The Bolshevik Revolution was not entirely bloodless. There was fighting in Moscow and several hundred people were killed. Yet for the first seven or eight months there was less violence than might have been expected to accompany a sweeping social revolution.

Had this trend continued, the revolution in Russia might have taken a far milder course than it did. However, four developments combined to usher in one of the most terrible civil conflicts in history, with the end result a totalitarian, one-party state. These events were: (1) the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, January 18, 1917; (2) the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty between Germany and Russia, March 3, 1918; (3) the Soviet clash with the Czech legionnaires, May 14, 1918; and (4) a series of political assassinations beginning June 20, 1918, and culminating in the shooting of Lenin on August 30, though he was not killed.

Constituent Assembly Dissolved. After the November revolution the often postponed Constituent Assembly was promptly elected by universal suffrage, the Socialist Revolutionaries polling about 21,000,000 votes, the Bolsheviks 9,000,000, the Cadets and other conservative groups 4,500,000 and other socialist parties nearly 2,000,000. All but 13 per cent of the vote was cast for socialist parties, mostly for the Right SR’s, who elected 370 delegates out of 700, while the Bolsheviks got only 175 and their Left SR allies 40.

The election registered a general unwillingness to accept the Red regime, except in the major cities, where the real power lay. The Assembly met in Petrograd on January 18, 1918, and was dissolved the next day, without any important protest from the country. The Red policy on the two engrossing questions, land and food, had robbed the Assembly of most of its interest and there was no solid foundation under the Assembly in the country—no traditions of backing democratic assemblies, no strong middle class, not even the ability to read. This is why, says Chamberlin, the alternative to Tsarism was Bolshevism, and the alternative to the latter not constitutional democracy but a military dictator.¹

Nevertheless, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly embittered the moderate intelligentsia in the cities and to the outside world it was a ruthless and lawless act.

George F. Kennan has written an unforgettable account of the relentless way in which the Reds smothered the Assembly with a heavily fortified armed ring a mile deep around the meeting place, through which the delegates had to pass with jeers and threats in their ears along the way, while large demonstrations in their favor were broken up with bloodshed. Once inside the hall the session was postponed from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. by the Bolsheviki, who filled the place with din and disorder when their opponents—a strong majority—tried to speak. The Social Revolutionary majority courageously stuck it out, until after the Bolsheviki had left at midnight, and passed a series of constitutional resolutions amid mounting menace from their sailor guards who earlier had been fired to frenzy against the Assembly. It adjourned at 4:40 a.m., having operated all day and night without food, only to be dissolved by the Reds the same morning.

There was “an element of finality” in the events of that night in creating a breach between the new regime in Russia and the Western world.²

Peace with Germany. Yet the peace of Brest-Litovsk stirred far more feeling against the Red government. It had not been achieved without a long struggle inside the Party. Lenin was adamant for it. He proposed to accept the harsh German terms in late January, but was voted down twice. Then Trotsky tried his dramatic walkout on the Germans, “no war, no peace,” only to have the Germans advance and exact still harsher terms. The final treaty was indeed humiliating. It took a third of Russia’s crop area, over half of her industrial strength and 62,000,000 people.

The ratification of the treaty was inescapable. It was impossible to renew the war against Germany. The people would not support it. Only by gaining peace at any price could the Red regime survive. Yet in addition to the dangerous Party crisis which accompanied ratification, two other grave consequences ensued: a rupture with the Left SR’s and growing conflict with the Allies. Losing the SR’s left the government purely Bolshevik and the hostility of the Allies provided munitions and other aid for a civil war of all the dissenting elements against the Reds.

Czech-Soviet Break. Yet the war might not have occurred had not a strange circumstance existed. There were in Russia some 45,000 to 60,000 Czech deserters from the Austrian armies, who had been fighting with the Russians. These men, nearly all democrats by conviction, were organized by Thomas A. Masaryk for return to the Western front. Other routes seeming impracticable, it was decided to move them out over the 5000–mile railroad to Vladivostock, and the first contingent reached that port safely. In western Siberia suspicion developed between the Soviets and the Czechs, fed by rumors rife in the outer world that the Soviets were arming Austrian and Hungarian war prisoners in Siberia. The rumors had no real basis, but in any event the antipathy between Czechs and Hungarians was enough to cause friction when several train loads of returning Austrian and Hungarian prisoners passed a detachment of Czechs at Chelyabinsk on May 18, 1918. One of the Hungarians hit a Czech with a missile and was promptly killed.

This led Trotsky rashly to order all the Czechs to be disarmed on pain of being shot on sight. Their National Council ordered them to comply, but instead the men defied the authority of the Soviets and very soon controlled much of the Ural region and nearly all of the Trans-Siberian railroad. “British, French and American agents encouraged them,” and under their protection two anti-Soviet governments were set up, representing relatively democratic elements.³

The seizure of effective power in Siberia by the Czechs was received with great satisfaction in Allied governmental circles. The Czechs could be used to prevent the return of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the Central Powers, no small item in May and June 1918.

In the wake of this gain it soon became apparent that the Soviet-Czech clash supplied the one element necessary for an international war against the Reds, with the hope of military success. With such a vast area apparently torn from Soviet hands, it seemed feasible to the Allies to arm White forces for assaults on the central Red area.

At the same time all of the anti-Red elements in Russia took heart. These included the dispossessed landowners, the nobility, many army and navy officers, most of the professional classes—including the great majority of the liberals—the church, manufacturers, some of the kulaks, or richer peasants, and a part of the pious illiterate peasants who had not yet been affected by Red propaganda.

