The evolving politics of Eliot's strategy as editor of The Criterion can be pegged to the growing discursive presence of communism more generally in the British public sphere, and more specifically to the growing public presence of Trotsky, as well as to the state of class relations in mid-1920s Britain, in the period around the General Strike. Eliot's treatment of Trotsky needs to be seen in the context of Trotsky's reception more broadly, notably in relation to his direct intervention in British politics with his book Where is Britain Going? (1926), which drew responses from Baldwin, MacDonald, Keynes and Russell, among others. Eliot's editorial strategy in dealing with Bolshevism was less direct than any of these prominent commentators, but appears most clearly in his advancement of a principle of European culture as a bulwark against Russia and Bolshevism.

While other writings by leading Bolsheviks such as Lenin and Bukharin were published in Britain, Trotsky is almost a case apart because of the volume of his writings and the extent of their dissemination in Britain and across the world. Trotsky became widely known outside Russia after the October Revolution, and his statements and activities were frequently reported in Britain, especially once he had assumed the role of Commissar of Foreign Affairs and begun to lead the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in December 1917, and then again when he became Commissar for War and architect of victory in the civil war. Even before the discussions began at Brest-Litovsk, The Times reported an interview in which Trotsky assured the correspondent that Russia would not negotiate a separate peace, announced his doctrine that there should be peace without annexations, and set out his theory that ‘the whole European proletariat will insist within the next few weeks upon the conclusion of a general peace’, an ‘illusion’, the correspondent notes, which marks the shift from the Bolsheviks’ former lives in ‘a dreamland of idealism’ to the ‘problems of practical statesmanship’. The national newspapers were of course keen to understand the attitude of the new Russian government to the war, but socialist and communist workers were interested in the Bolsheviks for different reasons.