Customer Review
ByPatrick Mcnallyon December 31, 2008
Sutton's major starting point for his argument here is with Trotsky's trip back to Russia from New York in early 1917. Kerensky had requested that Trotsky be allowed back to Russia and the US government agreed to this. Sutton starts his argument off by completely misinterpreting the meaning of these events. Sutton tries to cast this as if it were evidence of a plot to place the Bolsheviks in power, but Trotsky was not a Bolshevik at the time. Trotsky joined with Lenin after the July Days when the Petrograd workers and soldiers carried out an uprising where they demanded that Lenin should take power. Lenin himself was caught off guard by this uprising and ended up retreating into hiding. The most detailed treatment of the July Days is by Alexander Rabinowich, PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION. Sutton would have done better if he had spent more time consulting works of this type. Anyway, Sutton starts off on the wrong foot here because he assumes that some aid given to Trotsky fits in as part of a conspiracy to place the Bolsheviks in power. In fact, it should signify the opposite. Before the July Days Lenin and Trotsky had been bitter rivals for nearly 15 years. The records of their writings in early 1917 show the same rivalry continuing in very harsh language. If some hypothetical New York conspiracy were attempting to place Lenin in power, then helping Trotsky in early 1917 would have been totally counter-productive. This, of course, was exactly why Kerensky requested that Washington should allow Trotsky to return to Russia. He had no reason to expect a coming alliance between the two. Actually, if the Provisional Government had signed an immediate peace with Germany (as Lenin did a year later) then Kerensky's calculation would very likely have been correct. It was only because the war had created such enormous discontent among the populace that Lenin and Trotsky realized the need to unite and take advantage of the opportunity.
Sutton reports that when Trotsky was traveling back to Russia he was temporarily stopped midway and found to be carrying ten thousand dollars with him. After some disruption Trotsky was allowed to continue traveling. Many other sources often misreport this ten thousand as twenty million, although Sutton is probably more reliable on such a detail. Elizabeth Dilling attributed such aid to Jacob Schiff, but Sutton points out that Schiff refused to deal with the Bolsheviks after the overthrow of Kerensky's government (a government which Schiff had enthusiastically supported). Who's right and who's wrong here?
On the matter of where Trotsky would have received the money from I tend to agree with Dilling. Since Trotsky was not a Bolshevik, clearly any aid which he may have received in New York had nothing to do with a plot to install the Bolsheviks in power. That fits with Sutton's own comments on Schiff's refusal to deal with the Bolsheviks after Kerensky's overthrwow. It should be kept in mind that no one has ever disputed Schiff's willingness to give some aid to exiles and oppositionists from Czarist Russia. Most such aid went to liberal groups who had no interest in Marxism, but it's not implausible that an exiled Marxist such as Trotsky would have received some aid in New York from Schiff. What we can definitely rule out is that any such hypothetical aid given to Trotsky in New York was ever part of any plan to install a specifically Marxist government in Russia. If Schiff gave some aid to Trotsky during the latter's few months in New York this would have simply been part of the general practice by Schiff of supporting Czarist exiles, not something aimed specifically at advancing Marxism.
Lenin was almost assassinated in 1918. If that assassination had succeeded then it's likely that the later conflict between Stalin and Trotsky would have exploded into the open much sooner. This again shows how the possibility of Trotsky having received some temporary aid in New York would be incongruent with any hypothetical New York plan aimed at installing Lenin in power. If someone was making such a plan from far away then the only sensible thing to do would have been to help Lenin, the way that the German Kaiser provided Lenin with a trip back to Russia. Lenin was the authoritative head of the Bolshevik party. Lenin was the one recognized by the party membership as its leader. It was only Lenin's diplomatic influence within the party which enabled Trotsky to gain some grudging acceptance. But if the assassination had succeeded, then rivalries would have quite possibly broken out between the original Bolsheviks and Trotsky at a time when the Russian civil war just beginning.
Kerensky's government was in a major bind in early 1917. The only real way that any Russian government could have survived at that time was by making a swift peace with Germany. Kerensky chose not to do this for two reasons. First, the Russian liberals who Kerensky supported were convinced of the need to remain aligned with the western democracies as a step towards making Russia into a republic. They rejected any notion of signing a peace with the German monarchy that would alienate the democratic governments whom they felt so beholden to. Second, the military officers in the Russian army were committed to the war and would have attempted a coup if Kerensky had tried signing a peace. These facts put Kerensky in an impossible position.
