Introduction

The American intervention in Siberia during the Russian Revolution and civil war left no lasting effects on the region, other than a legacy of bitterness and mistrust for future Soviet-American relations. But seventy years of Soviet-American rivalry has obscured the fact that, during the Russian Revolution and civil war, Siberia had been a focal point in the United States’s struggle against the rival powers to recast the international economic and political order. This forgotten dimension of the American intervention in Russia represented a sophisticated foreign assistance program. It now deserves careful reevaluation in view of the important lessons it can provide for contemporary American policymakers who are struggling to devise effective policies for post-Soviet Russia.

In 1918, the decisive year of the calamitous world war, American statesmen were deeply concerned that the Russian Empire would be divided into German and Japanese spheres of influence. The origins of World War I itself lay in the rivalry over spheres of influence in semidependent developing regions, such as China, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. The collapse of the Provisional Government in Russia at the end of 1917 intensified this rivalry among the remaining powers by transforming the Russian Empire itself into an arena in this global struggle between imperial systems. During the extraordinary years 1918 and 1919, when a political vacuum existed in the empire, Germany, Japan, Britain, and France all pursued policies in Russia that were aimed at establishing spheres of influence of one form or another. If these powers had been allowed to dismember the Russian Empire, this would have given added impetus to their ongoing struggle to divide the remaining developing regions. This possibility alone required the United States to become actively involved in Siberia as part of its larger effort to promote the Open Door.

In contrast to this framework of great-power rivalry, American statesmen viewed bolshevism as epiphenomenal, a symptom of the czarist regime’s pervasive social and economic malaise that the war had unleashed. Indeed, during 1918 much of the Wilson administration’s antagonism toward the Bolsheviks arose from the practical consideration that this revolutionary regime served as a pawn in the larger systemic conflict among the Great Powers.

At the threshold of a new historical epoch, American statesmen also perceived tremendous opportunities for Russian-American relations. The Wilson administration had greeted the March Revolution of 1917 in Russia as an event that could have a great impact on the postwar international order. With the establishment of the Provisional Government, the administration was encouraged that Russia would now begin to evolve a constitutional form of government. As a corollary to this social and political process, major American corporate groups believed a post-czarist Russia would welcome American investment as an alternative to the politically based pattern of European investment during the czarist years. In this event, Russia would be disposed to participate in the international economy on terms consistent with Open Door principles: a world system that operated under rules that guaranteed equality of opportunity for trade and investment—in direct contrast to the existing system of preferential spheres of influence.

Against this background, American statesmen attached great significance to Siberia. They believed that this vast developing region, with its relatively egalitarian social structure, would rapidly begin the transition toward a postczarist civil society. As this social and economic transformation gathered momentum in Siberia, it would, in turn, provide a tremendous outlet for American investment and thereby help solidify an Open Door system. In order for the United States to unlock the full potential this unique region offered for economic expansion, the Wilson administration first had to overcome the challenges posed by the combined ambitions of the rival powers, as well as the new phenomenon of revolutionary socialism. Yet Siberia’s unparalleled significance as an economic frontier and the distinct interest the United States exhibited toward it only made the interpower struggle for hegemony in the region more intense. In this crucible of war and revolution, American efforts to provide Siberia with economic assistance should accordingly be viewed as a distinctly Wilsonian experiment in foreign assistance policy. Unlike post-World War II foreign assistance programs, American policy in Siberia not only had to contend with anticapitalist revolutionary movements but also with the ambitions of formidable rival powers. Therefore, during the formative stages of Soviet-American relations, the counterrevolutionary tendencies inherent in Wilson’s approach to Siberia were still subordinated to the progressive historical role American Open Door diplomacy played in its struggle against the more exploitative forms of imperialism practiced by the other powers.

This study examines the United States’s effort to promote social and economic reconstruction in Siberia between 1917 and 1922. It will demonstrate that this endeavor constituted a major policy initiative at a pivotal juncture in the nation’s evolution toward global preeminence in the twentieth century. This policy simultaneously represented the primary response of American statesmen to events in revolutionary Russia and an important new dimension in their larger struggle to achieve a structural transformation of the international political economy. The term “reconstruction” is used here to define the nature of American policy because it was consistently used by American statesmen themselves when expressing their purposes in Russia. More important, this term embodies the developmental impulses that motivated American policy. It conveys the American policymakers’ recognition that Siberia’s long-term development would ultimately hinge on fostering a stable civil society; efforts to gain immediate economic advantages in Russia would only hinder this goal. They clearly regarded their assistance policy in Siberia as a prelude to an ambitious developmental program that would reintegrate the former czarist empire and border regions like Manchuria into a global economy managed by the United States according to the rules of the Open Door.

