Churchill and Russia

Historian Andrew Roberts delivered the inaugural Stephen and Jane Poss Distinguished Churchill Lecture in London at the 2021 International Churchill Conference. This series will become a regular element of the yearly conference and feature leading voices in Churchill studies and current affairs. The International Churchill Society is grateful to Stephen and Jane Poss for making the series possible and is pleased to present the text of the first lecture.

At first glance, Winston Churchill’s stance on Russia seems to fit in well with his detractors’ charges of political inconsistency. He started off anti-Russian until 1914, then he became pro-Russian until 1917, when he became anti-Russian until 1938, when he became pro-Russian until 1939, when he went anti-Russian until 1941, when he became pro-Russian until 1946, when he became anti-Russian until 1949, when he started working for a settlement with Russia. No fewer than six changes of stance, which collectively have been held against Churchill as displaying precisely the kind of general opportunism that his enemies accused him of, both during his lifetime and since his death.

The Poss lectures, the inaugural of which I am very honoured to have been asked to deliver tonight, will cover three aspects. They will be about the protection and extension of freedom, the way that study of aspects of the life and career of Winston Churchill can help that, and a defence of his memory from revisionist detractors who are motivated by ideology rather than evidence-based history. I believe that nothing achieves all three of those objectives better than an investigation into Churchill’s lifelong relations with Russia. What I will argue tonight is that in fact, Churchill’s stance towards Russia was entirely consistent from start to finish.

Imperial Russia

For the first forty years of his life, Churchill’s overall stance was anti-Russian, as one might have expected from a British imperialist at a time when the greatest threat to British India appeared to come from losing the Great Game being played on her North-West frontier against the Tsarist Empire. His earliest reference to Russia appears in his poem Influenza, written in 1890, where one stanza runs:

O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains

Where Russian exiles toil in chains

It moved with noiseless tread;

And as it slowly glided by

There followed it across the sky

The spirits of the dead.

Even as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at Harrow, therefore,