Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Wilson at the same time remained adamantly opposed to an Allied invasion. Francis, after surgery in London, accompanied the President back to New York. He proposed sending 100,000 US troops to Petrograd to oversee fresh elections. 36Francis was to recall how he explained the obstacles:

The President replied that he had mentioned my recommendation to Lloyd George and that Lloyd George’s expression was, if he should order any British soldiers to go to Russia they not only would object but refuse to go. The President furthermore stated that he had mentioned the same subject to Clemenceau, and he had met the reply that if Clemenceau should order French troops to go to Russia they would mutiny, but the President said he would give further consideration to my recommendation. 37

Whether this was the real reason for American inactivity is doubtful. Wilson knew that so large a contingent would be practically an invasion force, and he wanted nothing to do with it. He preferred Hoover’s idea of offering food aid to Soviet Russia on condition that Lenin promised to cease fomenting revolution across his borders. 38There was no objection from Britain and France, and Wilson invited the Norwegian polar explorer and philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen to head the relief mission to Russia. It was Nansen who radioed the proposal to Lenin in April 1919.

The Russians replied on 14 May, welcoming the offer of food supplies but refusing to cease fighting. 39By then Kolchak was on the retreat. Lenin was not covetous of foreign grain at the expense of throwing away victory over a White army. Nor was Kolchak any more enthusiastic about Wilson’s initiative. He judged that the difficulty of crushing communism would increase if food relief arrived under a communist administration. The White Russian ambassador Sergei Sazonov cabled from Paris advising him to be more tactful in his dealings with the Allies. Kolchak’s response was to ask Sazonov to come to Omsk and see the Russian situation for himself. 40

Churchill had so agitated Lloyd George that the Prime Minister asked him to provide a paper costing the military options for Russia. Churchill havered, arguing that the Allies needed to fix a clear political line before he could offer any financial accountancy. 41This pleased Lloyd George, who felt he was denting Churchill’s aggressive inclinations. The French leaders were as anti-Bolshevik as Churchill. In public, Clemenceau and Poincare´ denounced the iniquities of Bolshevism — and they were eloquent about the Soviet expropriation of funds belonging to hundreds of thousands of French investors. But privately they admitted that a war against Soviet Russia would be as onerous for France as Lloyd George saw it would be for the United Kingdom. France had defeated Germany at the cost of ruining the French economy and could not start another big war. And when Béla Kun established a communist regime in Budapest in March 1919 the limits of Allied power were made manifest. American officials in Paris suggested to Marshal Foch that the Hungarians should not be left to their fate at Kun’s hands. Foch’s reply killed off any illusion about France’s preparedness to intervene. He said that he would need a minimum of 350,000 troops to invade and occupy — and he could no longer muster so many soldiers. 42

Captain T. T. C. Gregory of the American Relief Administration scoffed that ‘a battalion and a bugle under the Stars and Stripes’ would be quite enough to do the job. 43Whether this was overly optimistic did not matter; Wilson was never going to agree to such an expedition. The President was exhausted and under attack from all quarters. His former admirer William C. Bullitt resigned from the State Department on 17 May 1919. In his letter of resignation, he told the President that the Allied peace settlement could never hold — it was unfair to so many countries. Bullitt went on to say that the President should have ‘made your fight in the open’ and kept faith with the millions of people who had been willing him to stick by his principles. 44He wrote to Lansing more respectfully but ended with a plea against both the German peace terms and America’s entry into the League of Nations: he could see no good coming from either. 45

The German treaty was the first to be concluded at the Peace Conference. Clemenceau had worn down Wilson sufficiently to persuade him to accept terms that were deeply shocking for most Germans. Vast reparations were to be paid and war guilt was to be admitted; and Germany and Austria, regardless of what their peoples wanted, were forbidden to merge into a single German state. Wilson had considered lining up with Lloyd George against Clemenceau in order to soften the treaty, but the negotiations behind the scenes proved fruitless. Tired out and drained of practical ideas, Wilson gave up the struggle and, whereas the British and French experts remained active, American influence declined as the President faded. 46The treaty was solemnly signed in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919. The choice of place was deliberate. It had been there in 1871 that the French had been humiliated by the victorious Prussians. Germany had become a pariah power, its only consolation being that German ministers knew exactly what the Allies were demanding of them. Soviet Russia, the other pariah power, still had no idea what the Allied intentions towards it might ultimately be.

While the Allied powers had been conferring in Paris, they were troubled by some of the news that reached them from central Europe. Their fear grew that communism might spread across Europe; and although the German government had crushed the Spartacists in Berlin in January 1919, the fact that an insurrection had even been attempted was a worrying sign that the political far left could exploit a situation where unemployment and food shortages were on the rise. Germany was unlikely to be the only country which experienced such disorder. The victor powers felt anxious about the peace.

The Bolshevik leaders in Moscow drew comfort from exactly the same situation. Having made their own revolution by taking advantage of Russia’s wartime disintegration, they remained convinced that European sympathizers would soon emulate them — and although they had not wished for the death of Rosa Luxemburg, her untimely removal meant that Lenin and his Politburo could more easily dominate Comintern. Lenin was in buoyant mood, predicting revolutions that would set the continent on fire. Despite all the military difficulties faced by the Bolsheviks in the Urals, he expressed disdain for the Allied expeditionary forces in Russia. He told Arthur Ransome that Lloyd George might just as well send his soldiers to a communist university. 1He predicted that if the captured conscripts witnessed Bolshevism at work they would quickly turn into Bolsheviks themselves. The Soviet authorities put Boris Reinstein — a former emigrant to America — in charge of propaganda among British POWs who were allowed to stroll around the streets of Moscow. 2After intercepting a letter from a Private A. J. Fardon who had exchanged captivity for a job in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and seemed to be rather taken with the Soviet model, the Directorate of Military Intelligence in London grew worried about the Soviet tactic — and it was irritated with Ransome for facilitating Private Fardon’s correspondence with his family. 3

Ransome had also riled Lenin by saying that, while communism could succeed for the Russians, it had no chance of doing the same in Britain. Lenin replied:

We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there. 4