Since American policymakers thought their initiatives in Siberia would have far-reaching implications for American prosperity and for the stability of the emerging international system, the failure of these efforts in no way diminishes their significance. The inability of the United States to incorporate the region on an Open Door basis and the eventual withdrawal of the Soviet Union from the world market undoubtedly contributed to the formation of closed economic blocs during the interwar period. The development of regional economic blocs in turn disrupted international trade and investment, which contributed to the depression and to the tensions between the powers that resulted in World War II.¹

The Wilson administration’s assistance policy focused on two complementary initiatives: the restoration of operations on the Trans-Siberian railway and the provision of commercial assistance to the Siberian population via the region’s prominent peasant cooperative societies. These forms of assistance were geared toward reestablishing predictable and stable market relations along the continent-sized area traversed by the Trans-Siberian railway system. American policymakers were merely acting on the recognition that a more secure environment would provide an impetus for social and economic reconstruction in this region where czarist authority had been relatively weak and could be replaced by institutions more representative of the region’s society.

In its initial stages, the American assistance policy attempted to commence the reconstruction process in Siberia by nurturing the recovery of Russian civil society, or by encouraging what Wilson called “self-government.” Wilson’s conception of self-government sheds valuable light on his approach to the whole Russian question because it denotes a level of socioeconomic development rather than a specific form of government.

In Wilson’s view, self-government existed where there were political, institutional, or legal structures founded on the consent of the governed and that provided essential guarantees for personal and property rights. In other words, Wilson used the term “self-government” to characterize what amounted to a constitutional order: a civil society founded on voluntary associational activities and mediated by an institutional structure and a rule of law that accommodated individual liberty to public power.

Wilson attributed great significance to these self-governing social and political capacities because they were essential building blocks of the new international order he hoped to construct from the remains of the shattered system of European empires. As an alternative to the prewar system of international relations founded on a tenuous balance of power among rival empires, Wilson envisioned a rational system based on cooperation between powers, particularly with regard to their relations in developing regions. This type of system, which N. Gordon Levin has appropriately defined as liberal-internationalist, would operate within a framework of international law guaranteed by American economic and naval power.

While this study deliberately subordinates the anti-Bolshevik facets of the United States’s Russian policy, it fully acknowledges that American policymakers were staunchly anti-Bolshevik. Since American policymakers considered bolshevism the product of pervasive instability, they believed that economic assistance would constitute the only effective antidote to the problem. In other words, the reconstruction program embodied the truly coherent, or class-conscious, response of American policymakers to revolutionary events in Russia. Furthermore, a successful American-sponsored assistance program in Siberia would also serve as the most effective means for influencing events in European Russia.

While the Bolshevik regime survived, contrary to the expectations of most American policymakers, this in no way lessens the efficacy of American expectations or of policies rooted in these assumptions. After all, the Bolsheviks themselves were doubtful of their future when it became clear that revolutions would not erupt in the advanced Western industrial countries.

Because the American policymaking establishment considered the Bolshevik Revolution a temporary phase in the revolutionary cycle, more attention must be paid to their concern that the Bolshevik regime would become a pawn in the broader systemic conflict among the powers. Indeed, Germany, Japan, and Britain all attempted to use revolutionary instability to further their designs in the Russian Empire. Therefore, although American reconstruction efforts in Siberia were implicitly aimed at combating bolshevism, a comprehensive assessment of these initiatives must take into account their role in the intense interimperialist struggle for control of the region. By viewing the American assistance policy as part of this broader imperial rivalry, this study provides a wider perspective on the debate over the American response to revolutionary events in the Russian Empire.

In the critical years of 1918 and 1919, the thorny issue of military intervention in Siberia limited Wilson’s ability to undertake any substantial program of economic assistance in the region. Nevertheless, this study will demonstrate that Wilson’s controversial decision to undertake a military intervention on behalf of the stranded Czecho-Slovak Corps in the summer of 1918 was essentially an attempt to reconcile Allied pressure for a military intervention with his primary goal of providing economic assistance to Siberia.