It must be emphasized that the vast bulk of the peasants were too poor and benighted to comprise a political force. They were glad to have possession of the land and to be free for a time from the heavy hand of any central government. Beyond this they reacted only to local stimuli. They fought Red grain collectors and when famine came they joined the latter in despoiling those better off, but as a political force the vast bulk of the Russian people did not exist. They were too ignorant to count. In the end they largely determined the course of the civil war by turning against the Whites, but only by local action. They were too inchoate to organize or be organized.

To all these anti-Red elements, comparatively small in numbers but strong intellectually, must be added the various socialist parties, all of whom came into opposition to the dictatorial Reds. If anything could exceed the hatred of the dispossessed ruling classes for the Reds it was the fury of their socialist cousins, who felt that the Reds had prostituted and disgraced the faith. Like all defenders of orthodoxy, in all ages, they regarded the heretics as far worse than the non-believers. This cleavage between socialists and communists continues to the present, and is a phenomenon little understood in the United States.

Terror. In mid-1918 the Left SR’s, most radical of the non-Bolshevik socialists, began a campaign of assassination, along with many small revolts. On June 20 the government propaganda chief was killed. The German Ambassador fell next, on July 6, then the German commander in the Ukraine. These crimes marked the break of the Left SR’s with the government, in which they even had strong units in the new Cheka, or secret police. Finally, on August 30, Michael Uritsky, President of the Petrograd Cheka, was slain and Lenin was shot twice, though not dangerously wounded.⁴

These shootings unleashed a Red terror against all enemies of the regime. The Cheka was developed until in many parts of the country it superseded the Soviets. Zinoviev at once ordered 500 hostages in Petrograd shot, and the taking and shooting of hostages was common. From then on it was war without quarter on both sides.

Chamberlin estimates that 50,000 persons were killed by the Red Terror during the three years of civil war. The story circulated widely over the world that it had claimed 1,700,000 lives he regards as “a wild exaggeration,” devoid of proof. The Cheka struck especially at people of wealth, education or social standing, though often it destroyed quite ordinary people, especially resisting peasants. It was accompanied by revolting torture and a great deal of corruption, since criminals and sadists were glad to enlist in the Cheka.

The charge of corruption did not apply “to the majority of the men at the top” of the Cheka, especially to Felix Dzerzhinsky, “an old revolutionary of the most unimpeachable idealism,” whose colleagues all paid tribute to his “personal modesty and austerity.” On both sides the stakes were very nearly absolute: either all power or death—at best a dreary exile. Chamberlin adds that “one reason why no government could have survived in Russia in those years without the use of terrorism was that the national morale was completely shattered by the World War. No one, except under extreme compulsion, was willing to perform any state obligation.” Neither side could get orders obeyed without using force.⁵

An excellent picture of the White Terror is to be found in George Stewart’s The White Armies of Russia, based mainly on Russian language sources. Describing the White Terror in Siberia, he notes that “the slightest resistance brought upon a family execution and robbery—dozens executed simply because they were unenthusiastic about the regime at Omsk.” “Systematic pillage, murder and incendiarism” constituted the plan of campaign of Semenov, one of Kolchak’s chiefs. On August 19, 1919, Colonel Stephanov’s command slaughtered fifty-two car-loads of prisoners. Again, “hundreds of innocent peasants, townsmen, laborers, and railroad employees who were neither Red nor bandits nor disturbers of the peace and who were in no sense a danger to the White cause were murdered.” In another district “women were ripped open, children bayoneted, and men flayed alive. Brutality made Bolsheviks where none had been before.” Stewart concludes that “the Civil War had loosed men from every restraint of culture, religion, or common decency. Life for all hung by a thread; hundreds were shot on mere suspicion.”⁶

On every front the Whites were apt to slay prisoners of war and all others suspected of being Reds as mere vermin, and the Reds pursued a similar policy.

Kolchak’s Defeat. Stewart’s chronicle of the civil war, a conflict made long and deadly by large-scale Allied intervention, is one of the most depressing volumes this writer has ever read. It should be read by all American policy makers. Until the Nazis made wholesale murder a scientific business, the campaign of Admiral Kolchak in Siberia resulted in the most gigantic tragedy of all recent times.

On November 18, 1918, Kolchak overthrew the somewhat democratic regime at Omsk and made himself the supreme ruler of Russia. This assumption of dictatorship was an unpleasant surprise to the democratic Czechs, whose military power had made it possible. It deterred the Allies also from an imminent recognition of Kolchak. The presence of reactionary and absolutist officers around him counseled caution and led to a lengthy catechism by the Allies which, for the record, formally pledged him to democratic ways. Military aid was then advanced generously.

There are several things to note about this intervention in behalf of Admiral Kolchak.

1. It was done six months after the armistice—six months after any justification for it as a war measure could have been claimed.

2. It was done to a country with which no one of the four nations (Britain, France, Japan, and America) was at war.

3. It constituted an official, open and avowed attack on the Soviet government of Moscow.

4. Even if both the Soviet government and the Kolchak government were to be considered as factions equally entitled or equally not entitled to national control—even then the support of the Allies (in favor of one faction) constituted an intervention in a civil war, a subsidy of the one side against the other.⁷

In support of the Allied attempt to defeat and destroy the Bolshevik Government the British Government gave Kolchak seventy-nine shiploads of supplies, arms and equipment for 100,000 men,⁸ and for a time his armies advanced toward Moscow, only to be defeated and driven back thousands of miles along the Siberian railway in one of the most disastrous retreats of all time.

