Though Count Mirbach-Harff came surrounded with German experts on Russian affairs, he seems to have been as unprepared as his British and French opponents in the diplomatic bout to deal with the revolutionary scene. He was housed in the insanely ornate mansion of a departed sugar magnate named Berg. One of his first experiences was to view from his automobile in the Red Square the May Day parade held to celebrate the proletarian triumph.
Lockhart watching Mirbach seated among his aides in an open car reported that the supercilious smirk left the German’s face as he watched the ranks and ranks of illclad illfed illorganized working men march by. There was a look of strength about them. “He looked serious,” wrote Lockhart.
The Poverty Committees
With the coming of summer the tensions reached the breaking point. In spite of the protests of their Social Revolutionary partners, the Communists were enforcing Lenin’s policy of sending out “poverty committees,” made up usually of the ne’erdowells of the villages, to requisition the stored grain and other possessions of their more prosperous and hardworking neighbors. Any successful farmer was a kulak.
To the cold social mathematics of Lenin’s mind it was clear that he could never establish communism if he allowed a peasant bourgeoisie to grow up in the country. The kulaks must be eliminated.
But elimination of the best farmers would disrupt the production of food. Opposition grew among the most energetic and intelligent elements of the peasantry. In the mood pervading the villages it took only a small incident, like a match dropped in a ripe wheatfield, to set the whole of Russia blazing with civil war.
Civil War in Russia
On May 14 fighting breaks out at Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals, between a trainload of Czechoslovaks headed east and a trainload of Hungarian prisoners of war headed west. A man is killed on each side.
Trotsky immediately gives orders to disarm the Czechoslovak Legion. The Legion refuses to be disarmed and continues on its way east, seizing the railroad as it goes. East of Lake Baikal their detachments have a clear track into Vladivostok, but the large forces still on the line to the west are trapped because the Communists keep control of Irkutsk, the railroad center at the southern end of the lake.
As if at a prearranged signal all Siberia shakes off the Moscow yoke. Communists on the governing committees melt away into hiding. Moderate elements, tending to favor the Allies against the Germans, take charge again. In Manchuria, with some support from the Japanese, czarist officers are organizing an army to restore the Romanoffs. In southern Russia wherever the Germans have penetrated reactionary movements come to life. In the Ukraine the parliamentary Rada has been overthrown by an old regime general giving orders as hetman. The Don Cossacks have their own government Czarist groups with German support hold the Crimea and the towns on the Black Sea coast.
The remaining warmwater ports fall to the Allies. Vladivostok has become a Czechoslovak base. At the end of June the threat of invasion from Lapland by Mannerheim’s Germanbacked Finns forces the soviet of the Murmansk region to submit to occupation by the British. When Chicherin remonstrates over the phone the president of the Murmansk soviet calls him a pro-German and says that the comrades in Moscow are in no position to understand the situation in the north.
Insurrections follow the spring thaw. “Green” armies of anarchist peasants, “White” armies dedicated to the old regime, dissident Reds of every socialist creed collect and fight and fade into the forests. Fleeting republics and governments rise and make proclamations and disintegrate into chaos again. Villages bum. Towns are pillaged. Granaries are raided, cattle driven off. Men kill and die fighting for causes they hardly know the names of.
The Last Rising of the Left
On July 4, 1918, the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets meets in Moscow. The Left Social Revolutionaries, still represented in all the organs of the dictatorship, including the Cheka, have managed to elect a good third of the delegates. At a party caucus they decide that the parting of the ways has come. They will no longer submit to the despoiling of revolutionary peasants by the poverty committees, or to collaboration with the Germans who are shooting peasants in the Ukraine for resisting the requisition of their grain. Furthermore they demand the abolition of the death penalty.
The Congress is called to order in the old Bolshoy Theatre, where Muscovites of all factions still sit enthralled every night by the dancing of the nationalized imperial ballet which remains almost the only link to the culture of the old regime.
Lockhart, who is present in one of the boxes set aside for the Allied missions, describes the paladins of the Executive Committee seated on the stage. Sverdlov, its president, acts as chairman. At the end sits the leader of the Left Social Revolutionaries, Maria Spiridovna. Lockhart describes her as looking, with her pincenez and her dark hair pulled back smoothly on her head, for all the world like the rural schoolteacher in Tchekhov’s Three Sisters.
Maria Spiridovna is revered by all factions of the revolution. As a girl at the time of the outbreak in 1905 she shot an unpopular czarist official, suffered nameless brutalities at the hands of the cossacks and served long years at hard labor in Siberia. She shows her nervousness by ceaselessly toying with her pincenez.
The sessions are stormy to the point of madness. On the second day Maria Spiridovna makes a personal attack on Lenin:
“I accuse you,” she cries, “of betraying the peasants … of making use of them for your own ends, and of not serving their interests.” Her voice rises to a shriek. “When the peasants, the Bolshevik peasants, the Left Social-Revolutionary peasants, the Bolshevik peasants, the non-party peasants are alike humiliated oppressed and crushed—crushed as peasants—in my hand you will find the same pistol, the same bomb which once forced me to defend …”
Her words are drowned in applause and in a roar of opposing shouts and yelps and screams. Trotsky tries to speak and is howled down. Sverdlov helplessly tinkles his bell.
