Versailles Peace required not the reduction but the strengthening of French armaments. That is correct. France was maintaining with an armed hand the system of slavery and the conjunction of contradictions and ruthless hostility which over the last three years we have been in the habit of calling the Versailles Peace. When it came to the question of naval armaments and their possible limitation, the decomposition of the old Entente became clearly revealed even to the uninitiated.

France miscalculated, and she miscalculated in that Britain proved more realistic than she expected. Britain had also added up her gold balance, her Navy, shipyards and so on and compared them with the United States. She became only too clearly aware that the British pound sterling, which was accustomed to being the ruler of the world money market, had long ago been forced to make a big leap downwards – to a quarter of its pre-war value by comparison with the American dollar. As a result of her calculations Britain agreed to accept the balancing of her Navy with that of the United States. Thus, after her struggle with Germany for world power and the rule of the universe, and after Versailles, we are now witnesses to Washington. The United States refused to join the so-called League of Nations, which is nothing other than a decorative cloak for Britain’s domination over Europe exercised through the intermediary of France’s military and political rule on the continent. The United States refused to sign the Versailles Peace or enter the League of Nations. Conscious of the preponderance of her industry and her gold reserve, America appeared at Washington to re-make or finish off what in her opinion had not been sufficiently well and sufficiently firmly finished at Versailles. The centre of gravity of the capitalist world edifice was moved from Versailles to Washington. Washington made first and foremost an attempt to calm and pacify the so-called Pacific Ocean, which however is fraught with major international storms. There an attempt was made to reach an international agreement based on progressive international disarmament. France, intoxicated with her supposedly unlimited power, was sure that at Washington she would be able to turn the world antagonism between Great Britain and the United States to her advantage and secure a majority for the solution for which she would vote and thus strengthen her domination.

After her struggle and her victory Britain was no longer the first naval power that she was before the war, and now does not even dare to contemplate her Navy equalling the navies of the two next largest naval powers. At present the United States Navy is not yet equal to the British but it will catch up in the near future.

Before the work had time to be finished a new location for the same work appeared. This place is beautiful Genoa and it is supposed that the equilibrium necessary to Europe will be found here. We have been invited there and we may possibly take part in the work of the conference. However, here things are not quite so simple. The great disorder in inter-state relations will come to the surface. Some states will not be too ready to participate in a conference to which Soviet Russia has been invited. And we must state that it will be the hardest of all to turn France on to this new path. It has to be said that Lloyd George has taken up this problem as strenuously and energetically as he had formerly set the counter-revolutionaries against us. It took him a lot of trouble to bend Briand to accept participation in the negotiations, and in reply to Briand’s objections he delivered a speech which our ROSTA reported in full. He said in this speech: “France, by holding talks with Turkey in the person of Bouillon, is shaking the eastern robber by the hand; now she turns up her nose (I don’t know exactly what word Lloyd George used but the meaning was just that) and refuses to shake the northern robber by the hand.” By “northern robbers” Lloyd George means of course you and me. As we do not make a particular issue over etiquette, leaving that to the mandarins of the bourgeois delegations, we are prepared to accept his not very flattering definition. He also said: “When you go to international negotiations then be prepared for the worst and take a bar of disinfected soap with you, because you will have to shake all sorts of hands”. He meant the hands of the robbers of the North and East, but, let me add, every other sort too. We have always born this circumstance in mind in our international relations, and we too carry disinfected soap in our pockets on such occasions. How Lloyd George finally convinced Briand is hard to know, but the fact is that the Washington fiasco knocked a large part of France’s conceit away, and Briand, on returning to Paris, sensed that France’s international position had become much more difficult.

From a speech to the Moscow Soviet, 16th January 1922.

Anglo-Soviet Relations 1921-1923

The international revolution has not come as soon as we wished; there remain, if not decades, then more than weeks. It is hard to say how long it will be before the world revolution comes. Therefore it cannot be said with any certainty that no one else will make an attempt to start a war with us. The place from where a new danger could threaten us is Batumi. A year and a half ago negotiations were held with the British over the leasing of Batumi. It was not leased to her, but Britain could attempt to take it by force. If such an attempt proved successful Georgia would turn into a bridgehead where the remnants of Wrangel’s army could be thrown and we would thus have an ABCs in the Caucasus. With all our love of peace we must be prepared for war. Batumi is not important to us but the Caucasian Front is, and our diplomacy has stated this clearly; when in turn it inquired of Lord Curzon as to Britain’s intentions with regard to Batumi, he answered with the question whether we intended to occupy it. What does Curzon’s reply mean? The world bourgeoisie was amazed at Wrangel’s rapid rout, but after a brief respite found a new slogan for agitation and launched it by spreading rumours about an alleged new assault by us on Georgia.

In the Caucasus generally our position is not altogether favourable. Venizelos” Greece was a tool of the Entente against Turkey; now at the elections Venizelos’ party has received a minority and the Germanophile party has come forward; this is more advantageous to us as it will move – even if shyly and uncertainly – against the Entente. Britain and France cannot rely on Turkey in present conditions, but they can promise her Baku; that is, they can settle with her from our account. Thus it is clear that we have dangers ahead of us in the Caucasus. But we can prepare this front with a small concentration of forces and reinsure ourselves with regard to Batumi and Baku.

From a speech to secretaries of Moscow party cells, 26th November 1920

(There are No More Fronts)

* * *

What however are the possible chances of intervention, and above all what are the possible forms that intervention might take? Independent military action by any of the major European powers is not counted on even by the Russian émigrés. But they do expect of” the capitalist governments, and the French especially, active assistance for Russia’s lesser adversaries on the one hand, and the presentation of definite demands with regard to aid for the famine on the other.

Let us begin with the latter idea. Its absurdity is quite apparent. Conditions, and in the form of an ultimatum at that, have already been put to us. They were rejected. Then followed the period of interventions and blockades. We stood firm. The capitalist states were compelled by the logic of the situation to open negotiations with us. We went to meet them. A trade agreement with Britain was signed by both sides, in which Lloyd George drew the conclusions from past experience and did not dream of presenting any conditions whatsoever relating to Russia’s internal regime. One surely cannot believe that this same Lloyd George would decide to put forward political demands over the question of philanthropic aid? A crazy idea! Even if one were to allow for a moment the impossible, namely that a rabid supporter of Milyukov, Burtsev and Kuskova took over from Lloyd George and presented political conditions to us, it is quite obvious that this could only end in the greatest discomfiture for him. It is self-evident that we would turn down any talks on such a basis …

From a speech to the Moscow Soviet, 30th August 1921

(The Famine and the World Situation)

* * *

The fact that in such a devastated, exhausted and deeply shaken country as Russia a famine which gripped tens of millions of people has not brought the Soviet apparatus to a state of complete helplessness; that Soviet power has from the very start begun to make vigorous efforts to ensure the winter sowing of the Volga lands, already achieving the first successes in this direction; that the apparatus continues to work even under such extremely arduous conditions – all this demonstrates to the bourgeoisie, part of which was beginning to realize this even before the famine, that Soviet power is not a passing or temporary phenomenon but a factor to be reckoned with for a definite number of years to come. The British bourgeoisie has evidently understood this fully enough. The British bourgeoisie is, broadly speaking, the most perceptive: it has been said long ago that it thinks in centuries and continents. The British bourgeoisie has forged its might over centuries and grown used to looking a long way ahead, and is led by politicians who concentrate the whole past experience of their class in their consciousness.

Lloyd George said: “It is not a matter of philanthropy but a matter of returning Russia to a state of economic equilibrium and this can be done by establishing a regular economic alliance with Soviet Russia”. Lloyd George hopes that regular economic commercial relations will lead us to restore our economy and believes that it is as little possible to bring us down by famine as it was by military intervention. Thus we have here a seeming paradox. the famine, a profoundly negative fact, has not weakened us internationally but rather strengthened us. The bourgeois newspapers write: “Yes, this power must have living roots, it has withstood the scourge of the famine, we will have to reckon with it, there is no one else who can replace it.’

From a speech to the Zhitomir Soviet, 5th September 1921

* * *

The European bourgeoisie has at once begun to weigh things up this way and that, in order to determine its orientation. Britain wondered whether she had made a mistake by entering economic relations with us, at a time when the famine could perhaps have laid bare our insolvency and approaching collapse.

Those elements in the ranks of the French bourgeoisie who have had enough of awaiting the long promised downfall of Soviet power have now obtained a preponderance and have started to insist upon the inevitability of our collapse more stubbornly, together with the need to assist this collapse by military intervention. It has finally emerged that the public opinion of the European bourgeoisie has split into two basic groupings. I do not want to talk about the feelings of the western proletariat and its pressing desire to help us (the proletariat of Europe and America has shown its sympathy as far as its strength permits, by raising money, agitation and so on) because from the standpoint of the international situation it is the policy of the ruling bourgeoisie that has an immediate significance for the moment. So the orientation of the bourgeoisie has followed two lines. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie – that of Britain for instance which Lloyd George represents – has come to realize what has come about and said to itself. “No, this regime is stronger than we thought. If it could endure such a terrible disaster as the famine which struck tens of millions of human beings in such a weakened and exhausted country, and if the state machine did not split at the seams – if Soviet power did not lose its head but concentrated its attention on the very vital tasks of sowing the Volga lands; if it managed in the very first days to gather millions of poods of seed so as to save the Volga peasant economy for the following year, then this regime must have firm roots.” The British bourgeoisie is of course hostile to us, but it is perceptive and said to itself that there is in Soviet Russia no other force apart from the Communist Party and the working class organized into the state capable of maintaining law and order and assuming the functions of government.

From a speech to the 4th All-Russian Congress

of the Russian Communist League of Youth, 21st September 1921

* * *

Today the telegraph has brought news that the British government has taken a decision not to give aid to our famine-stricken people. This telegram evidently strictly reflects reality: not because Lloyd George had reckoned seriously on the collapse of Soviet power, but because the decision itself was very symptomatic. It means that pre-Genoa hesitations are being experienced and Lloyd George, whose position has become somewhat less stable, in order to insure himself with that section of bourgeois public opinion which opposes an agreement with us, has tossed a bone to those irreconcilable capitalists by a decision which is in itself of course quite “legal”: one cannot force the British government to give relief to the Volga famine.

