Bullitt was given a copy of the proposed settlement terms, but was warned that it was a personal statement by Kerr that had no official sanction; to protect the prime minister, Kerr thus ensured that, if necessary, Lloyd George could wash his hands of the matter. It seems not to have occurred to the young American envoy that should news of his mission become public, he, too, along with Kerr’s statement, might be disowned.
Bullitt set out on a path strewn with hidden land mines. Many on the Allied side were violently opposed to entering into contact with the Bolsheviks, and would have aborted Bullitt’s mission had they known of it. Certainly the French would have done so. Clemenceau, a Radical, had been imprisoned briefly by revolutionaries more leftist than he in the civil war of March 1871, and hated communists with the passion that so often animates rivals for the same political constituency.
Adding fuel to the fire of Clemenceau’s hatred for them, the communists of Moscow and Petrograd had dealt France two powerful blows. They had repudiated Russia’s government debt, bonds that largely were held by French investors. France’s losses on the tsar’s securities would be all the more painful if the Ottoman sultan, as seemed likely, were driven to default on the bonds of his empire, too, of which the French again were the principal holders. It could mean financial catastrophe for French investors.
Even more harmful was the world policy blow the Leninists had struck: by taking Russia out of her alliance with France, they had destroyed the geopolitical strategy that alone allowed the French Third Republic, a weaker country, to confront her powerful enemy Germany on equal terms.
It was true that on the Left of the French political spectrum, there were those who took a less dim view of what the Bolsheviks had done. At the time of the Bullitt mission, Marcel Cachin, a socialist editor, had a luncheon meeting with Adolf A. Berle, Jr.—the youngest man ever to graduate the Harvard Law School and now, at the age of twenty-four, the head of the Russian section of the American delegation in Paris—in which Cachin said the French Left would support a settlement with the Bolsheviks that included their pledges to stop their propaganda campaigns abroad and to withdraw from the Baltic states. But Berle, like Bullitt, may have overestimated the popular support on which Socialists like Cachin could count.
For in the Western world, communism was not regarded as a legitimate ideology. In speaking to the scholars of the Inquiry aboard the George Washington, Wilson, according to Bullitt’s notes, had referred to Bolshevism as a “poison.” In plague-stricken Paris, the metaphor changed: what Lenin was spreading was labeled a disease. Transcripts of meetings between the Allied leaders that later were turned over by Bullitt to the U.S. Senate have Italian prime minister Orlando saying in early 1919 to the other government heads that “to prevent a contagious epidemic from spreading, the sanitarians set up a cordon Sanitaire. If similar measures could be taken against Bolshevism …” In time they were, and they were almost always described in Orlando’s terms, as a cordon sanitaire: the roping off of an area of contagion by a line of guards.
The metaphor of communism-as-disease proved infectious. It was repeated often, thinkingly at first, unthinkingly later. Soon the words were in many mouths and on many tongues. Reminding his listeners that the German General Staff, in order to overthrow the Allied regime in Petrograd, had facilitated Lenin’s return to Russia and had supplied him with enormous quantities of the gold that enabled him to launch his bid for power, Winston Churchill, minister of war and air, told the House of Commons toward the end of 1919 that “Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city.…”
SENSIBLE PEOPLE do not try to compromise with an epidemic, they eradicate it; they treat an illness, not treat with it. In the United States, Britain, and France, there were enough people of importance who would have thought Bullitt’s mission dangerously wrongheaded so that it could not have gone forward openly. To be undertaken at all, it had to be undertaken in secret.
But it was evident that Bullitt was going somewhere: his job of briefing the peace commissioners each morning (“Chief of Division of Current Intelligence summaries”) was taken over temporarily by Christian Herter. One could have guessed where Bullitt was going; Germany and Russia were his two areas of special responsibility, so it was likely to be one or the other. But throwing observers off the scent, Bullitt and his companions, Captain Walter W. Pettit of U.S. military intelligence and the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, mentor of John Reed and Walter Lippmann, traveled west instead of east: they left Paris for London. From there they went north to Sweden. Leaving Stockholm for Petrograd, Bullitt began his confidential talks with the Bolshevik leaders Chicherin and Litvinov March 9, and then went on to Moscow March 11.
The Bolsheviks, holding on to the capital cities of Petrograd and Moscow and to a stretch of territory in Russia, yet surrounded by the armies of foreign and domestic enemies, were at one of the low points in their fortunes. They were being hurt badly by an Allied blockade; the population was starving. They tried to hide it by serving Bullitt whatever they had, so at first, as he savored quantities of caviar three times a day, he was given the impression that the stories current in the West of hard times in Russia were exaggerated. But Bullitt was quick to learn, and he soon understood why Bolshevik officials so often dropped by to talk business at mealtimes: they were hungry, and hoped he would invite them to share in what he was eating.
The starvation, in Bullitt’s view, was due to the Allied blockade and should not be blamed on Lenin’s regime. But he grew rapturous about what the Bolsheviks had been able to accomplish in other areas. The streets were safe, he reported by cable to Colonel House, and “prostitutes have disappeared from sight, the economic reasons for their career having ceased to exist.” Again and again he told Steffens and others that “we have seen the future, and it works”—a sentence that Steffens later published, without attribution, as his own.
