Books: Robert Service chronicles the West’s early failure to take action against Bolshevism

The Tragedy of Inaction

Guy F. Burnett

Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution

by Robert Service (PublicAffairs, 480 pp., $32.99)

“Russia, my lords and gentlemen, is the decisive factor in the history of the world at the present time,” observed Britain’s then-Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill in 1919.

In his new book, Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution, Oxford historian Robert Service shows that not only Churchill, but also most of the West, were aware of the emerging Soviet presence. 

For a crucial five years, though, the West remained passive while the new Bolshevik government teetered on the brink of failure.

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Allied intelligence revealed the terror within Russia. Winston Churchill warned: 

“Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism. . . . Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.”

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