Napoleon’s famous retreat from Moscow, in which he lost 70,000 men, was by comparison an orderly and successful disengagement. In Novonikolayevsk 60,000 people died of typhus and 30,000 lay unburied at one time. At Taiga over 50,000 were slain by hunger and disease. Most of the defeated army and its refugee trains had to retreat by foot in the bitter cold of the Siberian winter. On the 1500 mile trek from the River Tobol to Lake Baikal alone 1,000,000 men, women and children perished, along with innumerable horses, which starving people ate until the arctic cold added them to the long trail of corpses in the snow.

The stricken horde was driven on only by the knowledge that the avenging Red army was in hot pursuit, so close on their heels that Kolchak was captured and shot at Irkutsk and the great gold reserve of the Imperial Government captured.

This immense debacle was not due, either, to lack of Allied aid. Lloyd George declared in the House of Commons: “We have given real proof of our sympathy for the men of Russia who have helped the Allied cause, by sending one hundred million sterling worth ($500,000,000) of material and support in every form.”⁹

Kolchak’s effort to suppress the Reds had been aided by the presence of British, French, American and Japanese troops east of Lake Baikal, based on Vladivostock. The decision of the Allies to send troops to Vladivostock was made in July 1918. On July 2 the Allied Supreme War Council decided for intervention and on the 17th Washington notified the Allies that though opposed to a policy of armed intervention the United States would join the Japanese in landing troops at Vladivostock.

At first all of the Allied troops, including small British and French contingents, fought the Reds, but the American General Graves soon decided to adhere strictly to his rigid instructions forbidding any active help to either side. Thereafter his 7,000 troops aided Kolchak only by guarding parts of the railway and incurred his deep wrath by their antipathy to the unspeakable atrocities of his supporters, Semenov and Kalminkov. These villains were protected by the Japanese, who poured 72,000 troops into Siberia, in violation of their pledges to the United States, and conducted themselves in a manner that the Soviet peoples never forgot, until they smashed Japan’s armies in Manchuria in 1945. The American troops remained in Siberia from mid-1918 to earlv 1920, but the Japanese stayed two years longer, only gradually giving up their hope of an empire in Siberia.¹⁰

Allied Intervention in South Russia. In South Russia the intervention of France was still more inglorious. The French government sent 140,000 men to the Odessa region and the Crimea,¹¹ in an effort to recover some part of the great sums by means of which they had bolstered the Tsarist regime for more than twenty years.

On April 4, 1919, General Denikin, the White leader, was informed that the French would control everything in their zone of occupation, including “operations against the Bolsheviks.” It transpired, however, that the French troops which had survived Verdun and the Marne had no desire to die in Russia. Bolshevik propaganda made great headway among them, and no White military strength was in evidence. Accordingly, the French commander received an order to evacuate Odessa in three days, and he acted with such alacrity that the last French ship left the roadstead on April 8, 1919, pushed out by an irregular band of Red Partisans and leaving thousands of tearful people on the docks. On April 16, Sevastopol was evacuated with almost as much haste. The same spoliation and wholesale destruction of goods occurred under the French as under the Red and White troops. Damage committed by the French in their four months of occupation was estimated as 125,000,000 rubles.¹²

British intervention in South Russia was concentrated in the Caucasus provinces of Turkestan, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Denikin was forbidden to undertake any operations in the oil regions thus taken under British control, but unrest in Ireland and India compelled the British gradually to relax their hold on their investments in this area, though they clung to Batum until July 1920.¹³ The presence of British troops in Batum in September 1918 did not prevent the capture of the city by a force of Turks and Tartars, who massacred 30,000 Armenians and indulged in a wholesale orgy of murder, rape, arson and pillage.¹⁴ It would not be strange if all these events in the Caucasus had something to do with demands by Russia after the Second World War for the recovery of Kars and Batum from Turkey.

In December 1918 the British and French Governments made a special agreement dividing European Russia into two zones of occupation and influence, the British zone including the Cossack regions, the Caucasus, Armenia, Georgia and Kurdistan. The French zone comprised the Ukraine, Crimea, and east to the Don River. In this area the French made agreements with the White leaders giving them “control of Russian railways for fifty years and of economic and military policy for five years.”¹⁵

British contributions to Denikin’s armies were summarized by Winston Churchill as follows:

“A quarter million rifles, two hundred guns, thirty tanks and large masses of munitions and equipment were sent through the Dardanelles and the Black Sea to the port of Novorossiisk; and several hundred British officers and non-commissioned officers, as advisers, instructors, store-keepers, and even a few aviators furthered the organization of his armies.”¹⁶

The French material contribution to Denikin, while less than the British, was also large. In Washington Ambassador Bakhmetev was permitted to use considerable credits granted to the Kerensky Government just before its fall.¹⁷

Denikin’s Debacle. The immense military stores thus provided enabled the White forces in South Russia to make a really dangerous threat to Moscow. Large battles were repeatedly won and heavy booty in supplies and prisoners taken from the Reds. By September 1919 Denikin’s armies had taken Odessa, Kharkov, Kiev, Kursk and Orel. Beyond Orel they were only 200 miles from Moscow, but their nearly 1000–mile front was too long and when Trotsky struck at a weak point in October disaster ensued.

Another long tragic retreat began, in which thousands of refugees from every city joined. Before the desperate savage multitude reached Novorossiisk more than 200,000 people had died of typhus and exposure. Whole trains on the railroad became silent, with every person aboard dead, including the crews. When the survivors reached the port, in March 1920, a raging “Borah” wind covered the sidewalks with blue bodies, largely stripped by the survivors. Typhus and smallpox continued their deadly work while, as at Odessa, people fought for places on the transports. Some 50,000 embarked, but many more were left behind.