But on the other hand this decision when taken in conjunction with commentaries in several semi-official British newspapers, acquires a semi-demonstrative character. One of the papers, the Daily Chronicle says that, I quote, “the refusal of the British government to give relief is caused by the fact that Soviet power still maintains the Red Army ...” So is the British government intending to propose at Genoa disarmament or the reduction of armies? As far as we are concerned, then of course no obstacles need be expected to any measures which will relieve the peoples of the military burden. While preparations go ahead all along the line for new blows against us in the spring and while the French general staff has presented the Petlyura-ites through its military mission such an “innocuous” gift as a tank, the British government, to judge from the Daily Chronicle, is astonished that we are maintaining the Red Army! Yes, we shall maintain it simply because we well remember (and I started with this) the experience of the conference on the Prinkipo Islands: after the conference on the Prinkipo Islands which was never held, we lived through a dark and hard year.

From a speech to the Moscow Soviet commemorating

the fifth anniversary of the February Revolution, 12th March 1922.

* * *

Today the European bourgeoisie has no certainty as to how events will take shape tomorrow or the day after. It lives from one day to the next. The economic soil is exhausted while the crisis passes from convulsions to a temporary recovery which gives way to new convulsions. International relations are shaky. Yesterday’s allies and the chief ones, Britain and France, more and more oppose each other hostilely on all levels of capitalist relations, and that is why not a single European government is today capable of conducting a policy even to the extent that it could before the last imperialist war, calculated for 15, ten or even five years ahead. All the bourgeois governments live by the impulses of the given moment; they try to plug up and patch up the most crying contradictions, but that is all. And so – from contradiction to contradiction, from conflict to conflict and moving on from one diplomatic resort to another, they attempt to put off the most acute question. Hence their diplomatic impotence, akin to their previous military impotence. They have mighty armies – and yet they cannot smash us. They have a diplomacy with age-old experience – and yet they are incapable of carrying through to the end with us a single piece of business.

We talk about our retreats. Of course we have retreated a great deal, but compare our diplomatic platform in February and April of 1919 (I have just read it out to you) with the platform which we came to Genoa with and left there with. At Genoa we said: “Russia will not give herself up, nor sell herself off, Russia is not capitulating to the ultimatum of European world imperialism.” And what then? A short time afterwards there turns to us Urquhart, a representative of the leading lights of the stock exchange of Great Britain, a representative of enterprises worth billions in different parts of the world (he used to own many undertakings both in the Urals and in Siberia), and signs a preliminary conditional agreement with Comrade Krasin for a period of 99 years. A long period! I think that few of the youngest comrades here now will see the end of this period.

You might say: if the bourgeoisie is at present unable to look even five or ten years ahead, how is it that Urquhart is looking 99 years ahead? Herein lies the fact that the bourgeoisie, ruling as a class, as a state, must have a plan – who to conclude an alliance with, who is the greater and who the lesser enemy, and it has to foresee how relations will shape in five, ten or 15 years’ time. But Urquhart is acting as an individual proprietor and nothing more and his calculations are very simple and very correct in their simplicity. He says: “If we, the Urquharts, i.e. capital, hold on in Britain, in France and throughout the world then sooner or later we shall stifle Soviet Russia.” And he is right. But if – reasons Urquhart – we capitalists are overthrown both in Britain and in France we shall of course lose our property in the Urals and Siberia too, but the man who loses his head is not going to weep over his hairs; if capital is to be expropriated throughout the world then of course Mr. Urquhart’s concession will expire in a shorter period than 99 years. That is why his reckoning is entirely realistic and entirely correct. I do not know whether Comrade Krasin said this to him: “As long as you are a force throughout the world we will not of course expropriate you individually. But if the British worker expropriates you and takes your property into his hands then somehow or other we will come to an agreement with the British worker about this concession.” [Laughter] But you will say that nevertheless the Soviet government has renounced this agreement.

Yes, it has unconditionally. Britain’s policy does not provide a minimal guarantee for concluding a responsible and major agreement of a type which presupposes the possibility of normal relations between countries. Britain seeks to prevent Turkey establishing an opportunity for her existence within the natural frontiers of the Turkish state. Britain is in effect waging a war against France: Britain acts under the pseudonym of Greece while France in fact provides support for Turkey. The war has brought victory to Turkey with whom we have complete sympathy, for Turkey was fighting for her independence while Greece was carrying out Great Britain’s rapacious imperialist plans.

There arose the question of the Black Sea and the Straits. On the Black Sea exist states which form part of our federation, in addition Turkey, Bulgaria and Rumania. Yet Britain wants to settle the question of the Black Sea jointly with France and Italy but without the participation of the countries for whom the Black Sea forms an internal sea and its shores the doorstep of their house. In these conditions, where Britain tramples on the elementary rights and interests of the peoples of our federation, the Soviet government did not consider it possible to sign an agreement with a British citizen: fulfilling an agreement, let me repeat, presupposes a minimum of loyal relations between countries and governments.

From a speech to the 5th All-Russian Congress of

the Russian Communist League of Youth, 11th October 1922

(The Position of the Republic and the Tasks of Young Workers)

* * *

So far as concessions are concerned today, Comrade Lenin has here remarked: “Discussions are plentiful, concessions are scarce.” [Laughter] How to explain this? Precisely by the fact that there is not and there will not be any capitulation to capitalism on our part. To be sure, those who favour the resumption of relations with Soviet Russia have more than once contended and written that world capitalism, in the throes of its greatest crisis, is in need of Soviet Russia; Britain needs an outlet for her goods in Russia, Germany needs Russian grain, and so forth and so on. This seems perfectly true, if one surveys the world through pacifist spectacles, that is, from the standpoint of “plain horse sense” which is invariably quite pacifist. [Laughter] And that is why it is invariably bamboozled. One would then imagine that the British capitalist s would try with might and main to invest their funds in Russia; one would then imagine that the French bourgeoisie would orient German technology in this same direction so as to create new sources whereby German reparations could be paid. But we see nothing of the sort. Why not? Because we are living in an epoch when the capitalist equilibrium has been completely upset; because we live in an epoch when economic, political and military crises instantly criss-cross; an epoch of instability, uncertainty and unremitting alarm. This militates against the bourgeoisie conducting any long range policy, because such a policy immediately becomes transformed into an equation with too many unknowns. We finally succeeded in concluding a trade agreement with Britain. But this happened a year and half ago; in reality, all our transactions with Britain are still on a cash-and-carry basis; we pay with gold; and the question of concessions is still in the phase of discussion.

If the European bourgeoisie and above all the British bourgeoisie believed that large-scale collaboration with Russia would bring about immediately a serious improvement in Europe’s economic situation, then Lloyd George and Co. would undoubtedly have brought matters in Genoa to a different conclusion. But they are aware that collaboration with Russia cannot immediately bring any major and drastic changes. The Russian market will not eliminate British unemployment within a few weeks or even months. Russia can be integrated only gradually, as a constantly increasing factor, into Europe’s and the world’s economic life. Because of her vast extent, her natural resources, her large population and especially because of the stimulus imparted by her Revolution, Russia can become the most important economic force in Europe and in the world, but not instantaneously, not overnight, but only over a period of years. Russia could become a major buyer and supplier provided she were given credits today and, consequently, enabled to accelerate her economic growth. Within five or ten years she could become a major market for Britain. But in the latter event, the British government would have to believe that it could last ten years and that British capitalism would be strong enough ten years hence to retain the Russian market. In other words, a policy of genuine economic collaboration with Russia can only be a policy based on very broad foundations. But the whole point is that the post-war bourgeoisie is no longer capable of conducting long-range policies. It doesn’t know what the next day will bring and, still less, what will happen on the day after tomorrow. This is one of the symptoms of the bourgeoisie’s historical demise.

To be sure, this seems to be in contradiction with Leslie Urquhart’s attempt to conclude an agreement with us for not less than 99 years. But this contradiction is truly only an apparent one. Urquhart’s motivation is quite simple and, in its own way, unassailable; should capitalism survive in Britain and throughout the world for the next 99 years then Urquhart will keep his concessions in Russia, too! But what if the proletarian revolution erupts not 99 years or even 9 years from now but much earlier? What then? In that case, naturally, Russia would be the last place where the expropriated proprietors of the world could retain their property. But a man who is about to lose his head, has little cause to shed tears over his mop of hair.

From the report to the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International on

The New Economic Policy and the Perspectives for World Revolution, 14th November 1922.

* * *

Take a look at Britain. The conservative wing of capital is triumphant there. Having suppressed Ireland and stained her with blood while pursuing her age-old oppression in India, Britain is at this moment in Lausanne, attempting for a second time to bend and bring our friend Turkey to her knees. Under the pretext of a bogus freedom of the seas, Britain is demanding access to the shores of the Black Sea so as to keep them under the threat of her long-range artillery. What is more, Britain is busy fishing off our shores but depicts our attempt to protect our country’s vital economic interests as an assault on her interests. If that were not enough, Britain is also attempting to interfere in our internal life. She has the audacity to dictate to us on whom we should pass judgement and whom we should pardon. But let us who are gathered here on this May Day with our ranks closed say to everyone: hands off! we workers and peasants, and working and peasant women, are the masters here and we well know on whom to pass judgement and whom to pardon. From a speech at the Red Square Parade, Moscow, 1st May 1923.

* * *

At the Hague, several weeks after Genoa, respect towards our diplomacy had already diminished somewhat. After Genoa (which as you remember finished with nothing) our international situation (I am speaking all the while about the official situation, that is, about relations with bourgeois governments) began increasingly to deteriorate. Lord Curzon was by this time already counting on a new period of economic growth in Britain and throughout the world. By the laws of natural development, an economic crisis is usually succeeded by economic growth. At present economic advance in Europe has by no means reached pre-war levels, but the number of unemployed in Britain has nevertheless dropped sharply. In France it had not been great in the first place, while in America after an enormous crisis we can observe a general boom. During the past year very many major American trusts have on their own initiative raised wages so as to paralyse any strike movement in advance.

