1

The Open Door, Wilsonianism,
and the New Frontier in Siberia

The March Revolution of 1917 abruptly transformed the American view of the Russian Empire. In less than a fortnight, centuries of autocratic rule bolstered by a privileged bureaucracy collapsed and opened a space for progressive social forces to assert themselves. American statesmen believed the liberal character of this revolution would foster close political and economic ties between Russia and the United States in the future.

The interest American statesmen and businessmen took toward Russia after the outbreak of World War I was rooted in the fundamental secular trend in the development of American capitalism. Since the depression of the 1890s, American statesmen and business leaders recognized that America’s industrial development had reached a crossroad. Foreign investment outlets were needed to absorb profitably the capital surpluses generated by industrial capitalism since the 1870s. This overinvestment of capital in the domestic economy caused the severe industrial cycles and the labor unrest that marked this thirty-year period. This crisis underlay the United States’s staunch advocacy of the “Open Door” policy as its primary foreign policy objective by the late 1890s. Equal opportunity for trade and investment in developing regions would facilitate stable expansion of the capitalist system and reduce the sources of tension between the rival industrial powers.

Beginning in the 1890s, American statesmen believed the Chinese Empire offered the best prospects for American investment because of its huge population and rich natural resources. China was the only major developing region that had not yet been incorporated into the colonial empire of another power. Conditions in China, however, were not conducive to foreign investment. China’s social and economic backwardness increased risk and discouraged investors. Much of the economy was based on subsistence or compartmentalized into regions that inhibited the penetration of market forces. The Chinese monarchy’s rapid deterioration increasingly paralyzed its extensive governmental apparatus at the end of the nineteenth century, a process that encouraged the powers to erode China’s territorial sovereignty through the establishment of spheres of influence after 1895. By the outbreak of World War I, China had still not become the viable investment outlet that American capitalists had hoped for.¹

Prior to the March Revolution in Russia, a syndicate of investment banks led by the National City Bank had begun to exhibit confidence in Russia’s future when they floated a series of loans to the czarist government worth $86 million. From Petrograd, Commerce Department attaché Henry D. Baker thought that these loans could become the opening wedge for the large-scale involvement of American capital in Russia’s postwar development. At the time he reported that “it is anticipated that in connection with the great loan of $260,000,000 to the Russian Government now being negotiated by an American syndicate, headed by the National City Bank of New York, and also in connection with the Great International Corporation lately projected by National City Bank interests, there will be a great impetus created for American investment projects in Russia.”

The American International Corporation was formed in late 1915 by a group of large American corporations, led by the National City Bank, to take advantage of the withdrawal of European capital from developing regions. Its purpose was to obtain concessions for developmental projects and to finance them in the United States. The emergence of American financial preeminence was not overlooked in Russia where Baker noted: “There seems an unusual tendency … to be favorable to the idea of American firms participating in the development of this country, as it is realized that owing to the great calls on other foreign countries engaged in the present war for capital and financing the war, that the only country now left in a position to give material assistance to Russia with the development of its internal resources is the United States.”²

But it was the March Revolution in Russia that breathed new life into American conceptions of the Open Door. American businessmen and statesmen believed that Russia’s adoption of liberal democracy after March 1917 had set Russia on a path of development that was complementary to that of the United States.

The American-Russian Chamber of Commerce, which had been recognized as an official organ by the czarist government, expressed the high expectations American capitalists attached to the development of outlets in postwar Russia. The chamber’s vision of how relations between America and Russia would develop deserves close examination, since its members included numerous representatives of large corporations that hoped to participate in the development of Russia.

In September 1917 the chamber’s president, Charles H. Boynton, compared Russia’s position to that of the United States at the end of the Civil War. Like America during its era of Reconstruction, Russia would need large amounts of foreign capital to pay its foreign debt and to develop its manufacturing potential. Initially, the expansion of Russia’s domestic manufacturing industry, through the help of protective tariffs and foreign capital, would stimulate exports and relieve the burden of Russia’s large foreign debt.³