But except for that, Kerensky's decision to invite all Russian Left-wingers of every stripe back home made perfectly good sense. The reality on the ground was that the Provisional Government which Kerensky headed was already rivaled by the power of workers' and soldiers' councils in the streets. This was an unstable situation which couldn't continue indefinitely, but any government which sought to resolve the matter had to be doing so under a clear Left-wing header. Since Kerensky was trying to present himself as a moderate Left-winger in support of republicanism, the best strategy for him would have been to get out of the war by signing peace with Germany immediately, let the peasants break up the large estates and takeover land as they wish, and simultaneously welcome back home all once-exiled Leftists to Russia.
If this had been done, then Lenin and Trotsky would have emerged as part of a Left-wing opposition under the government. They probably would have continued many of their older disputes, rather than joining as allies. The case of the Spanish Left in the 1930s offers an abundance of examples of how Leftists can tear each other apart in a self-defeating manner. As longtime rivals there was no reason for Kerensky to expect that Lenin and Trotsky would form a working alliance for any length of time. The overthrow of Kerensky's government would certainly not have taken place in the form which it did in November 1917. The only monkey-wrench in all of this was that the Provisional Government had to be prepared to seek immediate peace with Germany, and they proved to be politically unable to do so. But there's no reason to believe that Kerensky's request that Washington allow Trotsky's return had anything to do with a plot intended to install the Bolsheviks in power.
An epilogue to this affair is that once Trotsky had been exiled from the USSR in 1929 he was refused the status of polital refugee by more governments on earth than any subsequent exile from Russia. Most Cold War exiles such as Solzhenitsyn were readily accepted by western governments. Trotsky repeatedly applied to numerous countries and was rejected by the majority, with the few that eventually agreed placing sharp restrictions on what he could do. While it's perfectly plausible that Schiff gave Trotsky some aid in New York, this clearly was not part of any long-term agenda aimed at advancing Trotsky's politics.
Now once that much is cleared up, it becomes apparent that Sutton has not provided any argument to show that Lenin ever received any aid from Wall Street prior to the overthrow of Kerensky. He recieved some aid from Germany, which clearly had an interest in undermining the government it was at war with, but none from Wall Street. However the revolution changed that for a few months. Again, it must be said that Sutton grossly underplays the significance of the First World War in determining Allied calculations. Instead, he imposes the standards of the Cold War on a much earlier time where they have no place.
It was apparent from the beginning that Lenin intended to begin sending revolutionary propaganda into Germany the moment he gained power. The Kaiser had aided his return to Russia out of short-term common interest. But once the Bolsheviks had seized power a new debate began in the Allied circles. Some advocated that the Bolsheviks should be overthrown to get Russia back in the war, but the priority was the war against Germany. For this reason Bruce Lockhart and some others advocated that Britain should accept the new government and attempt to aid them in carrying the revolution to Germany. The debate over this lasted 4 months, from the time of the Bolshevik revolution to the siging of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
The reason that it took so long to sign the peace was because of differences among the Bolsheviks. Bukharin urged that Russia should declare a revolutionary war on Germany. Lenin insisted that it was necessary to leave the war if the Bolshevik government was to survive. Trotsky, as the negotiator with the Germans, attempted to compromise these positions by refusing to sign any treaty but insisting to the Germans that as far as Russia's new revolutionary government was concerned the war was over and there was no need to sign any treaty because the German and Russian proletarians had no cause for war anyway. The Germans responded by resuming their advance into Russia. The Russian fronts collapsed everywhere and Lenin now got his wish that the party agreed to sign a peace.
Before the treaty was signed however, there were attempts by the Allies to aid the Bolshevik effort to subvert Germany. Sutton distorts the significance of this very badly by downplaying the First World War, saying nothing notable about Brest-Litovsk, and distorting the record of Lenin-Trotsky rivalry. Because of all of these misstatements of fact which appear in Sutton's book, the naive reader is led to believe that he is seeing a grand conspiracy directed from Wall Street with the aim of placing the Bolsheviks in power. Once the facts are sorted out, it becomes apparent that nothing of the kind has been demonstrated here.
Following Brest-Litovsk, the early stages of the Russian civil war began with early uprisings of the Whites in South Russia under first Gerneral Kornilov, followed by Denikin and Wrangel. In this civil war, the Allies attempted to give aid to the Whites. But they were severely constrained by discontent at home. The British unions attempted to locate and derail shipments of aid to the Whites. The French armies which entered Russia showed signs of total disintegration. Allied aid could only be effective to the extent that the Whites themselves were. No major Allied intervention would have been politically possible.