You will probably ask how our gracious correspondence with Lord Curzon will end. Comrades, I must admit in all conscience that I do not know and I am greatly afraid that at this moment Lord Curzon does not know either. He began at a time when, as I have said, it seemed that one push would be enough to bring us down. Seven weeks passed and nothing came down. He gave us a ten-day time limit then he added a few more days until Wednesday and finally by the Wednesday on the 13th or 14th day he wrote a new note, and in this latter note he asked us to reply as soon as possible and once and for all, but this time he did not set a time limit. It is to be hoped that our diplomacy will not abuse the patience of the very good Lord Curzon and reply at the first opportunity. But what will Lord Curzon answer to that? He was a minister in the Bonar Law government and the attempts to topple the Soviet government began under Bonar Law, but Bonar Law himself toppled first: between the two notes a change of government took place. It is said that the new one has a more conciliatory attitude towards us – I cannot take any responsibility for this report – that is what they say. So that the situation is that we are, as it were, sitting in a lottery and the number to be drawn is unknown: this best typifies the international situation and diplomatic activity and also the policy of the bourgeoisie, for it can pursue no consistent line and cannot predict the next day as it does not follow logically from the present. If we presume the worst, then a break in relations would of course be a serious blow to us, yet a blow we could survive.

From a report to the Moscow Provincial Congress of Metalworkers, 5th June 1923

* * *

The ultimatum of ten days (by Lord Curzon’s calendar) is an ultimatum which was presented on 8th May: today is the 16th of June, I believe; that is, the same amount of time has passed that the flood lasted according to the Bible, and the matter has still not been finally settled.

What, however, is the explanation for this ultimatum – which is a little imprecise with its time-limits – and what explains the great compliance shown by us in our reply to this ultimatum?

Here is has to be said clearly and distinctly: Britain, and, of course, I am speaking of ruling, bourgeois Britain, is remaining true to her traditional policy in this ultimatum. She regards her present struggle against us as in a certain sense the continuation of an overall struggle against Russia as a whole.

But what forms the fundamental line of British policy today? One should not forget that leading Great Britain is the most experienced bourgeoisie. Not that every one of its Curzons is a Solomon – that cannot be said at all – but all the Curzons have together accumulated over the centuries the collective wisdom, the collective experience and the collective treachery of the British ruling classes. The essence of Britain’s policy has always consisted of setting one stronger state against another weaker one and then staying on one side, and offering up prayers to the Lord of imperialism. This has been Britain’s traditional policy over a period of centuries.

Britain was likewise deeply hostile to Tsarist Russia. Britain is an ocean of water while Russia is an ocean of land which joins Europe to Asia. Britain strove to encircle every continent with the necklace of its ocean, but in Asia she always came into conflict with the rapacious imperialist ambitions of Russian Tsarism. During the Crimean War in 1855 Britain rallied to the side of Russia’s enemies. During the Russo-Turkish War in 1878 Britain was again on the side of Russia’s enemies. During the Russo-Japanese War Britain was on Japan’s side. Only in 1907 after the first Russian revolution did Britain’s policy change. Considering Russia to have been sufficiently weakened by her unsuccessful war with Japan, by the revolution and by internal disorder and so on, Britain concluded the Anglo-Russian agreement on the Persian question which formed the prelude to an Anglo-Russian alliance.

On the eve of the imperialist war Britain hesitated, comrades, when the British proletariat opens all the steel archives of British diplomacy (if those sly devils don’t destroy them) it will find conclusive proof that Great Britain wanted the imperialist war more than all the other states. If on 1st August Britain had said that she would go to war then neither Germany nor Austria-Hungary would have been dragged into the war but would have given way. If Britain had said that she would not go to war then neither Russia nor France would have begun to fight but would have come to an agreement. On the eve of the war Britain took a provocative stance and thus brought the war down on to the European continent. The same thing in relation to the Ruhr. If Britain had not wanted France to get bogged down in the Ruhr thereby weakening herself and exhausting Germany, then there would not have been a Ruhr story. Britain provoked it, Britain wanted it and now she stands on the side and watches, awaiting the moment for her intervention. Remaining aside and having the fire banked with the hands of others, that is the essence of the policy of the British bourgeoisie, the most treacherous in the world.

Remember the policy of Britain during the period of the interventions and blockades. All these facts are so fresh in our memories that I shall not enumerate them, although I will not conceal from you that as soon as I received the ultimatum, I instructed our war department here to compile a short list of what official Britain did to us during the first three years of interventions and blockades. In particular let me recall that during the imperialist war Russia lost 3,080,000 men but Britain lost 455,000: that is, six times less than Russia. In order that Lord Curzon might at the present moment consider himself powerful enough to present us with a ten-day ultimatum, the blood of over three million Russian workers and peasants had to be spilt for the glory of British imperialism. We shall present this account one day to the British bourgeoisie. After Britain’s victory had been assured by the death of over three million Russian peasants and workers, Britain inaugurated an era of interventions and blockades. The same policy both on a large and a small scale. Britain was not at war with us, but she did have her expeditionary units at Archangel and Murmansk. For what purpose? To mobilize Russian peasants and workers there in support of the White Guards, and to force them to fight the Red peasants and workers. In the North, in the Archangel-Murmansk region during the occupation Britain lost no more than ten to fifteen men, but she shot hundreds. British counter-intelligence there had its own favourite method: those whom it had any suspicion of being unsympathetic to the Russian bourgeoisie it simply dropped through the ice.

Now Britain is demanding compensation from us for two British citizens – a male and a female. They were occupied here on the most innocent matters: engaging in espionage, helping to blow up railways, assassinate Soviet public figures and so on. One of them suffered for it – he was shot (but this is a spy’s occupational hazard) while the other was put in prison. Now we have to pay out 30,000 [roubles] in gold for the lady and 70,000 as a pension to the dependents of the worthy gentleman. We must acknowledge Lord Curzon’s extreme moderation, for he is not demanding pensions in the case of the fifteen or thirty British who died in our north.

Two words about Britain’s role in the Caucasus. We still remember the story of the shooting down at a remote station of the 26 Bolsheviks who had been brought from Baku (they have gone down in history as the 26 Baku Commissars): this was carried out in accordance with the instructions of the British officer Teague-Jones and with the agreement of the British General Thompson. One day we shall demand pensions and damages for our 26 Baku comrades, of whom Comrade Shaumyan was an old revolutionary and a member of the Central Committee of our party.

There you have a schematic picture of Great Britain’s role in the imperialist and civil wars. Then a turn followed and we had a trade agreement with them. Why? Under the pressure of a most severe crisis and the search for a solution to it. Three million unemployed put a colossal burden on the British budget and Lloyd George had hoped first to aid the unemployed, and secondly to be the first to go into Russia and reorganize her with the aid of British capital; that is, economically shackle her and convert her into a colony. About two years of this trading policy have passed. What have they revealed? Above all that, economically speaking, we are developing more slowly than the impatient profiteers of the City would have liked and not along the line they had imagined. They had reckoned that the NEP was a capitulation by the Russian proletariat in the field of economic construction, but in actual fact it was not. On the other hand Britain’s economic situation has improved and Anglo-Russian economic relations are at the present moment not such a major factor in Great Britain’s general balance of trade ...

Nor have the Conservatives in Britain been elected for all time the Labour Party, that is British Menshevism, the British Liberals, and the Independents, in short everything needed to produce a British Kerenskyism or Milyukovism, all this has to replace the Conservatives whose right wing is formed by Lord Curzon’s group. This will be in a year or two. There can be no doubt that a victory of the Left Bloc in France will automatically bring about a strengthening of the reformist, Menshevik position in Britain.

In the year that remains before such changes, the extreme Conservative wing of the bourgeoisie will make an attempt to exploit a fascist war against Soviet Russia, which even today presents of course a fundamental danger in the eyes of the world bourgeoisie – and especially that of Britain. What did Lord Curzon’s task consist of when he presented us with an ultimatum? He hoped that in reply we would make a move which could be interpreted as a slap in the eye for the British government, and which would offend the public opinion of all the British philistines and narrow-minded petty-bourgeois., including both the philistines and the narrow-minded people of the British Labour Party – and their proportion is said to be pretty high. But we spotted this artless trap.

We had to force the philistines to understand how we saw things here and because their skulls are made of a material which takes a long time to penetrate, the ten-day time limit which Lord Curzon gave us was insufficient. That, comrades, is the explanation of our policy. Our job was to say: Lord Curzon is displaying magnanimity but we will display even more magnanimity; Lord Curzon is peaceably disposed but we are disposed even more peaceably; he does not want war but we trebly do not want it. That is the meaning of our reply.

Thus we engaged in diplomatic preparation, explained our position and managed to hammer something into them. The first formal result lies in the fact there will apparently be no rupture of relations; but I regard this result as minor because, given the nature of Lord Curzon – and his nature merely reflects the nature of the ruling groups of the British bourgeoisie – there can be no stability in our relations with Great Britain. judge for yourself: during the intervention we shot a British spy and forgot about it long ago. The trade agreement was signed after this. Now they declare to us: pay up the cash or we shall break off trade relations with you. Well, comrades, this is monstrous evidence of the fact that this clever, experienced British bourgeoisie has bad nerves, threatening us now with every kind of extortion and demand: it will go on doing so in the future. Therefore the current situation for us does not contain any great guarantees as regards stability.

The caution which we manifested on this question had good educational effects. It thwarted the schemes of the bourgeoisie for the present. But in no event can we have a complete peace, primarily because, as I have said, there remains an unstable situation in Europe and moreover a gigantic revolutionary process in the East which worries Britain particularly.

Of course the main point of the ultimatum was, in Curzon’s own definition, the so-called propaganda in the East. Curzon’s demand for ending propaganda in the East is, according to analyses by the more perceptive bourgeois journalists, an empty demand by its very nature, for it is not a question of this or that Soviet citizen turning up there or even occupying an official position and in this or that statement violating Britain’s right to exploit and plunder the peoples of the East, but of our country, as long as it behaves correctly on the national question, presenting the greatest mortal threat to any colonial might and especially the British.

There’s why Britain most of all is disturbed by the resolutions of our 12th Party Congress on the national question. We developed and refined our national policy and are adopting serious measures to implement all aspects of it and especially in such countries of the Soviet Union as Turkestan and Azerbaijan where it has a great demonstrative importance for the East ...

From a report to the 6th All-Russian Congress of Metalworkers, 16th June 1923

* * *

Comrades! Our most recent history begins with Lord Curzon’s ultimatum, so allow me to start with this historic fact.