The afternoon of March 14, by appointment, Bullitt finally met alone with Lenin in the Kremlin. Lenin already had read the Kerr statement of Allied terms, and in the desperate circumstances in which his government found itself, was prepared to accept it with only slight modifications. He told Bullitt that by throwing his weight in the Central Executive Committee against Trotsky and the generals, he had been able to force a committee decision to listen to a proposal from the Western world. But the proposal had to come from the West, he said. The terms were tough, and Lenin may have wanted to be able to tell his own people that they had been forced on him by the other side.
Lenin informed Bullitt that if by April 10 the West asked his government to do so, his regime would agree to a peace settlement on what essentially were Kerr’s (and Britain’s) terms: an immediate cease-fire; an amnesty in and out of Russia; free movement in and out of all the countries of formerly tsarist Russia; all the governments on Russian soil, including those still ruled by the tsarist military, to be recognized within their existing frontiers; a resumption of trade and an end to the Allied blockade; the Soviet and other Russian governments to pay all of Russia’s debts and financial obligations; the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Russia; and the convening of a conference in a neutral country to arrive at a formal settlement.
“The Allies, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, would have been well out of it on these terms. It is a pity they were not accepted.” Such was the mature judgment of George Kennan, America’s foremost student of U.S.-Soviet relations, some four decades later. Even if circumstances had strengthened Lenin’s hand such that he could have repudiated the agreement later, the Allies would have been no worse off than they were with no agreement at all.
But Bullitt was mistaken in his estimate of Soviet intentions. He did not understand Lenin’s agenda. During the month of Bullitt’s stay in Russia, the Soviets formed the Communist International (the “Comintern”) as a rival to the Socialist international conference that
Bullitt had attended in Bern the month before. Communism was cutting itself off from socialism on the basic issue of democracy: Bern was for it, Moscow against it. Moreover, the Bolshevik regime did not regard any peace agreement with the West as other than a temporary expedient: in Lenin’s words, “The existence of the Soviet Republic together with the imperialist states is in the long run unthinkable.”
So while Bullitt returned to Paris with an opportunity for the West to grasp, it was not so great an opportunity, nor could its benefits be expected to endure for so long, as he supposed.
Bullitt was jubilant about his having secured Lenin’s agreement to Britain’s settlement terms. House, too, was delighted, seeing a chance to quickly restore order in Europe—all the more desirable because a communist revolution had taken place only days before in Hungary. So when Bullitt reported to him in Paris the night of March 25, House phoned and sought an immediate audience for Bullitt with the President, who had recently returned to Europe. But Wilson refused, saying he had a headache. He also said that he had a one-track mind and could not deal with Russia while concentrating on other issues; he told House to take the matter in hand.
House scheduled meetings for Bullitt the next day with the other American peace commissioners. The following day Bullitt met at breakfast with the British: Lloyd George, Kerr, Smuts, and Balfour. In principle they should have been pleased, for it was Kerr’s terms that Lenin had accepted. In fact, Lloyd George did want to agree to those terms. But he would not step forward; he did not want to get out in front on such an explosive issue and be the one to draw fire. He said he would follow if Wilson would take the lead. According to Bullitt, the British prime minister waved a copy of the mass-circulation, scare-headline Daily Mail in front of him—a newspaper that denounced the proposed agreement—and asked, “As long as the British press is doing this kind of thing how can you expect me to be sensible about Russia?”
The editors of the Daily Mail had the story of the secret agreement Bullitt had brought back with him because Gordon Auchincloss, House’s secretary and son-in-law, had leaked it to them. Auchincloss had done so to try to wreck the agreement, of which he strongly disapproved. American newspapers followed the Daily Mail in denouncing the agreement with Lenin, and Wilson’s press secretary on April 2 cabled from Washington: “The proposed recognition of Lenin has caused consternation over here.”
Wilson turned his back on Bullitt, who became House’s exclusive responsibility and political liability. Even before Bullitt’s breakfast with the British, the President quietly had made his move. Wilson, who had begun to lose confidence in House the week before (of which more will be said presently), asked Herbert Hoover to advise him what to do about Soviet Russia. Hoover’s advice was to not get involved in any military operations against Bolshevik Russia but also to not recognize Lenin’s regime (“We cannot even remotely recognize this murderous tyranny …”), to demand that communist Russia unilaterally cease fire and cease agitation beyond its frontiers, and to offer to feed the people of Soviet Russia as a humanitarian gesture.
House, sensing which way the wind was blowing, quickly abandoned the Bullitt proposal (though without telling Bullitt) and opted for fighting Bolshevism with food. Auchincloss and his law partner David Hunter Miller drafted a document for House along these lines; while Bullitt, bewildered, could not understand why a new approach was being adopted just when the one he had explored in Moscow was on the verge of succeeding.
