PARIS 1919 (12 page)

Lloyd George would have preferred to include Russia in the Peace Conference. As he told Clemenceau at their meeting in London in December 1918, they could not proceed as if the country did not exist. He had, he said, great sympathy for the Russian people. “Their troops had fought without arms or munitions; they had been outrageously betrayed by their Government, and it was little to be wondered at if, in their bitterness, the Russian people had rebelled against the Alliance.” Russia was a huge country, stretching from Europe to Asia, with almost 200 million people. If the nations with claims on Russian territory were to be allowed to come to Paris, then surely the Russians themselves deserved the right to be heard. That might mean inviting the Bolsheviks. He did not like them, Lloyd George told the Supreme Council, but could they refuse to recognize them? “To say that we ourselves should pick the representatives of a great people was contrary to every principle for which we had fought.” The British government had made the same mistake after the French Revolution, when it had backed the émigré aristocrats. “This,” Lloyd George said dramatically, “led them into a war which lasted about twenty-five years.”
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His arguments did not go down well with Clemenceau, who loathed the Bolsheviks, partly because he saw them as tools of the Germans and partly because he abhorred their methods. For Clemenceau revolution was sublime when it was the one of 1789, despicable when it fell into the hands of the Jacobins, with their Robespierres and Lenins, who used the guillotine and the noose to create perfection. He had lived through the mob violence and the bloody suppression of the radical Commune of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. From that moment on he had broken with the extreme left. In 1919 he, like the other Allied leaders, also had to heed his own public opinion. If the Bolsheviks sent representatives to Paris, he told Balfour in a private interview, the extreme radicals would be encouraged and the middle classes would panic. There would be rioting in the streets, which his government would have to put down with force. That would not be a good atmosphere for the Peace Conference. If his allies insisted on going ahead with such an invitation, Clemenceau warned, he would be obliged to resign.
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And did the Bolsheviks speak for all the Russian people? They controlled only the core Russian lands, along with the great cities of St. Petersburg (soon to become Leningrad) and Moscow. They faced rival governments: that of the White Russians, as they were commonly known, in the south, under General Anton Denikin, one of the better tsarist generals, and another in Siberia under Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. In Paris itself, Russian exiles, from conservatives to radicals, had formed the Russian Political Conference to speak for all non-Bolshevik Russians. Sergei Sazonov, who had been a foreign minister under the tsar, found himself working with Boris Savinkov, a famous terrorist. Sleek, fashionably dressed, a gardenia in his buttonhole, Savinkov was much admired in Paris. Lloyd George, who always liked efficiency, said: “His assassinations had always been skilfully arranged and had been a complete success.”
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Unfortunately, the Russian Political Conference got only grudging support from the rival governments of Denikin and Kolchak (which also spent much time trying to outmaneuver each other) and none at all from the Bolsheviks.

On January 16, Lloyd George brought the whole question of Russia before the Supreme Council. It seemed to him that they had three choices: first, to destroy Russian Bolshevism; second, to insulate the outside world from it; or third, to invite the Russians, Bolsheviks included, to meet the peacemakers. They had already taken steps towards the first two options: there were Allied soldiers on Russian soil, and the Allies had a blockade on Russia. Neither of these appeared to be working. He himself therefore preferred the last option. In fact, they could do the Russians a good turn by persuading the different factions to talk to each other and try to work out a truce. It was, he said privately, what the Romans had done when they sent for the barbarians and told them to behave.
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The peacemakers did not find it easy to make up their minds. There were objections to each course of action. Intervention to overthrow the Bolsheviks was risky and expensive; isolating Russia would hurt the Russian people; and bringing Bolshevik representatives to Paris or anywhere else in the West ran the risk of giving them a chance to spread their message, to say nothing of infuriating the conservatives. Wilson supported Lloyd George. The French and Italian foreign ministers, Pichon and Sonnino, demurred. At the least, suggested Pichon, they should listen to the French and Danish ambassadors, who had just returned from Russia. The two duly appeared, with alarming tales of the Red Terror, which Lloyd George cavalierly dismissed as exaggerations.
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The Supreme Council found itself unable to come to any decision.

Throughout the Peace Conference, Allied policy toward Russia remained inconsistent and incoherent, not firm enough to overthrow the Bolsheviks but sufficiently hostile to convince them, with unfortunate consequences, that the Western powers were their implacable enemies. Churchill, who begged repeatedly for a clear policy line from his own government, was bitter in his memoirs about Allied indecision. “Were they at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war— shocking! Interference—shame!”
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Churchill, of course, was for intervention. So was Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the senior French soldier and Allied commander-in-chief. And so were Tory members of Parliament in London and embittered French investors. Against them were ranged an equally vociferous group: the unions in solidarity with a working-class movement, humanitarians of various stripes, and the pragmatists who, with the popular London
Daily
Express,
simply said, “We are sorry for the Russians, but they must fight it out among themselves.”
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That tended to be Wilson's view. “I believe in letting them work out their own salvation,” he told a British diplomat in Washington just before the end of the war, “even though they wallow in anarchy for a while. I visualize it like this: A lot of impossible folk fighting among themselves. You cannot do business with them, so you shut them all up in a room and lock the door and tell them that when they have settled matters among themselves you will unlock the door and do business.” Wilson assumed that the shape of the room would remain much the same. He did not contemplate, as the British sometimes did, the breakup of the Russian empire. Self-determination, as he saw it, meant the Russian peoples running their own huge country. The only exception he made, on the basis of the same principle, was for Russia's Polish territory, which he felt should be part of a restored Poland. Curiously, he did not see Ukrainian nationalism in the same light (possibly because his great Republican opponent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge favored an independent Ukraine) and he staunchly resisted Allied recognition of the Baltic states. Otherwise his policy toward Russia was largely negative: nonintervention and nonrecognition. The sixth of his Fourteen Points called for the evacuation of Russian territory by foreign armies (he had the Japanese in mind, in particular) so that the Russian people could work out the institutions that best suited them. When the Russians had sorted out who was governing them (he hoped that it would not be the Bolsheviks), the United States would extend recognition. This, Wilson liked to point out, was what the United States had done in the Mexican civil war.
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The trouble was that the Allies had already intervened. In the spring of 1918, British troops had landed at the northern ports of Archangel and Murmansk, and the Japanese had seized Vladivostok on the Pacific and spread westward into Siberia to keep the Germans from getting their hands on Russian raw materials such as grain and oil, as well as on ports, railways and munitions. To keep an eye on the Japanese (and perhaps on the British) and to protect a legion of Czechs who had got themselves stuck in Siberia from Russian prisoner-of-war camps, the Americans had reluctantly landed their own troops. (“I have been sweating blood,” Wilson complained to House that summer, “over the question of what is right and feasible to do in Russia. . . . It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.”) The British then prevailed on the Canadians to supply a force to balance the Americans and the Japanese. Down in the south another British force moved into the oil-rich mountains of the Caucasus. When, at the end of the war, Britain decided not only to keep its troops in place but to offer support to anti-Bolshevik White Russians, it was quite clear that an intervention that had started out against the Germans had slipped into something quite different.
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The defeated Germany, on Allied instructions, started to pull its troops out of the Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Allies struggled to fill the vacuum. By the end of 1918, there were over 180,000 foreign troops on Russian soil and several White Russian armies receiving Allied money and Allied guns. People were starting to talk about a crusade against Bolshevism. But there was strong opposition to any more military adventures. The slogan from the left, “Hands Off Russia,” was gaining in popularity. If they were not careful, Lloyd George told his cabinet, they would spread Bolshevism simply by trying to put it down. The prospect of being sent to Russia was hugely unpopular among British and American soldiers. The Canadians, who had been supplying troops for the Siberian expedition and for Murmansk, wanted to pull out by the summer; there was “great anxiety” over the issue in Canada, Borden told his colleagues in the British empire delegation.