Boynton emphasized that the United States’s historical experience placed it in a better position than any other nation to assist Russia’s development. America had the necessary capital, the proper technology, and the organizing ability Russia needed to develop its industries. Yet beyond these complementary economic factors, Boynton stressed that many prominent Russians favored American capital because they considered it “untainted by political designs” unlike the “German exploitation of their economic life prior to the war.” Before the war European powers like France and Germany had intensively exploited specific sectors of the Russian economy to advance their own political and economic objectives to the detriment of Russia’s national development. In contrast Boynton believed the Russians would welcome American capital and expertise because “what she needs is the great extensive development such as we have had in this country because Russia is a great huge nation which requires a similar treatment to that of our own.” Indeed, notwithstanding the various differences in cultures and climatic conditions between the two countries, Boynton did “not consider it too optimistic to assume that Russia’s development during the next fifty years will be parallel to that of the United States during the last fifty years.”⁴

Consistent with this assumption that Russia’s development would resemble that of the United States, Boynton did not envision a neocolonial relationship between the two countries, even though Russia would furnish a large export market for American goods in the short run. Rather, American exports would hasten the process of reconstruction in Russia during the immediate postwar period. Because Russia’s own manufacturing was in its infancy, Boynton suggested that American firms that were interested in that market should “have in mind that for a short time after the War, say two or three years, there will be a splendid opportunity for the sale of all kinds of American merchandise.” He qualified this observation with the reminder that “the far-seeing business man will be laying his plans today for co-operating with Russian capital in the organization of factories in Russia for the production of standard American products which will meet the needs of the Russian market.”⁵ The recognition by the chamber in 1917 that Russia would require American exports to help reestablish domestic production helps explain why in the summer of 1918 the Wilson administration adopted a commercial assistance program to begin the process of reconstruction in Russia. At that time the chamber would help the administration to collect data from the private sector regarding the availability of goods for Siberia.

In the long run, American business had a greater stake in helping Russia develop its own manufacturing potential. Beyond the export of goods Boynton thought that in many cases, “it will be more advisable for American firms to interest themselves in the actual manufacture of their products in Russia through cooperation with Russian capital, the sale of their manufacturing rights, or the establishment of their own plants in the Russian field.” Moreover, Russia’s development was also expected to play an important role in maintaining American prosperity since “both from the standpoint of a market for American merchandise and for American equipment machinery, and as a field for the investment of American capital in manufacturing enterprises, Russia will undoubtedly present perhaps our most favorable foreign opportunity at the termination of the War.”⁶ This contention was supported by no less an authority on the American economy than Herbert Hoover, who attached great importance to the Russian market as an outlet for American capital and as a guarantor of continued American prosperity. As late as December 1921 Hoover still asserted to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes that “the hope of our commerce lies in the establishment of American firms abroad, distributing American goods under American direction and, above all, in the installation of American technology in Russian industries.”⁷

Like most American observers in 1917, Boynton assumed that radicalism in Russia was an inevitable but transitory phase of the revolutionary process. It was important that American businessmen not be discouraged by these revolutionary vicissitudes because “the pendulum of political forces will continue to swing, sometimes violently, but it is certain to come to rest at a point of equilibrium where all Russia will join in a government of stability, of integrity and provide individual opportunity and freedom for its citizens.”⁸ For this reason Americans must not become involved in the “temporary political upheaval” because their attention should be fixed on the “Russia of the future.” Thus, the public’s attitude toward Russia would be best informed by America’s diplomatic corps, consular service, and business representatives “whose judgments are best adapted to a clear conception and proper deductions from its passing events.” This sound “American opinion of Russia” would always lead one to the overriding conclusion that even several years of social and political instability would not diminish Russia’s tremendous economic potential.⁹

Woodrow Wilson was also dedicated to the objective of establishing the Open Door as a precondition for maintaining America’s economic prosperity. Yet, in Wilson’s system of values, an Open Door political economy served a higher moral purpose as well. Wilson believed capitalist social and economic relations and republican institutions were inseparably linked historically, together constituting the basis for political democracy, individual liberty, and economic development.¹⁰ For this reason, Wilson understood that economic policy would always play a critical role in shaping a nation’s civic qualities. This concern for a society’s moral characteristics was the unifying theme in all of Wilson’s political writings and speeches throughout his public career in academia and later in politics.¹¹ Wilson’s commitment to encourage liberalism and democratic institutions abroad not only reflected American national interest, but also the moral principles embodied in his political economy. Through the instruments of the Open Door and the League of Nations he was endeavoring to construct a modern international commonwealth in which individual liberty, civic responsibility, and economic development were harmonized by constitutional-democratic institutions at both the national and international levels.