In the Crimea, General Wrangel brought some order out of chaos and in May and June 1920 his 40,000 fit troops defeated the Reds in Taurida, just north of the Isthmus, in a series of sanguinary battles, but after the Russo-Polish war was ended, on October 12, 1920, the Red Army swept the White forces into the sea. Some 126 ships carried 146,000 people away from the Crimea to exile and penury abroad. Behind them their native land lay filled with ruined cities, wrecked railroads, hungry, plague-stricken people and unburied corpses—fit soil for the apocalyptical famine of 1921–2.

Though led by able, honest and liberal commanders at the top, the White movement in South Russia had been discredited “by violence, flogging, plundering and drunkenness”; by “dissolute officials who brought to the new posts their old vices, the old incompetence, laziness and self assurance”; by unending quarrels, jealousies and disputes; by “orgies among officers, many high in power,” which had been followed by drunkenness, debauchery and corruption among the mass.¹⁸

No tolerable kind of civil authority was ever created. The untrained people were left to dissipate themselves in “an orgy of talk” without any of the zealous educational direction supplied by the Reds. The large proportion of the old governing classes in the Army repelled the people, and, above all, the landlords were restored to their estates of which the Revolution had deprived them.

The Polish Invasion. Immediately after the defeat of Denikin’s great advance toward Moscow the Red Army was confronted with a major war with Poland. From December 22, 1919, to February 4, 1920, the Soviet Government addressed three separate appeals for peace negotiations to Poland, offering a boundary well to the west of the racial and linguistic frontiers. Poland, too, needed peace badly, having been one of the main battlegrounds on the Eastern front. While hunger and disease were not as rife as in Russia, they were bad enough. However, the Polish colonels and aristocrats who gathered around General Pilsudski had other ideas. They aspired to “the permanent weakening of Russia” by seizing all the territory between the newly independent states of the Caucasus and the Baltic, cutting Russia off from both the Baltic and Black Seas and depriving her of most of her agricultural and mineral wealth. What the defeated Germans had sought to do the Polish leaders would now carry through.¹⁹

They were obliged to wait until Denikin’s offensive had failed, since the Whites would oppose their ambitions even more surely than the Reds. Then moving swiftly in late April 1920, Polish troops occupied Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine on May 8, and all protests by Allied powers were rebuffed. In August 1920, U.S. Acting Secretary of State Norman H. Davis vainly warned the Poles to accept the Curzon line which the Paris Peace Conference had fixed as a fair boundary between the Polish and Russian peoples.²⁰

By that time the Red Army had driven Pilsudski’s troops back to the gates of Warsaw, assisted by a revival of national patriotism led by the offer of the services of General Brussilov and many other Tsarist officers. Accepting these offers the Reds still sought to make the war one against the Polish ruling classes, in the hope of gaining a communist Poland. For the Reds the war became an intense crusade to create in Poland a friendly communist neighbor, to which they proposed to give a boundary more favorable than the Curzon line.

This dream was ended by a patriotic rising of the Poles, working men included, by the insubordination of the young Red General Tukhachevsky, “who led his army westward, instead of obeying the first principles of strategy by joining with Budenny in encircling Warsaw,”²¹ and by the arrival of aid to Poland from the West.

Faced with a spread of the Red flood into Poland the British poured munitions through Danzig and the French sent General Weygand with 400 officers to reorganize the Polish forces. The result was a crushing defeat of the Red armies, which sent them reeling back into Russia with heavy losses.

The treaty of peace, signed at Riga, March 18, 1921, gave the Poles much less territory than Moscow had offered them earlier, but much more than the Allies thought wise. A broad strip of land inhabited predominantly by White Russians and Ukrainians was included in Poland and remained there until recovered by Russia in 1939. The White Ambassador Bakhmetev, in Washington, warned prophetically in 1921 that “restored Russia will never approve a treaty of dismemberment forcibly imposed in times of adversity; nor will the peasant population, predominantly Orthodox, of the Western provinces of Russia acquiesce in the domination of Polish Catholic landlordism.”²²

In the years before 1939 it was the certainty that the huge landed estates created in this area after 1921 would be ended by any Russian occupation which made it impossible for the Polish colonels to accept Russian aid against Germany. After 1939, too, the loss of their estates made it impossible for them to cooperate with Russia against Germany, or with her in organizing the new Poland.

Intervention in the Baltic. While the Red Army was massing for its decisive battles with Denikin’s forces the White forces in the Baltic under General Yudenitch made a spectacular dash for Petrograd. Early in 1919 Red forces had thoroughly alienated the Baltic peoples by occupying most of their important cities, looting and killing thousands before they were driven out by volunteer and German forces, leaving starvation behind them. Small White forces gradually increased in number and were assured of munitions by British General Gough. These arrived in Reval on August 2, 1919.

