John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The assassination of Mirbach is the signal for a general rising of the Left Social Revolutionaries already planned against the Communists. They seize the office of the Cheka and hold Dzerdzinsky hostage. After a few hours Trotsky’s troops and the disciplined chekists restore order. Almost before it begins the revolt is suppressed. The Left Social Revolutionaries are either dead or under lock and key. The survivors are expelled from all the organs of government. Lenin’s Communists rule alone. Whoever is not for them is against them.

The same day a rising was suppressed in Petrograd and a Green army, backed, so the story went, by the French military mission in Moscow, seized Yaroslavl, important strategically as the head of navigation on the upper Volga, and held out there for a month. Meanwhile the Czechoslovak troops blocked on the Trans-Siberian threw in their lot with the anti-communists, and started moving west with the objective of fighting their way north to Archangel and effecting a junction with the British forces in the Murmansk area. As they proceeded towards the Urals, town after town fell to them without resistance. Assorted anticommunists took over the local governments and proceeded to greet them as liberators.

Ekaterinburg was one of the towns in the path of the Czechoslovak Legion. The month before, as revolt spread through Siberia, the pitiful remnants of the Romanoff family had been brought to Ekaterinburg from internment at Tobolsk, and imprisoned in what had been the mansion of a local merchant. The party consisted of the Czar and Czarina and their daughters and thirteenyearold son. With them was the family doctor and three servants. Most of them were ill from poor food and harsh treatment.

In the middle of the night of July 16 they were awakened by a firing squad acting under orders from the Urals Regional Soviet and told to go down in the cellar. The Czar had to carry his son in his arms as the boy was too ill to walk. There they were lined up against a wall. The leader of the squad told them that they were going to die. The Czar did not understand him, and leaning forward to say “What?” was shot in the face with a revolver. Immediately the executioners emptied their revolvers into the huddled figures. Those who were still groaning were finished off with bayonets. The bodies were hastily covered with quicklime and thrown into an abandoned mineshaft.

A few days later the Czechoslovaks captured the city.

Professor Masaryk had arrived in Washington from Petrograd via Vladivostok and Tokyo early that May. His arrival was eagerly looked forward to by Lansing and his counsellors in the State Department. Here at last was a returning Russian traveller in whose views the President expressed lively interest. Everything Woodrow Wilson heard predisposed him towards Masaryk. He was no arrogant millionaire or flybynight placer miner but a college professor with academic standing. The fact that he came from a small and oppressed country with a profound protestant tradition could not help but arouse the President’s sympathy. The Presbyterian in him was never far beneath the surface. Even so Masaryk had to wait in Washington more than a month, after preparatory luncheons with Lansing and House who both reported favorably, before the President could make up his mind to see him.

Their first interview was in late June. Masaryk, one of the most accomplished international lobbyists of the century, saw to it that he and the President should hit it off.

Masaryk succeeded where the British and French embassies and the Supreme War Council failed. He dramatized the plight of the poor Czechs bravely fighting their way to freedom through hordes of Germans and Hungarians armed by the Bolsheviks. Their occupation of Vladivostok, coming almost on the same day as the action of the Murmansk soviet inviting British intervention “materially changed the situation,” as Lansing cynically put it, “by introducing a sentimental element into the question of our duty.”

The first result of Wilson’s interview with Masaryk was that the cable facilities of the State Department were placed at the disposal of the Czechoslovak representative for a message to Chicherin protesting the failure of the Soviet Government to live up to its guarantee of free and unmolested passage to Vladivostok for the Czechoslovak Legion.

A few days later the President was confiding in House, in the same letter in which he spoke of sweating blood over the Russian problem: “I hope I see and can report some progress presently, along the double line of economic assistance and aid to the Czechoslovaks.”

Wilson had already made up his mind. Two days before he wrote House he called in Secretary Baker and Lansing and Josephus Daniels and General Peyton C. March, now Chief of Staff, to his quiet upstairs study in the White House, ostensibly to consult them, but actually to announce his decision after “thinking through the processes, alone, behind his own closed door.”

“It is the clear and fixed judgment of the Government of the United States,” the President read off a small pad, “that military intervention there would add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it, injure her rather than help her, and that it would be of no advantage in the prosecution of our main design, to win the war against Germany.”

After some cogent arguments against intervening in Russia’s internal struggles, he delivered himself, possibly to the surprise of his hearers, of the proposition that military action was admissible after all: “only to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces and get into successful cooperation with their Slavic kinsmen and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defence in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.”

He itemized the sort of assistance he was thinking of: “Assistance by a commission of merchants, agricultural experts, labor advisers, Red Cross representatives, and agents of the Young Men’s Christian Association.” But military action must come first. “The execution of this plan will follow and not be permitted to embarrass the military assistance rendered in the rear of the westward moving forces of the Czechoslovaks.”

What had started as a plan to help evacuate the Czechoslovaks had turned into a plan to secure their Siberian rear while they advanced into the heart of Russia west of the Urals. A discussion of details followed: the Japanese should be encouraged to furnish small arms, machineguns and ammunition to the Czechoslovaks besieged along the railroad. The Americans and Japanese should each furnish seven thousand men to protect the Legion’s communications.

When the President was finished he asked for comments. According to March’s notes Secretary Lansing commended the paper, Secretary Baker (who had argued himself blue in the face trying to talk the President out of it) merely nodded, Secretary Daniels approved and the general himself shook his head.

“Why are you shaking your head, General?” asked the President with some asperity. General March (noting for his private satisfaction that he had never been a yes-yes man) replied that he had already explained that he didn’t think such an expedition was militarily feasible and that besides the Japanese would take advantage of it for territorial gains.

“We’ll have to take that chance,” said the President testily.

The document was circulated to the Allied chancelleries in the form of an aide-memoire but it wasn’t till August 7 that public announcement was made that an American Expeditionary Force was being dispatched to Siberia. Masaryk immediately wrote the President an effusive note. “Your name Mr. President, as you have no doubt read, is openly cheered in the streets of Prague.”