These ambitions inspired Wilson’s enthusiasm for the March Revolution in Russia. Wilson regarded the March Revolution as an important step toward the construction of a new international political order based on liberal-democratic principles. In his request to Congress for a declaration of war against Germany on April 2, 1917, Wilson stressed that America would be joined by the new Russia as “a fit partner for a League of Honour,” that now consisted solely of democratic nations. Wilson’s optimism about the prospects for the March Revolution was based on the belief that the Russian people had always been essentially democratic in character. The population’s democratic impulses had been shackled by the czarist autocracy, which Wilson thought had never truly been Russian “in origin, character or purpose.” He asserted that “Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instincts, their habitual attitude towards life.”¹²

Wilson’s overestimation of Russia’s natural democratic qualities should be traced to the intellectual influence of his longtime friend and intellectual confidant Frederick Jackson Turner. In his influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that American democracy had been revitalized throughout the nineteenth century by the influence of the western frontier. Frontier conditions fostered such liberal virtues as personal independence and industriousness among the settlers as they struggled to subdue nature in an environment unfettered by any preexisting social divisions. These virtues, in turn, were imparted into the democratic political institutions that emerged from this egalitarian social base. Once liberal-democratic political institutions were established, the liberal character of the society would persist through subsequent stages of economic development. Turner concluded his essay by speculating that America’s inherent liberalism could serve as a guide for other peoples.¹³

Wilson’s enthusiasm for the March Revolution appears less naive when the Siberian frontier is taken into account. Contemporary observers predicted that Siberia would play a role in promoting Russia’s cultural development that was analogous to the American frontier in the nineteenth century. This new frontier would foster liberal-democratic qualities among the settlers and constitute the foundation for a long-term community of interests between Russia and the United States. The pervasive influence of Turner’s thesis on the American policymaking establishment is exhibited by a confidential memorandum produced for the members of the United States’s delegation to the Washington Naval Conference in late 1921. In this review of Siberia’s settlement, the anonymous author credited “the natural movement of the Russian people eastward … led by the pioneer” as the motive force behind Siberia’s integration with Russia. The author then portrayed Russian colonization of Siberia in terms that virtually restated Turner when he asserted: “After the explorer came the settler. Consolidation of Government followed. As a result the barren wild country, unoccupied save for a few scattered half savage Asiatic tribes, was transformed into a vigorous Russian commonwealth, adapted to the institutions and culture of the white man.”¹⁴

The influence of John Locke’s Natural Law is particularly apparent in the author’s comment: “The advance was a natural movement of exploration and colonization by the Russian people themselves and was not a policy of annexation initiated or executed by the Government.”¹⁵ Slavic peasants were legitimately exercising their natural right to appropriate and exploit underdeveloped resources. Finally, the author presumed an historical parallel between America and Russia in declaring:

politically Russian, northern Asia must be considered as a country sharing in the institutions and social organization of Europe and America. Notwithstanding the fact that, preceding the revolution, Russia was under a form of government denominated as autocratic, the genius of the people revealed in its culture and exemplified in local life was, like that of other western peoples, essentially democratic. In the case of Siberia this was even more marked by reason of a population largely drawn from the more independent and enterprising elements of the Russian people and further hardened in the struggle with primitive nature and the trials of frontier life.

Generally speaking the exploration and settlement of Siberia bears a striking resemblance to the opening of the American West and is in fact almost a duplicate of this romantic achievement.¹⁶

This fundamentally Turnerian outlook, together with prospects for close economic ties between the two continental empires in the postwar period, was the basis for Wilson’s confidence in the future of liberal democracy in Russia.

In view of the absence of democratic institutions in Russia’s history, Wilson’s conception of self-government requires examination, lest his optimism for Russia’s incipient democracy be dismissed as completely implausible. Wilson was essentially concerned about encouraging civic liberty in Russian society, rather than with promoting democracy as a specific form of government. As he explained in his essay of 1900, “Democracy and Efficiency,” Americans cherished democracy “for the emphasis it puts on character; for its tendency to exalt the purposes of the average man to some high level of endeavor; for its just principle of common assent in matters in which all are concerned; for its ideals of duty and its sense of brotherhood.” In other words, Wilson favored the democratic form of government because it was the most conducive environment for cultivating civic virtue in the whole population.¹⁷