In the meantime, the food crisis had been alleviated by the American Relief Administration, which saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the stricken region. On June 8, 1919, Major R. R. Powers of the A.R.A. arrived in Reval and at once “informed himself of the amount of food necessary to secure the successful occupation of Petrograd by the Whites.” An important conference, on the 11th, resulted in the promise of American food supplies by the army. It was later agreed, also, that food might be sold at a price greater than cost, to finance the White forces, and American flour was sold to the population at a price six times above that distributed by the Esthonian authorities. Early in August, after the British munitions arrived, General Yudenitch appealed to the A.R.A. for gasoline and received a telegram from Herbert Hoover in Paris promising 50,000 gallons of gas at Reval on September 1, and requesting to be kept informed as to “relative front powers.”²³

The political situation was then cleared up by drastic action on the part of the British. Since the Reds had recognized the independence of Esthonia while the Whites refused to do so, General F. A. Marsh invited the White leaders to a conference on August 10, 1919, and gave them forty minutes to form a government, with a slate of ministers supplied by him, and to recognize Esthonia’s independence. Esthonia at once agreed to cooperate with Yudenitch and the drive on Petrograd was announced. Early in September his forces advanced while Allied ships maintained a naval blockade of the city. Some 500 Red seamen lost their lives when Admiral Cowan’s guns sank three of their torpedo boats.²⁴

On land the four tanks included in the British armaments and manned by British crews almost won the campaign.²⁵ The raw Red levies had never seen such monsters and retreated in panic before them. Later, the Putilov works in Petrograd hastily improvised a few tanks to show the terrorized recruits what these weapons were like. Nevertheless, Yudenitch swept to the suburbs of the city at a most crucial moment. Lenin favored abandoning it rather than divert troops from the southern front, but Trotsky rushed to the city and rallied the defenders, both for offensive effort and for a last ditch street defense, should the Whites break into the city. The determination of the young Reds whom he scraped together “astounded Whites and Reds alike” and Petrograd was saved.

The retreat of Yudenitch began late in October and repeated on a smaller scale all the heart-rending agonies of the other White debacles. Back in the Baltic states his troops were disarmed and treated harshly by the Esthonians, who now feared Red reprisals. Yudenitch escaped in an automobile under the British flag, leaving behind him 1200 troops suffering from spotted typhus and 21,000 starving refugees attached to his army. Typhus had killed 14,000 of his men during the retreat.

Intervention in North Russia. The Allied intervention in North Russia began with the consent of the Bolshevik Government. A German division under General von der Goltz had landed at Hango, Finland, April 3, 1918, and combined with White Finns to drive the Reds out of Finland and advance to within twenty-five miles of Petrograd, also endangering the Murmansk region. The Murmansk Soviet was accordingly authorized to accept Allied aid. After the danger to Petrograd had lessened, the Soviet Government became alarmed at the growing Allied forces in Murmansk and on June 30 ordered the local Soviet to expel them. It refused to do so and instead concluded a treaty with the Allies which made a complete breach between them and the Soviet Government.²⁶

By the middle of July Allied plans for the occupation of Archangel were ready. On July 25 the Allied Ambassadors, who had fled from Petrograd to Vologda went on to Archangel, which had been prepared for revolt against the Reds by various Allied intrigues. A week later the British General Poole arrived with troops. President Wilson had not agreed to the sending of American forces until July 17, 1918, and the first of 5,500 American troops did not arrive until August 3, the day after Archangel had fallen.

The new government which replaced the Red authorities was still too Red for the military men, so all but two of the Cabinet were kidnapped and imprisoned. However, the Ambassadors were shocked by this event, and when strikes and peasant discontent agitated the region they insisted that the leading minister be restored under pledge to make his Cabinet more conservative. Finding themselves in an intolerable position, the ministers resigned and thereafter the region was ruled by the military, in alliance with Russian General Miller, an avowed monarchist.

When the war with Germany ended, November 11, 1918, various official explanations were given for continuing the Allied occupation: the ice would soon close the port, and the pro-Ally Russians who had been induced to take the field against the Reds could not be left to certain vengeance. “Thus, little by little, the Allies were entangled in the Russian morass.”²⁷

The Allies had taken the offensive, fanning out in five directions. After winter set in they went on the defensive, but the Reds attacked and bitter campaigns continued all winter. Serious frictions developed between all the national contingents represented and with the natives, who resented the reactionary character of the regime supported by the Allies and also looked askance at “the interest which the British showed in the resources of North Russia.” The natives felt also that the exchange rate was unfairly manipulated against them, and the dishonesty of many of the Allied troops offended the people, especially the peasants. Thieving from government stores flourished, the troops trading the stolen supplies for furs, or rum. The Russians charged them with stealing like common thieves and became less and less enthusiastic about the continued hardships of the war. For their part the Allied troops could not understand why they continued to be there, after the Armistice, and they were oppressed by the dreadful cold, the long Arctic nights and the grim solitude of the forests.

At home both the British and American Governments had increasing difficulty in defending the continued presence of the troops in Russia and evacuation of the Americans began at the end of May 1919.

On the British side the evacuation took a strange turn. The ships which carried the Americans away brought British reinforcements, “preparatory to evacuation,” and on May 4 War Minister Churchill directed General Ironside to prepare for an offensive in the direction of Kotlas, with the object of making a junction with Kolchak. Reinforcements for this purpose poured in during June and July. These troops “were among the best in the British Army and were exceedingly well equipped.” Allied troops now numbered 37,000, outnumbering the Reds, but as the summer advanced the defeat of Kolchak destroyed any hope of the junction which it was expected would lead to the capture of Petrograd.²⁸

Then it became evident that the British evacuation which had been promised since the spring would have to be carried out. Pulling out, however, proved to be a far more difficult operation than going in. Lord Rawlinson, one of the top British commanders, was sent out in August to direct the withdrawal and further British reinforcements followed him. After hard fighting all summer, the Allies managed to disengage themselves and by September 27, 1919, the evacuation of Archangel was complete, great military stores being turned over to the puppet General Miller, with the advice to evacuate Archangel and concentrate all his strength on Murmansk, the evacuation of which was completed by the Allies on October 12, after several near disasters. Miller preferred to try to hold both ports and lost them in February 1920, 500 of his officers being shot by the Reds at one time.