“Then Lenin walks slowly to the front of the stage,” writes Lockhart. “On the way he pats Sverdlov on the shoulder and tells him to put his bell away. Holding the lapels of his coat, he faces the audience—smiling, supremely self-confident. He is met with jeers and catcalls. He laughs good-humoredly. Then he holds up his hand and with a last rumble the tumult dies.”
Lenin contends that the Left Social Revolutionaries are illogical. Renewed war with the Germans will only be to the advantage of the other imperialist faction, the Allies. The Russian proletariat must quietly consolidate its power, must patiently wait for the moment when warweariness shall cause the oppressed peoples of all the countries of Europe to rise in world revolution.
In spite of Lenin’s calming speech the congress breaks out into a wild demonstration against members of the German mission seated in one of the boxes. Sverdlov adjourns the meeting.
The following afternoon, carrying identification cards signed by Dzerdzinsky and furnished them by Social Revolutionary members of the Cheka, two S.R.s call on Ambassador Mirbach on the pretext that the Cheka has discovered a conspiracy to assassinate him. He has papers says the first man. He puts his hand in his briefcase and draws out a pistol and shoots. The first shots go wild, but his companion takes careful aim and shoots Mirbach through the head. Both assassins escape through a window after exploding a couple of handgrenades in the embassy hall.
The assassination of Mirbach is the signal for a general rising of the Left Social Revolutionaries already planned against the Communists. They seize the office of the Cheka and hold Dzerdzinsky hostage. After a few hours Trotsky’s troops and the disciplined chekists restore order. Almost before it begins the revolt is suppressed. The Left Social Revolutionaries are either dead or under lock and key. The survivors are expelled from all the organs of government. Lenin’s Communists rule alone. Whoever is not for them is against them.
The End of the Romanoffs
The same day a rising was suppressed in Petrograd and a Green army, backed, so the story went, by the Fr
ench military mission in Moscow, seized Yaroslavl, important strategically as the head of navigation on the upper Volga, and held out there for a month. Meanwhile the Czechoslovak troops blocked on the Trans-Siberian threw in their lot with the anti-communists, and started moving west with the objective of fighting their way north to Archangel and effecting a junction with the British forces in the Murmansk area. As they proceeded towards the Urals, town after town fell to them without resistance. Assorted anticommunists took over the local governments and proceeded to greet them as liberators.
Ekaterinburg was one of the towns in the path of the Czechoslovak Legion. The month before, as revolt spread through Siberia, the pitiful remnants of the Romanoff family had been brought to Ekaterinburg from internment at Tobolsk, and imprisoned in what had been the mansion of a local merchant. The party consisted of the Czar and Czarina and their daughters and thirteenyearold son. With them was the family doctor and three servants. Most of them were ill from poor food and harsh treatment.
In the middle of the night of July 16 they were awakened by a firing squad acting under orders from the Urals Regional Soviet and told to go down in the cellar. The Czar had to carry his son in his arms as the boy was too ill to walk. There they were lined up against a wall. The leader of the squad told them that they were going to die. The Czar did not understand him, and leaning forward to say “What?” was shot in the face with a revolver. Immediately the executioners emptied their revolvers into the huddled figures. Those who were still groaning were finished off with bayonets. The bodies were hastily covered with quicklime and thrown into an abandoned mineshaft.
A few days later the Czechoslovaks captured the city.
Masaryk at the White House
Professor Masaryk had arrived in Washington from Petrograd via Vladivostok and Tokyo early that May. His arrival was eagerly looked forward to by Lansing and his counsellors in the State Department. Here at last was a returning Russian traveller in whose views the President expressed lively interest. Everything Woodrow Wilson heard predisposed him towards Masaryk. He was no arrogant millionaire or flybynight placer miner but a college professor with academic standing. The fact that he came from a small and oppressed country with a profound protestant tradition could not help but arouse the President’s sympathy. The Presbyterian in him was never far beneath the surface. Even so Masaryk had to wait in Washington more than a month, after preparatory luncheons with Lansing and House who both reported favorably, before the President could make up his mind to see him.
Their first interview was in late June. Masaryk, one of the most accomplished international lobbyists of the century, saw to it that he and the President should hit it off.
Masaryk succeeded where the British and French embassies and the Supreme War Council failed. He dramatized the plight of the poor Czechs bravely fighting their way to freedom through hordes of Germans and Hungarians armed by the Bolsheviks. Their occupation of Vladivostok, coming almost on the same day as the action of the Murmansk soviet inviting British intervention “materially changed the situation,” as Lansing cynically put it, “by introducing a sentimental element into the question of our duty.”
The first result of Wilson’s interview with Masaryk was that the cable facilities of the State Department were placed at the disposal of the Czechoslovak representative for a message to Chicherin protesting the failure of the Soviet Government to live up to its guarantee of free and unmolested passage to Vladivostok for the Czechoslovak Legion.
