David Carlton. Churchill and the Soviet Union. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. 234 pp.

Russian Review.....

http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/carlton.htm

 

The first words in David Carlton’s Introduction to Churchill and the Soviet Union repeat Winston Churchill’s famous 1939 description of the Communist state:  “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”  He begins his Conclusion with the same cliché.  Between these two bookends, Carlton tries to unwrap another mysterious enigma—Churchill’s attitudes and policies toward the Soviet Union.

And they are an enigma.  After World War I, Churchill relentlessly demanded Allied Intervention to eliminate the Bolshevik scourge.  By the late 1930s, he was urging Britain to forge and alliance with the Soviets against the German-Nazi threat.  During the dark winter of 1939 and 1940, he wished that Britain would aid Finland against the Soviet Union.  After June 1941, he embraced the USSR as a worthy ally in the common struggle against Adolf Hitler.  By 1946, he was proposing a united Anglo-American front against Russia and global Communism; soon he was even calling for an atomic showdown with the Soviets.  Finally, during the 1950s, he promoted an early summit with the Muscovite regime.

Carlton chronically divides his story into seven chapters, each carefully tracing Churchill’s twists and turns on the Soviet Union.  It is amazing that, despite Churchill’s own voluminous writings, extensive official documentation, and about 650 existing biographies, how much Carlton has to rely, ultimately, on speculation.  He manages, however, to come to the clear conclusion that, “ideologically-based anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism were Churchill’s most abiding obsession for some forty years,” and his “apparent somersaults were mere digressions and often only tactical in character.” (p. 200)

While sympathetic, Carlton is hardly uncritical of his subject.  One of the great merits of this book is that Churchill does not come off as myth.  Churchill’s approach to the Soviets throughout was self-serving, opportunistic, petty, ambitious, insincere, often inebriated, and in the last years clouded by senility.  He also tried to promote Britain’s national interests oft threatened from many sides, including by Communist Russia and Nazi Germany.  Carlton’s Churchill is fully human with all the contradictions, mistakes, self-serving political machinations, undeserved good fortune—and strength of character—that make so many people in positions of power so compelling.  In this regard, one of the most interesting of Carlton’s themes is his comparison of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler to Churchill’s frequent appeasement of Joseph Stalin.  Carlton effectively points out how politically close Chamberlain and Churchill truly were.

Carlton ends his book by evaluating the effectiveness of that for which Churchill is most sainted—his fervent opposition to Communism.  On the one hand, Carlton sympathetically supports Churchill’s pride in saving both Greece and Spain from Communism after World War II.  On the other hand, he effectively uses the conceit of the annual lecture at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri celebrating Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of 1946 to undermine Churchill’s place in the anti-Communist pantheon.  He notes that on that day of fiery Churchillian rhetoric, often seen as the declaration of the Cold War, that “the self-effacing chairman” (p. 219) President Harry Truman literally and metaphorically sat in the background.  But who, he asks, in the end was the more effective?  Carlton clearly sees Truman as the true anti-Communist hero for his “greater maturity, steadiness and sense of proportion.” (p. 219)

J. Calvitt Clarke III

Jacksonville University

Return to Jay Clarke’s Curriculum Vitae
Return to Jay Clarke’s Homepage