American casualties during the northern occupation numbered 2,845. British losses were less, but the expedition had cost them over $50,000,000.²⁹

Reasons for Intervention. The Allied motives in this great series of interventions had been mixed. Some of the leading reasons were: (1) before the Armistice immense military stores at Murmansk-Archangel, sent to Russia for her armies, were thought to be in danger of falling into the hands of the Germans. (2) Even after the Reds renounced the war a need was urgently felt for reconstituting the Eastern Front in someway, to halt the large transfers of German troops to France. If the Reds could be overthrown maybe the Whites would re-enter the war. (3) The Poles and Japanese had great imperialistic ambitions. To a lesser extent similar dreams beckoned the British, especially in the oil region of the Caucasus, and the French. (4) After the Armistice, Bolshevism was the great fear which haunted the controlling elements in the democracies. War upon it seemed urgent, with the great hope of crushing it in its lair before it spread further.

Of all these motives there can hardly be any doubt that the last one became the dominant purpose of the British and French Governments. President Woodrow Wilson had embarked on the two small American ventures in intervention with the greatest reluctance. He sought in each case to set up safeguards to avoid taking part in the Civil War and in a large measure he succeeded, especially in Siberia. In London and Paris there were no such scruples about Russia’s future, though there was vacillation on the part of the more moderate conservatives in Britain, led by Lloyd George and Balfour. These more moderate men were carried along by the hard shelled conservatives in the British Government, led by War Minister Churchill, who increasingly directed the intervention.

Intervention Limited by Mounting Domestic Resistance. The entire intervention effort, vast as it was, was still a half-way affair. Before the end of the war with Germany it had necessarily to be limited. After November 1918 the French and British leaders saw plenty of reason for helping the Whites, but they were held back and frustrated by the war weariness of their own peoples and by the impossibility of inducing their troops to fight a new war.

In Britain the Labor Party Executive asked the Government immediately after the Armistice to define its intentions toward Russia, but received no reply. In the following June a Labor Party Conference passed a resolution, by 1,893,000 votes to 935,000, demanding an immediate end to intervention and for “the unreserved use of both political and industrial power” to enforce the demand. In the autumn of 1919 there were great street demonstrations against the intervention and in May 1920, at the height of the Polish offensive against Russia, dock workers’ strikes stopped the sending of munitions to Poland.

When the Poles were defeated and the Reds marched on Warsaw, Premier Lloyd George hinted war on July 21, and the British fleet was alerted in the Baltic. On August 7, Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon sent a note to the Soviet Government threatening war if the Red Army did not stop. This brought nation-wide labor demonstrations and on August 9 a meeting of all labor leaders unanimously warned the Government that “the whole industrial power of the workers will be used to defeat this war.” A national conference was called and a Council of Action set up with full powers to order all labor union members to down tools.³⁰

In the face of increasingly resolute opposition by labor, and by public opinion generally, the British Government was unable to intervene decisively in Russia. One by one the White movements reached their climax and collapsed. In the main, London and Paris had to confine their later intervention efforts to the sending of huge quantities of supplies to the Whites, accompanied by some technical assistance.

In addition the Allied Supreme War Council maintained a hostile naval blockade of Red Russia until January 16, 1920, and this was an important factor. The Soviets did not have the use of a single seaport. They were thrown completely on their own and survived only by what strength they could generate in the heart of Russia.

Each one of the great interventions attempted suffered from the inability of Western Governments to go all out. The Whites always had larger hopes than were fulfilled, though both Kolchak and Denikin received enough military supplies to have achieved great results if they had been able to use them wisely. None of the White movements had first-rate leadership and none of them demonstrated to the people that they had anything better to offer than a return of landlordism and the crushing of the Reds. The latter succeeded in winning over more and more people to the very end of the fighting. The strength of the Red regime increased with each assault upon it.

Growth of the Red Army. Recognition must be given, too, to the great feat of the Red leaders in creating a new army. Beginning almost from scratch after the disintegration of the Imperial armies, their forces had little military value at first, often descending to brigandage. After the break with the Czechs in Siberia and the advance of White forces to Kazan it became a matter of life and death to create a real military force. Conscription and military training were established by degrees: the former officers were cajoled and coerced into serving again, with liberal rewards for distinction or good service and drastic action against families or shooting for the disloyal; short course officers’ schools were successful; discipline was enforced; and the size of the army rapidly expanded. It was almost doubled during August 1918 and reached 800,000 by the end of the year. By 1920 the figure was 3,000,000 and during 1920 it grew to 5,500,000.

Arms were not available for more than 500,000 and there were 2,846,000 deserters during 1919 and 1920. Nearly all were recovered by one means or another. The incessant activity of the Communist Party in propagandizing and teaching the recruits could not make them like the army, but it did fire enough with revolutionary fervor to win the Civil War. About half of the members of the Party went into the army and their fanatical zeal stiffened the others.

The hero of the war on the Red side was unquestionably the Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky. Under his administration nearly 50,000 former officers were restored to the army and as many more trained. He did not attempt the military direction of the sixteen armies which held the fronts at the height of the war, but his armored train, in which he carried everything from a printing press to automobiles, was constantly on the move, especially to points of emergency. It was Trotsky who “drove the heterogeneous masses of the Red Army to final victory by a combination of ruthless fanaticism, abounding energy and never failing resourcefulness.”³¹

The Failure of Intervention. When the last of the White debacles came to its tragic close, what did the West have to show for its intervention in Russia? It is difficult to point to any constructive gain, aside from the possible holding of some German troops in Finland during the early stages of the Northern intervention. Otherwise the five great campaigns had all ended in defeat. For a while the Red regime was in desperate straits, ringed into an area of a few hundred miles surrounding Moscow, but always it won in the end.