In his pride at what he had accomplished in Moscow, Bullitt had not noticed the strength of the political currents running against his project. A letter signed by 200 members of Parliament appeared in the London Times opposing recognition of Soviet Russia. Winston Churchill wrote to the prime minister telling him that the House of Commons was practically unanimous on the point. Churchill urged that Wilson “not be allowed to weaken our policy …” and, referring to the Bullitt mission, claimed that the President’s “negotiations have become widely known and are much resented.”
Quickly leaving the scene of a political accident, Lloyd George, on a flying trip to London, told the House of Commons that “of course there are constantly men of all nationalities coming from and going to Russia, always back with their own tales.… But … nothing authentic.…” He denied that he or his government had made an approach to Lenin. He said: “There was some suggestion that a young American had come back from Russia with a communication. It is not for me to judge the value of this communication, but if the President of the United States had attached any value to it he would have brought it before the conference, and he certainly did not.”
Not knowing what to do, but angry and tired, Bullitt left town: he went off on a brief vacation. Then he returned, to urge sending a reply before the deadline expired, but found that he could not get through to anybody in a position of authority.
He wrote a letter to the President in which he tried to explain, in the context of the dangerous disorder then prevailing in central and eastern Europe, the importance, as he saw it, of achieving an accommodation with Lenin’s regime. The “peoples of Europe have been seeking a better way to live for the common good of all,” he wrote, but they “have found no guidance in Paris”—which is to say, from the President and the Allies—and so “they are turning towards Moscow.” He claimed that “to dismiss this groping of the peoples for better lives” as “Bolshevism” was to misunderstand everything. These were peoples, he wrote, whose first instinct had been to turn toward the United States and its President; they had turned away, toward Soviet Russia, only because Wilson had failed them. “Six months ago all the peoples of Europe expected you to fulfill their hopes. They believe now that you cannot. They turn, therefore, to Lenin.…”
It was a sort of revolution, Bullitt claimed, that was occurring all over Europe, and it had arrived at a crossroads. If the United States cooperated with the “constructive and kind” leaders of the revolution—and Bullitt must have included Lenin among them in order to arrive at the conclusion he reached—then the energies of the revolution could be diverted into “peaceful and constructive” channels. But to support military interventions against the revolutionaries instead, as the President and the Allies were doing, would drive them “in self defense, to terror and massacres,” as had happened, Bullitt claimed, in “the French Revolution more than a century ago and the Russian Revolution last year.”
One did not need to agree with this analysis in order to be convinced that the Lenin offer should have been accepted; there were quite different grounds for believing it. In his proposals to Bullitt, Lenin was accepting the loss of most of prewar Russia, and if confined to a relatively small territory and surrounded by enemy Russian as well as non-Russian states, Bolshevism might be neutralized, or might even wither and die. Indeed, in hindsight it looks as though backing the Bullitt-Lenin agreement offered a better chance of containing communism in Russia than did supporting the armies of the tsarist officers Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin in the wars they were waging against the Reds.
But Bullitt and his negotiations had become political liabilities, and nobody in power wanted to be weighed down by him or them. The expiration date of Lenin’s offer, April 10, came and went; but the West made no move to follow up on the proposals that Bullitt had brought back with him.
NOW THAT THE WORLD has had a long experience of communist government and has developed an understanding of the goals of Lenin and Stalin, it can be said with some degree of confidence that there was no real chance of bringing the Soviet regime into a peaceful and friendly long-term relationship with the Western democracies; but in 1919 one could not have been sure.
So the repudiation of Bullitt by Wilson and Lloyd George left questions unanswered that would trouble the democracies for decades to come. Had the West thrown away—as many would come to believe—the last, best chance to win the trust of Russia’s new rulers? Was the outlaw behavior of the Soviet government in subsequent years due to its having been treated as an outlaw from birth?
To those of Bullitt’s generation who in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s would be called upon to define America’s policy toward the Soviet Union, his unfulfilled mission left behind a disturbing legacy of doubt. Many of them would operate under the disadvantage of having a conscience that was not entirely clear where Soviet Russia was concerned, for they worried that in 1919 the United States might have been at fault.
29
WILSON COLLAPSES
You Americans are broken reeds …
—John Maynard Keynes, in a letter to Norman Davis (June 5, 1919)
WHILE WILSON WAS GOING to and from the United States in February and March, and Bullitt was going to and from Russia, American peacemakers who stayed on in Paris became aware that somehow they had lost the affection in which they had once been held: they had become unpopular. In the words of Joseph Grew, “the honeymoon between America and France is over.…”
It finally had sunk in to the French mind that the Americans did not agree that the war had been about France—and that the peace consequently had to be, too. The war had begun in a German invasion of France. The war essentially had consisted in the battle for France. The battlefield of the war had been northern France. The French army had suffered 6 million casualties in the fighting, which was more than those absorbed by the armies of Britain, the British empire and commonwealths, the United States, Italy, and Japan combined. Now, Frenchmen believed, there were only two questions to resolve: how to compensate France for what Germany had done to her, and how to prevent Germany from doing it again. It all was so simple to a French mind; why could the Americans not see it? And why did not the American President, on his arrival, go out to see for himself the battlefields and cemeteries that would give him a firsthand sense of what the war had been and what it had meant?
In the Time of the Americans Page 32