But Wilson was quick to point out that “democracy is merely the most radical form of ‘constitutional government,’” what he also called “representative government” or “self-government.” He assumed that “constitutional government” could actually exist in a variety of forms. Constitutional government was distinguished by the existence of a covenant or fundamental law between government and the people, which was maintained by regular public consent; the covenant itself must guarantee individual liberty and delimit the authority and functions of government.¹⁸ These fundamental principles could be preserved in different forms of constitutional government. In “Democracy and Efficiency,” Wilson contended that it was an unfortunate irony that America’s vigorous democratic character and principles had actually hindered the development of its governmental institutions. At the threshold of a new age, Wilson regretted that America lacked the administrative ability necessary to assume the international responsibilities of a great power.

This evaluation of the American political culture suggests Wilson never supposed that American institutions could serve as a model of government for an infant democracy such as Russia.¹⁹ Rather, the enthusiasm Wilson expressed for Russian democracy in his war address reflected his assumption that, with the collapse of the absolutist government, Russia would finally be free to evolve its own unique brand of constitutional government. In the context of his worldview, Wilson’s assertion that Russia was “democratic at heart” should be interpreted to mean that he believed Russian society was endowed with considerable, if rudimentary, civic qualities. Wilson was confident these attributes would constitute the basis for a genuinely representative government whose actual form would be suited to Russia’s specific historical and cultural conditions.

This analysis also provides the key to understanding Wilson’s approach to the Russian question after the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. Both Wilson’s policy of nonintervention in Russia’s domestic politics and the United States’s efforts to furnish commercial assistance to Siberia were consistent with his dictum from “Democracy and Efficiency” that what America had to offer the world was “the aid of our character … and not the premature aid of our institutions.”²⁰

Recent developments in Russia lent credence to the historical comparisons American statesmen drew between Russia and the United States. Indeed, Donald Treadgold has devoted a whole study to the Siberian migration in which he argues that before World War I, the society that was developing in Siberia exhibited greater similarities with the nineteenth-century American frontier society than with its European Russian origins.²¹ By 1913, over 5 million people had migrated to Siberia from European Russia—most of these after 1890. Yet, between the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the early 1890s, the czarist regime never formulated an effective migration policy to either forbid or to assist migration. Prior to the 1840s, the government tried to colonize Siberia with exiles and compulsory colonists. Illegal voluntary migration, however, outnumbered these officially sponsored initiatives as peasant colonists sought land and freedom from creditors, servitude, and government regulations.

During the 1820s, the governor-general of Siberia reported that it was senseless to prevent free migration to Siberia because it helped settle this underpopulated region and because it alleviated overpopulation in European Russia. In 1843, the government initiated a program whereby state peasants could leave overpopulated villages and be settled in Siberia with financial assistance from the state. Nevertheless, Treadgold emphasizes throughout his study that official sponsorship of migration failed to reduce the flow of illegal migration to Siberia, since peasants preferred to flee rather than subject themselves to the paternalism of the state.

After 1892, when the Trans-Siberian Railroad was begun, the government finally bowed to the inevitable and committed itself to a generously subsidized program of regulated resettlement. A large percentage of the migrants continued to avoid this official program. Between 1909 and 1913, from 31 to 47 percent of all migrants were still irregular. When Petr Stolypin became prime minister in 1906, he advocated a liberal approach to the question of migration. He reasoned that instead of attempting to regulate the migrants’ destination, the government should let people choose their destination and then assist their endeavor.

Stolypin regarded the question of Siberian migration as especially important because he believed that the region’s settlement would play a central role in the regeneration of the whole empire. The principal objective of his government was to dissolve the commune system and to replace it with individual peasant property. This process would stimulate Russia’s economic development and enhance social stability, which was necessary if the monarchy was to survive in a constitutional form as Stolypin desired.

