PARIS 1919 (13 page)

The Allied intervention in Russia was always muddled by differing objectives and mutual suspicions. The Americans were officially against intervention, yet they kept their troops in Siberia after the end of the war, to block Japanese designs. Where the French before 1914 had relied on a strong Russia to keep Germany in line, the British had worried about the Russian threat to India. In 1919 France would have preferred a restored White Russia, but Britain could have lived with a weak Red one. Curzon, who loathed everything the Bolsheviks stood for, was delighted that the Russians had lost control of the Caucasus; the British must, he told Churchill, be careful that Denikin, the White Russian leader in the south, did not get his hands on the area again. The British tended to be suspicious of French motives. The French government, complained Lloyd George, was unreasonably swayed by its own middle classes, who had lost their savings in Russia. “There is nothing they would like better,” he said, “than to see us pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them.”
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While the Allies dabbled fitfully with intervention in Russia, they also explored the option favored by Lloyd George: that of negotiation. On January 21, 1919, Wilson and Lloyd George suggested a compromise to the Supreme Council. The Russians would be encouraged to agree on a common position on the peace settlements for discussion with the Allies. Since the French did not want the Bolsheviks to come to Paris, why not meet them, along with other Russian representatives, somewhere nearer Russia? As long as they refused to speak to the Bolsheviks, Wilson added, the Russian people would believe Bolshevik propaganda that the Allies were their enemies. Clemenceau, supported by Sonnino, objected that the very act of speaking to the Bolsheviks would give them credibility. He was not prepared to break with his Allies over this and so, reluctantly, he would go along. Only Sonnino held out. They must, he urged, collect all the White Russians together and give them enough soldiers or at least the weapons to destroy the Bolsheviks. Lloyd George had a practical question. How many soldiers could they each provide? There was an awkward pause. None, came the answer. It was agreed to proceed with negotiations. Wilson immediately sent for a typewriter. “We conjured up visions of a beautiful American stenographer,” a British journalist recalled, but a messenger appeared with Wilson's battered old machine, and the president sat in a corner tapping out an invitation. As Clemenceau left the room he snarled to a waiting French journalist, “Beaten!”
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Wilson's draft, which talked of the Allies' sincere and unselfish desire to help the Russian people, was duly sent to the representatives of the major Russian factions, inviting them to meet on the Princes Islands— Prinkipo—in the Sea of Marmara between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The islands were a favorite picnic spot for the inhabitants of Constantinople. They had also been used by the Turkish authorities just before the war as a place to dump the city's thousands of stray dogs; for weeks, desperate barks and yaps had echoed back across the waters.

An invitation was sent off to the Bolsheviks by shortwave radio, and Paris waited for a reply. It was difficult to gauge what the response would be. Already the Bolsheviks had established what was to become a familiar pattern of rudeness and civility, utmost hostility and grudging cooperation. Lenin believed that the Russian Revolution would set fire to Europe, then the world. Borders, flags, nationalism, the tools of a doomed capitalism for keeping the workers of the world apart, would be swept away. His first commissar for foreign affairs, the great revolutionary theorist Leon Trotsky, saw his new post as a simple one: “I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop.” (In an unconscious parallel to Wilson's call for open diplomacy, he had much fun rummaging through the old tsarist files and publishing, to the considerable embarrassment of the Allies, secret wartime agreements carving up, for example, the Middle East.) The only question for Lenin and Trotsky was one of tactics. If world revolution was going to happen immediately, there was no need to deal with the enemy. If there was a delay, however, it might become necessary to play off one capitalist nation against another. In 1917, the Bolsheviks assumed the first was true; by 1919, even though Lenin summoned a founding congress for a world revolutionary headquarters, the Communist International, they were starting to have doubts.
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The Soviet foreign policy, which reflected this ambivalence, did much to deepen the Allies' suspicions. In October 1918 Georgi Chicherin, a disheveled, obsessive scholar who had just replaced Trotsky as commissar for foreign affairs, sent a sarcastic note to Wilson, mocking his cherished principles. The Fourteen Points called for leaving Russia alone to work out its own fate; curious, then, that Wilson had sent troops to Siberia. The American talked of self-determination; how odd that he had not mentioned Ireland or the Philippines. He promised a League of Nations to end all war; was this some sort of joke? Everyone knew that the capitalist nations were responsible for creating wars. At that very moment, the United States and its partners in crime Britain and France were plotting to spill more Russian blood and extort more money from Russia. The only true league was one of the masses.
