On July 30, 1914, posters went up in Russian cities ordering reservists from the ages of nineteen to forty-three to report to their barracks. Czar Nicholas II had promised his French allies that he would attack Germany with 800,000 men if war broke out, drawing enemy divisions to an eastern front. The Czar presided over a population of 180 million that was 80 percent illiterate, in a nation four times the size of the United States, stretching five thousand miles from Europe and the Baltic Sea to Asia and the Pacific. He ran his domain like a private and gated estate.
To farms where no word came more distant than that of the nearest market town, the mail brought a summons for the peasant to appear “with his riding horse.” The defense of the fatherland had a resonance that was instinctively obeyed, and hastily formed divisions trooped to the front from the eastern isolation of Siberia, from the banks of the Volga, from the steppes of Turkestan, the men wearing steel helmets and shouldering rifles with long bayonets. Russian commanders designated their units as so many bayonets.1
By October, more than four million men were under arms, but it was the nineteenth century fighting the twentieth, Cossack horses and outdated maps against mechanized armies with telegraph and telephone, rifles against machine guns—and when the ammunition ran out, bayonets against machine guns, the officers leading the charge with drawn swords, as they had against Napoleon in 1812.2
And yet, only Russia among the Allies fought the Central Powers on their own soil, invading East Prussia in August, and suffering severe losses. With a seemingly inexhaustible supply of reserves, the Russians were willing to mount offensives on demand, tying up German and Austrian troops and taking 2,700,000 prisoners. Marshal Ferdinand Foch later said: “If France was not wiped off the map of Europe, we owe it first to Russia.”3
By March 1915, 200,000 new recruits a month were being mobilized, while fifty thousand rifles came off the production lines. The stories of unarmed Russian infantrymen waiting for the weapon of a fallen comrade were not German propaganda, but the demoralizing truth.
On September 1, 1915, after the Russians had retreated from Poland, the Czar himself took command, determined as a matter of personal pride not to lose face before the Allies. With 11 million men in the ranks, and four million more to be called up in 1916 and 1917, Russia could fight on. But Russia was bleeding, not only on the battlefield but on the home front. Those millions of men had to be fed, as did tens of thousands of horses using up tons of fodder. Priority for the army meant severe shortages of food and fuel on the home front.4
Every war has its profiteers, who nibble rodentlike around the edges of events and don’t much care what side they are on so long as they get paid. Such a man was Alexander Helphand, a Russian-born adventurer who began his career as a Socialist journalist in Germany at the turn of the century, writing under the pen name “Parvus.”
In 1900, Helphand was operating an illegal press in a suburb of Munich, one of the European centers for Russian revolutionaries in exile. A leading firebrand, the thirty-year-old lawyer Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, had recently finished a three-year term of exile in Siberia, and had taken to calling himself Ilyin or Lenin. Helphand agreed to print Lenin’s newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), which was distributed illegally in Russia.
Caught up in Lenin’s cause, Helphand took part in the failed revolution of 1905, and was arrested and sent to Siberia. In exile, his revolutionary fervor dimmed. Escaping to Turkey, he went into the import-export business and made a fortune. His only interest now was self-interest, but he maintained his radical contacts in the hope that a new regime in Russia would bring him some advantage.5
On January 9, 1915, the German ambassador to Constantinople, H. Wangenheim, reported to Berlin that he had been approached by a Dr. Alexander Helphand, who was “definitely pro-German” and who advocated “the total destruction of czarism and the division of Russia into smaller states.” Germany would be successful, said Helphand, if it “kindled a major revolution in Russia…. The interests of the German government were therefore identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.” Helphand offered to organize the rising but would need considerable sums of money and wanted to present his plan to Berlin.6
The Germans were willing to consider any plan to destabilize Russia and take her out of the war. Helphand was summoned to Berlin on March 6. He saw Kurt Reizler, an aide of Chancellor Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg, to whom he gave an eighteen-page memorandum entitled “Preparations for Mass Political Strikes in Russia.” Helphand proposed that the Germans subsidize a splinter group of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party, who called themselves “The Majority” (Bolsheviks), and whose leader, Lenin, lived in Switzerland in exile. His plan was quickly approved: the next day Arthur Zimmerman, an undersecretary in the Foreign Ministry, asked the Treasury for 2 million marks to fund Russian revolutionary propaganda, half of which was turned over to Helphand.7
In May 1915, Helphand went to Bern to discuss with Lenin the prospects for a revolution in Russia. Lenin was at first receptive to the plan, for his own slogan at the time was “transform the imperialist war into a civil war.” He blamed the war on giant banks and “surplus capitalism”; it was but a convulsion of the corrupt bourgeois state. When he saw his old friend, Lenin was dismayed by his appearance, for with his bloated face and heavy paunch over stumpy legs, Helphand seemed the very caricature of an imperialist banker. Lenin learned from those in Helphand’s entourage that the man he had known as a revolutionary was now a shameless displayer of wealth, staying at the best hotel, drinking champagne for breakfast, and surrounded by a retinue of pretty young women. It seemed more than likely that he was getting his money from the Germans. Any connection with the Germans would be fatal for Lenin, who would be accused of being in their employ.8
