Did Churchill say: “If the children of officials do not fight, then this is not a war, but a business”?

Internet users in Russia and Ukraine actively use a quote attributed to the British Prime Minister when discussing mobilization. We decided to check the correctness of this attribution.

The phrase “If the children of officials do not fight, then this is not a war, but a business,” attributed to Winston Churchill, became popular on social networks in 2024. She can be found in X, Telegram, Facebook And "VKontakte", it has spread widely in TikTok and on YouTube. The quote is often used in comments to articles and posts on the topic of war and mobilization.

If there were a ranking of historical figures to whom the most fictional quotes are attributed, Churchill would certainly be one of its leaders. On the website of the Winston Churchill Society, an international scientific organization that preserves and studies the politician’s legacy, there is even selection the most popular phrases erroneously attributed to the British Prime Minister. A few quotes like this earlier sorted it out "Checked."

One of the key partners of the Winston Churchill Society is Churchill Archive Center at the University of Cambridge. This archive contains more than 800,000 texts related to the politician: his personal documents, articles, diaries, correspondence, transcripts of speeches, etc. All of them are digitized and accessible online. “Verified” studied the texts stored in the archive, which contain both the words war (“war”) and business (“business”). There were 150 of these, but none of the corresponding fragments even remotely resembled the quote being verified.

A search on Google and Yandex showed that the statement attributed to Churchill was not found on the Russian-language Internet until early 2024 (the earliest usage found by Verified is dated January 16). Without mentioning the British Prime Minister, a similar phrase appears in earlier publications - for example, in the post published in May 2023 on Instagram. An anonymous user, who writes a lot about various conspiracy theories, posted pictures of the children of Soviet statesmen on his profile and commented on them as follows (the author’s spelling and punctuation are preserved): “If everyone goes to fight, both the children of rulers and the children of the poor, then this is a righteous war. If the children of rulers do not go to war along with all the people, then this is not a war, THIS IS BUSINESS.” 

Later this phrase was published, for example, in “VKontakte"and on forums. The authorship of the statement was attributed to a certain classic, and the phrase “children of officials” appeared in the caption to one of these posts.

“Verified” studied the prevalence of the phrase “Children of officials do not fight” in the Russian-language segment of the Internet. IN National Corpus of the Russian Language it doesn't occur at all. A search on Google and Yandex for different time intervals showed that this expression began to appear on social networks shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This is indirectly confirmed by data from the Yandex Wordstat service, which records the frequency of various queries in Yandex - users began to search for the phrase “Children of officials do not fight” in February-March 2022, but in general, in the first months of the war, interest was low. The popularity of this request increased sharply after the start of partial mobilization in Russia in September 2022. 

Questions for government officials who send ordinary people to fight and protect their relatives from being drafted into the active army quite often arise during armed conflicts. Thus, the phrase attributed to the Russian general Alexander Lebed from the First Chechen War still remains popular: “Let me recruit a company from the children of the elite, and the war will end in a day.” How wrote “Verified,” the military leader’s original statement sounded a little different. In May 2023, the same thesis was expressed by the founder of the Wagner PMC, Evgeny Prigozhin. In an interview with political strategist Konstantin Dolgov, he stated: “I recommend to the elite of the Russian Federation: gather your boys, bitch, send them to war, and when you go to the funeral, when you start burying them, people will say: “Now everything is fair.” Similar arguments are voiced from time to time in public discussions in Ukraine. For example, in February 2024, sports commentator and ex-host of the Inter TV channel Roman Kademin posted on TikTok appeal, in which he said: “Fight for what? Knowing how much Ukraine is mired in corruption. Knowing that the children, wives, families of state leaders and middle-ranking officials have been abroad for a long time. Children of military age are abroad. To fight so that someone can leave peacefully, while others don’t have that opportunity at all?” Kademin's video has received more than 1 million views.

Thus, there is no evidence that the quote “If the children of officials do not fight, then this is not a war, but a business” belongs to Winston Churchill. This statement was apparently inspired by statements made by other famous people on the same topic, and was subsequently attributed to a British politician to give it more credibility.

Cover photo: Winston Churchill Society

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

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