During the trying months between January and September 1918, Wilson repeatedly rejected Allied appeals for an effort to restore the eastern front. Wilson only accepted the efficacy of an intervention in Siberia when he learned that a consensus of anti-Bolshevik political representatives, especially the representatives of the peasant and worker cooperatives, would welcome an American-led intervention to bolster popular resistance against Germany. These sentiments convinced Wilson that the politically conscious segments of Russian society favored an Allied intervention in defense of Russian national sovereignty, if it did not threaten Russian territorial integrity. The attitude of the cooperative societies particularly influenced Wilson’s decision to intervene, because these organizations were truly organic regional institutions that represented the material and social aspirations of a considerable segment of the Siberian population. After Wilson reached this decision, he steadfastly insisted that any Allied military operations in Siberia should be limited to providing logistical support for the Czecho-Slovaks, who, in turn, would provide security for the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

But the rival aspirations of Britain, France, and Japan in Siberia undermined American efforts to assist the reconstruction of civil society in the region during 1918 and 1919. By the end of 1919, Bolshevik forces triumphed over the conservative regime of Alexandr Kolchak. Kolchak had acceded to power in November 1918 with the support of British military officials. His regime was doomed by its exclusive reliance on military means to defeat bolshevism and by its unwillingness to develop support among the population. If the Kolchak regime’s repressive practices were not sufficient hindrance to constructive policy in Siberia, Japan used its large military expedition to frustrate the work of the American railroad advisers and to impede the shipment of American goods west along the railroad. This study will demonstrate that the debate within the Wilson administration over recognition of the Kolchak regime was primarily motivated by its broader desire to finance economic assistance for Siberia.

The United States abandoned its assistance efforts in Siberia after the Bolshevik victory at the end of 1919. Even then, the Republican Harding administration persuaded the American railroad advisers to remain on the Chinese Eastern Railway, the Manchurian section of the Trans-Siberian system, for another three years until the end of 1922. The continued presence of American railway advisers on the fringe of the Trans-Siberian system demonstrates the importance American policymakers attributed to this transportation artery. While enormous obstacles stood in the path of these advisers’ work from the time of their arrival on the Trans-Siberian railway in June 1917 until they left in October 1922, both the Wilson and Harding administrations never wavered in their belief that the stakes involved warranted a continued American presence on the system.

To fully appreciate the implications of the American commitment on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, it is necessary to view the venture in the broader context of American Open Door diplomacy in the Far East. Striking parallels existed between the direction of American policy on the Trans-Siberian system from 1917 to 1922 and major American initiatives in Manchuria a decade earlier. From 1905 until his death in 1909, E. H. Harriman, the American railroad magnate and financier, alternatively attempted to purchase partial control of the South Manchurian Railway from Japan or the Chinese Eastern Railway from Russia as part of his ambition to own a worldwide railroad network. To strengthen his bargaining position, Harriman even undertook negotiations with Chinese officials to build a line parallel to the South Manchurian Railway.

Harriman’s proposals received strong diplomatic backing from the State Department during the Taft administration. In 1909, Secretary of State Philander Knox attempted to revive Harriman’s plans when he proposed his “neutralization” scheme, whereby the powers would jointly finance China’s redemption of all the Manchurian railroads. All of these initiatives failed because of Japanese opposition and because Britain and France ultimately refused to support these proposals over the objections of their respective Far Eastern allies, Japan and Russia. The continuity between the Harriman-Knox proposals and American policy toward the Trans-Siberian system between 1917 and 1922 became apparent in 1920 when the U.S. government officially supported inclusion of the Chinese Eastern Railway within the jurisdiction of the Second China Consortium Banking Group.

American assistance policy in Siberia also foreshadowed future foreign assistance programs. In early 1919, the Wilson administration negotiated an agreement with Britain, France, and Japan for supervision of the Trans-Siberian railway; this cooperative framework resembled, in basic respects, contemporary multilateral developmental agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Subsequently, Wilson wanted to obtain a large congressional appropriation, similar to the Marshall Plan, for a large-scale program to assist Siberia’s reconstruction. This plan, which was shelved during the treaty fight, demonstrates Wilson’s recognition that the U.S. government must assume a major responsibility for promoting global stabilization and long-term economic expansion.

From one angle, the limited funding given the American assistance efforts in Siberia may seem to call into question the degree of commitment to the reconstruction of Siberia. But the American political system’s lack of experience with large foreign assistance programs posed a formidable obstacle for American statesmen who recognized the potential significance of Siberia. In view of these political constraints, the Wilson administration stood no chance of justifying any large expenditures for the doubtful prospect of assisting a region suffering from widespread turmoil. Nevertheless, Wilson remained determined to obtain a large appropriation for Siberia from Congress in the summer of 1919, just as his political fortunes were waning.