Lenin decided to keep his distance from Helphand, who with his secret funds had launched a paper in Berlin called Die Glocke (The Bell), which followed the Foreign Ministry line. He wrote that Die Glocke was “an organ of renegades and dirty lackeys surrounding the cesspool of German chauvinism.”9
In any event, Helphand’s account of his meeting with Lenin must have sounded encouraging, for on July 6 the German Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, asked the Treasury for 5 million marks to promote propaganda in Russia. In August, Helphand moved to Copenhagen, where a branch of his firm was located and where he had his most devoted admirer, the German envoy, Count Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau. It was said that Helphand practically dictated the envoy’s cables to Berlin. On August 14, 1915, Brockdorff-Rantzau gave him a ringing endorsement, reporting that Helphand was “an extraordinarily important man whose unusual powers I feel we must employ for the duration of the war.”10
Helphand was by no means the only German spy on the Bolshevik beat. The Germans were particularly active in neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland. In Stockholm, their chief agent was an Estonian nationalist, Alexander Keskula, who hoped that with the breakup of the Russian empire his small Baltic country would gain its independence.
Among Keskula’s multiple operations was an office at the Stockholm railroad station where he explained to Russians coming home from the United States and Canada how they could avoid mobilization in the Czar’s army. He also recruited Russian revolutionaries living in Sweden to write defeatist pamphlets that were smuggled into Russia after being printed on his press. One of his efforts was a picture book describing the excellent treatment afforded by the Germans to Russian prisoners of war. It was intended for distribution in the Russian trenches and included photographs of grinning Cossacks eating sauerkraut and bratwurst.
Keskula was on friendly terms with Lenin, and sent him copies of the pamphlets he was preparing for Russian barracks, calling for mutinies. Lenin in turn sent Keskula the situation reports he was getting from his people in Russia, which Keskula passed on to his control on the German General Staff in Berlin, an intelligence officer named Steinwachs. All this activity took money, and Steinwachs paid Keskula 20,000 marks a month.11
On September 30, 1915, Keskula went to Bern to see Lenin, who listed the conditions under which he would be prepared to make a separate peace with Germany if his revolution succeeded. This fanciful manifesto included Russian troops liberating India from English imperialism, though he also announced his intention to confiscate large landholdings. Lenin’s willingness to sign a separate peace was uppermost in the mind of the German envoy in Bern, Baron Gisbert von Romberg, when he sent a long and astonishing dispatch to Berlin, stating that “in Keskula’s opinion, it is therefore essential that we should spring to the help of the revolutionaries of Lenin’s movement at once…. He will report on this matter in person in Berlin. According to his informants, the present moment should be favorable for overthrowing [Russia’s] government.” Thus from two sources, Helphand and Keskula, Berlin was getting the same advice: back the Bolsheviks.
On December 26, 1915, the German Foreign Ministry authorized 1 million rubles for Helphand, to be paid by the legation cashier in Copenhagen. On January 23, Helphand reported that the rubles had been smuggled into Petrograd (St. Petersburg). The money would be used to launch a series of strikes, but he now preferred to delay the uprising, for there was talk of deposing the Czar. At this point, because of the delay, Foreign Secretary von Jagow lost patience with Helphand and concluded he was a fake, possibly pocketing Treasury funds; Helphand found himself out in the cold. An accidental alliance of opportunists, Baltic nationalists, and Leninists had coalesced around the idea of a Russian revolution. The German Treasury was funding them, so far with little to show for it, and Lenin was stranded in Switzerland, with no hope of return to Russia.12
In the fall of 1916, von Jagow resigned as Foreign Secretary in protest against the resumption of the unrestricted submarine warfare that would bring the United States into the war the following April. His successor was Arthur Zimmerman, a man given to bold policy initiatives. He was the author of the telegram that bears his name, inviting Mexico to enter into an alliance with Germany against the United States in exchange for which she would regain “her lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” Intercepted and decoded by the British, the Zimmerman telegram was published in March 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson and helped prepare American opinion for U.S. entry into the war. Zimmerman was also strongly in favor of the Bolshevik strategy to shut down the Eastern Front, which to some in the Foreign Ministry seemed as farfetched as the offer to Mexico.13
In the end, events in Russia had a momentum of their own. Rasputin, the Czarina’s sinister adviser, who was suspected of plotting to make peace with Germany, was murdered in December 1916. Food shortages a month later in Petrograd brought thousands to the streets, demanding bread and breaking shop windows, in what became known as the February Revolution.
