Over the past few days in the OT I’d commented on notorious historical figures and their linguistic abilities. I’ll try to compile some of that info into a single post.

This was inspired by reading Bertrand Patenaude’s Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, where he discusses Trotsky’s peculiar linguistic habits at some length. Trotsky, like most of the Bolsheviks, was a polyglot as much by necessity as choice: he spent much of his life in exile, in various European countries along with a stint in New York – and that before Stalin ousted him from the Soviet Union. Trotsky spoke the obvious languages for a revolutionary-in-exile (French and German) and had a good command of English and Italian. For whatever reason, however, he never learned Spanish and so either spoke to his Mexican acquaintances (including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo) in French or English.

There’s more dispute about Lenin. He spoke fluent German and after spending a number of years in Switzerland was said to speak Russian with a German accent. He also spoke near-fluent French and like Trotsky had a decent command of English – which he spoke in an Irish brogue, having learned the language from a Dublin-born tutor during his time in London. Some accounts claim that Lenin spoke a variety of Eastern European languages – Polish, Czech, Yiddish – to varying degrees but these are harder to verify.

Stalin’s language skills were more limited to those found in the Russian Empire. Born in Georgia, he considered Georgian his native language and never lost his heavy accent even when speaking Russian. He’s also known to have learned Armenian during his childhood, and retained some Latin, Greek and old Slavonic from his seminary years. Command of non-Russian languages appears to be more limited: he knew enough German to read Marx in the original, but he never mastered French. He may have known some English but there’s no real evidence of any skill beyond anecdotes – he supposedly confided in FDR’s son at Yalta that he understood more English than he could speak. He’s also said to have tried learning Esperanto during his time in Vienna, with the same degree of success as most Esperanto speakers.

Outside of the USSR, it seems like the fascist language skills are more limited. Benito Mussolini could speak excellent, if not quite fluent French and very broken German – during his conferences with Hitler and other Nazis, he often refused to use an interpreter and baffled them as his language. He apparently spoke some degree of English, though, as its easy to find YouTube clips of him speaking in that language.

Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, only spoke German and refused to learn anything else. What a hopeless bourgeois. Some of his inner circle fared better – Joachim von Ribbentrop, though generally considered a moron, could at least boast fluent command of English and French from his time living in Canada. Hjalmar Schacht also spoke a good amount of English, as he spent much of his early life in New York (his middle name was Horace Greely, after the American journalist).

Unfortunately, the only ones I could find speaking English were Trotsky. Trotsky has a heavy accent with the occasional mispronunciation, but his English is infinitely better than my Russian…or any other language.

And Mussolini, who is obviously not a native speaker but whose English comes off a lot more fluent than I would have expected: