By the operation of a natural paradox the sweeping social revolution in Russia worked against a democratic revolution in Germany. The First World War had largely been fought, at least in the United States, against German autocracy and Prussian militarism. President Wilson would not make peace except with a new democratic government. Yet on November 10, 1918, the day before the Armistice, the Supreme Allied Command issued a decree stating that it would deal in Germany only with the officials of the Imperial Government. Where these had been ousted the Allies later insisted on their reinstatement, under Paragraph V of the Armistice Agreement. They also retained the power to enforce their will by keeping the blockade in force, over President Wilson’s protest, until April 1919.¹

The Old Regime Left in Power in Germany. Internally, also, the fear of Bolshevik revolution operated to prevent a democratic revolution in Germany. Bolshevist ideas had made considerable headway in the German forces in the East and in August 1918, as defeat became certain, the German armies in the West became receptive to Red slogans. The Russian embassy in Berlin was active in aiding the German Reds, called Spartacists, and the Social Democrats became deeply alarmed during October 1919 by the defection from their ranks to the Spartacists.

When, therefore, Workers and Soldiers Councils sprang up all over Germany, after the Navy revolt inaugurated the fall of the Monarchy in early November 1918, the Social Democrats thought that they were in great danger of going the way of Kerensky, especially since the Berlin Workers and Soldiers Council showed signs of playing a role analogous to the Petrograd Soviet. The Social Democrat leader Ebert accordingly turned to the Army High Command for armed support against the radicals. On November 10, 1919, he telephoned GHQ at Spa and made a deal with General Groner, who readily persuaded Hindenburg and Ludendorff of the advantages of using the Social Democrats. During the next two months the army was used several times to crush the Communists, sometimes with artillery.

Thus the fears of both the Allies and the very moderate German Socialists combined to save the power of the two war-making classes in Germany, the Junkers and the industrial barons. The Socialists shrank from breaking up the great estates of the Junkers, and the latter retained not only their great economic power but their hold over the army, the bureaucracy, the courts and the schools. Then they sabotaged the Republic perpetually, because they knew that democratic machinery now existed through which their estates and their power could be liquidated.

Like the Junkers, the industrial magnates felt helpless momentarily when the Imperial Government fell, so they hastened to make a deal with the Socialist leaders of the great trade unions. On November 15, 1918, a momentous pact was concluded in which the employers disavowed any future support to company unions, agreed to workers councils in each plant, accepted the eight-hour day and made other concessions. The Socialists thought they had won a great victory, and the power of the industrialists was consolidated until the day when they would swing it behind Hitler to destroy the Republic.²

Having been left with the effective power in their hands, the Reichswehr leaders proceeded to capitalize on the Red fears of the Allies and the Socialists. The Army chiefs alleged that a “Red Army” had suddenly risen out of the ground in the Ruhr, which was due to be demilitarized and evacuated by German troops. On March 20–1, 1920, the German press carried large headlines about “The Fall” of Essen, Mulheim, Duisburg and Düsseldorf. The “Red Army” was in communication with Moscow.

This terrifying phenomenon was investigated by two officers of the Allied control commission, Graff and Wauchope, who went to the scene and observed what happened. The German troops had been ostentatiously evacuated from the “fallen” cities, without a sign of disturbance anywhere beforehand. Then, as reported, some armed bands of communist youths had “roamed at large over the Ruhr, doing a little shooting, a little looting, and a great deal of drinking.” One of them directed by agents provocateurs of the Army did set up a “Soviet” in Duisburg which was advertised as controlling the city. For five days the world’s press was flooded with stories of the terrible atrocities being committed by the Reds.

Then when Germany and the Western world had been properly terrified, the Reichswehr moved back into the abandoned cities and slaughtered the rowdies whom they had invited to do their worst. “Every man who surrendered was shot, usually by an officer with a revolver.” In addition to saving all good Germans from Bolshevism the Army had intended to prove to the Allies that the German armed forces in the Neutral Zone were not sufficient to maintain order. When the maneuver was over, the Army had thirty-four batteries of artillery and thirty battalions of infantry in the area.

This part of the plot failed, due to the excellent intelligence work of Graff and Wauchope, but their report was not published by the Allies and the world believed the tale of the great communist revolt raging through the Ruhr. In Britain especially the notion was deeply planted that unless Germany were “set on her feet” she would “go Red.”³ Lord D’Abemon, the British Ambassador to Germany, was soon flirting with the idea that “a good bargain” might be made with the German military leaders in “cooperating against the Soviet.”⁴

Democracy Distrusted. The Allies did try in the Treaty of Versailles to limit the military power of the new Germany, but the very means they chose—an army of 100,000 men recruited by twelve year enlistment—was bound to buttress conservatism in Germany. If this was not actually intended, the British and French Governments had no desire to curb the German war-making classes. Paris and London had been antagonistic to the democratic March Revolution in Russia, which was not very violent, though the Allied peoples all welcomed it.

The November Revolution was a very different matter. It was bloody and its sweeping goals frightened those who approved of moderate change. Nevertheless, as James P. Warburg has pointed out, “had the Governments of Britain, France, and the United States been confident in the dynamic justice of their own systems of democracy, they need not have been afraid of bolshevism in their own countries, even if the Russian Bolsheviks were to stir up all the trouble they could.”⁵

This comment applies equally well to later times. Certainly after 1917 British and French conservatives were acutely aware of the great numbers of underprivileged people beneath them, an awareness which led them through the whole period of appeasement to strive for agreement with the growing fascist forces on the Continent.

An Anti-Red Crusade in the United States. Yet in the post-1917 years many other factors added to the growing hatred of the Reds. The charge that the Red leaders were German agents was widely and stubbornly believed, and the Red peace with Germany was deeply resented.

In the United States these varied factors enabled fear and prejudice to do the rest. The Red Terror was always reported in the press luridly; the White Terror never mentioned. The Red attack upon the Orthodox Church as a political force was interpreted as an extermination of all religion. This offended the majority of Americans keenly. Equally devastating was the story about the nationalization of women. This idea originated in the mind of an obscure woman in a small Russian town and was treated as a joke in a Russian comic paper. Then in Saratov the Bolsheviks sought to discredit a powerful group of anarchists by attributing to them a fantastic scheme for a Bureau of Free Love. From these beginnings the story grew to a nationalization of all women and for months was assiduously taught to the American people as truth.⁶

During February-March 1919 the Overman Committee of the Senate conducted hearings whose effect was “to picture Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of homicidal maniacs whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and carry the nation back to barbarism.”⁷ This theme was hammered into the national consciousness by the strongest language which headline writers and editors could invent. Even the failure of predicted horrors to materialize did not slow the campaign. On October 31, 1918, the New York Times announced in front page capitals that a grand massacre of all Russian bourgeoisie would take place on November 10. When the date came nothing happened, but the widespread characterization of the Red leaders as beasts and perverts continued.

In these circumstances nearly all questioning was terrorized into silence and the stage set for a nation-wide man hunt for all suspected of harboring the terrible Red disease. This grim hysteria was concentrated especially upon recent immigrants. “The hostility to immigrant workers, which had long been smouldering in the country, was now suddenly combined with hostility to heterodox thinkers and burst into a conflagration of hysterical hatred.”⁸

Mass Raids. Unfortunately for the poor, confused immigrants, who had fled from oppression in Russia and elsewhere, the Attorney-General of the time, A. Mitchell Palmer, was convinced of the imminence of Red revolution. There was no time to lose. Agents of the Department of Justice were detailed in great numbers to infiltrate into radical and communist groups, becoming vociferous radicals but trying not to actually foment violence and disorder. Then raids were sprung, the greatest on January 1–2, 1920, when all the dragnets were pulled in during a gigantic operation extending from coast to coast and gathering in more than 4000 people.

What happened in New England has been described at length by Judge George W. Anderson in the Colyer Case. The head of the federal agents in Boston commanded a force of 300 to 500 men. Halls were raided, suspects lined up against walls, thoroughly searched and hauled off to police stations. Somewhere between 800 to 1200 persons were taken into custody. In Lynn thirty-nine people, half of them citizens, who had met to discuss the forming of a cooperative bakery, were jailed one night and in Nashua five were put in one cell without a mattress. In Hartford a number of people were arrested at a Communist meeting and when their friends went to the jail to see them they too were promptly locked up as prima facie communists. At Deer Island, where many were confined and conditions were chaotic, one person killed himself before all the other prisoners and another went insane.

From all over New England people were shipped into Boston by train, handcuffed together and photographed frequently as they were led through the streets. All were rigorously questioned incommunicado, without benefit of counsel, and a “preliminary record” made up against them. Most of these people, says Judge Anderson, “were perfectly quiet and harmless working people, many of them not long ago Russian peasants.” Nearly all were arrested and their premises searched without warrants. Many were held in jail for days until the warrants arrived. In Detroit one hundred men were kept for a week in a “bull pen” twenty-four by thirty feet. Bail was often fixed at $10,000, though the Immigration Rules advised $500.

In the end the Department of Labor and the courts released the great majority of the people arrested, and of those held few were deported—all to the chagrin of Attorney-General Palmer, who wrote contemporaneously that:

“Like a prairie fire the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order. . . . It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.”⁹

The comment of our leading authority on civil liberties was that “Mr. Palmer adopted the attitude of the men he denounced. Because the law hindered the result he wished to accomplish and thought desirable, he disregarded the law.”¹⁰ Chafee adds that some of the violent crimes which punctured this period may have been the result of the resentment bred by several years of harsh suppression of radical elements, both by government and private organizations.

Reaction Rampant. As an editor of Harpers Magazine put it:

“Big navy men, believers in compulsory military service, drys, anti-cigarette campaigners, anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book censors, Jew haters, Negro haters, landlords, manufacturers, utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause good, bad, indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin.”¹¹

Even the Russian Famine Fund, the National Council of Churches and the Foreign Policy Association were branded as Red. “These people are in our industries, schools and to some extent in our clergy,” charged Clayton R. Lusk, the head of the famous Lusk Committee.

One and all, the super-American elements of the year 1920 evinced their disbelief in democracy. They had no faith in the masses of their fellow citizens but regarded them as inflammable material ready to be set on fire by the tinder spark of some agitator. They disbelieved in the essential sanity and common sense of the average man and thought they had to control his thoughts and opinions by suppression, imprisonment and exile. Knowing little history they were more than willing to defy the dictum of President Wilson, who lay a broken man in the White House during this time of rigorous reaction, that “repression is the seed of revolution.”

Then, as later, American conservatives feared that a few communists could suddenly subvert the Republic. In Chicago States Attorney Hoyte announced on the day of the great raids that a gigantic conspiracy had been discovered throughout the United States to overthrow the government. The conspirators “proposed to seize the businesses, the industries and the natural resources of the country by direct action” and to establish a Soviet government.¹²

As May Day 1920 approached, Palmer predicted that on that day the Bolsheviks, hundreds of thousands strong, would try to overthrow the Government and plant the Red flag on the Capitol. The day passed without incident, but on September 16, 1920, a small horse-drawn wagon blew up in Wall Street near the offices of J. P. Morgan Company with a tremendous explosion. This confirmed the Red fears of all the alarmed people, though ten years of frequent efforts to connect the crime with the Reds never succeeded.¹³

Socialist Legislators Expelled. In this atmosphere it was natural that socialism should be assailed. On January 7, 1920, just after the great Red raids, the New York legislature met and the Speaker of the House haled the five Socialist members elected from New York City before him to charge that they had been elected on “a platform absolutely inimical to the best interests of the State of New York” and to invite a resolution of expulsion. This was promptly presented by the Lusk Committee, which for a year had been conducting raids, prosecuting radicals and filling “the press with a flow of terrorizing descriptions of the Red menace,” and adopted, the five Socialists being hustled out of the House by the Sergeant at Arms.

In its passion to smite at all things Red the Lusk Committee made no distinction between the gradualist, democratic, legal-process socialists and the totalitarian Reds. All were damned together and 60,000 voters denied the right to advocate socialism by democratic means. Fortunately this extreme action produced a healthy reaction among conservatives. Charles Evans Hughes protested within forty-eight hours, calling it “a most serious mistake to proceed, not against individuals charged with violation of law, but against masses of our citizens combined for political action, by denying them the only recourse of peaceful government; that is, action by the ballot box and through duly elected representatives in legislative bodies.”

Under Hughes’ leadership the Bar Association of New York City, the Tribune, the National Security League and many other influential groups attacked the action of the legislature, but the New York Assembly paid no attention whatever to these remonstrances. Its Judiciary Committee refused to hear Mr. Hughes and concocted a large omnibus of vague charges which produced the desired expulsion of the Socialists from the Legislature by an overwhelming vote, too late for new elections. Then the Legislature adjourned, Speaker Sweet proclaiming the session “a victory for undivided Americanism.”¹⁴

The Legislature was not amenable to reason. It knew it was heavily supported by public opinion, especially in the rural districts. Even the New York Times declared that the expulsion of the Socialists was “as clearly and demonstrably a measure of national defense as the declaration of war against Germany.”¹⁵ But, concludes Chafee, “the nation was saved. The American people, long bedrugged by propaganda, were shaken out of their nightmare of revolution. The red terror became ridiculous on the lips of Speaker Sweet.” People began to laugh at the idea of a legislature trembling before five men. The spell was broken and sanity began to assert itself, especially in Washington.

Repercussions of the French Revolution. Whenever social revolution is on the march in the world frightened American conservatives have been able to mould public opinion against it in the short run by their control and handling of the news. The anti-Red excesses of 1918–20 were no more successful than the Federalist reaction against the French Revolution. As in 1917, the initial feeling of the American people was one of rejoicing and welcome to the revolution. But, as the terror developed in France and extreme theses began to be heard, alarm spread from the top downward. The raw tactlessness of a succession of French Ministers culminating in the insult of the XYZ affair prepared the way for the conclusion that the French Revolution was from the first nothing but a blot on the record of humanity and that only evil would ever result from it. Men of substance feared that “the end of all government and law which had come in France would eventually destroy the United States.”¹⁶ Even George Washington favored the repressive legislation which ensued.