The costs, however, were staggering. When it was all over Russia was devastated throughout her vast expanses, from Poland to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Caucasus. Millions of poor civilians had died of abuse, hunger and famine, which was soon to claim millions more. Everything was in a far worse state than at the time of the March revolution, bad as that was. Hatred and degradation filled the land. The upper classes in whose behalf the war had been fought had been humiliated and broken in labor battalions, killed and scattered abroad to live in bitter exile.

The results of the Allied intervention have been tellingly summarized by Bruce Lockhart, who was the British Agent to the Soviets after formal diplomatic intercourse was interrupted. His conclusions are that by June 1918 there was no danger of Russia being overrun by Germany, that it was a mistake to intervene at all, that the consequences were “disastrous both to our prestige and to the fortunes of those Russians who supported us” and that they regarded the intervention “as an attempt to overthrow Bolshevism.”³²

It is well to remember also that after the Armistice the Soviets made persistent efforts to make peace with the Allies, on almost any terms. Between November 1918 and February 1919 the Soviet Government addressed seven peace proposals, “couched in the most conciliatory language,” to the Entente Powers and to the United States.³³

Was Bolshevism Checkmated? One negative dividend can be claimed for the great sums which the Allies expended in backing the Whites. In his fine history of The Russian Revolution Chamberlin reminds us that much of Central and Eastern Europe was in such a state of disintegration as to be fertile ground for Bolshevik agitation. He cites the undoubted passion of the Red leaders of the time for world revolution and comments that nothing but lack of strength prevented them from supporting militarily Bela Kun’s Red regime in Hungary as energetically as Britain supported Kolchak and Denikin. Therefore, if there had been no intervention, or if it had stopped after the Armistice, the Russian Civil War “would almost certainly have ended much more quickly in a decisive victory of the Soviets. Then a triumphant revolutionary Russia would have faced a Europe that was fairly quivering with social unrest and upheaval.”³⁴ In other words, the interventions of the West had the negative advantage of preventing the Bolshevizing of Europe and of pushing the frontier of communism farther East.

This is a tenable thesis, yet the arguments against it are weighty. Without the arming and financing of the White revolts by the West those in the North and the Baltic would not have occurred at all and the Siberian and South Russian movements would not have been formidable. Indeed it is difficult to see how they could have been any serious threat to the Soviet Government. In that situation there would accordingly have been no dire necessity to organize a great Red army. There was more than enough to do in establishing the new Red heaven, without pouring all the energies of the infant regime into forging a mighty army, in a land already sick and tired of war. It was not until the crisis developed that the Reds turned away from Utopia and concentrated on war. They had paid the highest price in humiliation and loss of territory to get out of World War I. Peace was their platform and, having surrendered a broad belt of land in the West to get it they showed no tendency to reconquer it by force after Germany’s collapse. Their doctrines of antiimperialism and cultural freedom for all nationalities militated strongly against such an adventure. Far from attempting to recover Poland they freely offered a generous frontier. It was only after Poland sought to carve out a huge Empire in Russia that the Reds tried to carry the Revolution to Poland.

From the first it was the West which was on the offensive, not the Soviets. When the first important gathering of monarchists occurred at Rostov, in South Russia, during December 17, its leaders were at once offered $100,000,000 by the British Government and 100,000,000 rubles by the French to make war on the Soviet Government. Dewitt C. Poole, American Consul-General in Moscow, also went quickly to see the White rebel leaders and reported, on January 26, that the United States should support the anti-Soviet cause.³⁵ It is difficult to conclude that the originally pacifist Reds would or could have created a powerful new war machine without the early and persistent intervention of the West. When they were encircled with Western-armed forces on all sides there was nothing to do except to go to war, and to make the war total.

Within the limits of the exhaustion and chaos which lay all around them the Reds waged the first total war. They had to do so in order to survive. In the fires of this grim testing time they also hammered out the machinery of the totalitarian state—organized terror by the secret police, the planned use of all national resources, nationalization of all industry, class war in the villages in order to feed the starving cities (which later ended in the forced collectivization of the land), a monolithic, highly disciplined Party controlling and unifying all activity, military or civil, and a powerful army, taught and schooled with every means at command.

These pillars of totalitarian state power might well have been erected under the Soviet State in the course of time, without the compelling whip of the Civil Wars. They may all have been implicit in Marxism, but it is altogether unlikely that they would have been built as quickly and strongly. Evolution in the Soviet Union would have proceeded much more slowly and, in all probability, with much greater moderation, without the scourging compulsion of Western intervention.

Continuing Effects of the Interventions on World Politics. Yet the biggest effect of the West’s intervention has yet to be considered, the effect upon the minds of the Russian people and the Red leaders. When war again engulfed the vast reaches of Russia, on the heels of the First World War, it put a strain upon humanity seldom borne before. For another two and a half years the people had to endure coercion, looting, killing and worse, from both sides. Already impoverished and weary, they had to go through endless agonies of plague and famine in which millions died. In the United States few even remember that terrible time and most Americans never heard of it, but the Russians cannot be expected to forget. Such an experience is burned into the very soul of a nation.

The Red leaders, especially, were given every reason to believe that the Western world sought their extermination and that it would be only a question of time until the capitalist powers would be back to finish the job. They were presented also with a telling argument with which to justify all their oppressive regimentations of the Soviet peoples—“If you do not work and obey, the terrible times will come again!”