Realist critics might respond that this study merely demonstrates the futility of American attempts to escape from the balance of power, which they view as the main source of international stability. But these writers overemphasize the causal role of the balance of power that has always served as a means of furthering other ends. Prior to World War II, American foreign policy challenged the balance of power because it was a serious impediment to tangible American interests. The existence of treaty arrangements, like the Anglo-Japanese alliance in the Far East, helped these powers preserve their spheres of influence from American encroachment. It was only when World War II brought about the complete collapse of the system based on spheres of influence that the United States could establish multilateral institutions to supervise international development. Therefore, in many respects the Wilson administration’s Siberian policy represented a “test run” for the accomplishments of midcentury.

The first chapter in this volume provides a brief assessment of American views on the political and economic future of Russia and particularly of Siberia. This chapter demonstrates how Siberia’s unique position within the Russian Empire made it a particularly attractive area for the prospective extension of American influence. American statesmen had a special affinity for Siberia because of its frontier characteristic, which lent itself to superficial analogies with the American frontier of the nineteenth century. The region’s rich natural resources, its relatively egalitarian social structure and the weakness of czarist institutions appeared to make it fertile ground for rapid economic development after the Revolution of March 1917.

The American reconstruction program for Russia consisted of three phases. Chapter 2 examines the first phase of this process, which spanned the period of April through November 1917, when the United States furnished the Provisional Government with assistance to its railways. America’s strategy to open the Russian “door” was based on establishing American managerial and technical influence on the Trans-Siberian and European Russian Railroads during World War I. The United States offered the Russian Provisional Government a body of prominent railroad engineers, the Advisory Commission of Railway Experts, in order to improve operations on the Trans-Siberian Railroad after April 1917. This commission was placed under the chairmanship of John F. Stevens, the most prestigious railroad engineer in the United States. Stevens would be the pivotal figure in the American reconstruction program until the end of 1922.

In the year between the Bolshevik Revolution and the Armistice in November 1918, the threat of German economic domination of Russia preoccupied American policymakers. American statesmen believed the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power was merely a temporary phase in the revolutionary cycle; consequently, they feared this regime would merely pave the way for Germany’s aims in Russia as the population sought liberation from revolutionary extremism. Chapters 3 through 6 cover the year 1918, during which the Wilson administration strove to defeat Germany’s efforts to consolidate its economic position in the Russian Empire following the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, which gave Germany extensive economic privileges. In this context, American economic assistance to Siberia during 1918 served two purposes: it played an immediate strategic role in the war effort against Germany and it attempted to provide the commercial assistance necessary to begin the reconstruction process. The inter-Allied Goods Exchange Trading Company (Tovaro-Obmien), the Russian Bureau of the War Trade Board, and the plan for a temporary ruble currency in Siberia were all conceived to further these dual objectives. The Wilson administration even hoped the Czecho-Slovak Corps could play a role in this process as an Allied police force along the Trans-Siberian railway system. This force, which was originally slated for transportation to the western front, consisted of former Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war who were reorganized in Russia on behalf of the Allied cause.

Chapters 7 and 8 examine American efforts to restore effective operations along the Trans-Siberian railway and to strengthen its links to the international market. Any chance for promoting reconstruction in Siberia, and eventually in European Russia, now rested squarely on the fate of the Siberian railway system. Chapter 7 shows 1919 to be the critical year for Wilson’s reconstruction program. After the conclusion of an inter-Allied railroad agreement in February 1919, the formulation of a comprehensive assistance program for Russia became a priority for the Wilson administration. By August, events in the Far East and political conditions at home undermined this nascent program. The defeat of anti-Bolshevik leader Admiral Kolchak, Japan’s hostility to Stevens’s efforts to stabilize the railroads, and domestic opposition to Wilson’s Russian policy blocked any hope of implementing a government-financed reconstruction program for the region.

After the Allies withdrew from Siberia, the United States retained John Stevens in Manchuria to manage the Chinese Eastern Railway, the last major segment of the Trans-Siberian railway system. Chapter 8 surveys the intersection of the Siberian program with Chinese issues from 1920 through 1922. To prevent Japan from closing the eastern approach to Siberia, the United States sought inclusion of the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway within the jurisdiction of the new China Consortium. This chapter adds a new dimension to our understanding of America’s Far Eastern policy by demonstrating the integral role Siberia once played in American calculations.