To facilitate the individualization of land tenure in European Russia, the surplus population had to be resettled in Siberia. Siberia was particularly suited to individualized land tenure. Virtually all of Siberia’s land was legally owned by the state, rather than the commune, a factor that would expedite its transference into private holdings. Yet, independent of juridical issues, the sparsely settled Siberian frontier naturally tended to develop private landholding. Because of the region’s abundance of land, the Siberian commune rarely evolved the authority to redistribute land. Instead, land tenure in Siberia was quickly evolving from some form of squatters’ right at the consent of the commune to hereditary-household tenure without any redistribution occurring.²²

Treadgold cites a good deal of evidence that shows that this natural migration to Siberia was producing a prosperous peasant class in that region. A survey commissioned by Stolypin and the Minister of Agriculture Aleksandr Krivoshein, published in 1911, revealed that, on average, a Siberian settler had more land, cattle, grain, and machinery than the average European Russian peasant. Furthermore, Stolypin also figured that yields and productivity were significantly higher than in European Russia and the income of a typical Siberian family was rising steadily.²³ Even the Soviet historian M. M. Stishov admitted that it was not unusual to find households with ten to twelve horses or cows in Siberian villages. Interestingly enough, he did not categorize these peasants as “Kulaks,” but as a type of prosperous “middle peasant.”²⁴

Russian observers were taking note of Siberia’s prosperity and of the unique social structure that was developing there. As Treadgold explained, by the turn of the century Russians frequently referred to Siberia as being “democratic” in character because of its high degree of social and economic equality, although political connotations were not implied prior to the March Revolution. Stolypin, who was the strongest proponent of individualized peasant proprietorship, was himself ambivalent about the democratic tendencies that were taking root in Siberia. He even confided to a familiar journalist a fear that “the Democracy of Siberia will crush us.”²⁵ Treadgold did not interpret this concern as an indication that Stolypin expected the peasantry to demand universal suffrage in the near future, but rather, that Siberia’s democratic culture would undermine the value system of Imperial Russia over time.

Following this theme, Treadgold demonstrates that Russian writers characterized the Siberian population in terms that were strikingly reminiscent of Turner. For instance, Treadgold quotes a statement by government demographer N. V. Turchaninov in which the latter described the Siberian migrant as:

Representing, in the person of the settlers, the daring escapees from Russia proper, having moved here under harsh conditions sometimes even prior to the conquest of the region, and in the person of the recent settlers, the most energetic and enterprising representatives of their milieu—for only such migrants become firmly acclimatized and strike root in the new regions—the Siberian peasants indeed differ from the remaining mass of the Russian peasantry … in their greater steadfastness … in the struggle with [nature] … their greater mobility and readiness to accept every kind of innovation.²⁶

Treadgold cites substantial evidence that the Siberian frontier also stimulated self-sufficiency and initiative among the settlers, as well as a high degree of equality. Aziatskaia Rossiia, a two-volume series of books on Siberia, observed that the Siberian peasantry was receptive to the use of modern agricultural machinery and to the technical advice of agronomists.

In Asiatskaia Rossiia the settlers’ innovativeness was attributed to the network of cooperative societies that were developing rapidly in Siberia. This study emphasized that the Siberian settlers exhibited “an exceptional capacity for self-help by means of cooperatives, credit unions, and other types of unions and societies.”²⁷ American policymakers viewed the rapid expansion of the cooperative movement in Siberia after 1914 as a phenomenon of great import, a development that would foster democratic civic values in Russian society and economic ties with the United States.

The cooperative movement in Russia received its original impetus from the penetration of market forces in the 1890s as peasant producers began to suffer from sharp increases in the cost of rye bread and meat. Cooperation made swift progress after a limited constitutional government was inaugurated in 1905, even though the cooperative movement did not enjoy the status of a legal personality under the czarist government.

The severe disruptions caused by war stimulated an unprecedented expansion of cooperative societies of all varieties, as they were the only institutions capable of organizing supply and distribution in this poorly integrated empire of small producers. The membership of all consumers’ societies increased from less than 2 million in 1915 to 17 million in 1919. In Siberia alone the number of consumer societies grew from 519 in 1914 to 8, 140 in 1918. By 1918 between one-fourth and one-third of the aggregate value of Siberia’s entire retail trade was sold by local consumers’ cooperatives.²⁸

Russian cooperatives can be grouped into three general categories: consumer, credit, and agricultural, although functions increasingly overlapped as the societies multiplied rapidly during the war. The primary units of cooperation were the local societies that were formed voluntarily by their members. These local societies were combined into unions of cooperative societies at the district, provincial, and national levels to accumulate the financial resources and to derive the bargaining power to engage in efficient buying and selling. A few large cooperative unions, such as the Union of Siberian Creamery Associations, represented whole regions. Cooperative organizations were also established by labor organizations such as the prominent All Russian Railway Supply Union.