William Chapin Huntington, the commercial attaché at the American embassy, witnessed the riots without surprise. The food situation was so acute, he reported, that people were living on herring and apples and vobla, fish dried in the sun that stank to high heaven. Vobla used to be a swear word, but now it was lunch. One of the translators at the embassy had seen a woman sitting on the pavement quietly lie down and die, without a groan. The Cossacks were ordered out against the rioters. Formerly they would have drawn their weapons and fired but now they rode up and down the sidewalks in silence.14
Huntington was able to observe the decisive moment when the czarist regime fell. As the troops faced the crowd, there was a flicker of hesitation when a soldier had to decide whether to fire on his countrymen—and in that fraction of a second, the men in the barracks sided with the rioters and turned against their own ruler.
Out of the Petrograd riots came the Czar’s abdication and the formation of a provisional government. Nicholas II was urged to withdraw so that he would not be an impediment to the pursuit of the war. A delegation of members of the Duma, the Russian parliament, went to see him in the city of Pskov, 150 miles south of Petrograd, on March 15, 1917. “My abdication is necessary,” the Czar wrote in his diary in the early hours of the next morning, “for the sake of…maintaining calm in the army at the front…. All around is betrayal, cowardice and deceit.” And though he could not know it then, fifteen months away, death in a cellar by firing squad, at age fifty, with his wife and children.15
In the chaotic days after the Czar’s abdication, when the Provisional Government was formed, its outstanding figure was Alexander Kerensky, who was named Minister of War and Justice, and in July, Prime Minister. As a young Socialist lawyer, Kerensky had been the fiery defender of revolutionaries, but once elected to the Duma in 1912 he calmed down. He backed the policy of joining the Allies, but became disgusted with the regime’s conduct of the war and urged its dissolution. In a time of extremes, Kerensky was caught in the classic dilemma of the moderate leader, the conductor whose only purpose is to keep the train on the tracks.16
He had to contend not only with factions inside the government, but with a countergovernment in the rise of the soviets, which started out as a kind of Russian town hall, an outlet of the disenfranchised for all the piled-up grievances of generations. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers elected one deputy per thousand workers and per military company, who supposedly expressed the popular will, with infusions of agitprop from the Bolshevik minority, which eventually took it over. The soviets thus became the vehicle through which the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, which one historian described as “responsibility without power confronting power without responsibility.”17
The Petrograd Soviet set up its own Military Section, which infiltrated the Petrograd garrison of 150,000 and drew up the infamous Order No. 1, broadcast to the troops at the front and designed to destabilize the army. The order abolished the death penalty for desertion, demoted all officers to the rank of soldiers, and called for the election of soldiers to committees, which then proceeded to elect their officers. Committee meetings took the place of military discipline.