The continuing effects of the West’s intervention on world politics are self-evident. The will of the governing classes in the West to stamp out the communist experiment in Russia was expressed in deeds which the Red leaders cannot forget as easily as we can. To them it was a long ordeal of fire and blood. To us it was a far-away incident undertaken with mixed motives and soon forgotten.

American Public Opinion Poorly Informed. Indeed the American people never knew with any accuracy what was transpiring in Russia during this decisive period, except very imperfectly after the event. On August 11, 1920, the New Republic published a remarkable analysis of the news coverage of the events here described by the New York Times, then as now one of our most objective sources of news. The article was written by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz in a wholly constructive spirit, after studying the news dispatches in the Times about Russia from March 1917 to March 1920. The report covers forty-two pages which make up a deeply disturbing document.³⁶

It disclosed that the hopes and fears of the men on the Times organization determined the color and character of the news about Russia. From March 1917 until the Bolshevik revolution the news, especially in captions and emphasis, was so optimistic as to be misleading. From November 1917 until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the news was “handled in a rather uncritically pro-Bolshevik fashion,” on the assumption that the Soviets would refuse to make peace with Germany. Then under the stress of disappointment and danger, “organized propaganda for intervention penetrates the news” intensely for a month until President Wilson announced, in early April 1918, that there would be no intervention and, after a month’s interval, there was another sustained campaign for intervention until the President approved it on July 12.

Up until the Armistice the Red Peril had played an insignificant role, but at once it filled the news and served as a new motive for continuing intervention. Lippmann and Merz considered this “one of the most significant things about” the drive for intervention. “The notion of a fundamental antagonism between the Soviet Government and the American is not insisted upon until after American troops are on Russian soil.” Up until then it was a simple matter of preventing German domination of Russia. Then suddenly the tune changed and our “troops went to fight Germany and remained to fight Russians.” On December 13, 1918, the Times asked editorially: “Having entered Russia for a purpose, why not carry out that purpose?”—and argued that our armies in Russia should be reinforced to “drive the Bolsheviki out of Petrograd and Moscow.”³⁷

The Lippmann-Merz study granted the patriotism of the editors and newsmen, but in this period found “passionate argument masquerading as news,” in headlines as well as articles. “The Russian policy of the editors of the Times profoundly and crassly influenced their news columns.” “For subjective reasons,” also, the Times staff “accepted and believed most of what they were told by the State Department, the so-called Russian Embassy in Washington, the Russian Information Bureau in New York, the Russian Committee in Paris and the agents and adherents of the old regime all over Europe.”

The two investigators concluded that “from the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all.” Thus in the two years following November 1917 it was stated no less than ninety-one times that “the Soviets were nearing their rope’s end, or actually had reached it.” Collapse was reported fourteen times. The effect was to postpone from month to month insistence by the people that “the Allied statesmen must re-evaluate their policy of indecision, intervention and blockade.”

Instead there was an often repeated search for a “dictator-savior.” Kolchak’s dictatorial coup was hailed with pleasure. Then it was “Kolchak Triumphant” until after his disastrous retreat was well under way, covered up magnificently by the newswriters until the bitter end. This same cycle was repeated with Denikin. The pro-Denikin dispatches from Harold Williams at the front “were obviously queer at the time and are ridiculous in the light of events.”

In the case of Poland’s invasion of Russia, Poland was pictured as an exhausted nation on the defensive, about to be inundated by a Red offensive. On January 1, 1919, a dispatch from Warsaw reported that “the Bolsheviki have forced the Poles to take up arms by their advance into Polish territory.” The alleged Red offensive never materialized, but a year later, on January 22, 1920, a dispatch from Washington stated flatly that “the strategy of the Bolshevist military campaign during the coming Spring contemplates a massed attack against Poland, as the first step in a projected Red invasion of Europe and a military diversion through Turkestan and Afghanistan toward India.”

A week earlier, on January 12, 1920, General Bliss had told a Congressional committee that on December 2, 1919, Polish armies were more than 180 miles deep in Russian territory, yet on February 16, 1920, another firm statement left “no doubt that the Bolsheviki are preparing an enormous offensive against Poland” in the early Spring, one which Poland could not resist. Many other dispatches supported the idea of Poland on the defensive. Actually the Soviet counter offensive against Poland’s all-out drive into Russia did not begin until July 1920.

When President Wilson sought to get all the warring factions in Russia together on the Island of Prinkipo, near Constantinople, early in 1919, the Reds accepted the invitation and the Whites all haughtily refused. In our news a partial version of the Soviet reply was published which justified the idea that it was the Soviets who would not suspend hostilities and come to conference. If the full text had been printed it would have disclosed the willingness of the Soviets not only “to secure an agreement that would put an end to hostilities” but to discuss “the question of annexation of Russian territories by the Entente powers” or by “forces which . . . receive financial, technical, military or any other support from them”—in other words, Kolchak and Denikin.³⁸

Communism Strengthened. This exposé does not leave much on the side of the credit ledger in the books of the Allied intervention in Russia. Aside from very limited indirect military benefit in North Russia there is little to record except the negative virtue of keeping communism on the defensive. All of the five major campaigns of intervention failed disastrously, leaving Russia exhausted and embittered, but with a greatly strengthened Soviet regime firmly committed to totalitarian methods of survival and of ruling. Instead of exorcizing the great Red nightmare the interventions of 1918–20 fixed it in the uneasy slumbers of the West.

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