The Federalists, who controlled the machinery of government and most of the press were in a strategic position to take full advantage of the attempted bribery of our commissioners to France. The publication of the XYZ insult to our government led quickly to the forming of mobs in the cities and to attacks on the homes of French sympathizers, especially Republican editors. Benjamin Franklin’s statue was smeared and wildest rumors of French duplicity were believed. Bowers summarized the picture painted by the rumor-mongers as follows: “The French invasion at hand—slaves armed—masters murdered in their beds—churches burned—women outraged—girls kidnapped—horrors piled on horrors, and all because of democracy.”¹⁷

This atmosphere provided the opportunity for the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Alien Law provided for the expulsion of undesirable aliens and increased the time required to become a citizen from five to nineteen years, a measure designed to halt the flow of Irish and other immigrants into Jefferson’s Republican Party.¹⁸ The Sedition Law forbade the publication of matter intended to defame the Government or to bring its officers into disrepute. These laws resulted in a minor reign of terror during which judges tried to enforce the new laws and citizens resisted the restriction of their civil liberties with defiance, demonstrations and riots. The Federalists replied by enforcing the laws “with ever increasing vigor,” in the face of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798–9, denying their validity. Men went to jail and paid heavy fines “for indulgence in a loose tongue regarding persons and policies, the public character of which made them at least fair topics of discussion.” The resulting conflict was a leading cause in the defeat of the Federalist Party in the election of 1800.¹⁹

Should the United States Recognize the Soviet Government? In 1798 there was a Bonaparte to push aside the corrupt and bungling Directory which had aroused so much indignation in the United States. In 1920 no Russian man-on-horseback could suppress the Russian Reds. All the possible candidates had tried and failed. Kornilov, Alexiev, Denikin, Wrangel, Yudenitch, Miller and Kolchak—each had done his best, with immense aid from the West, and all had failed. Failure had involved, too, the growth of a powerful Red Army which was effectively controlled and policed by the Communist Party for the express purpose of preventing the rise of any Bonaparte.

After 1920, therefore, the new government in Russia had either to be recognized or ignored. By the test of international law which usually governed, the test of stability and effective rule, the Soviet Government would need to be recognized. But the American Government could not bring itself to associate with the bloody regime which had defeated all efforts to oust it.

Secretary of State Colby stated the position of the United States on August 10, 1920, in a letter to the Italian Ambassador which said:

“There can be no mutual confidence or trust, no respect even, if pledges are to be given and agreements made with a cynical repudiation of their obligations already in the mind of one of the parties. We cannot recognize, hold official relations with, or give friendly reception to the agents of a Government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions; whose diplomats will be the agitators of dangerous revolt; whose spokesmen say that they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.”²⁰

Some months after this rebuff, on March 22, 1921, the Soviet Government asked for a resumption of trade relations with the United States. Secretary Hughes replied by refusing to resume normal trade relations with Soviet Russia until they accepted: (1) the right of private property; (2) freedom of labor; (3) the sanctity of contract; and (4) provided for safety of human lives. In his reply, Hughes was supported by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.²¹

These conditions were much stiffer than those laid down by Colby. They practically required the Reds to give up all their totalitarian socialist ways and become good bourgeoisie again. However, this stern attitude did not prevent the American Relief Administration, still under Herbert Hoover’s leadership, from doing a magnificent job of famine relief in Russia from September 1921 to July 1923. Some $60,000,000, in part raised by public subscription, was expended under the direct supervision of the A.R.A. and a major proportion of the 20,000,000 famine sufferers was saved.²²

This work of mercy did not lead to any political recognition of the Soviets. Our Government continued to recognize the Embassy of the Kerensky Government as the representative of Russia in the United States. In March 1922 this Embassy secured the entry into the United States of the notorious bandit leader Gregory Semenoff, who under Japanese sponsorship had turned Eastern Siberia into a bloody horror of terrorism and rapine in 1919. SemenofTs effort to get support here for a “peaceful revolution” in Siberia aroused Senator Borah’s ire and led to testimony before a Senate Committee that Semenoff had been responsible for the murder of at least 100,000 people.²³ This publicity was followed by the departure of both Semenoff and Ambassador Bakhmetev, though an agent of his continued to act as the representative of Russia.

On December 6, 1923, President Coolidge discussed the recognition of Russia in his annual message to Congress. In his highly moral manner he declared that we would not “enter into relations with another regime which refuses to recognize the sanctity of international obligations. I do not propose to barter away for the privilege of trade any of the cherished rights of humanity. I do not propose to make merchandise of any American principles. These rights and principles must go wherever the sanctions of our Government go.”