Kerensky did what he could, purging the high command and bringing in the excellent general A. A. Brusilov, who had won some important battles in 1916, as commander in chief. He sent commissars to the front to whip up offensive spirit in units where Bolshevik agitators preached defeatism. Officers who refused to take up advance positions were court-martialed. The goal of the Provisional Government was clearly expressed—to keep fighting the Germans.18
David R. Francis, the American ambassador, was not a career diplomat but a Democratic wheelhorse who had served as mayor of St. Louis, governor of Missouri, and Secretary of the Interior under Grover Cleveland in the 1890s. At the age of sixty-five, he was white-thatched but still vigorous, a big man, thick in the chest, with the stern demeanor and upright carriage of a Western sheriff. One expected to see spurs at the cuffs of his striped pants. When he arrived in Russia in March 1916, Francis left behind his wife but brought with him some of the comforts of home—a black valet, a portable cuspidor (he astonished the Italian ambassador by hitting it from a distance of four feet), and a supply of chewing gum, which he masticated happily at diplomatic receptions. He was a man of strong opinion, though he knew precious little of Russia’s history, culture, or language.19
Francis was overjoyed when Nicholas abdicated. He was tired of czarist rule and thought the Russian people were too. Suspicions abounded as to the loyalty of the German-born Czarina, and he was convinced that German spies lurked in every department of the Czar’s government. From the window of his embassy office at 34 Pourstadtskaia Street, the ambassador had an excellent view of the February events. He saw a barricade go up at the corner of Serguisky and Litainy streets. He heard desultory firing. He was told that a regiment whose barracks were two blocks away had mutinied and killed their colonel.20
When the Provisional Government was formed, Francis presented his credentials to its Foreign Minister, Pavel Miliukov, who told him: “This government has come to stay.” Francis sent a two-hundred-word cable to Washington recommending recognition and went up to the Mariinsky Palace for the swearing-in ceremony. “I have not lost faith,” he wrote to his son, “in Russia coming out of this ordeal as a republic and with a government which will be founded on correct principles.”21
Woodrow Wilson, reelected in 1916 on the promise of keeping America out of the war, was in the spring of 1917 inching toward the fray. But declaring war had to be presented in Wilsonian terms, as a crusade between democracy and an evil military empire. In this context, the despotic Czar’s overthrow was providential, for Russia could now be shown in a democratic skin, ready to join an alliance of free nations. On March 22, Wilson announced that the American government would be the first to recognize the novice regime. He hailed the February Revolution as a major step toward building a desirable postwar world order. There was a hearty round of applause in the American press for what was too quickly seen as the advent of Russian democracy. Now, it was said, the Russian people would be fighting for themselves instead of for a corrupt and possibly pro-German monarchy.22
On April 2, in his message to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Germany, the President said that the United States now had in Russia “a fit partner for a league of honor.” Carried away by his own rhetoric, he opined that Russia was “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 instinct, their habitual attitude towards life.”23 In fact, for the great mass of the Russian people, the habitual attitude toward life was despair, but Wilson’s optimistic assessment helped to justify the need to go to war. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war,” Wilson concluded. On April 6, Congress complied, and America was at war.
By the time Lenin heard the news of the Czar’s abdication, he had moved from Bern to Zurich, which had better libraries. In his ratty rooms at Spiegelgasse 14, which he shared with his dough-faced wife, Krupskaya, he tried to take it all in. One thing was clear: military failures had shaken czarism and created the conditions for a revolution. He had to get back to Russia at once. But how? By plane? Via Sweden? With a wig over his bald head? He would get no help from the French and the British. Germany was the only possible route. He would have to act with great care, so as not to be seen as an instrument of German scheming.
In Bern, the German envoy von Romberg reported on March 23, 1917, that “leading Russian revolutionaries” wished to return to Russia via Germany. From Copenhagen on April 12, Brockdorff-Rantzau appealed for the reinstatement of his friend Helphand. He knew only too well, he said, that Foreign Secretary von Jagow had been “especially fond of whetting his sharp tongue on him,” but Helphand “now finds himself to be a German, not a Russian…. Give him a hearing…he could be extremely useful.” Helphand was predicting that if Germany backed the extremist element, the Russian army would disintegrate in three months. After seeing Helphand in Berlin, Foreign Secretary Zimmerman advised the General Staff that “since it is in our interest that the radical wing of the Russian revolutionaries should prevail, it seems advisable to allow transit.”24
The German plan was to help the Bolshevik leaders in Switzerland to get home and to secretly assist them in gaining the upper hand. They would wait for the military situation to deteriorate and would then try to negotiate a separate peace. On April 1, 1917, the Foreign Ministry asked for 5 million marks for secret work in Russia. Once the Bolsheviks returned to Petrograd, part of this money would be passed on to them via Helphand in Stockholm.
