Stalin Archives - Richard M. Langworth

The Polish and the Holocaust: What Churchill Knew

25 August 2021 Comments 2 Comments

Polish firing squad of one

Mr. Paul Bonowicz staged a one-man protest against Churchill in South Ruislip, Middlesex. He denounced “the lies in British books about Winston Churchill. I am Polish and we know he betrayed Polish people.” He added: Churchill “knew about the Holocaust. He knew Jewish people were dying, but he didn’t help. After the war there was a deal between Churchill and Stalin, and the price was Poland. Part of my country went to the Soviets. It was Churchill who decided which part, not the Poles.” —Uxbridge Gazette.

Churchill did know about the Holocaust, and alone among allied leaders, he tried to do something about it.…

“Stalin never broke his word to me.” Were these Churchill’s words?

14 June 2020 Comments 0 Comments

A magazine fact checker writes asking if Churchill ever said, “Stalin never broke his word to me.” The short answer is yes. The long answer shows how careful we should be when quoting Churchill.

The source of this quote is the journalist C.L. Sulzberger (1912-1993), in his 1970 book, The Last of the Giants, page 304. In it Sulzberger reports his “five hours with old Winston Churchill” at Chartwell on 10 July 1956.

Churchill, wrote Sulzberger, thought Stalin “a great man, above all compared to Khruschev and Bulganin,” and quoted Churchill as follows:

Stalin never broke his word to me.…

The Language: Some Issues over “Issues”

17 September 2019 Comments 3 Comments

Trashing tradition

“Issues over Issues” is reprinted with revisions from an essay in 2007.

“I confess myself to be a great admirer of tradition. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward….The wider the span, the longer the continuity, the greater is the sense of duty in individual men and women, each contributing their brief life’s work to the preservation and progress of the land in which they live, the society of which they are members, and the world of which they are the servants.” —Winston S. Churchill, Royal College of Physicians, 2 March 1944

“The Cardinals’ bus from their hotel in midtown Manhattan was delayed by more than an hour as it made its way to the ballpark on Wednesday.…