To appreciate why the Whites lost the civil war, some of John Hodgson's observations have relevance:
-----
"I did not, during the whole of my service with the Army in Russia, ever see a nurse in a British uniform, but I have seen girls, who were emphatically not nurses, walking the streets of Novorossiisk wearing regulation British hospital skirts and stockings," wrote John Hodgson, a British war correspondent sent to report about life in Denikin's Russia. "I saw and talked to young ladies of good social standing ... who were wearing costumes made of British officers' serge," he added, as he wrote of men at the front who went into battle "wearing practically nothing but a print shirt and a patched pair of trousers." Almost every minor bureaucrat in South Russia seemed to have a new, crisply creased British summer uniform. "It is impossible to believe," Hodgson reported, "that we sent out clothing for the benefit of lawyers and petty civil officials." ... Transferred to the military sphere, such massive corruption proved destructive. While Denikin's desperate commanders tried to break through Red fortifications with infantry, British tanks sat on the dock at Novorossiisk. Although Hodgson found "it was always possible for a local profiteer to bribe railway officials and obtain freight cars ... on a colossal scale," it proved impossible to find trains or trucks to move the tanks inland. "One night," Hodgson noted sadly, "a typical Black Sea storm caused one of the tanks to slip its moorings, and the whole consignment [of ten] slid quietly to the bottom of the harbor." Nor was that an isolated instance. While men dying from typhus and dysentery lay on rotting, lice-infested sacks, Hodgson watched the equipment for an entire two hundred-bed British hospital disappear at wharfside. "Beds, blankets, sheets, mattresses, and pillows disappeared as if by magic," he reported. "They found their way to the houses of staff officers and members of the Kuban Government."
-----
-- W. Bruce Lincoln, RED VICTORY: A HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR, pp. 218-20.
That just scratches the surface, but it should be a reminder to someone that the reasons for the White defeat were much more fundamentally basic than simply an alleged Wall Street conspiracy. Sutton shows no real awareness of anything that occurred in the Russian civil war, and therefore the entire framework of understanding the eventual Bolshevik victory is way out of line in his book. Some other related points made by Peter Holquist are worth noting:
-----
In describing this expedition, the insurgents portrayed Podtelkov, who had balloted for the Consituent Assembly as a Left Socialist Revolutionary, as "conducting Bolshevik agitation." Anti-Soviet insurgents similarly depicted the Soviet land decrees that so disturbed the Cossacks as "Bolshevik," even though the decrees reflected Left Socialist Revolutionary views at least as much as Bolshevik ones. The Manichean identification of all foes as "Bolsheviks" reduced all support for either local soviets or Soviet power to one party, the Bolsheviks. Such a narrowing of categories was a significant development, for many pro-Soviet Cossacks on the Don had earlier identified themselves with the revolution generally or somewhat loosely with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The insurgents' equation of all support for local soviets with "Bolshevism" unwittingly reinforced the Bolshevik Party's own attempts to claim for itself the mantle of sole party for the Soviet state... Of interest here is not so much the veracity of the Cossack leadership's narrative as how the leadership came to interpret the conflict as one between monolithically anti-Soviet Cossacks and uniformly pro-Bolshevik peasants.
-----
-- Peter Holquist, MAKING WAR, FORGING REVOLUTION, pp. 150, 152.
It's important to bear in mind that what we now regard as "the Bolshevik government" really did not emerge until 1921 in the aftermath of the civil war. Dismissing Kerensky's phantom government in late 1917 did not give the Bolsheviks decisive control over Russia. In other parts of Russia far away from the capitol the Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and other Left-wing groups were effectively the government. Although Lenin maintained that such conciliationist parties should be dismissed, the Bolsheviks were on many occasions in the early stages forced to adapt themselves to the reality of such parties holding power. It was the White uprising, and the fact that the Whites were so rabidly hostile to all of the traditional Russian Left, including the Bolsheviks's rivals on the Left, which allowed the Bolsheviks to place themselves at the head of the revolution decisively.