A few days later the President was confiding in House, in the same letter in which he spoke of sweating blood over the Russian problem: “I hope I see and can report some progress presently, along the double line of economic assistance and aid to the Czechoslovaks.”
Wilson had already made up his mind. Two days before he wrote House he called in Secretary Baker and Lansing and Josephus Daniels and General Peyton C. March, now Chief of Staff, to his quiet upstairs study in the White House, ostensibly to consult them, but actually to announce his decision after “thinking through the processes, alone, behind his own closed door.”
“It is the clear and fixed judgment of the Government of the United States,” the President read off a small pad, “that military intervention there would add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it, injure her rather than help her, and that it would be of no advantage in the prosecution of our main design, to win the war against Germany.”
After some cogent arguments against intervening in Russia’s internal struggles, he delivered himself, possibly to the surprise of his hearers, of the proposition that military action was admissible after all: “only to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces and get into successful cooperation with their Slavic kinsmen and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defence in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.”
He itemized the sort of assistance he was thinking of: “Assistance by a commission of merchants, agricultural experts, labor advisers, Red Cross representatives, and agents of the Young Men’s Christian Association.” But military action must come first. “The execution of this plan will follow and not be permitted to embarrass the military assistance rendered in the rear of the westward moving forces of the Czechoslovaks.”
What had started as a plan to help evacuate the Czechoslovaks had turned into a plan to secure their Siberian rear while they advanced into the heart of Russia west of the Urals. A discussion of details followed: the Japanese should be encouraged to furnish small arms, machineguns and ammunition to the Czechoslovaks besieged along the railroad. The Americans and Japanese should each furnish seven thousand men to protect the Legion’s communications.
When the President was finished he asked for comments. According to March’s notes Secretary Lansing commended the paper, Secretary Baker (who had argued himself blue in the face trying to talk the President out of it) merely nodded, Secretary Daniels approved and the general himself shook his head.
“Why are you shaking your head, General?” asked the President with some asperity. General March (noting for his private satisfaction that he had never been a yes-yes man) replied that he had already explained that he didn’t think such an expedition was militarily feasible and that besides the Japanese would take advantage of it for territorial gains.
“We’ll have to take that chance,” said the President testily.
The document was circulated to the Allied chancelleries in the form of an aide-memoire but it wasn’t till August 7 that public announcement was made that an American Expeditionary Force was being dispatched to Siberia. Masaryk immediately wrote the President an effusive note. “Your name Mr. President, as you have no doubt read, is openly cheered in the streets of Prague.”
Once a decision was made on Siberia the decision to send a detachment to help the British hold Murmansk came easy. Some lingering doubt must have remained in the President’s mind. In his answer to Masaryk he wrote that the professor’s letter was particularly appreciated because “I have felt no confidence in my personal judgment about the complicated situation in Russia, and am reassured that you should approve what I have done.”
Edgar Sisson’s Scoop
As part of the campaign to arouse popular support for the President’s decision to send troops to Russia the Committee for Public Information began directing towards Reds and Bolsheviks some of the hatred it had stirred up against the Germans. Press reports of the Moscow terror and of the murder of the Czar and his family made this not too hard an assignment.
When Sisson returned to Washington, still tense from his nervewracking escape from Petrograd, he resumed his position as second in command to George Creel at the old house on Jackson Place. Creel further put him in charge of the foreign desk. Sisson arrived big with portent over the globeshaking repercussions he expected from the publication of his documents on the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy.
Before leaving London, where he stopped over to consult with the British intelligence services,
he prepared for the explosion by ordering all C.P.I. personnel out of those parts of Russia under Communist control. A man named Arthur Bullard, who seems to have been levelheaded and wellinformed on Russian affairs, was in charge of the Moscow office. Bullard protested that he was in no present danger. Lenin’s government seemed reluctant to come to a final break with the American missions. Bullard cabled Sisson that he was getting considerable play for the President’s statements in Russian newspapers and that he wanted to stay. Sisson answered that leave he must. In an aside to a friend Sisson explained his insistence on pulling his representatives out of soviet territory as a way of impressing the administration with the importance of his revelations.
According to Major Dansey of British Military Intelligence, the members of the secret services whom Sisson talked to in London were opposed to publishing the documents at all. British military and naval intelligence and the office of the postal censor had gone over a set of the same papers sent in by a British agent named Maclaren, whom Major Dansey described as “hipped on buying documents,” and had decided that the so-called circulars were forgeries clumsily typed on the same Russian typewriter, and that such of the accompanying letters as seemed to be genuine had little propaganda value.
Though the full story of German financing of certain Russian revolutionary newspapers during the early part of the war did not come out till many years later, the British intelligence services were undoubtedly aware at that time that the Bolshevik leaders had been helped by German agencies to return to Russia and that they might have received subsidies in the period of antiwar propaganda before their seizure of power, but they saw no sense in trying to claim that Lenin and Trotsky were acting as German agents because it was untrue on the face of it. According to Major Dansey’s account he explained to Sisson that many of the documents were forgeries and urged him to go slow with them.
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