Comrades, you will remember the contents of the ultimatum and you will remember that the history dragged on not for ten days but 41 or 42 days, and you will remember than on some very substantial points we gave way but on some other likewise very substantial ones we did not give way. In order to draw a balance, let us recall what exactly we conceded to Lord Curzon. In the first place we withdrew Comrade Weinstein’s letter which had not been written quite in total accordance with the textbook of etiquette. Secondly, on the question of fishing in the three or twelve-mile limit, we paid a due of respect to the long-range naval artillery of Great Britain and recognized her right to catch fish in the murky water beyond the three-mile limit. We paid out 100,000 roubles cash down. On the question of propaganda, we undertook with a clear conscience to do against Britain nothing worse than what she might do against us on the principle of the complete equality of the parties and I have no doubt, and nor will you, that our word is firm – we may not answer for Tsarist treaties but we fulfil our own in earnest.

On the question of recalling our two representatives, Comrade Raskolnikov from Afghanistan and Comrade Shumyatsky from Persia, we answered with a refusal. In his last note, or memorandum, Lord Curzon portrays matters as though we would still recall Raskolnikov for reasons of internal business or something of that nature. This was an obscure passage. Anyway we have not given anyone any commitments to this effect: if it is a matter of internal business it is of concern only to the Soviet government and no one else. As regards Shumyatsky, Lord Curzon proposed to leave him in Persia after having given him a severe reprimand. We accept this on the condition that a similar reprimand be given to the representative of Great Britain over there, and I can assure you, comrades, that he does need a little reprimanding.

That is the formal balance. On some substantial points we gave way, without any joy on our part, and on others we refused and the agreement was preserved. But if you try to draw up not a formal, diplomatic balance but a political balance, and ask yourself. as a result of this attempt to seize us by the throat with a ten-day ultimatum, did we become weaker or stronger? then I believe, comrades, that without bragging we can say we have become stronger. Not because we showed any finesse or diplomatic wisdom, but simply because the ten-day ultimatum not only failed to produce a capitulation from our side but turned into just over 40 days of negotiations which led to concessions, and it all boiled down to a rotten compromise between mighty Great Britain and the Soviet Union ...

The British and French bourgoisies are today ruling through their extreme right wing, but they feel it necessary to re-form and reconstruct themselves. In France, a shift towards the Left Bloc and in Britain to the Labour Party would almost inevitably signify recognition of the Soviet Union, and consequently the liquidation of our revolution recedes into the misty distance. But if this is so, the Fascists and Fochists (after our friend, General Foch), i.e. two parties which have identical feelings towards us, will argue: why, in the period still remaining, while imperialism has not yet spent all its energies (in Italy the Fascists have just triumphed and a coup has taken place in Bulgaria), why can’t we have a go at overthrowing Soviet Russia?

There, comrades, is the basic reason for Lord Curzon’s attempt to put us on our knees (and if possible to lay us out on the floor) by his ultimatum. We know of course that today Lord Curzon cannot send a single expeditionary corps or a single British regiment to Archangel, the Murmansk or Odessa. Such an act would provoke the deepest indignation of the proletarian masses in Britain, and the Labour Party on coming to power would be forced to respond to such indignation. Lord Curzon was banking on his ultimatum inciting some other country against us. He was counting on our close neighbours. Let us name them: Rumania and Poland ...

That, comrades, is what explains the Curzon ultimatum and the failure of the ultimatum. But if we digress from diplomacy – from the withdrawal of the letters, and from the 100,000 pieces of silver, which is after all a sum which even our modest budget can manage somehow – if we digress and weigh up the political result then you get this picture: the most powerful imperialist state in Europe had tolerated us, but finally presented us with an ultimatum hoping thereby to bring matters to a decisive conclusion. During the course of this ultimatum the government in Britain changed, while even within the government there was a conflict over it. The business dragged on and ended up with us paying 100,000 roubles for two agents and we forwent what in the language of bourgeois diplomacy is called “prestige”, but as our concept of prestige does not quite coincide with Lord Curzon’s we set a different price on this imponderable quantity. We have become stronger and more powerful and this is emphasized most sharply by the fact that we have undertaken negotiations, for the time being of a preliminary nature, with Japan, that mighty imperialist power in the Far East which, though linked with the Entente and linked with Great Britain, agreed to negotiations in the very same period as the Curzon ultimatum ...

From a speech to party, trade union, Young Communist and other organizations

of the Krasnaya Presnya district (Moscow), 25th June 1923.

The Revolutionary Crisis in Germany

I said that Britain might intervene. But on this score one must at once clearly understand Britain’s impotence on the continent of Europe. It is important to understand this not only for the German revolution but also for ourselves: Britain is impotent on the continent of Europe. The more clearly we understand this and the more forcefully and distinctly we repeat it, the more useful it will be for our international policy, in the sense that Britain will brandish her threats and ultimatums around less. In point of fact Britain is a purely maritime state. She has played an enormous role in Europe. But how and when? Whenever there were two countries in Europe fighting each other for mastery. When France was fighting Germany with approximately equal forces Britain stood behind their back, supporting over a long period first one, and then the other. This had been so even earlier when Spain was strong; she would in this way first assist her and then weaken her. Britain has been playing such a role for many centuries now. She uses the struggle between the two major European states and supports the slightly weaker one with money, technical assistance and materials against the stronger one. And the European balance depends on Britain. She. as it were, gets a lot of fun for little cost. That is her age-old policy. Why did Britain intervene in the war in 1914? Because Germany had become too strong. Germany had here become so strong that Britain could not achieve a balance just by giving assistance to France. So Britain had to depart from her traditional policy. Now she had to roll up her sleeves and get involved in a war and a struggle. She managed this by mobilizing quite a large number of British workers and throwing them onto the European continent. Consequently she supported France so strongly that the latter finally crushed Germany. So now the hegemony in bourgeois Europe belongs exclusively to France. Germany is prostrate at France’s feet and France does not wish even to talk to Germany about the terms of Germany’s capitulation. But from the very moment that France had obtained complete hegemony and complete mastery Britain was rendered completely impotent. France declared: “I will take the Ruhr”. Britain replied: “that is not to my benefit”. They had a big row which went on a long time. Why was it not to Britain’s benefit? Because she needed to raise Germany up a little against France so as to restore the equilibrium. So what did France do? Curzon’s protests notwithstanding, France went into the Ruhr and took the Ruhr. And what did terrible Britain do? She resigned herself. Terrible Britain threatened Turkey, and the Turks who enjoy good-neighbourly relations with us organized an army, and not without our assistance.

What did Britain do? She counterposed the Greeks to them. She had absolutely no forces of her own. What did the Turks do? They smashed the Greeks and marched to Constantinople against the terrible Britain who had packed up and left Constantinople.

Comrades, from the standpoint of international relations this is a most important fact of the epoch in which we are living. On the European continent Britain is impotent. Of course we are not complaining about this.

What can Britain do to the German revolution? Deliver an ultimatum? But this would be inadequate. In fact the question can be reduced to France’s conduct, not Britain’s, Thus if France decides to intervene then Britain could be useful to France by assisting her with the money that she needs, by blockading German ports and shipping and so on. Britain’s role has been one of a quartermaster and pirate. But the decisive role in an occupation of Germany would belong to France and her land-based vassals Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia ...

From a report to the 8th All-Russian Congress of

the Communications Union, 20th October 1923

* * *

But the German revolution will not be decided by the inner relation of forces alone. Germany is situated in a capitalist encirclement and a victorious German revolution would have to leap out of it. This encirclement is formed principally out of France, Belgium, across the Channel Britain, Poland and Czechoslovakia. These are the decisive states. There are in addition Austria, Switzerland, Holland. They will not play an active part, but of course if the big neighbours decide to follow a policy of suffocation then the little ones will be able to help by pulling the ends of the rope. But we must take account of the conduct of the chief imperialist states. Let us start with Britain. Yesterday I was speaking to the metalworkers about this and let me say again now that Britain is today powerless on the continent. Britain delivered an ultimatum to us and we made this or that concession not because she could have routed us, but because we were interested in maintaining our economic relations. This powerlessness of Britain appears to contradict the conception of her as an extremely rich country, a strong maritime power with her Stock Exchange, her City and her Navy, although in this latter respect she has a great rival in the shape of the United States. But Britain was strong on the continent only so long as there were two equally matched land powers fighting in Europe. Britain always supported the weaker against the stronger. If the weaker outgrew the stronger then Britain would change her sympathies. By adding her weight to the scale pan of Europe’s destiny she would thereby decide it. By intervening directly in the 1914 war she broke violently with her own traditions and put a big army on the continent because Germany had too far outgrown France. You know that the patriotic British trade unions have always maintained pacifist ideas, at least with regard to land wars, for their leaders were more inclined to live off their fatherland than to die for it. These pacifists only supported their government with great reluctance. During the war Britain helped France too energetically and France emerged the hegemon (the master of the situation) in Europe. Now whenever Britain attempts to intervene in European affairs, France doesn’t give a damn. We can see this in the case of the Ruhr. British diplomacy first protested and then gave in. An even more striking case was her policy in relation to Turkey. Britain declared Turkey to be an enemy of the human race. So what resulted? When Turkey (I mean Ankara) began to get to her feet, what could Britain do? She counterposed Greece to her. Turkey smashed Greece. In the end Britain left Constantinople and the Turks entered. Britain’s impotence on the continent was obvious.

Naturally the most avowed enemy of the German revolution will be none other than the British bourgeoisie. She has more than once previously formed a coalition against revolution, as for instance at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. But Britain’s arms are short. She is not a land power. She could only support France, if the latter took the path of intervention, by blockading German ports and delivering supplies and so on to the occupying armies.

From a report to a conference of political workers

in the Red Army and Navy, 21st October 1923.

The Foreign Policy of the First Labour Government

Of course we cannot demand we are resorting to violence, upon taking power in his hands MacDonald embarked on the construction of five new cruisers much from MacDonald: he is not a Bolshevik, he cannot take the bourgeoisie by the throat, he cannot take its banks. But in Britain, in democratic, advanced, cultured Britain, there exists to this day a monarchy. Couldn’t we at least demand from MacDonald as a leader of the Second International and a most influential Menshevik, that on coming to power he would take a broom and sweep the cobwebs out of his monarchy? But it seems that the Second International wages a struggle for democracy only as long as this struggle is directed against the dictatorship of the working class. But when it is a matter of sweeping out the old medieval trash and garbage, democracy ceases to be important.