As it became apparent that the Whites were a hopeless cause, the Allied governments (and Britain especially) began reconciling themselves to the need to resume trade with Russia as a way of reviving the economy. Sutton again tries to cast this fact as evidence a grand plot to bring the Bolsheviks to power. That of course is silly. If Sutton had taken more time to actually study the Russian civil war and better appreciate the causes of the White defeat, then he could have spared us such nonsense. The fact is that Britain's economy was really sagging and labor leaders had pointed out that resuming trade with Russia was a logical way of reviving the economy. If the Whites had been less incompetent, if the White officers had given their support to a Left-wing government led by Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, then Britain might have been able to give aid to victory over the Bolsheviks and subsequently begin trade with this government. By 1920 it was clear that no native Russian force would be able to overthrow the Bolsheviks anytime soon and that if trade was to be eventually resumed it would have to be with a Russia led by them.
All in all, Sutton's book stands as a remarkable display of ignorance masked as scholarship. If you really wish to understand how the Bolsheviks managed to gain power then you'd do better to start with Lincoln, RED VICTORY, as a real scholarly history of the Russian civil war.
Sutton reports that when Trotsky was traveling back to Russia he was temporarily stopped midway and found to be carrying ten thousand dollars with him. After some disruption Trotsky was allowed to continue traveling. Many other sources often misreport this ten thousand as twenty million, although Sutton is probably more reliable on such a detail. Elizabeth Dilling attributed such aid to Jacob Schiff, but Sutton points out that Schiff refused to deal with the Bolsheviks after the overthrow of Kerensky's government (a government which Schiff had enthusiastically supported). Who's right and who's wrong here?
On the matter of where Trotsky would have received the money from I tend to agree with Dilling. Since Trotsky was not a Bolshevik, clearly any aid which he may have received in New York had nothing to do with a plot to install the Bolsheviks in power. That fits with Sutton's own comments on Schiff's refusal to deal with the Bolsheviks after Kerensky's overthrwow. It should be kept in mind that no one has ever disputed Schiff's willingness to give some aid to exiles and oppositionists from Czarist Russia. Most such aid went to liberal groups who had no interest in Marxism, but it's not implausible that an exiled Marxist such as Trotsky would have received some aid in New York from Schiff. What we can definitely rule out is that any such hypothetical aid given to Trotsky in New York was ever part of any plan to install a specifically Marxist government in Russia. If Schiff gave some aid to Trotsky during the latter's few months in New York this would have simply been part of the general practice by Schiff of supporting Czarist exiles, not something aimed specifically at advancing Marxism.
Lenin was almost assassinated in 1918. If that assassination had succeeded then it's likely that the later conflict between Stalin and Trotsky would have exploded into the open much sooner. This again shows how the possibility of Trotsky having received some temporary aid in New York would be incongruent with any hypothetical New York plan aimed at installing Lenin in power. If someone was making such a plan from far away then the only sensible thing to do would have been to help Lenin, the way that the German Kaiser provided Lenin with a trip back to Russia. Lenin was the authoritative head of the Bolshevik party. Lenin was the one recognized by the party membership as its leader. It was only Lenin's diplomatic influence within the party which enabled Trotsky to gain some grudging acceptance. But if the assassination had succeeded, then rivalries would have quite possibly broken out between the original Bolsheviks and Trotsky at a time when the Russian civil war just beginning.
Kerensky's government was in a major bind in early 1917. The only real way that any Russian government could have survived at that time was by making a swift peace with Germany. Kerensky chose not to do this for two reasons. First, the Russian liberals who Kerensky supported were convinced of the need to remain aligned with the western democracies as a step towards making Russia into a republic. They rejected any notion of signing a peace with the German monarchy that would alienate the democratic governments whom they felt so beholden to. Second, the military officers in the Russian army were committed to the war and would have attempted a coup if Kerensky had tried signing a peace. These facts put Kerensky in an impossible position.
But except for that, Kerensky's decision to invite all Russian Left-wingers of every stripe back home made perfectly good sense. The reality on the ground was that the Provisional Government which Kerensky headed was already rivaled by the power of workers' and soldiers' councils in the streets. This was an unstable situation which couldn't continue indefinitely, but any government which sought to resolve the matter had to be doing so under a clear Left-wing header. Since Kerensky was trying to present himself as a moderate Left-winger in support of republicanism, the best strategy for him would have been to get out of the war by signing peace with Germany immediately, let the peasants break up the large estates and takeover land as they wish, and simultaneously welcome back home all once-exiled Leftists to Russia.