No existing study has recognized the scope or significance of the Wilson administration’s policy initiatives in Russia. For decades, the political and intellectual climate created by the American-Soviet bipolar rivalry has led too many scholars to view Wilson’s response to the Russian Revolution simply as a prelude to the Cold War. In his two-volume study Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920, George F. Kennan, statesman, historian and a realist critic of Wilsonian foreign policy, eschewed any efforts at a broad appraisal of Wilson’s Russian policy in favor of a narrative approach that emphasizes that the complexity of international relations militated against the efficacy of universalist worldviews such as bolshevism or Wilsonianism. In his American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947, William A. Williams focused on the anti-Bolshevik motives of the Wilsonians. The single best source on the ideological basis of Wilsonian foreign policy is the work of N. Gordon Levin, who argued persuasively in his study Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution that Wilson attempted to foster an environment favorable to the development of liberal constitutional institutions in the Russian Empire in opposition to both revolutionary socialism and militaristic imperialism.

The best introduction to the question of American involvement in Siberia is John A. White’s study, The Siberian Intervention. Relying almost exclusively on published sources, this excellent study suggests several important points about the political economy of American policy in Siberia. White argues that it was the pressure exerted on Russia by Germany and Japan that gave purpose to the Allied and American intervention in Russia. Betty M. Unterberger’s America’s Siberian Intervention, 1918–1920 provides a solid background on the subject of America’s intervention in Siberia. She emphasizes that the Wilson administration undertook a limited intervention on behalf of the Czecho-Slovak Corps to maintain Russian sovereignty and to preserve the Open Door in Siberia and northern Manchuria against Japanese aggression. Her essay “Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution,” published in Arthur S. Link’s Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913–1921, provides a fine overview of Wilsonian policy.

Linda Killen’s path-breaking study The Russian Bureau: A Case Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy is the first monograph to address the issue of American economic assistance to Siberia. This valuable study surveys American commercial assistance efforts in 1918 and 1919 and questions the consistency between Wilson’s high-sounding rhetoric regarding his expectations for Russia’s liberal-democratic potential and his reluctance to commit funds for a program of economic assistance.

Recent historiography on the American intervention in the Russian Revolution has polarized around exaggerated positions. David McFadden’s Alternative Paths: Soviets and Americans, 1917–1920 overstates the potential for a Soviet-American rapprochement and expanded trade with Soviet-controlled regions during this period; and Christine White’s British and American Commercial Relations with Soviet Russia, 1918–1924 also overestimates the significance of American trade expansion with the Soviet Union in the 1920s.² Alternately, David Foglesong’s America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 emphasizes what he considers to be the counterrevolutionary nature of the Wilson administration’s policy toward Russia. By ignoring the significance and complexity of the interpower rivalry in Russia and the sophistication of the Wilson administration’s assistance policy, Foglesong mistakes the distinctly progressive character of Wilson’s policy for a series of covert operations against the Bolsheviks.

My use of primary sources demonstrates that American foreign policy is conceived and managed by a policymaking “establishment” composed of government officials and strategic representatives of the private sector. This “establishment” is fundamentally oriented toward promoting the stable expansion of the corporate political economy. This does not imply that U.S. foreign policy is a servant of specific interests, nor does it condemn foreign investment as necessarily harmful to developing countries. It merely recognizes the predominance of corporate capitalism and the leadership of both government officials and private individuals who assumed this system was the prime agent of progress.

The primary sources for this study are Record Group (RG) 59: The General Records of the Department of State; the manuscripts of the central figures in the Wilson administration; and RG 43: The Records of the Advisory Commission of Railway Experts to Russia, the Russian Railway Service Corps, and the Inter-Allied Railway Committee. RG 59 continues to be an indispensable resource for examining American foreign relations; this vast body of material can still yield new insights into the policymaking process. This study has also made extensive use of the papers of Woodrow Wilson, Robert Lansing, Frank Polk, Breckinridge Long, Edward M. House, Gordon Auchincloss, Roland S. Morris, Charles Evans Hughes, Vance McCormick, and British representative Sir William Wiseman. The records of the American Railway Experts in Russia have proved extremely valuable in revealing the connections between the engineers’ technical and operational work on behalf of the Trans-Siberian railway and America’s broader economic and political goals in the region. Samuel Harper’s papers contain valuable correspondence with officials in the Russian division of the State Department. Finally, the papers of Cyrus McCormick Jr. have memoranda regarding American economic assistance efforts in 1918.

Records of Russian Bureau of the War Trade Board, RG 182; the country files of the Treasury Department, RG 39; the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, RG 151; and the Commerce Department, RG 40; were all used in order to examine the complex range of problems American policymakers confronted and the sophisticated methods Wilsonian policy devised to solve those problems.