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Yet the Bolsheviks also struck conciliatory notes. Maxim Litvinov, Chicherin's deputy, was smooth and agreeable. He had lived in London for several years, eking out a living as a clerk and marrying a novelist, Ivy Low, from the fringes of Bloomsbury. On Christmas Eve 1918, he sent Wilson a telegram from Stockholm. It spoke of peace on earth, of justice and humanity. The Russian people, Litvinov went on, shared Wilson's great principles. They had been the first to cry out for self-determination and open diplomacy. All they wanted now was peace to build a better society. They were anxious to negotiate, but Allied intervention and the Allied blockade were causing terrible misery. The Bolsheviks found themselves obliged to use terror to keep the country afloat. Would not Wilson help them?

Wilson was deeply impressed. So, when he saw the telegram, was Lloyd George. An American diplomat, William Buckler, was dispatched to talk to Litvinov. Buckler's report, which Wilson brought to the Supreme Council on January 21, was encouraging. The Soviet government, as it was now calling itself, was ready to do much for the sake of peace, whether that meant paying at least part of the repudiated foreign debts or granting new concessions to foreign enterprises. It would drop its calls for worldwide revolution; it had only been forced to use such propaganda as a way of defending itself first against Germany and more recently the Allies.
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Wilson and Lloyd George had some reason, then, to expect that the Bolsheviks would welcome the invitation to Prinkipo. The two statesmen chose their delegates: a liberal journalist and a defrocked clergyman for the United States, and for Britain a delighted Borden—“a great honour to Canada.” (He did not know that Lloyd George was having trouble finding someone to go.) They all waited. The Soviet government's reply arrived on February 4. Not for the last time the Bolsheviks misjudged the West. They craftily, but transparently, avoided agreeing to a cease-fire, one of the preconditions laid down by the Supreme Council. They did not bother to comment on the appeal to high principles in the invitation. Clearly thinking that capitalists understood only one thing, they offered significant material concessions, such as raw materials or territory. After all, it had worked with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. Wilson was taken aback: “This answer was not only uncalled for, but might be thought insulting.” Lloyd George agreed. “We are not after their money or their concessions or their territory.”
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At the same time the other invitees, with quiet support from the French and from friends such as Churchill, were digging in their heels. The news of the Prinkipo proposal had deeply shocked the White Russians. In Paris, the exile community turned out in a huge demonstration; far away in Archangel, pictures of Wilson were hurriedly taken down. Sazonov, the former foreign minister, asked a British diplomat how the Allies could expect him to meet the people who had murdered his family.
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If the British and the Americans had put pressure on them, the White Russians would probably have caved in, but neither Wilson nor Lloyd George was prepared to do so. Prinkipo was becoming a political problem for both men. The press and some of their own colleagues were increasingly critical. Lloyd George, who depended on Conservative support for his coalition government, had already been warned by Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, and his deputy that the government might well break up over the issue. By February 8, Clemenceau, in a rare communicative mood, told Poincaré that the Prinkipo meeting was in trouble. Wilson showed no signs of wanting to respond to the Bolsheviks' partial acceptance. Just to make sure, Clemenceau begged Balfour to delay discussion until the president left for his brief visit to the United States. By the time the White Russians sent their refusal on February 16, Wilson was at sea, Lloyd George was back in London dealing with a threatened general strike and Prinkipo was already dead.
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That left the whole question of Russia as undecided as ever. In London, Churchill was demanding that Lloyd George make a clear decision, either to intervene in force or to withdraw from Russia once and for all. Lloyd George was not prepared to do either: full-scale intervention would create trouble on his left; withdrawal would make trouble on his right. And so, as he did on other occasions at the Peace Conference, he proceeded indirectly, testing out first one approach and then another without exposing himself.