Von Romberg reported on April 4 that Lenin and the others wanted permission to travel by sealed train through Germany at once. As bait, they promised that once back in Russia they would secure the release of some German prisoners of war.25
Final approval from Berlin came on April 5, 1917. Two second-class carriages waited on the German side of the Swiss border, at Gottmadingen, thirty miles north of Zurich. On Monday, April 9, a group of thirty-three Bolsheviks assembled for the trip home, among them Lenin and his wife and daughter, and his Paris-born mistress, Inessa Armand; his sidekick Gregory Zinoviev with his wife and son; and Karl Radek, the Polish-born wanderer, who had attached himself to Lenin and made himself useful. Their carriages were connected to a larger Berlin-bound train. As they crossed Germany on April 12, Kaiser Wilhelm mockingly proposed that they be given his traditional Easter message to read. They proceeded from Berlin to Sassnitz, a German port on the Baltic, then by ferry to the southern tip of Sweden and up to Stockholm on April 13, where Helphand, who was waiting at the station, tried to see Lenin but was rebuffed. He did, however, later see Radek, who stayed in Stockholm to run the Bolshevik office there. The others went on to Finland and took the train to Petrograd, where they arrived on April 16.26
“Lenin received a splendid welcome from his followers,” von Romberg reported to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg on April 30: “Three quarters of Petrograd workers are behind him…. It is not clear which course the revolution will take.”
On June 3, Foreign Secretary Zimmerman noted the “growing disorganization and unwillingness to fight of the Russian army. Lenin’s propaganda is growing stronger and his paper Pravda is printing 300,000 copies. Work in the armament factories is at a standstill. The transport crisis is acute.” The German plan, astonishingly, seemed to be working.27
In Petrograd that July, Kerensky faced a Bolshevik coup. Trucks packed with mutinous soldiers and sailors suddenly appeared in the streets. A red flag flew from one of the trucks bearing the words: “The first bullet is for Kerensky.” This time, enough loyal troops were found to put down the mutiny. Trotsky was arrested and Lenin fled to Finland.
William Chapin Huntington, the American commercial attaché, called it “a spurt of anarchy.” He saw men driving around in trucks firing machine guns while others were shooting out the windows from the top floors of buildings. The only result so far as he could see was sixteen dead horses. He counted them himself on the Litainy Prospect.28
Meanwhile, conditions continued to deteriorate on the Eastern Front. Albert Rhys Williams, a Protestant minister and newspaper correspondent who was covering the war, succumbed to the syndrome of sympathizing with the side he was writing about. Won over by the suffering of the Russian people, he came to believe that only the Bolsheviks could lift them out of their misery and became their ardent apologist. At the front in a village in the Ukraine that July, about three hundred women and forty old men and boys crowded around Rhys Williams. He asked them how many had lost someone in the war and nearly every hand went up. An eerie collective moan spread among them, like a winter wind blowing through the trees; Rhys shivered from the sheer intensity of the suffering they communicated.29
Bolshevik propaganda was destroying the Russian army. Robert F. Leonard, one of the hundreds of Americans in Russia at the time, was at the front in August 1917, not far from Kiev, as part of a YMCA team, and saw the soldiers selling machine guns to the Germans for 5 rubles, and a six-inch gun for a bottle of brandy. Then they would start for home. Most of the weapons were American-made.30
By now, seven thousand copies of Pravda were arriving daily at the front, encouraging the men to vote instead of fight, and to dismiss their officers, who were beaten and horse-whipped. Utterly shamed, several officers committed suicide. At the end of July 1917, General Anton Denikin, who commanded the summer offensive, stated: “We no longer have an army.”31
In August, Riga fell, under clouds of yellow cross gas, which ate into the clothes and body, rendering gas masks useless. The Germans now had an open road to Moscow, three hundred miles away. Kerensky replaced Brusilov with the disciplinarian general Lavr Kornilov, whom a month later he would imprison after an aborted coup attempt.32
In June 1917 there arrived in Washington an ambassador from the Russian Provisional Government. For thirty-seven-year-old Boris Bakhmeteff, a onetime physics professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd, this was the second tour of duty in the United States. He had come in 1915 as head of a purchasing commission, to buy weapons for the Czar’s armies, and felt drawn to Wilsonian principles. As a member of the liberal Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party, he was named deputy minister of commerce and industry after the Czar’s abdication. His sympathetic grasp of American political life made him a fitting choice for ambassador. He had a knack for saying what Americans liked to hear. His method could have been borrowed from the professional optimist Emile Coué, who wanted everyone to say, upon rising in the morning: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
Boris Bakhmeteff seemed to embody the democratic, pro-Ally resolve that President Wilson was looking for in the Russians. At a White House dinner on June 21 he eagerly expounded on the great Russian offensive. In his meetings at the State Department, he played down the demands for peace in the streets of Petrograd. He told the New York Times that all of Russia had agreed to fight the war.