Coolidge was willing, however, to make very large concessions for “the purpose of rescuing the people of Russia.” This was during the period of the New Economic Policy, restoring a great deal of private trade, which Lenin had been forced to inaugurate in 1921 to prevent the total economic collapse of Russia. Coolidge noted that there were “already encouraging evidences of returning to the ancient ways of society,” but more were needed. Whenever there appeared “works mete for repentance our country ought to be the first to go to the economic assistance and moral rescue of Russia.” He hoped we could act soon.²⁴

Overlooking the lofty moral eminence from which President Coolidge spoke, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Chicherin, hastened to send a message to Coolidge, December 16, 1923, expressing his complete readiness to accept “the principle of mutual non-interference in internal affairs” and to discuss the Kerensky debts, “on the assumption that the principle of reciprocity will be recognized.” The Soviet Government was “ready to do all in its power, so far as the dignity and interests of its country permit, to bring about the desired end of renewal of friendship with the United States of America.”

This overture was promptly and curtly rejected by Washington, where it was said that there was nothing in the Soviet note or otherwise which would warrant recognition.²⁵

British-Soviet Friction. Early in 1924 the new Labor Government in Great Britain recognized the Soviet Government and in April agreed to the principle that Russia was entitled to present against British claims to Tsarist debts her own claims for damage done during the Allied interventions. This treaty failed of ratification when the Conservatives soon returned to power, in the election in which the forged “Zinoviev Letter” played a leading part in their victory.²⁶

In 1926 the British Conservatives were further embittered by the abortive effort of Soviet trade unions to aid a British coal-mine strike with $6,000,000 of contributions. On May 12, 1927, British police raided the Soviet trade agency Arcos, in London, in search of stolen documents containing military secrets. The documents were not found, but others seized were declared to justify the severance of diplomatic relations on May 26, 1927, by a vote of 367 to 118 in the House of Commons.²⁷ Diplomatic relations were restored in late 1929 by a new Labor Government.

American Reasons for Non-Recognition. The turbulence of British-Soviet relations, featured by frequent charges of Soviet propaganda in Britain, did not encourage the American Government to recognize the Soviet Union. The period of hysterical hatred had passed, but it was believed that the Soviet regime was not a government, certainly not a Russian national government, but a group of international revolutionists who had happened to master Russia and would use it as a base for overthrowing other governments. The fear of communist propaganda was ever present.

At the same time it was reasoned that communism was an unworkable economic system which must break down eventually. To recognize the Red regime would only encourage it to pursue this folly, so real friendship for the Russian people themselves required the continuance of non-recognition until the Soviet Government abandoned its unsound practices. Anyway there could be no peace with a regime which repudiated its debts and denied the rights of private property.²⁸

These beliefs were shared by the majority of the American people, including labor leaders. In some they amounted to a conviction that the two economic systems were so incompatible that they could not live together on speaking terms. The Lenin-Trotsky theory that the world must be all one or the other was accepted. Russia was a pariah and the less contact with her the better. Even the Soviet Ambassador to Mexico, Mme. Alexandra Kollontai, was not allowed to pass through the United States on the way to her post. In November 1926 the State Department ruled that she was an inadmissible alien, actively participating in “the international Communist subversive movement.”²⁹

This attitude was fostered by the kind of reporting which the Chicago Tribune did about Russia in these years. Boasting on August 25, 1926, that it “alone among the great American journals” had painfully but successfully defied the “garbling censorship of the Red Government,” the Tribune published a stream of articles which would lead its widespread readers to conclude that there was a never-ending series of revolts in Russia. Beginning in 1925, Schuman collected the following series of headlines in the Tribune:

soviets fight famine as grain myth explodes (October 26, 1925)

claim starving poor threaten doom of soviet (June 15, 1925)

russians free! to rob, starve, murder, and die (November 15, 1925)

siberia tries to shake off moscow’s yoke (November 26, 1925)

russia unloads jewels to save soviet regime (February 10, 1926)

secret report shows russia near collapse (March 20, 1926)

uncover secret terrorist plot to seize russia (July 30, 1926)

rumania hears of widespread russian revolt (August 7, 1926)

soviet party in chaos as trade, industry totter (August 4, 1926)

odessa troops mutiny against moscow regime (August 9, 1926)

russia ferments as red factions grasp for power (August 10, 1926)

reds reinforce kremlin fort as mutiny grows (August 13, 1926)

economy regime in russia fails: crisis impends (August 21, 1926)

reports revolt against soviet begins in russia (April 9, 1927)

red army fights with south russians (April 19, 1927)

russia calls soldiers home as revolt rises (April 21, 1927)

famine strikes russia: poland fears invasion (July 27, 1927)

moscow traps cash of foreign business firms (October 16, 1927)

industry faces swift disaster in red russia (October 23, 1927)

trotsky’s clan fights soviet police: 18 die (November 23, 1927)

hundreds die in ukraine riots, rumania hears (November 26, 1927)

Schuman’s comment was that the reports of revolts were “wholly without foundation” and the other articles “differed only in the degree of their inaccuracy.”³⁰

By that time twenty-one other governments, including Britain, France and Japan, had recognized the Government of the Soviet Union, but that made no difference to the United States. A few radicals and liberals urged that we could not always ignore the government of so vast an area, but the great majority were content with keeping the Red contamination out of the country, officially at least. A series of economic and political earthquakes was required to change this outlook.