In spite of his repeated declarations against war and his accusations that we are resorting to violence, upon taking power in his hands MacDonald embarked on the construction of five new cruisers. A tank-building programme is in full swing. The air force is developing rapidly. Yet if MacDonald had devoted himself to abolishing the monarchy, abolishing the House of Lords, and halting the construction of cruisers, he would make a great saving of millions of pounds which could be used for schools, workers’ housing, unemployment benefit and so on ...

Imagine, comrades, the talks that are to be held in London. What will our representatives say? Obviously they will talk about the riches of the USSR, the surplus of raw materials that we have, raw materials so vital to the British people. In Britain there is technical equipment and enormous capital funds. Our delegates will therefore propose the following agreement to the British: “Give us capital and we will pay for this with our raw materials, our natural resources – in ten years we shall both be ten to twenty times richer.”

Of course we would be able to come to an agreement with the British workers if there were people in the British government with backbone, character and will who were not afraid of the bellowing of the British bourgeoisie. Given these conditions we could conclude an excellent agreement with a British Labour government, and British workers would have good cheap bread and the peasants of Russia, Transcaucasia and Azerbaijan would have British machinery, manufactures and technical resources for the development of our handicrafts, industry and so on. Such an alliance would not be in any way unrealistic but is hampered by the fact that there is not a strong Communist Party in Britain.

Under the sway of the British Labour government are millions of oppressed Indians and Egyptians. The duty of an honest revolutionary party is to give the oppressed the right to self-determination. Does MacDonald do so? No. Through his administrators he is conducting a struggle against revolutionaries in India and thus his e has become one of the most hated to the colonial working masses.

What demands will MacDonald present? Curzon stated in the House of Lords that Britain’s recognition of the USSR would be a mistake unless Britain received her old debts from us. But these debts are £130 million for pre-war debts, £500 million for war debts and I think £150 or £180 million due to individual British citizens who suffered during the October revolution. I managed somehow to add up these figures and they come to about 10,000 million gold roubles.

We will completely refuse the demands of the British moneylenders for the settlement of old debts by the USSR. A business-like economic link with Great Britain must begin with a clean slate and the past has to be buried. If Britain demands compensation for the murder of the two spies, then we should present a counter-claim for the murder of the 26 Baku commissars and for the destruction of our towns and villages carried out with the aid of British gold. We will not repay old debts, incurred before us. As early as 1905 we warned through the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies that we would not repay Tsarist debts. But if we received a loan from Britain signed by representatives of the trade unions of the USSR, then of course we shall repay these loans in full, for the prestige and honour of our workers’ and peasants’ country is very dear to us.

We need not speak about the firmness of MacDonald’s position for his party has compromised itself sufficiently in the eyes of the British workers: this will provide a powerful impulse to the development and growth of the Communist Party in Britain.

From a speech to the Baku Soviet, 14th April 1924

* * *

You ask whether the British press is correct to regard my Tbilisi speech as an attack on Britain, or rather on MacDonald. I do not know what you mean by an attack. MacDonald has repeatedly attacked the Soviet system and the tactics of the Communist Party. Only recently MacDonald stated as one of the leaders of the Second International that he had fought Moscow and had beaten Moscow. We reserve the same right of criticism of MacDonald’s policy as he reserves in regard to us.

It is well known that MacDonald and his party made bitter accusations against us over our policy in regard to Georgia. I have just returned from that country and I greatly regret that MacDonald is, in view of his past, deprived of the opportunity of visiting Georgia to be convinced on the spot of the mood of the workers and peasants. I doubt whether the mood of the workers and peasants of India or Egypt can be set alongside that reigning in Georgia and Azerbaijan. I permitted myself to express this view in Tbilisi and in Baku.

MacDonald has on various occasions sharply censured us for violating the methods of formal democracy. As a matter of fact we set the rule of the working class above formal democracy. But it did seem that we were right to expect that MacDonald and his party would set precisely such a democracy above all else. In our conception the existence of a monarchy and a House of Lords contradicts democracy. Although the real rule of the toilers is for us higher than formal democracy, we do consider formal democracy a step forward in comparison with the monarchy and the aristocracy. This too I permitted myself to observe in both speeches, in Tbilisi and Baku.

Allow me to put another question: does MacDonald’s criticism of the Soviet system and communist policy signify hostility to our Union?

The tempo and the forms in which the conflict between the Third and the Second Internationals will be resolved is a great historical question. I think that Mr. MacDonald is somewhat mistaken to say that he has beaten Moscow. He has beaten a great deal if he has beaten this last-born child. But I do not at all see why extremely serious and long-standing disagreements over the Soviet system, the revolutionary dictatorship, the British monarchy and the Church need prevent us establishing broad economic links of equal benefit to either side.

An interview with a representative of

the International News Service, 18th April 1924

* * *

Certainly our situation would be ten times, a hundred times easier if in Britain there was a revolutionary workers’ government. It would grant us, on the basis of a comradely business-like agreement, a very substantial credit. We should be immediately able to increase our production, flood the market with all kinds of goods for the peasants’ use, and in five years raise the level of our agriculture. What would that mean for Britain? It would mean abundant and cheap grain, timber, hides, flax and all kinds of raw material. The British people, the working people – that is to say nine-tenths of the total population of Britain – as also the people of the Soviet Union, would benefit to an extraordinary degree from such business-like co-operation, and we, comrades, would be able in a few years to rise to the summit of economic well-being, to a height from which we are still very, very distant. Alas, I do not believe that the present government of Britain, a Menshevik government, is capable of taking such a bold, decisive step.

No, we shall have to learn, for several years yet before the coming to real victory of the proletariat, in the main to stand on our own feet. This means that we shall advance, but slowly. We shall be frank with ourselves about this. And when the bourgeois newspapers ask us, and me in particular: “Suppose our ruling classes don’t grant you a loan – what will that mean? The collapse of Russia? The collapse of the Soviet power?” – we shall answer them: “How can a gigantic country of 130 million people, who have been awakened for the first time by the revolution, where the young are learning to think critically – how can such a country collapse? A country with inexhaustible natural resources like ours cannot collapse and will not collapse.”

The bourgeois press of London, we are told by the latest news telegrams, quotes our speeches, in particular my own, as evidence that by our sharp criticism we wish to break off negotiations. That is a slander. An agreement with the British people will be a good thing for us and for the British people. But if the British bourgeoisie think that we shall say: “Help, we are collapsing!” – if the British bourgeoisie think we shall agree to any conditions they care to impose, then the British bourgeoisie are wrong.

We have already raised ourselves the two or three first steps and have already shown ourselves and others that we are able to work, to advance the economy and culture of our country. And, if I could, I would say to the City, that centre of London, to its banks and bankers, to the MacDonald government, to all the ruling circles of Britain: here, take a look at these, our young generation, the flower of the working class. They are learning to work and to think. Our young generation has passed through the furnace of October, it has grown up in the great school of Lenin. We and our country, so rich in natural wealth, will not perish. With your aid we shall go forward faster, and that will be a great gain for you. Without you we shall go forward slower, but go forward we will, and the reign of labour will come to triumph in our country.

From a speech on the fifth anniversary of The Communist Young Workers Home, 29 April 1924

(Young People, Study Politics!)

* * *

We can now see a further example – that of the government of the British trade unions, the government of the Labour Party, that is a government of the Amsterdam and the Second Internationals. And the “Amsterdam” military budget of the British government? – I have worked it out, not a difficult job, since you only have to put together three parts: the army budget, the naval budget and the air force budget. In all it comes to £115 million which, translated into roubles, comes to 1,150 million gold roubles. Not a scrap less it would appear, but in fact 10 to 15 million gold roubles more than last year, that is, more than the budget of the Conservative government of Britain, and some four if not five times more than our Soviet budget! When this budget was placed before the British parliament, there happened to be present some naive MPs of this same Labour Party who threw up their hands and asked how this could be linked with the puritan pacifism of the Labour Party? and there was a member of this same party, one Mr. Guest – I have not heard this surname before – who at that very moment nodding in the direction of Moscow, said (I have quoted this once already) “and what about Moscow’s militarism?” Comrades, permit me to give you a quotation from an old speech of Vladimir llyich [Lenin]. He made it on just this very same question against our Mensheviks on 13th March 1919: “A certain Prussian monarch in the 18th century made a very wise remark: ‘If our soldiers understood what we are fighting for, then we would not be able to wage a single war more’. The old Prussian monarch was no fool.” But we are now in a position to say in comparing our situation with that of this monarch: “We can wage a war because the masses know what they are fighting for.” And moreover: “there are some stupid people who howl about red militarism. Really, what a ghastly crime! The imperialists of the whole world fling themselves upon the Russian Republic to strangle it, and we set about creating an army which for the first time in history knows what it is fighting for and what it is making sacrifices for, and which is successfully resisting a numerically superior enemy, while each month brings nearer the resistance of the world revolution on a hitherto unseen scale. And they condemn this as red militarism! I repeat: either they are idiots not standing up to political analysis, or they are political knaves.” And further on a few lines lower down, he says again still more sharply and bluntly: “We have a position where only the filthiest and lowest political crooks can utter strong words and accuse us of red militarism.” V1adimir llyich liked to express himself simply, clearly and sharply. And so in London, we find a so-called Labour MP, who knows that it was not the Red Army which made a landing on the Thames but British forces which landed on the banks of the Northern Pechora and other rivers; who knows that British officers took part in the Yaroslavl uprising and in other bloody acts; we find a so-called Labour MP who, in answer to the reproach that it is you who are building five new cruisers and new minesweepers and it is you who are expanding the Curzon programme for light tanks and are enlarging your air force and navy endlessly, says: “But look, over there in Moscow, isn’t there some militarism being started up?” It is not surprising if after these words you go to the quotation from Ilyich where it is said that only the dirtiest and lowest of political crooks can make this sort of accusation of red militarism.