If this had been done, then Lenin and Trotsky would have emerged as part of a Left-wing opposition under the government. They probably would have continued many of their older disputes, rather than joining as allies. The case of the Spanish Left in the 1930s offers an abundance of examples of how Leftists can tear each other apart in a self-defeating manner. As longtime rivals there was no reason for Kerensky to expect that Lenin and Trotsky would form a working alliance for any length of time. The overthrow of Kerensky's government would certainly not have taken place in the form which it did in November 1917. The only monkey-wrench in all of this was that the Provisional Government had to be prepared to seek immediate peace with Germany, and they proved to be politically unable to do so. But there's no reason to believe that Kerensky's request that Washington allow Trotsky's return had anything to do with a plot intended to install the Bolsheviks in power.
An epilogue to this affair is that once Trotsky had been exiled from the USSR in 1929 he was refused the status of polital refugee by more governments on earth than any subsequent exile from Russia. Most Cold War exiles such as Solzhenitsyn were readily accepted by western governments. Trotsky repeatedly applied to numerous countries and was rejected by the majority, with the few that eventually agreed placing sharp restrictions on what he could do. While it's perfectly plausible that Schiff gave Trotsky some aid in New York, this clearly was not part of any long-term agenda aimed at advancing Trotsky's politics.
Now once that much is cleared up, it becomes apparent that Sutton has not provided any argument to show that Lenin ever received any aid from Wall Street prior to the overthrow of Kerensky. He recieved some aid from Germany, which clearly had an interest in undermining the government it was at war with, but none from Wall Street. However the revolution changed that for a few months. Again, it must be said that Sutton grossly underplays the significance of the First World War in determining Allied calculations. Instead, he imposes the standards of the Cold War on a much earlier time where they have no place.
It was apparent from the beginning that Lenin intended to begin sending revolutionary propaganda into Germany the moment he gained power. The Kaiser had aided his return to Russia out of short-term common interest. But once the Bolsheviks had seized power a new debate began in the Allied circles. Some advocated that the Bolsheviks should be overthrown to get Russia back in the war, but the priority was the war against Germany. For this reason Bruce Lockhart and some others advocated that Britain should accept the new government and attempt to aid them in carrying the revolution to Germany. The debate over this lasted 4 months, from the time of the Bolshevik revolution to the siging of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
The reason that it took so long to sign the peace was because of differences among the Bolsheviks. Bukharin urged that Russia should declare a revolutionary war on Germany. Lenin insisted that it was necessary to leave the war if the Bolshevik government was to survive. Trotsky, as the negotiator with the Germans, attempted to compromise these positions by refusing to sign any treaty but insisting to the Germans that as far as Russia's new revolutionary government was concerned the war was over and there was no need to sign any treaty because the German and Russian proletarians had no cause for war anyway. The Germans responded by resuming their advance into Russia. The Russian fronts collapsed everywhere and Lenin now got his wish that the party agreed to sign a peace.
Before the treaty was signed however, there were attempts by the Allies to aid the Bolshevik effort to subvert Germany. Sutton distorts the significance of this very badly by downplaying the First World War, saying nothing notable about Brest-Litovsk, and distorting the record of Lenin-Trotsky rivalry. Because of all of these misstatements of fact which appear in Sutton's book, the naive reader is led to believe that he is seeing a grand conspiracy directed from Wall Street with the aim of placing the Bolsheviks in power. Once the facts are sorted out, it becomes apparent that nothing of the kind has been demonstrated here.
Following Brest-Litovsk, the early stages of the Russian civil war began with early uprisings of the Whites in South Russia under first Gerneral Kornilov, followed by Denikin and Wrangel. In this civil war, the Allies attempted to give aid to the Whites. But they were severely constrained by discontent at home. The British unions attempted to locate and derail shipments of aid to the Whites. The French armies which entered Russia showed signs of total disintegration. Allied aid could only be effective to the extent that the Whites themselves were. No major Allied intervention would have been politically possible.
