Against the Russian Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
This composite chapter, drawn from three distinct texts spanning 1917 to 1930, constructs a sustained polemic against British imperialism's relationship to the Russian Revolution, exposing the continuity between Tsarist-era repression and the "democratic" alliance that succeeded it. The core argument is that Britain, far from being a benign ally of revolutionary Russia, acted as the principal enforcer of counter-revolutionary interests from the outset, using its naval power and diplomatic leverage to suppress revolutionaries while the Provisional Government's socialist ministers—Tsereteli, Chernov, and Skobelev—collaborated in this subjugation.
The narrative centres on Trotsky's own arrest at Halifax in April 1917, where British naval authorities forcibly removed him and five other Russian revolutionaries from the Christianiafjord despite valid passports and visas. The chapter deploys this episode as a microcosm of British policy: the physical manhandling, the strip-search before a dozen men in Amherst camp, and the camp commander Colonel Morris's frank admission that Trotsky was deemed "dangerous to the present Russian government" and "dangerous to the Allies in general." The detail of Morris's colonial career in the Boer War and his muttered wish to have Trotsky "on the South African coast" underscores the chapter's claim that British imperial methods were simply being redeployed against the revolution.
The chapter draws heavily on the experience of political exile under Tsarism as a comparative framework. Trotsky notes that even in the Peter-Paul Fortress, searches were conducted in private; the "democratic allies" subjected him to humiliation before a dozen men. This inversion—where the supposedly liberated Russia's allies prove more brutal than the Tsar's police—is the chapter's central rhetorical device. The British embassy's slander that Trotsky travelled on a German subsidy is refuted through Lenin's Pravda article of 16 April 1917, which the chapter reproduces, and through Buchanan's own subsequent admission that he knew nothing of any subsidy.
The polemic extends to the socialist ministers of the Provisional Government, who are charged with full responsibility for the government of Lvov and Tereshchenko, an alliance not with British revolutionaries like Maclean and Askew but with "their jailers Lloyd George and Henderson." The later speeches from 1917-18 broaden the attack to reveal the "diabolical plan" of world imperialism: that London tacitly approved German annexationist demands at Russia's expense, allowing Germany compensation to make it more amenable at negotiations with Britain and France. The chapter thus positions the Halifax arrest not as an isolated incident but as the first act of a coordinated imperialist assault on the revolution, one in which the socialist ministers were complicit from the start.