When Bakhmeteff presented his credentials on July 5, he and Wilson got along like kindred spirits. In August in Boston, he told a receptive crowd that “Russia, the great democracy of the East, will stand hand in hand with you, her eldest sister, this great democracy of the West.” Even after the summer offensive turned into a rout, he told the New York Times on September 4 that “only one or two per cent of the army” was unreliable and asserted that “the Russian army is not crushed and is not going to be crushed.”
Bakhmeteff was such a salesman, it was said that he could have sold feathers to the Indians. Even Robert Lansing, the Secretary of State, who had little faith in Kerensky, liked him. Lansing was a deeply religious Presbyterian Elder and a “Bourbon Democrat,” who believed in government by incorruptible elites. His distaste for big government and robber barons was exceeded only by that for the “virus” of Socialism.
Colonel Edward M. House, who had won the President’s trust and affection, was his closest adviser and back-channel agent in foreign policy. More of a pragmatist and less of a moralist than either Wilson or Lansing, House saw the Czar’s overthrow as beneficial, if only his successors could act more like American liberals. “Bakhmeteff and I speak the same language,” House wrote in his diary that August. Wilson was so taken with the Russian envoy that he granted him a $100 million credit to cover the costs of the military contracts he was taking out. In October, the Treasury Department gave him another $50 million.33
Bakhmeteff was sketching a distorted picture of events in Russia. Wilson’s dilemma was that he was not receiving an accurate and detailed counterversion from his ambassador, who was under a cloud—a cloud no bigger than a lady’s hand. On the boat over from New York in 1916, Francis had made the acquaintance of the captivating, cosmopolitan Matilda de Cram, who could charm men in four languages. She was married to a Russian with whom she had emigrated to the United States when the war broke out because he was too closely involved with the Germans in business deals. Having left two sons behind, she went back to visit them (though certain reports said she had taken the same boat as Francis purposely in order to meet him).34
In Petrograd, the fortyish but still enticing Matilda was a frequent guest at the American embassy, supposedly to give the ambassador French lessons. Sometimes she spent the night. Embassy personnel were concerned, for the ambassador’s living quarters adjoined the file and code room. In the diplomatic community, tongues wagged about the elderly ambassador with the roving eye who had left his wife in Missouri.
Intelligence officers at Allied embassies warned General William V. Judson, the American military attaché, that Russian counterintelligence listed Madame de Cram as a German agent, but to no avail. They stopped sharing with Judson sensitive information that might be revealed to Madame de Cram as pillow talk.35
Judson was a brigadier general who combined the jobs of military attaché and chief of the U.S. military mission. Pugnacious and opinionated, he was also an astute analyst and a beaver for facts, who viewed Ambassador Francis with disdain as an “indoor man,” while he was the “outdoor man,” on his rounds gathering information. Nor did he have much regard for the Russians, whom he described in a letter to the War College as “mostly ignorant as plantation negroes.” His greatest fear was that Russia would stop fighting and “become practically a German colony…to render vitally needed assistance to the Central Powers, which will more than likely enable them to win the war.”
After his recall to Washington, Judson wrote an eight-page report to the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, in which he mentioned the ambassador’s private life: “I personally appealed to the ambassador to see Madame de C. no more and I showed him the dossier relative to her which Captain [E. Francis] Riggs [assistant military attaché] borrowed from the Interallied Passport Bureau. Thus I was the only one who personally approached the ambassador on the subject of Madame de C.” But Francis held Judson’s advice against him.36
Since Francis was out of his depth and romantically entangled with a possible German spy, President Wilson and the State Department were to some extent cut off from the undercurrents and intricacies of the swiftly evolving Russian drama. In an attempt to remedy the situation, a number of special envoys were dispatched to Russia in 1917.
When President Wilson performed his about-face from neutrality to war in April 1917, he felt the need to whip up anti-German ardor in pacifist-minded pockets of the country and in ethnic enclaves where the melting pot had failed to melt. Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, the propaganda arm of the war effort, and the granddaddy of all the Voices of America and information agencies yet to come. It was a peculiarly American attempt to sway people abroad through direct appeal, rather than through government-to-government diplomatic channels.
