Leon Trotsky’s Writings on Britain
Volume 1

The Decline of British Imperialism


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 [1] 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 [2] maintains an alliance not with British revolutionary socialists like Maclean, Askew [3] and others, but with their jailers Lloyd George and Henderson. [4]

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 [5] 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 [6] 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 [7] appeared in the Smolny Institute and decl]ared on behalf of America that its protest to Dukhonin’s [8] 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 [9], 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. [10] 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


Volume 1, Chapter 2 Index


Footnotes

1. Irakli Tsereteli (1881-1960), Victor Chernov (1873-1952) and Matvey Skobelev (1885-1938), Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary ministers in the Russian Provisional Government of May-August 1917.

2. Prince Georgi Lvov (1861-1925), head of Provisional Government from 23 March to 7 July 1917. – Mikhail Tereshchenko (1886-1956), Russian Foreign Minister from 5 May to 25 October 1917.

3. John Maclean (1879-1923), Scottish revolutionary socialist and opponent of First World War; leading influence on the movement known a Red Clydeside; jailed in 1916 for his anti-war activities, but released again in 1917; supported October Revolution and appointed Soviet consul in Scotland, but never joined the Communist Party. - J.B. Askew, British Social Democrat with close connections with German Social Democracy, translator of many SPD documents and texts.

4. David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Welsh Liberal politician, responsible as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) for the introduction of old age pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness benefits; prime minister from 1916 to 1922. – Arthur Henderson (1863-1935), a leader of the British Labour Party, who rallied the party to support World War I and became a government minister. He later served as Home Secretary in the first Labour government (1924) and Foreign Secretary in the second Labour government (1929-1931).

5. George Buchanan (1854-1924), British diplomat, ambassador to Russia 1910-1918.

6. Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov (1858-1943), historian and liberal politician in pre-revolutionary Russia; foun der of the Consatitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party; member of first Provisional government in 1917; forced by mass movement to resign; after the October he supported and advised the counter-revolutionary White forces during the Civil War and then went into exile in Paris, where he edited an anti-Soviet Russian-language paper.

7. William V. Judson (1865-1923), United States military attaché in Petrograd (1917-1918).

8. Nikolai Dukhonin (1876-1917), Chief of Russian Staff until November 1917, when he was killed by his own troops.

9. Georgi Chicherin (1872-1936), Russian Social Democrat, later Soviet diplomat; Menshevik before World War I, adopted anti-war position and drew closer to the Bolsheviks; jailed in Britain in 1917, Trotsky secured his release in exchange for hostages including Buchanan, British ambassador to Russia; formally joined the Bolsheviks early in 1918 and was appointed Trotsky’s deputy at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs; suceeded Trotsky on his resignation and remained Commissar for Foreign Affairs until 1930, when he was replaced due to bad health.

10. Peter Petrov, Russian revolutionary, veteran of the 1905 Revolution who sought asylum Britain, close collaborator of John Maclean, arrested in 1916 along with his wife Irma under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and subsequently deported to Russia.


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Last updated on: 2.7.2007