Events Compel Recognition. The first of these world-shaking events was the tremendous explosion of paper values in Wall Street in October 1929. The Coolidge-Hoover boom burst with such titanic force that unemployment, misery and hunger spread around the earth. Not only had great sums of money from all parts of the capitalist world gone up in the smoke of the Wall Street eruption, but the floor of American loans upon which world prosperity was supported was suddenly jerked from under the nations. The American loans had been made recklessly and riotously. Then suddenly the picture changed. Instead of possessing total confidence, we had none. Creditors sought to collect, first in Austria, and couldn’t. Result: financial panic sweeping to Germany, then to Britain and back to the United States.

In these years of bitter bread it appeared also that the Soviet Union was not filled with unemployment and want. Under the regimentation of the Soviet planned economy everybody had a job and life went on as usual, except for some hardships caused by the disruption of world trade. This phenomenon led multitudes of Americans to develop a great interest in this strange economy which had been supposed to collapse presently, but instead our own had. What made this new system tick? Many people were not so certain that Washington should never speak to Moscow.

Similarly, the world political situation broke up beneath our complacent, politically isolationist feet. The Japanese seized the golden moment of the world economic collapse to take over Manchuria and start on that imperial march through apparently defenseless China which soon carried them to Singapore and beyond. In Germany, too, the great American depression gave the death blow to the facade Republic which the Allies had set up. Hitler’s Nazi Party mushroomed suddenly into control of Germany, for purposes which only the blind could ignore.

It was this concatenation of economic and political disaster which led the new Roosevelt Administration to recognize the Soviet Government on November 16, 1933. The League of Nations had not unnaturally failed to restrain Japan, when the two giant neighbors between which she lay were non-members. It was equally certain that Hitler would go unrestrained if the two most powerful countries on earth continued to hold completely aloof from each other. In their exchange of messages both President Roosevelt and President Kalinin found it possible to agree that this was an abnormal situation.

The terms of the American-Soviet agreement expressly waived all Soviet claims for damages due to the American intervention in Russia during 1918–21 and contained the following promises which the Soviets regarded as disavowals of any new American intervention and we accepted as assurances that we would not be subverted by propaganda. Each party agreed:

1. To respect the right of the other to order its own life in its own way within its jurisdiction and refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the other.
2. To refrain and restrain all persons in government service from any act liable to injure the tranquility, prosperity, order or security of the other, and especially any act tending to incite or encourage armed intervention, agitation or propaganda, favoring a change in the political or social order.
3. Not to permit the formation on its territory of any organization having as its aim an attempt on the territorial integrity of the other or to aid or subsidize such organization.
4. Not to permit formation of a group on its territory, and to prevent the activity of such a group, aiming at bringing about a change in the political or social order of the other.³¹

For us the sixteen years of non-recognition of the Soviet Union is a forgotten incident, one of those times when we righteously held aloof from a strange and unproved regime. To the citizens of the Soviet Union, and especially to its continuing leadership, this unique gap in the diplomatic intercourse between great nations must leave a different and deeper meaning, one much more difficult to forget. The memory of long ostracism is likely to persist.

Russo-German Friendship. We have never had any experience in the role of an outcast nation. For both Germany and Russia the experience was bitter in the years after 1920. It was not until April 10, 1922, that they were invited to the important economic conference at Genoa, as poor relations permitted to attend, but “tolerated on a strictly inferior footing.”³² At the Conference Chicherin offered to recognize Russia’s pre-war debts, on condition that Russia’s counter claims for Allied intervention in Russia be considered. In the bill which he presented these claims amounted to $60,000,000,000. Chicherin pointed out that in 1872 an arbitration tribunal had awarded the United States $15,000,000 damages on account of the losses caused to it by one Confederate ship built in Great Britain. Was not Russia entitled to compensation for the infinitely greater damages wrought on her soil by Allied intervention?

