HOW WWII WAS LOST:

October 1917 would not have made its seismic impact had it represented merely a domestic Russian change of government, however bloody. Foreign observers had long predicted the Romanovs' doom. Russia's condition fulfilled de Tocqueville's dictum that servitude becomes intolerable when there is some lightening of its chains. Contrary to later Soviet propaganda, industrialisation was making great strides across the 1914 Russian empire.

But the Bolshevik ascent to power took place in the midst of the greatest war in human history. Russia's withdrawal from the conflict, through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, for some weeks seemed likely to precipitate a victory for the Central Powers. Though such an outcome was averted, the new dispensation in Moscow put the fear of God into the western allies.

The Bolsheviks proclaimed their commitment to the destruction of established governments worldwide. The Communist International, established in 1919, promised to fight 'by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State'.

The objectives of Lenin, Trotsky and their followers thus threatened the interests of rulers and property-owners everywhere. Churchill persuaded Lloyd George, as Britain's prime minister, together with the governments of the US, France, Canada, Italy and other allies, to launch a half-hearted and disastrous armed intervention in Russia, aimed at assisting the Whites and especially the Czech Legion to reverse the events of October 1917.

Three VCs were awarded in 1919 to Royal Navy torpedo-boat commanders who attacked Bolshevik warships in the Baltic. That extraordinary episode cries out for a good modern history. Until this gets written, I recommend a very slight but rewarding 1967 historical novel by John Harris entitled A Light Cavalry Action, which focused on the British army's role.

It is a familiar student essay question, whether the revolution could have been averted, but for the world war and resultant loss of up to three million Russian lives. It seems more useful merely to suggest that, in the political and ideological climate of the early 20th century, the collectivist experiment was bound to be attempted somewhere, and Russia or China were obvious testbeds. The consequences for millions of Russian peasants, together with the ferocity of Soviet oppression, were successfully concealed from most western eyes for half a century. The 1789 French revolution killed only a few thousand aristocrats and transferred land to peasants, who thus became ardent upholders of property rights. The Russian version required liquidation of the entire governing class and transfer of land to collective ownership, an incomparably more radical proceeding. Douglas Smith's 2012 book Former People gives a harrowing account of the fate of the Tsarist aristocracy.

In the West, the gullibility of the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and the rest of the 'true believers' was fed by a desperation to suppose the Soviet example viable. 'Looking around us at our own hells,' wrote the historian Philip Toynbee, who became a communist at Cambridge, 'we had to invent an earthly paradise somewhere else'. As late as 1945, the leftist publisher Victor Gollancz brought posterity's contempt upon himself by declining to publish Animal Farm, George Orwell's great satire on Bolshevism. [...]

No believable economist would claim that the Russian people benefited from Leninist or Stalinist social and economic policies. It is easier to project an upward trend for Russian living standards after 1918 had the Tsarist regime survived than to make a case that the Soviet system profited anyone, save the commissars. It has proved a common characteristic of communist regimes around the world that -- to paraphrase Orwell -- all pigs are equal, but some secure access to bigger troughs than others. British visitors to Moscow in the darkest days of the second world war cringed at the extravagance of the banquets they were served at a time when most of the country was starving and even -- in extreme circumstances, such as those of besieged Leningrad -- eating each other.

Yet until the last years of the 20th century the supply of useful idiots -- western apologists for the Soviet Union -- seemed limitless, and included such figures as Tony Benn. Anthony Powell's novel Books Do Furnish a Room captures the enthusiasm for Soviet communism that pervaded post-1945 London socialist sitting rooms and literary gatherings.

No modern reader can set down the works of Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest, Robert Service or Anne Applebaum without a sense of awe at the cruelties committed in the name of 'the people', the cause of Russian communism; cruelties indulged almost to this day by their western defenders. It bears notice that German people under the Nazis, with the exception of Jews, enjoyed much greater personal freedom than did Russians at any time after 1917.

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