To appreciate why the Whites lost the civil war, some of John Hodgson's observations have relevance:
-----
"I did not, during the whole of my service with the Army in Russia, ever see a nurse in a British uniform, but I have seen girls, who were emphatically not nurses, walking the streets of Novorossiisk wearing regulation British hospital skirts and stockings," wrote John Hodgson, a British war correspondent sent to report about life in Denikin's Russia. "I saw and talked to young ladies of good social standing ... who were wearing costumes made of British officers' serge," he added, as he wrote of men at the front who went into battle "wearing practically nothing but a print shirt and a patched pair of trousers." Almost every minor bureaucrat in South Russia seemed to have a new, crisply creased British summer uniform. "It is impossible to believe," Hodgson reported, "that we sent out clothing for the benefit of lawyers and petty civil officials." ... Transferred to the military sphere, such massive corruption proved destructive. While Denikin's desperate commanders tried to break through Red fortifications with infantry, British tanks sat on the dock at Novorossiisk. Although Hodgson found "it was always possible for a local profiteer to bribe railway officials and obtain freight cars ... on a colossal scale," it proved impossible to find trains or trucks to move the tanks inland. "One night," Hodgson noted sadly, "a typical Black Sea storm caused one of the tanks to slip its moorings, and the whole consignment [of ten] slid quietly to the bottom of the harbor." Nor was that an isolated instance. While men dying from typhus and dysentery lay on rotting, lice-infested sacks, Hodgson watched the equipment for an entire two hundred-bed British hospital disappear at wharfside. "Beds, blankets, sheets, mattresses, and pillows disappeared as if by magic," he reported. "They found their way to the houses of staff officers and members of the Kuban Government."
-----
-- W. Bruce Lincoln, RED VICTORY: A HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR, pp. 218-20.
That just scratches the surface, but it should be a reminder to someone that the reasons for the White defeat were much more fundamentally basic than simply an alleged Wall Street conspiracy. Sutton shows no real awareness of anything that occurred in the Russian civil war, and therefore the entire framework of understanding the eventual Bolshevik victory is way out of line in his book. Some other related points made by Peter Holquist are worth noting:
-----
In describing this expedition, the insurgents portrayed Podtelkov, who had balloted for the Consituent Assembly as a Left Socialist Revolutionary, as "conducting Bolshevik agitation." Anti-Soviet insurgents similarly depicted the Soviet land decrees that so disturbed the Cossacks as "Bolshevik," even though the decrees reflected Left Socialist Revolutionary views at least as much as Bolshevik ones. The Manichean identification of all foes as "Bolsheviks" reduced all support for either local soviets or Soviet power to one party, the Bolsheviks. Such a narrowing of categories was a significant development, for many pro-Soviet Cossacks on the Don had earlier identified themselves with the revolution generally or somewhat loosely with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The insurgents' equation of all support for local soviets with "Bolshevism" unwittingly reinforced the Bolshevik Party's own attempts to claim for itself the mantle of sole party for the Soviet state... Of interest here is not so much the veracity of the Cossack leadership's narrative as how the leadership came to interpret the conflict as one between monolithically anti-Soviet Cossacks and uniformly pro-Bolshevik peasants.
-----
-- Peter Holquist, MAKING WAR, FORGING REVOLUTION, pp. 150, 152.
It's important to bear in mind that what we now regard as "the Bolshevik government" really did not emerge until 1921 in the aftermath of the civil war. Dismissing Kerensky's phantom government in late 1917 did not give the Bolsheviks decisive control over Russia. In other parts of Russia far away from the capitol the Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and other Left-wing groups were effectively the government. Although Lenin maintained that such conciliationist parties should be dismissed, the Bolsheviks were on many occasions in the early stages forced to adapt themselves to the reality of such parties holding power. It was the White uprising, and the fact that the Whites were so rabidly hostile to all of the traditional Russian Left, including the Bolsheviks's rivals on the Left, which allowed the Bolsheviks to place themselves at the head of the revolution decisively.
As it became apparent that the Whites were a hopeless cause, the Allied governments (and Britain especially) began reconciling themselves to the need to resume trade with Russia as a way of reviving the economy. Sutton again tries to cast this fact as evidence a grand plot to bring the Bolsheviks to power. That of course is silly. If Sutton had taken more time to actually study the Russian civil war and better appreciate the causes of the White defeat, then he could have spared us such nonsense. The fact is that Britain's economy was really sagging and labor leaders had pointed out that resuming trade with Russia was a logical way of reviving the economy. If the Whites had been less incompetent, if the White officers had given their support to a Left-wing government led by Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, then Britain might have been able to give aid to victory over the Bolsheviks and subsequently begin trade with this government. By 1920 it was clear that no native Russian force would be able to overthrow the Bolsheviks anytime soon and that if trade was to be eventually resumed it would have to be with a Russia led by them.
All in all, Sutton's book stands as a remarkable display of ignorance masked as scholarship. If you really wish to understand how the Bolsheviks managed to gain power then you'd do better to start with Lincoln, RED VICTORY, as a real scholarly history of the Russian civil war.
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