District and provincial cooperatives were centralized in two national organizations, the All-Russian Union of Consumers’ Societies, and the Narodny (Peoples) Bank. The Central Union of Consumers’ Societies was the leading organization of Russian cooperation after its reorganization from the Moscow Union of Consumers’ Societies in 1917. This central union linked the network of consumers’ societies into a national federation by coordinating wholesale supply and marketing activities. More than three thousand individual societies owned shares in the Central Union by 1917. After 1917, the Central Union evolved beyond its original cooperative trading endeavors into “a national institution with far flung interests, a state within a state.”²⁹

As private trade collapsed during the war, the major cooperative organizations, particularly the Central Union and the Union of Siberian Creamery Associations, increasingly assumed the status of quasi-state institutions because the government had become dependent on them for supplying the army and cities with provisions. The Central Union’s prominence in the nation’s economy was reflected in the numerous commodity departments or divisions that were established to manage day-to-day commercial activities. Separate departments existed for grains, fats and oils, fish and groceries, dairy, ironware, textiles, haberdashery, footwear, raw materials, finances, legal affairs, and transportation. An Economic and Organization Department handled supervision, policy formulation, and planned methods of organization. Finally, the Central Union’s manufacturing operations were expanded to meet the severe shortages of many basic consumer goods.³⁰

The Narodny (Peoples) Bank was founded in 1912 for the purpose of supplying funds to credit institutions and cooperative enterprises. Affiliated credit cooperatives, including the Central Union of Consumers’ Societies, owned the bank’s stock. The Narodny Bank maintained a paid up capital of 10 million rubles by 1918. During 1917 the bank had a turnover of 3 billion rubles. Like the Consumers’ Societies, the Narodny Bank achieved the status of a quasi-governmental institution when the Provisional Government made the State Bank’s credit available to it.

American observers believed cooperative institutions played an equally important cultural role in nurturing democracy and self-improvement among the rural population.³¹ A wide range of educational activities were sponsored by cooperative institutions including schools, newspapers, lectures, conferences, children’s playgrounds, social entertainments, amateur theatricals, concerts, choruses, and reading rooms. These nontrading activities were designed to encourage new social values such as self-reliance, thrift, cooperation, and the technical skills indispensable for economic progress. In fact, American observers viewed Russian cooperatives so favorably because their voluntary associational principles were seen as a necessary appendage to private enterprise at this stage of national development. Eugene Kayden, a War Trade Board specialist, emphasized that individuals joined cooperatives for their “material benefit” and “social welfare” and “to participate directly in an order of economic exchange which has been described as irredeemably private and capitalistic. Cooperation was therefore a socializing force within the framework of the present society, taking for its function the training and directing of the creative economic instincts toward a more harmonious and rational order.”³² William C. Huntington, an experienced Commerce Department attaché, recommended Russian cooperatives as worthy partners in America’s effort to reconstruct Russia in a statement to a National City Bank official:

Personally I look upon the cooperative movement with favor, and, while fully aware that it does not operate with the efficiency and initiative of a private business concern, believe it has accomplished much for the Russian people, and that it is a pretty good training school in constructive democracy. Last summer [1918] I sat in a directors’ meeting of the Moscow Narodny Bank in Moscow, and, gazing at the men there, I got the impression that they were the nucleus of the future middle class of Russia.³³

Both Huntington and Kayden were recognizing that the cooperatives represented organic social institutions that would play a critical role in fostering better integration between civil society and the state. War had given impetus to this process as cooperative officials were incorporated into the central state bureaucracy and war committees because of their ability to organize the supply of necessities for the army and urban areas.³⁴

American statesmen were confident that a progressive democratic government in Russia would naturally seek American technical expertise and capital resources after the war because they assumed an historical community of interests between the two continental empires. These historical impressions shaped the American response to Russian events between 1917 and 1922. American assistance to Russia after 1917 through agents such as the Stevens Railway Commission and the Russian Bureau of the War Trade Board represented the enlightened self-interest of the United States. Wilsonian impulses were intertwined with long-term American investment interests and the need to combat German economic domination of the Russian Empire. Thus, it would underestimate American policy to overlook the organic relationship between these constituent motives. Because American statesmen believed the United States and Russia shared complementary interests, they could sincerely disclaim selfish motives while fully expecting to derive the benefits from close economic ties with a kindred liberal empire.