From a speech to the Moscow Soviet, 29th April 1924

(May Day in the East and West)

Anglo-American Rivalry and the Growth of Militarism

The basic world antagonism occurs along the line of the conflict of interests between the United States and Britain. Why? Because Britain is still the wealthiest and most powerful country, second only to the United States. It is America’s chief rival, the main obstacle on its path. If Britain should be squeezed, or undermined, or, all the more so, battered down, what would then remain? The United States will, of course, dispose easily of Japan. America holds all the trumps: finances and iron and oil, political advantages in relations with China, which is, after all, being “liberated” from Japan. America is always liberating somebody, that’s her profession. [Laughter, applause]

The main antagonism is between the United States and Britain. It is growing and approaching ever closer. The British bourgeoisie has not been feeling so well since the first years of Versailles. They know the value of ringing coin; they have had great experience in this connection. And they cannot have failed to notice that the dollar now outweighs the pound sterling. They know that this preponderance inescapably finds its expression in politics. The British bourgeoisie has completely demonstrated the power of the pound sterling in international politics, and it now senses that the era of the dollar is dawning. It seeks consolation, and tries to console itself with illusions, The most serious British newspapers say: “Yes, the Americans are very rich, but they remain, in the last analysis, provincials. They do not know the paths of world politics. We British have had far more experience. The Yankees need our advice and our leadership. And we British will guide these provincial relatives of ours, who have suddenly grown so rich on the paths of world politics; and naturally we shall retain the corresponding position, while collecting a fee in the bargain.”

There is, of course, a modicum of truth in this. I have already mentioned my doubts about the senatorial knowledge of European geography. I am sincerely uncertain about it. Yet in order to do big things in Europe, it does not hurt to possess a knowledge of European geography. But how difficult is it for a possessing class to learn the sciences? We know that it is not at all difficult for the bourgeoisie, grown quickly rich, to learn the sciences. The sons of the lapti-wearing Morozovs and Mamontovs bear a striking resemblance to hereditary nobles. It is the oppressed class, the proletariat, that finds it difficult to rise, develop and conquer all the elements of culture. But for a possessing class, especially one so fabulously rich as the American bourgeoisie, this is not at all hard. They will find, train or buy specialists in all fields. The American is just beginning to take stock of his world importance, but is not yet fully cognizant of it. His American “consciousness” still lags behind his American and world “being”. The whole question must be approached not from the standpoint of a cross section of the present-day situation but in its proper perspective. And this is a perspective not in terms of many long decades but rather in terms of a few brief years.

This Babylonian tower of American economic might must find its expression in everything, and it is already expressing itself, but not yet fully by far. What capitalist Europe has now at its disposal in world politics is the heritage of its former economic power, its old international influence which no longer corresponds to today’s material conditions. America has not yet learned to realize her power in life. That is true. But she is learning quickly, on the bones and flesh of Europe. America still needs Britain as a guide on the paths of world politics. But not for long.

We know how swiftly a possessing class, in its ascent, alters its character, its appearance and its methods of operation. Let us take, for example, the German bourgeoisie. Was it so long ago that the Germans were considered shy, blue-eyed dreamers, a people of “poets and thinkers”? A few decades of capitalist development transfigured the German bourgeoisie into the most aggressive armour-clad imperialist class. True, the settlement came very quickly. And the character of the German bourgeois again underwent a change. Today on the European arena, they are rapidly assimilating all the customs and usages of beaten curs.

The British bourgeoisie is more serious. Their character has been moulded in the course of centuries. Class self-esteem has entered into their blood and marrow, their nerves and bones. It will be much harder to knock the self-confidence of world rulers out of them. But the American will knock it out just the same, when he gets seriously down to business.

In vain does the British bourgeois console himself that he will serve as guide for the inexperienced American. Yes, there will be a transitional period. But the crux of the matter does not lie in the habits of diplomatic leadership but in actual power, existing capital and industry. And the United States, if we take its economy, from oats to big battleships of the latest type, occupies the first place. They product all the living necessities to the extent of one-half to two-thirds of what is produced by all mankind.

Oil, which now plays such an exceptional military and industrial role, totals in the United States two-thirds of the world output, and in 1923 it had even reached approximately 72 per cent. To be sure, they complain a lot about the threats of the exhaustion of their oil resources. In the initial post-war years, I confess I thought that these plaints were merely a pious cover for coming encroachments on foreign oil. But geologists actually do affirm that American oil at the current rate of consumption will, according to some, last twenty-five years, according to others, forty years. But in twenty-five or forty years, America with her industry and fleet will be able to take away oil from all the others ten times over again. [Laughter] There is hardly any need for us, comrades, to spend sleepless nights over it. [Applause]

The world position of the United States is expressed in figures which are irrefutable. Let me mention a few of the most important ones. The United States produces one-fourth of the world wheat crop; more than one-third of the oats; approximately three-fourths of the world maize crop; one-half of the world coal output; about one-half of the world’s iron ore; about 60 per cent of its pig iron; 60 per cent of the steel; 60 per cent of the copper; 47 per cent of the zinc. American railways constitute 36 per cent of the world railway network; its merchant navy, virtually non existent prior to the war, now comprises more than 25 per cent of the world tonnage; and, finally, the numbers of motor cars operating in the trans-Atlantic republic amounts to 84.4 per cent of the world total! While in the production of gold the United States occupies a relatively modest place (14 percent), thanks to its favourable trade balance, 44.2 per cent of the world’s gold reserve has collected in its vaults. The national income of the United States is two and a half times greater than the combined national incomes of Britain, France, Germany and Japan. These figures decide everything. They will cut a road for themselves on land, on sea and in the air.

What do these figures presage for Great Britain? Nothing good. They signify one thing: Britain will not escape the common lot of capitalist countries. America will place her on rations. Whether Lord Curzon likes it or not, he will have to accept rations. This is our 6ultimatistic’ message to him from here. But we must also add: When Britain’s position becomes such as to compel her openly to accept rations, this will not be performed directly by Lord Curzon – he will not be suitable, he is too unruly. No, this will be entrusted to a MacDonald. [Applause] The self-esteem of the politicians of the British bourgeoisie is not such as to make them amenable to the transference of the greatest empire in the world to the meagre foundations of American rations. Required here will be the benign eloquence of MacDonald, Henderson and the Fabiansin order to exert pressure on the British bourgeoisie and to convince the British workers: “Are we, then, actually to engage in war with America? No, we stand for peace, for agreements.” And what does agreement with Uncle Sam, mean? The foregoing figures speak eloquently enough on this score. Accept rations. That’s the only agreement for you, there is no other. If you refuse, get ready for war.

Britain has up to now retreated step by step before America. Before our very eyes, it is still fresh in our memory, President Harding invited Britain, France and Japan to Washington and in the calmest way offered Britain – what? That Britain limit her fleet. No more, no less.

Yet before the war it was Britain’s doctrine that her navy must be more powerful than the combined fleets of the next two strongest naval powers. The United States has put an end to this, once and for all, In Washington, Harding began, as is customary, by invoking the “awakened consciousness of civilization,” and he ended by telling Britain that she must accept rations. You will take five units; I will take (meanwhile) five units; France, three units; Japan, three units. Whence these proportions? Before the war the American fleet was much weaker than Britain’s. In the course of the war, it grew enormously. And therewith, whenever the British write with alarm concerning the American navy, the American naval writers reply by demanding: “What did we build our navy for? Why, it was to defend your British isles from the German submarines.”

That is why, mind you, they built their fleet. But it is useful for other purposes too. But why did the United States resort to this naval limitation programme at Washington? Not because they are unable to build warships fast enough, and the biggest battleships, at that. No, in this respect no one can match them. But it is not possible to create, train and educate the necessary cadres of sailors in a brief period. For this, time is required. Here is the source of the ten-year breathing space projected in Washington. In defending the programme limiting the construction of battleships, the American naval journals wrote: “If you so much as dare to balk at an agreement, we shall turn out warships like so many pancakes.” The reply of the leading British naval periodical was approximately as follows: “We are ourselves in favour of pacifist agreements. Why do you keep threatening us?’

This already expresses the new psychology of ruling Britain. It is growing accustomed to the fact that it is necessary to submit to America, and that the most important thing is to demand ... polite treatment. This is the most that the European bourgeoisie can expect from America on the morrow.

In the competition between Britain and the United States, only retreats are possible for Britain. At the price of these retreats, British capitalism buys the right to participate in the deals of American capitalism. Thus a coalition Anglo-American capitalism seemingly arises. Britain saves face, and does so not unprofitably, for Britain derives substantial profits from it. But it receives them at the price of retreating and clearing the way for America. The United States is strengthening her world positions; Britain’s are growing weaker.

Only the other day, Britain renounced the previously adopted plan of reinforcing Singapore. It is too bad we have no map here. Singapore and Hong Kong mark the most important high-ways of imperialism. Singapore is the key between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It represents one of the most important bases of British policy in the Far East. But in the Pacific, Britain can conduct her policy either with Japan against America, or with America against Japan. Huge sums were appropriated for the fortification of Singapore. And MacDonald had to decide: with America against Japan or with Japan against America? And so, he renounced the fortification of Singapore.

This is not, of course, the last word of British imperialist policy. The question can come up again for a new decision. But at the given moment it is the beginning of Britain’s renunciation of an independent policy – or an alliance with Japan – in the Pacific. And who ordered Britain (yes, ordered!) to break the alliance with Japan? America. A formal ultimatum was issued: break the alliance with Japan. And Britain broke. Meanwhile, Britain is conceding and retreating.

But does this mean that this is how matters will proceed to the very end, and that war between them is excluded? In no case. On the contrary, at the cost of concessions today Britain is buying only redoubled difficulties on the morrow. Under the cover of collaboration, contradictions of unprecedented explosive power are accumulating. Things not only can but also must come to war, because it will be extremely difficult for Britain to move to a secondary position and to roll up her empire. At a certain point, she will be compelled to mobilize all her forces in order to resist with arms in hand. But in an open struggle, too, so far as it is possible to foresee, all the odds are on America’s side.

Britain is an island and America is likewise an island of a sort, but much larger. Britain is completely dependent in her day-to-day existence on countries beyond the ocean. But the American “insular” continent contains everything that is necessary for existence and for the conduct of war. Britain has colonial possessions on many seas and America will “liberate” them. Having begun the war with Britain, America will summon hundreds of millions of Indians to rise in defence of their inalienable national rights. The same summons will be issued to Egypt and Ireland – there is no lack of those who can be called upon to free themselves from the yoke of British capitalism. just as today America, in order to drain the living juices from Europe, comes to the fore draped in the toga of pacifism, so in the war with Britain she will step out as the great emancipator of the colonial peoples.

