October 17, 2008

By V.G. Trukhanovsky
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978

Reviewed by Peter McIver in Finest Hour 37, Autumn 1982

     In 1941 Churchill brought the house down in Congress with the rhetorical query, “What kind of people do they think we are?” He referred, of course, to the Axis, but doubtless he had occasion later to wonder the same about the Russians. This book would have told him. He would not have liked it.

    Trukhanovsky, a Marxist historian who has written extensively on British history, presents a Churchill not always recognizable. The view is interesting, and a boon to understanding the Soviet mind. The author repeats the charge of duplicity in the Hess affair; he believes that had Hess not insisted on WSC’s ouster as prelude to an Anglo-German rapprochement, Britain and Germany would have combined against Russia. Further to this theory he accuses Sir William Stephenson (“Intrepid”), of planting false documents to make the Germans think Stalin was about to attack them, forcing Hitler to attack first.

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    But it’s not all old propaganda: there is some new as well. We are told that though WSC was for most of his life a very wealthy man (???),he used tax avoidance schemes to cheat the tax man and thus the people. WSC’s books fostered the idea that Britain, not Russia, won the war; the Battle of Britain gets short shrift, as a “diversion” which helped the Soviets gain the upper hand in the East. Not discussed are the consequences of a British defeat. Where would the USSR have been without the British convoys in 1941-42?

    Though WSC’s love of freedom seems above challenge, Trukhanovsky makes an attempt. Against the 20th Century struggle for liberation, he says, WSC did all he could to stop the USSR from liberating the peoples of Eastern Europe. He actually sent troops to halt the liberation of Greece. He supported Tito against the liberating Red Army. He objected to the Hungarian put-down of 1956 and fought socialism’s rise in England. Etc., etc., etc.

    While I cannot recommend this volume as an unerring purveyor of fact, I will at least call it an important addition to our references from behind the Iron Curtain. It is biased, sometimes comical, often historically inept, and designed to promote the Soviet view. Whereas here in the West, truth has many faces, in the Soviet Union she has only one. And that’s official.