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The French, who talked a strong line on intervention, could actually do very little. They did not have the manpower or the resources. Under an agreement with Britain, France was in theory responsible for the southern Ukraine and the Crimea, and Britain for the Caucasus and central Asia. (What that meant, beyond supporting local anti-Bolshevik forces, was never clearly spelled out.) But only a handful of French soldiers had arrived in Russia before the end of the war. The French general in the Near East, Louis Franchet d'Esperey, complained bitterly, “I do not have enough forces to settle into this country, all the more so since it would not appeal to our men to experience Russia in winter when all their comrades are resting.” His warnings were unwisely ignored.

The French government moved a mixed force, with French, Greek and Polish troops, to the Black Sea port of Odessa. The expedition promptly found itself fighting a heterogeneous collection of enemies, from Bolsheviks to Ukrainian nationalists to anarchists. Morale plummeted during the long winter of 1918–19 and the Bolsheviks found easy pickings when they sent in French speakers to work on the troops. As one French officer reported, “not one French soldier who saved his head at Verdun and the fields of the Marne will consent to losing it on the fields of Russia.” In April 1919, the French authorities abruptly gave up what was becoming a debacle and hastily pulled out, abandoning Odessa and its people to the Bolsheviks. Civilians lined the waterfront, vainly begging the French to take them with them. A smaller French expedition left the Crimean port of Sebastopol in somewhat better order, taking with it some 40,000 Russians, including the mother of the murdered tsar. Two weeks later the French Black Sea fleet mutinied.
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Although France remained vociferous in opposing the Bolsheviks and their ways, it played no further part in the Allied intervention. Foch came up with a series of increasingly improbable plans to march into Russia with armies variously made up of Poles, Finns, Czechoslovaks, Rumanians, Greeks and even the Russian prisoners of war still in Germany, all of which came to nothing, partly because his cast of extras mostly refused the parts assigned them, but also because of strong opposition from the British and the Americans.
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French policy became by default the second of the options Lloyd George had outlined: to isolate Bolshevism within Russia. At the Peace Conference and in subsequent years, France did its best to build up states around Russia such as Poland to form, in the old medieval phrase, a cordon sanitaire around the carriers of the plague. This had the advantage, even more important to the French, of providing counterweights to Germany and a barrier in the unlikely event that Germany and Russia should try to join forces. Foch and Churchill were among the few in Paris who took that possibility seriously. Churchill warned about a future combination of a Bolshevik Russia with a nationalist Germany and Japan. “In the ultimate result we could contemplate a predatory confederation stretching from the Rhine to Yokohama menacing the vital interests of the British Empire in India and elsewhere, menacing indeed the future of the world.”
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“We should continue to keep an eye on them,” a weary Clemenceau said of the Bolsheviks to Lloyd George at the end of 1919, “surrounding them, as it were, by a barbed wire entanglement, and spending no money.” Money was always a problem in 1919. Lloyd George tried to dampen Churchill's enthusiasm for intervention by reporting a conversation with the chancellor of the exchequer, Austen Chamberlain: “We cannot afford the burden. Chamberlain says we can barely make both ends meet on a peace basis, even at the present crushing rate of taxation.” The British spent perhaps £100 million on their Russian adventure; the French under half that amount. “How much will France give?” asked Lloyd George when the question of expanding military intervention came up in February 1919. “I am sure she cannot afford to pay; I am sure we cannot. Will America bear the expense? Pin them down to the cost of any scheme before sanctioning it.”
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Much of the aid to the White Russians was being wasted through inefficiency and corruption. Petty officials behind the lines took the uniforms intended for the soldiers; their wives and daughters wore British nurses' skirts. While Denikin's trucks and tanks seized up in the cold, antifreeze was sold in the bars. Although the Bolsheviks were later able to paint a propaganda picture of world capitalism in all its might arrayed against their revolution, in fact Allied help did very little to stave off White defeat.
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