Mother history has made things easy for American capitalism: for every act of rapine, there is a liberating slogan ready at hand. With regard to China, it is the “Open Door” policy! Japan seeks to dismember China and to subjugate certain provinces by military force, because there is no iron in Japan, no coal, no oil. These constitute three colossal minuses in Japan’s struggle with the United States. For this reason Japan seeks through seizure to assure herself of the riches of China. But the United States? It says: “Open Door in China.”

With regard to oceans, what does America have to say? “Freedom of the seas!” This rings superbly. But what does it mean in action? It means: Get over to one side, Britain’s navy, make room for me! “Open Door in China” means: Stand aside, Japan, and let me pass! It is essentially a question of economic seizures, of robberies. But because of the specific conditions of US development, this travail appears at one time under the guise of pacifism, and at another, it almost assumes a liberating aspect.

Naturally, Britain, too, possesses great advantages which derive from her entire past history. First and foremost, she disposes of powerful bases of support and the strongest naval bases in the world. America doesn’t have that. But, in the first place, it is possible to create all this, secondly, it is possible to take all this away, piecemeal and by force, and thirdly and lastly, Britain’s bases are bound up with her colonial rule and are vulnerable for just this reason. America will find allies and helpers all over the world – the strongest power always finds them – and together with these allies, America will find the necessary bases.

If, at the present time, the United States binds Canada and Australia to herself through the slogan of defending the white race against the yellow – and in this way justifies her right to naval supremacy – then, on the. next stage, which may come very soon, these virtuous Presbyterians may announce that, in the last analysis, the yellow-skinned peoples are likewise created in God’s image and are consequently entitled to replace the colonial rule of Britain by the economic domination of America. In a war against Britain the United States would be in a highly favourable position, since it could from the very first day issue a summons to the Indians, the Egyptians and other colonial peoples to rise up, and could assist them with arms and supplies.

Britain will have to think ten times before deciding on war. But, in avoiding war, she will be compelled to retreat step by step under the pressure of American capitalism. The conduct of war requires the Lloyd Georges and the Churchills; the MacDonalds are required for the conduct of retreats without a battle.

What has been said about the. interrelations of the United States and Britain also applies, with corresponding changes and, so to speak, in miniature to Japan, and on a truly minute scale to France and other second-rate European powers. What is at stake in Europe? Alsace-Lorraine, the Ruhr, the Saar territory, Silesia, that is, some tiny area of land, some petty strips. In the meantime, America is drafting a plan to place everybody on rations.

In contrast to Britain, America is not preparing to create an American army, and American administration for the colonies including Europe. It will “allow” them to preserve at home a reformist, pacifist, toothless order, with the assistance of the Social Democracy, with the help of the (French) Radicals and other middle-class parties and at the expense of their respective peoples. And it will extort from them blessings (up to a certain time) for not having violated their “independence.” This is the plan of American capitalism and this is the programme on the basis of which the Second International is being resuscitated.

This American “pacifist” programme of putting the whole world under her control is not at all a programme of peace. On the contrary, it is pregnant with wars and the greatest revolutionary paroxysms. Not for nothing does America continue to expand her fleet. She is busily engaged in building light and fast cruisers. And when Britain protests in a whisper, America replies: You must bear in mind that I not only have a five to five relationship with you, but also a five to three relationship with Japan, and the latter possesses an inordinate number of light cruisers which makes it necessary for me to restore a balance.

America chooses the largest multiplicand and then multiplies it by her Washington coefficient. And the others cannot vie with her, because, as the Americans themselves say, they can turn out warships like so many pancakes.

The perspective this offers is one of preparation for the greatest international dogfight, with both the Atlantic and the Pacific as the arena, provided, of course, the bourgeoisie is able to retain its world rule for any considerable length of time. For it is hard to conceive that the bourgeoisie of all countries will docilely withdraw to the background, and become converted into America’s vassals without putting up a fight; no, this is hardly likely. The contradictions are far too great; the appetites are far too insatiable; the urge to perpetuate ancient rule is far too potent; Britain’s habits of world rule are far too ingrained. There will inevitably be military collisions. The era of “pacifist” Americanism that seems to be opening up at this time is only laying the groundwork for new wars on an unprecedented scale and of unimaginable monstrosity.

From a speech to the Society of Friends of the Physics

and Mathematics Faculties, 28th July 1924 (Perspectives of World Development)

* * *

If we were to look for some elements of stability in the present unstable shaky era of historical development then possibly the only stable element is the uninterrupted, automatic growth of militarism. In Europe today we are observing a change of parliamentary regimes. Elections in Britain and forthcoming elections in Germany. MacDonald’s government was the first so-called Labour government in Britain. Who will replace it? Most likely the Conservatives, far less probably MacDonald will return. Let us not make guesses – that is not the object of the report I wish to make today – but one thing we can say without fear of error: whoever returns to power over the British Empire the automatic growth of militarism is assured ...

The United States was a non-militarist country until recently. An abrupt turning point came with the imperialist war. The United States intervened at the end of the war and they achieved what they needed in that war. i.e. they routed Germany at the end, which Britain, the chief obstacle in the USA’s path to world dominion did not desire. Britain needed a weakened but not a routed Germany – against France, but the United States needed a powerful France against Britain ...

Thus let me say there are processes of two kinds: basic and secondary; from the standpoint of policy we cannot avoid taking temporary processes into account too.

MacDonald appeared. It was no accident that he appeared either! We attempted to conclude a treaty with him but did not complete it – complications in MacDonald’s own career impeded that. Curzon has come back and we shall hold talks with Curzon as well. All these are processes of a secondary and tertiary nature but the basic one is the growth of contradictions, the frantic growth of militarism, the desperate situation of the productive forces and the preparation for a world bloodbath.

From a speech to supply units of the Red Army, 25th October 1924

(The Growth of World Militarism and Our Military Tasks)

* * *

They have concluded an international “pact” under which Britain has now become something of a Justice of the Peace for Europe. Britain must see that France does not upset Germany but so as Germany does not upset France. Britain represents a guarantor – again just a word like “pact” – for the inviolability of frontiers. However less cautious diplomats now and again add that though this is a pact for peace it is for a peace only for civilized, democratic, pious states, and that this pact has an edge which is directed against that impious, undemocratic, un-peace-loving state which is called the Soviet Union. When recently our press began with its characteristic impoliteness to denounce them, saying: you, Messrs. diplomats, are all hypocrites, for all your pact is a criminal deal in order in the first place to plunder the colonies, in the second to obtain American capital and in the third to oppose the Soviet Union, leading diplomats replied that it was in no way against the Soviet Union; for if she comes to her senses, takes a proper attitude to us, and is so good as to complain to the League of Nations, we will have a seat ready for her there, and so on.

But these gentlemen cannot add two and two together. For only just recently ministers of the Britain who was appointed to act as Europe’s Justice of the Peace, expressed their opinion about us very sharply. I have with me here some newspaper cuttings to this effect. Joynson-Hicks, the British Home Secretary, stated: “I cannot believe that British people (that is British workers) will let themselves be fooled by a foreign power whose only objective is the destruction of Great Britain.” They unite with each other for peace and scream that there is a power whose only objective – just think! – is to destroy Great Britain. “In Moscow they are gunning for Britain”, Joynson-Hicks goes on, “as they have realized there that Britain is defending the freedom of the world”. Britain defending the freedom of the world! Let’s see, if we were to commission our State Publishing House to issue a twelve-page booklet, one copy for every literate person, we would catalogue how Britain over the centuries has defended the freedom of the world, how she ruined Spain and Portugal, how she made war on China, because the Chinese did not want to be poisoned with British opium, how she subdued and strangled India, how for centuries she forced Ireland to shed blood, how she strangled Egypt, how she supported the most reactionary Chinese Marshal, Chang Tso-lin against Chinese democracy, how in China at present she is forming with the aid of sterling a force for the Russian monarchist Nechaev to support Chinese monarchist reaction; how in Turkey she supports the reactionary Old Turks against national Turkish democracy and detaches Mosul where the large oil deposits are situated, and finally how she has been and still is operating in our country. Only a few days ago we read how our GPU uncovered an Anglo-Estonian spy plot led by the ex-Tsarist officer Frank, with the participation of the Russian monarchists and a central organization in Tallin and branches in Leningrad and other places. Ruling-class Britain, defending the freedom of the world! She has attracted and amassed the fierce hatred of the popular masses of both hemispheres. Yet this British bourgeoisie, dyed through and through and reared on the traditions of slave ownership, plunder and strangulation of whole peoples, in the words of one of its most die-hard operators, Hicks the Home Secretary states that a plot is being hatched in Moscow against Britain, the defender of peace!

Another minister whose name we know a little better, Churchill, stated that “world history entered a new period when the gang of inhuman plotters moved into the Kremlin.” That history has entered a new period we agree but as regards the gang of plotters we shall remind Churchill about this at a suitable moment. We have good and firm memories. “In relation to Britain” continues the minister, “these dark forces exhibit a special malevolence”. Let us say without equivocation: ruling-class Britain has organized a pact which by design must represent a gang of imperialist plotters against the freedom of the whole world for this is just what their “pact” is when translated into straight language. They merely heap the blame on the Soviet Union for what the imperialists are guilty of. However Churchill suddenly spoke up with a wild tongue on the second day after the October revolution when both foreign and our own capitalists had not had time to bandage their wounds. We would have thought that eight years was long enough to get used to the fact, gentlemen! But no, their wounds are apparently still smarting today. A gang of plotters! The destruction of Great Britain! The British imperialists scream this not through strength but out of fear and hatred, gnashing their teeth and expressing themselves in virtual obscenities. But fortunately, the devil’s bark is worse ... sorry, I mean Churchill’s, bark is worse than his bite (laughter).

From a speech to the Kislovodsk Soviet, 9th November 1925

(Eight Years: Results and Prospects)

* * *

The unexampled economic superiority of the United States, even independently of a conscious policy on the part of the American bourgeoisie, will no longer permit European capitalism to raise itself. American capitalism, in driving Europe more and more into a blind alley, will automatically drive her onto the road of revolution. In this is the most important key to the world situation.