The Allied governments firmly refused to admit that the Soviet arguments had any validity and were dumfounded when the outlaw Germans and Russians went over to the neighboring town of Rapallo and made a treaty, on April 16, 1922, which was the basis of cordial relations between them until Hitler came to power. Their understanding was so close that the German Reichswehr was soon very active in Russia, reorganizing and training the new Red army and at the same time practising with all sorts of new military weapons denied it by the Treaty of Versailles. In this fashion did the German Junkers repay the Allies for leaving them in control of the German army and government. Under their tutelage the Red army became a formidable military force.

Soviet Promotion of Disarmament and Peace Pacts. Though not desired as a member of the League of Nations, the Soviet Union was invited as early as 1927 to the sessions of the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference. On November 30, 1927, Foreign Minister Litvinov presented a plan for general and complete disarmament, the discussion of which was postponed to the next session. In the following February he offered another plan for total disarmament containing sixty-three articles, but only the German and Turkish representatives supported it. On March 23, 1928, he presented a third plan for partial disarmament but could not get a date set for its discussion.³³

Soviet Russia was not invited to the conference of August 28, 1928, in Paris which adopted the Kellogg-Briand Pact, since she did not have diplomatic relations with the United States. However, she promptly accepted this pact for the renunciation of war and soon persuaded all of her neighbors to sign the Litvinov Protocol, which put the Pact into effect between them and the Soviet Union. The representatives of Latvia, Esthonia, Poland and Rumania signed on February 9, 1929, and Lithuania, Turkey and Persia soon followed.³⁴

In the World Disarmament Conference which met in Geneva in 1932, Litvinov recalled Russia’s efforts toward disarmament in a speech on February 11, 1932. He declared that the World War should have been the last war and that “what is required of us is to find effective means to put an end to war.”³⁵

In the summer of 1933, Litvinov drew up a definition of aggression to which the adherence of all countries was invited. The convention declared that “every state has an equal right to independence, security, defense of its territory and free development of its state system.” Article II defined an aggressor as any state which should be the first to commit any of the following acts:

1. Declaration of war upon another State;
2. Invasion by its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State;
3. Attack by its land, naval or air forces, with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels, or aircraft of another State;
4. Naval blockade of the coasts or ports of another State;
5. Provision of support to armed bands formed on its territory which have invaded the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take on its own territory all the measures in its power to deprive these bands of all assistance or protection.³⁶

This Convention for the Definition of Aggression was signed between Russia and her neighbors, Afghanistan, Esthonia, Latvia, Persia, Poland, Rumania and Turkey, and was soon accepted by many other governments.³⁷

All of these initiatives by Litvinov in the direction of disarmament and limiting aggression were heavily, if not completely, discounted by the Western diplomats. They found it impossible to believe that the dreaded Communist state really had pacific purposes. On his side, Litvinov doubtless knew that some of his disarmament proposals would cause embarrassment without being accepted. Yet there is no reason to question the sincerity of his desire to prevent another war. The Soviet Union had nothing to gain by it and much to lose. The Five Year Plans had provided a promising base for an industrialized Russia, but only the foundation. Both domestic prosperity and military security had still to be attained, and might never be achieved if the Soviet Union were attacked by ambitious aggressive nations from both the West and the East.

Growing Fear of Invasion. It was the fear of a simultaneous assault on the U.S.S.R. by both Japan and Germany which made Litvinov a sincere advocate of collective security. The Soviet leaders had no illusions about their situation. They had read in the Japanese Tanaka memorial about “the inevitability of crossing swords with Russia on the fields of Mongolia.” They had pondered Hitler’s declaration in Mein Kampf about reversing “the eternal German migration to the South” and looking Eastwards toward new soil in “Russia and her subject Border States.”

The danger in the East led the Soviets to put aside the humiliation of their ejection from China by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 and renew diplomatic relations with China in December 1932. In the West, Litvinov toured the European capitals in early 1933, signing non-aggression and mutual assistance pacts with France, Poland, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, and by the end of the year he had covered 1800 miles of the Soviet Union borders with a contiguous chain of non-aggression pacts.³⁸ All of these were drawn in strict accordance with the authority and jurisdiction of the League of Nations.³⁹

At the London World Economic Conference in June 1933 he collected the signatures of ten states to his definition of aggression. In the same gathering the Hugenberg Memorandum openly angled for support of German expansion at Russia’s expense.⁴⁰

The conference failed, and with it Litvinov’s offer to buy a billion dollars worth of goods from the depression wracked West, if the creditors would grant long term credits and accept goods in repayment. Trade experts thought the plan sound. The Soviets had not defaulted on a single commercial payment.⁴¹ However, the nations had so ringed themselves around with tariffs and other economic defenses that they could not easily take a return flow of Russian goods, even if they had not been nervous about Russian “dumping.”

For Litvinov the London Economic Conference was a triumph. In addition to the other achievements noted above he had smoothed out a British embargo on Russian trade and prepared the way for American recognition. He had also given assurances that during recent years the Third International had “much diminished its efforts to bring about a world revolution.”