To run what was essentially a gargantuan advertising agency, Wilson picked his old friend George Creel, the hard-driving, Missouri-born newspaper editor who had won his spurs as editor of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News. Creel’s volatile mind threw out ideas the way a parade scatters confetti, with the aim of channeling the nation’s energies into constructive patriotism. His committee churned out features and films, pamphlets and cartoons. He papered the country with fifty thousand billboards, such as “Halt the Hun” and “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” He sent out eighteen thousand “Four-Minute Men” to give short speeches from coast to coast. No proposal was ignored, though Creel balked when he was urged to bring to the United States for display some of the Belgian children whose hands had been chopped off by the Germans.37
Creel launched an international department to counter German lies and sent emissaries to the major European capitals. In June he dispatched a journalist of good reputation, Arthur Bullard, to Russia, to promote a gung ho, stay-in-the-war publicity campaign.
Bullard was not only Creel’s envoy, but the unofficial emissary of his friend Colonel House. The Bullard mission was one of several that left for Russia in the summer of 1917. What they had in common was a muted intelligence function. When a Red Cross mission left in June, its key figure, Raymond Robins, was destined to play a pivotal role in the first months of the Bolshevik Revolution.38
Robins was born in 1873 into a deeply dysfunctional family. His mother, Hannah, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and institutionalized when he was twelve; his father, Charles, was a business failure, always trying to recoup his losses; his brother, Saxton, committed suicide. But Raymond was a survivor, strong-willed and hardworking, whose inordinate drive to succeed was tempered by do-gooder instincts. At the age of seventeen he worked in a Tennessee coal mine, earning credentials as a friend of labor. In his twenties, he caught the gold fever and headed for the Klondike. Instead of gold, he found religion, and went to Nome, Alaska, in 1899 to run a church called the Hospice of Saint Bernard. Nome was a lawless, anything-goes, shoreline tent city in its wastrel boom period. Minister Robins preached the gospel, tended the sick, and buried the dead. He fought typhoid and corruption and made his mark as a muscular reformer who carried a six-gun.39
In 1900 Robins left Alaska for Chicago, where he plunged into settlement work, parks and playgrounds, housing and soup kitchens: all the areas of social improvement then handled by private agencies. Robins became an important figure in the municipal landscape, went on speaking tours, joined a dozen organizations, and liked to call himself a “Fighter, Slum Dweller, and Preacher of a new social gospel.” These periods of whirling activity alternated with bouts of depression that required hospitalization. In 1905 he married Margaret Dreier, a beautiful German-American suffragette and social activist of the Major Barbara type. Margaret was five years older than Raymond and about a million dollars richer. To deflect rumors that he was after her money, Robins invented a gold strike in Alaska that had made him rich. Theirs was a highly compatible and happy match that lasted forty years—the willowy Margaret, with her perfect oval face and long chestnut hair in a bun, and the short, stocky Raymond, like an overgrown barrow boy, with a forelock dangling over a high brow and a look of stubborn resolve in his dark eyes.40
Robins got into Chicago politics as a labor organizer. He joined the Progressive movement and backed Theodore Roosevelt, who broke away from the Republican Party and ran in 1912 as a Progressive or Bull Mooser. Roosevelt split the Republican Party down the middle and Wilson won. In 1914 Robins ran for the U.S. Senate on the Progressive ticket from Illinois, but lost.
In June 1917, Robins was spinning his wheels when he heard from Teddy Roosevelt. His old friend had recommended him for the Red Cross Commission, the brainchild of copper magnate William Boyce Thompson, which was being formed to go to Russia. Thompson was fixated on maintaining the Eastern Front and hoped, under cover of the Red Cross, to shore up the Provisional Government. Another motive for the rotund Wall Street pirate was his determination to match or to outdo his mogul friends in winning the war.
Thompson’s Red Cross outfit consisted of a team of thirty, including doctors and sanitary engineers. They had uniforms and military ranks, and were in the service of the International Division of the U.S. Army, reporting to Secretary of War Newton Baker. Thompson planned to do the regular Red Cross relief work, but also to prop up the Kerensky regime. Wilson was not overjoyed to see Robins, who had backed Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, on the commission, but Newton Baker liked him and told Wilson that his “old friend Robins [would] do what he could to break up the contraband ring headed by pro German Russians.”41
Behind Thompson, there was the hidden presence of the President, who had given the copper millionaire a secret letter of instructions. For Wilson, Bolshevism meant not only the end of the Russian war effort, but a threat to the stability of any postwar global order.