This is revealed most graphically and incontestably in Britain’s situation. Britain’s trans-oceanic exports are cut into by America, Canada, Japan and by the industrial development of her own colonies. Suffice it to point out that on the textile market of India, a British colony, Japan is squeezing out Britain. And on the European market, every increase of sales of British merchandise cuts into the sales of Germany, France and vice versa. Most often it is vice versa. The exports of Germany and France hit those of Great Britain. The European market is not expanding. Within its narrow limits, shifts occur now to one side, now to another. To hope that the situation will change radically in favour of Europe is to hope for miracles. just as under the conditions of the domestic market, the bigger and more advanced enterprise is assured victory over the small or backward enterprise, so, in the conditions of the world market, the victory of the United States over Europe, that is first and foremost over Britain, is inevitable.

In 1925 Britain’s imports and exports reached respectively 111 percent and 76 percent of their pre-war levels. This implies an adverse trade balance of unprecedented proportions. The reduction in exports signifies an industrial crisis which strikes not at the secondary but at the basic branches of industry: coal, steel, shipbuilding, woollens, etc. Temporary and even considerable improvements are possible and even inevitable, but the basic line of decline is predetermined.

One becomes filled with justifiable contempt for the “statesmen” of Britain who have retained all their old conformities so incompatible with the new conditions and who lack the most elementary understanding of the world situation and the inevitable consequences inherent in it. The reigning British politicians, Baldwin and Churchill, have recently favoured us again with their candour. At the end of last year, Churchill announced that he had twelve reasons (yes, he said that) for being in an optimistic mood. In the first place, a stabilized national currency. The British economist Keynes has called Churchill’s attention to the fact that this stabilization meant a maximum reduction of 10 per cent in the prices of merchandise exported, and consequently a corresponding increase in the adverse trade balance.

The second reason for being optimistic was the excellent price of rubber. Sad to say, Mr. Hoover’s twenty-nine questions have considerably reduced the rubberized optimism of Churchill. Thirdly, there was the decrease in the number of strikes. But let us wait on this score until the end of April when the collective contract of the miners comes up for consideration. Fourth reason for optimism – Locarno. From one hour to the next, there is no improvement. The Anglo-French conflict, far from diminishing, has intensified since Locarno. As touches Locarno let us wait, too; one counts one’s chickens when they are hatched. We refrain from enumerating the remaining reasons for optimism; on Wall Street the price they fetch is still dropping. It is interesting to note that The Times of London published an editorial on this same subject entitled: Two Rays of Hope. The Times is more modest than Churchill; it has not twelve but only two rays of hope, and these too are x-rays, that is, rather problematical rays.

To the professional light-mindedness of Churchill, one can counterpose the more serious opinions of the Americans who make an appraisal of British economy from their own standpoint, and also the opinion of British industrialists themselves. Upon returning from Europe, Klein, the director of the US Department of Commerce, made a report to industrialists which, notwithstanding its purely conventional tone of reassurance, lets the truth break through.

“From the economic point of view,” he said, “the only gloomy spot, [abstraction evidently made from the situation of France and Italy as well as the relatively slow restoration of Germany] – the only gloomy spot, I say, is the United Kingdom. It seems to me that Britain is in a doubtful commercial position. I would not want to be too pessimistic because Britain is our best customer but a number of factors are developing in that country, which, it seems to me, must give rise to serious consideration. There exist in Britain formidable taxes, the reason for which, according to certain people, must be found in our thirst for money, not to say more. Still it is not entirely correct ... The stock of tools of the coal industry is the same as a few dozen years ago, with the result that the cost of manual labour per ton is three or four times more than in the United States.”

And so forth and so on in the same vein.

Now, here is another comment. J. Harvey, American ex-ambassador in Europe, considered by the British as a “friend and well-wisher,” which is in a sense true for he speaks, as a rule, sentimentally of the need of coming to Britain’s aid – this same J. Harvey recently published an article entitled: The End of England (the title alone is priceless!), in which he comes to the conclusion that “British production has had its day. Hereafter the lot of Britain is to be an intermediate agent,” that is to say, the sales clerk and bank teller of the United States. Such is the conclusion of a friend and well-wisher.

Let us now see what George Hunter, a great British shipbuilder, whose note to the government made a stir in the entire British press, has to say: “Has the Government” [and the government, after all, is Churchill with his twelve reasons for optimism], he says, “a clear idea of the disastrous condition of British industry? Does it know that this condition, far from improving, is worsening progressively? The number of our unemployed and of our partially unemployed represents at the minimum 12.5 percent of the employed workers. Our trade balance is unfavourable. Our railroads and a large part of our industrial enterprises pay dividends out of their reserves or pay none at all. If that continues it is bankruptcy and ruin. There is no improvement in prospect.”

The coal industry is the keystone of British capitalism. At present it is completely dependent upon government subsidies. “We can,’ says Hunter, “subsidise the coal industry as much as we like; that will not prevent our industry generally from waning.” But if subsidies stop, British industrialists could not continue to pay the wages they now pay; and that would provoke, beginning with the next May Day, a grandiose economic conflict. It is not hard to imagine what would be implied by a strike embracing not less than a million railwaymen and transport workers. Britain would enter into a period of greatest economic shocks. One must either continue to grant ruinous and hopeless subsidies, or resign oneself to a profound social conflict.

Churchill has twelve reasons for optimism, but the social statistics of Britain testify that the number of employed workers is decreasing, that the number of miners is decreasing, but that there is an increase in the number of restaurant employees, cabaret personnel and elements of the lumpen-proletarian type. At the expense of producers, the number of lackeys increases, and, by the way, these figures do not include the political lackeys and ministers who with servility implore the generosity of Americans.

Let us once again counterpose America and Britain. In America there is a growing aristocracy of labour which aids in the establishment of company unions; while in Britain, fallen from her supremacy of yesterday, there grow layers of lumpen-proletariat below. Revealed best of all in this juxtaposition and counterposition is the displacement of the world economic axis. And this displacement will continue to operate until the class axis of society is itself displaced, that is, until the proletarian revolution.

Mr. Baldwin, of course, demurs to this. Though Mr. Baldwin carries more weight than Churchill, he understands as little. At a gathering of industrialists, he outlined a means of getting out of the predicament – a Conservative prime minister always has patent remedies for all ailments. “It sometimes seems to me,” he said, “that some of us have slept for at least six or seven years.” Much longer! Mr. Baldwin himself has been asleep for at least fifty years, while others stayed up. “We will do well,” continued the prime minister, “to be guided by the progress realized during this period by the progress realized during this period by the United States.” It would indeed take a bit of trying to be guided by the “progress” of the United States. In that country they dispose of a national wealth of 320 billion, 60 billion in the banks, an annual accumulation of 7 billion, while in Britain there is a deficit. Let us be guided a little! Let us try!

“The two parties [capitalists and workers],” continues Baldwin, “can learn much more at the school of the United States than in the study of the situation in Moscow.” Mr. Baldwin should refrain from spitting into the Moscow well. We could teach him a few things. We know how to orient ourselves among facts, analyse world economy, forecast a thing or two, in particular the decline of capitalist Britain. But Mr. Baldwin cannot do it.

Churchill, the finance minister, also referred to Moscow. Without it, you can’t make a good speech nowadays. Churchill, you see, had read that morning a horrible speech by Mr. Tomsky, who is not a member of the House of Lords. He happens to be, as Mr. Churchill truthfully asserts, a man who occupies an extremely important post in the Soviet Republic. Mr. Tomsky spent his youth not at Oxford or at Cambridge with Mr. Churchill but in the Butirky Prison, here at Moscow. Nevertheless Mr. Churchill is obliged to speak of Mr. Tomsky. And, it must be admitted, he does not speak very kindly about Mr. Tomsky’s speech at the Trades Unions Congress at Scarborough. Mr. Tomsky did indeed make a speech there, and apparently not a bad one, judging from the impression it made on Mr. Churchill. The latter cited extracts from the speech which he characterized as “ramblings of a barbarian.”

“I estimate,” he said, “that in this country we are capable of managing our own affairs without unwarrantable interference from outside.” Mr. Churchill is a very proud man but he is wrong. His patron Baldwin says that one must learn at the school of the United States.

“We do not want to have a freshly laid crocodile egg for breakfast,” continues Mr. Churchill. It is Tomsky, it seems, who laid a crocodile egg in Britain. Mr. Churchill does not like it; he prefers the politics of the ostrich that hides its head in the sand, and, as you know, both the ostrich and the crocodile propagate themselves in the same tropical colonies of Britain. Then Mr. Churchill gets really cocky: “I am not afraid of the Bolshevik revolution in this country. I do not criticize personalities.” And so forth and so on. That does not prevent him from delivering a wild speech against Tomsky. So he is afraid, after all. He does not criticize the personality of Tomsky. God forbid, he merely calls him a crocodile.

“Great Britain is not Russia.” Very true. “What use is there in introducing to the British workers the dull doctrine of Karl Marx and in making them sing the Internationale out of tune?” It is true that the British workers sometimes sing the Internationale off-key, with music supplied by MacDonald, but they will learn to sing it without any false notes precisely from Moscow. In our opinion, despite all the twelve reasons for optimism, the economic situation of Britain brings nearer that hour when the British working class will sing the Internationale at the top of their voices. Prepare your eardrums, Mr. Churchill! ...

As touches the preparation of the disarmament conference, of exceptional interest is a semi-official article recently published in a British review and eloquently signed “Augur.” Everything points to the fact that this Augur has close ties with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is generally well acquainted with what goes on behind the scenes. Under the banner of preparing the disarmament conference, the British Augur threatens us “with measures which will not be pacific measures.” This amounts to a direct threat of war.

Who is threatening? Britain, who is losing her foreign markets; Britain, where unemployment prevails; Britain, where the lumpenproletariat is growing; Britain, who has only a single optimist left, Winston Churchill – this Britain is threatening us with war in the present situation. Why? Under what pretext? Is it not because she wants to take it out on somebody else because of the affronts dealt her by America?

As for us, we do not want war. But if the British ruling classes wish to accelerate the birth pangs, if history wishes to deprive them of their reason before depriving them of power, it must, precisely now, push them over the steep slope of war. There will be incalculable suffering. But should the criminal madmen let loose a new war on Europe, those who will emerge victorious will not be Baldwin, nor Churchill, nor their American masters, but the revolutionary proletariat of Europe.

A speech delivered on 15th February 1926 and

first published in Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn, 16th February 1926

(Two poles of the workers movement)