World Revolution Subordinated. This assurance was highly suspect. Actually a historic struggle had been fought out in the Communist Party, of which the world knew little, and it had ended in the defeat of the advocates of world revolution. As early as December 1925 the Fourteenth Congress of the Party had passed a resolution asserting that in Russia there was “every requisite for the building of a complete socialist society.” Then Trotsky made a formidable combination with Zinoviev, Kamenev and many other party leaders to oppose the new thesis and to insist upon “permanent revolution.”

Several reverses abroad during 1927, notably in China, where Chiang Kai-shek dismissed all his Soviet advisers and made war on the Communist wing of the Kuomintang, led the bloc to charge that Stalin had betrayed the World Revolution. A great struggle ensued but the Fifteenth Party Congress supported Stalin by an overwhelming vote and expelled the Left Oppositionists. Trotsky was exiled to Alma Ata in Turkestan. Here, by his own account, he was allowed to exchange 3050 political letters and telegrams before being deported on February 12, 1929.⁴²

Trotsky’s defeat did not mean that all thought of world revolution in Russia had ended forever, but it did mean that the Party line had changed, that effort would now be concentrated on “building socialism” in Russia. It would have been strange if any other decision had been reached, since the world revolution was simply not getting anywhere. It had been proved a chimera—not a single country in Europe, or elsewhere, had joined the new economic church. If totalitarian socialism were to be “built” anywhere it had to be in Russia alone. For the Russian Communists in 1927–8 it was a case of here and now or never. The world revolution might be cherished as a far-off ideal, but it definitely had to be put in the background. There was every reason why Litvinov’s statement that the efforts of the Third International had “much diminished” should be true. The West, however, found this difficult to believe so long as any activity of the Third International could be detected. Many continued to discount the realistic side of Soviet behavior in favor of a fixed idea that the real objects of all Soviet life and activity had been established forever during the early days of the Red revolution.

Nor did the collapse of Western prosperity after 1929 alter this ideological fixation. The number of communists in the West increased somewhat, but the controlling elements plumped for fascism, in terror lest the world revolution might really come about.

The Soviets Approach Geneva. With equal blindness the Kremlin continued to support the German Communists in their fratricidal war with the German Socialists until Hitler mastered both of them. Yet aside from this disastrous detail the Soviet leaders had no illusions about their world position. In an interview with Walter Duranty, on December 28, 1933, Stalin hoped that the reasonable elements in Japan would prevail, but the Soviet Union was forced to prepare “because no nation can respect its government if it does not foresee the danger of attack and prepare for self defense.”⁴³

In the West the Soviet leaders observed the roaring munitions plants in Germany and drew their own conclusions from Germany’s resignation from the League of Nations in October 1933, following that of Japan early in the year. If, said Stalin, the League of Nations is only the tiniest device “somewhat to slow down the drive toward war and help peace, then we are not against the League.”⁴⁴

This was Russia’s reason for putting aside years of scoffing at the League of Nations as an aggregation of the powers which had intervened in Russia and only wanted to preserve the status quo. She now ceased to belong to the revisionist group and became a defender of the map of Europe as it existed. At the same time the Pilsudski regime in Poland revived its dreams of gaining territory from Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and the Ukraine and nursed its deep hostility toward Russia. Polish chauvinists convinced themselves that Hitler’s field of expansion was really in the Balkans. Why not balance off Germany against Russia, and if the worst came go along with Germany, sharing in the spoils? Negotiations were opened with Germany and a Polish-German non-aggression pact was signed in January 1934. The ring of hostility which completely surrounded Nazi Germany up to this time was broken. Hitler spoke fair words about ending all differences with Poland. French and Russian diplomacy had suffered a smashing defeat, which was only partly repaired by the formation of a Balkan Entente in February 1934, including Turkey.

The real counter-weight to German ambitions was found in Russia’s entry into the League of Nations, on September 18, 1934, after severe denunciations by Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal and Argentina.

Of course the Soviet Union did not come to Geneva to save the League of Nations from disintegration and failure. The Soviets came to save themselves from attack, probably on two fronts. At the worst they hoped that friendship and cooperation with the western democracies through the League would keep them from being attacked by Germany in case they were invaded by Japan. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union could best save itself by becoming a loyal member of the League of Nations, by accepting the principles and rules for keeping the peace which the West had originated and set down in the League Covenant, and by trying to secure a better application of the Covenant than had occurred in the past. Soviet interests coincided with those of the League. If the League stiffened and kept the peace, Russia would be saved with it from the disaster of another war. So, too, would everybody.

On its side the West was compelled to accept the Soviet Union as a world power for similar reasons. She might be useful as a counter-weight to the aggressive imperialisms of Japan and Germany.

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