He told Churchill that any decision on Russia had to be made in Paris, with Wilson's participation. Churchill dashed across the Channel on the morning of February 14, the day the president was due to leave for the United States. (In his memoirs, Lloyd George expressed pious horror that Churchill had “adroitly” slipped over to Paris on his own initiative.) After a hectic drive to Paris—and a crash which left his car's windshield shattered—Churchill rushed into the Supreme Council just as Wilson was getting to his feet. The president listened courteously as Churchill pointed out that the uncertainty over Allied intentions was bad for the troops in Russia and for the White Russians. His own view was that withdrawal would be a disaster. “Such a policy would be equivalent to pulling out the linch-pin from the whole machine. There would be no further armed resistance to the Bolsheviks in Russia, and an interminable vista of violence and misery was all that remained for the whole of Russia.” Wilson, as Lloyd George must have known, refused to be drawn. Allied troops were doing no good in Russia, he admitted, but the situation was confusing.
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Churchill remained in Paris for a couple more days, trying to prod the Supreme Council into at least a clear policy; but with Wilson and Lloyd George absent this was difficult. Lloyd George, who was getting daily reports from the faithful Kerr, directed matters from a distance. “Winston is in Paris,” he told a friend cheerfully. “He wants to conduct a war against the Bolsheviks. That
would
cause a revolution! Our people would not permit it.”
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He sent Churchill mixed signals, hinting that Britain might supply weapons and volunteers for the White Russians but then, in the next cable, warning him against planning military action against the Bolsheviks. The War Office, Lloyd George claimed, felt that the presence of Allied soldiers in Russia was a mistake. He agreed: “Not merely is it none of our business to interfere with its internal affairs, it would be positively mischievous: it would strengthen and consolidate Bolshevik opinion.” Lloyd George made sure that Kerr gave copies of his message to other members of the British empire delegation as well as to House. From the middle of the Atlantic, Wilson sent his warning: “Greatly surprised by Churchill's Russian suggestion,” he wired, “it would be fatal to be led further into the Russian chaos.” He need not have worried. On February 19, the day chosen to renew the discussion on Russia at the Supreme Council, Clemenceau was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt, and any decision was postponed indefinitely. Allied troops remained on Russian soil, but there was no great crusade.
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Perhaps, as Wilson was fond of suggesting, the peacemakers needed more information. Several of the younger Americans, including the radical journalist Lincoln Steffens and William Bullitt, a young Russian expert with the American delegation who was known to oppose intervention, were already suggesting a mission of inquiry. Lloyd George agreed that it might be a good idea, not least as a way of postponing an awkward decision.
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On February 17, House told Bullitt that he had been chosen to lead a small secret mission to talk to the Bolshevik leaders about what sort of conditions they might accept to make peace with the Allies. Bullitt was delighted. His job in Paris had been routine; now, as he saw it, he was moving onto center stage. A product of the privileged, insular world of the Philadelphia upper classes, he had enormous confidence in himself and his own judgment. Something of a prodigy, or so his doting mother thought, he had sailed through Yale University. His contemporaries thought him brilliant, although some also noticed that there was something cold and calculating in the way he used and discarded people. He admired Wilson and his principles tremendously, but wondered if the president was up to defending them.
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Together House and Kerr outlined a list of subjects the mission was to discuss. “Bullitt was going for information only,” House assured other American delegates. He failed to make this sufficiently clear to Bullitt himself, who maintained, even when his expedition came to grief, that he had a mandate from both House, speaking on Wilson's behalf, and Lloyd George to negotiate conditions of peace with the Bolsheviks. Steffens, who went on the mission, concurred: “Bullitt's instructions were to negotiate a preliminary agreement with the Russians so that the United States and Great Britain could persuade France to join them in an invitation to a parley, reasonably sure of some results.” Steffens, not for the first time, was wrong. Neither House nor Lloyd George had given up hope of some sort of settlement, but they were not about to alienate either the French or their own domestic opinion if the Bolsheviks proved recalcitrant. A small mission headed by an insignificant twenty-eight-year-old might bring back good news. It was expendable if it did not.
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