When Robins first learned that Thompson would be his boss, he asked, “What’s that Wall Street reactionary doing on this mission?” Thompson was no happier about Robins, whom he called “That uplifter, that trouble-maker, that Roosevelt shouter. What’s he doing on this mission?” But once in Russia, both men revised their opinion.42
On arrival in Petrograd in early August 1917, the mission took rooms at the Hotel Europe. “All here is chaos!” Robins wrote his wife, whom he addressed as “Blessed One,” on August 7. “The government will last no one knows how long…the outlook is stormy in the extreme.” On the front, the Russians were in retreat, “and about 18,000 Russian troops have been shot by their own brothers.” Robins visited the Czar’s residence, Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles from Petrograd. The children’s playthings were scattered in the nursery, amid notes scratched by young hands. One of them said: “Our French lesson was very hard today.”43
In Petrograd, Robins saw long lines for bread, milk, meat, and sugar. Old women sat on the sidewalk and knitted while they waited. Robins thought the government would go the way of the lines: if they got shorter it would live, if they grew longer it would die.
To Robins, the Kerensky regime seemed little more than a paper affair. When he traveled about and showed local officials his Kerensky credentials, they laughed and told him to see the chairman of the soviet. This was, he discovered, the only way to get things done. If he wanted six wagons to carry grain from the village to the station, he asked the soviets and got six wagons. Orders did not come from the Winter Palace, where Kerensky was entrenched, or from the Duma, but from Smolny, the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet.44
Once the Red Cross supplies had been unloaded and stored, Thompson and Robins concentrated on the political work. Thompson was eager to launch a pro-war, anti-Bolshevik propaganda campaign. He offered to subsidize the two liberal non-Marxist parties, the Social Revolutionaries and the Kadets or Constitutional Democrats. He formed the Russian Committee to hire speakers, produce pamphlets, and buy newspapers and presses. In the initial capital outlay for this campaign he spent $1 million of his own money.45
Back in Washington, President Wilson applauded Thompson’s “helpful interest in Russia’s fight for freedom” and the “finely practical” form it was taking.46 Thompson and Creel were doing much the same kind of work that the German Foreign Ministry had previously undertaken, but the momentum that fall was all on the side of the Bolsheviks, whose Red Guards patrolled the streets of Petrograd.
On September 29, 1917, the German Foreign Ministry indulged in a bit of self-congratulation. Disgraced after the publication of his telegram to Mexico, Zimmerman had been replaced as Foreign Secretary by Baron Richard von Kuhlmann, who reported that “German military operations…were seconded by intensive undermining activities inside Russia…to further separatist endeavors…and give strong support to the revolutionary elements.” The secret German policy of arranging for Lenin’s return and funding the Bolsheviks was paying off. As von Kuhlmann put it, “The Bolshevik movement could never have attained the scale or the influence which it has today without our continued support.”47
September had seen a right-wing coup by General Kornilov; the coup had failed but it succeeded in dividing the army into commissars and czarists. “Kerensky has acted with vigor and real courage,” Robins wrote his “darling blessed one” on September 13. But by September 24 it was no longer clear if the government would last or if the Bolsheviks would establish the Commune (as in the Paris Commune of 1871). Would the Germans take Petrograd? Would the food supply last? It was the wildest and most uncertain time.48
The growing influence of the Bolsheviks was all too apparent. Judson, the military attaché, reported back to Washington that the Germans were spending $10 million a month to pay their expenses. Thompson asked Washington for $3 million a month to keep his campaign going, but Wilson exploded that he had “gone crazy.” Creel, who acted as a liaison between the President and the Red Cross mission, told Thompson on October 24 that Wilson’s refusal was not “due to any lack of willingness, but to the iron limitations imposed by our law and our public opinion.” At his wit’s end, Thompson on Friday, November 2, called an extraordinary meeting of the Allied military missions to figure out a way to shore up the collapsing Eastern Front.
The French and the British came, and of course Judson and Robins, as well as a Russian general and Kerensky’s private secretary. Major General Alfred Knox, the British military attaché, who had served in India and Egypt, thought of the Russians as colonial natives “who have got to have a whip over them.” He launched into such a vicious attack on Kerensky’s incompetence that the two Russians present left in protest. Only Robins stood up to him. Knox turned on him and said, “You are wasting Colonel Thompson’s money.”
“If I was,” Robins said, “Colonel Thompson knows all about it.”
“I am not interested in stabilizing Kerensky,” Knox said. “The only thing worthwhile in Russia is to establish Kaledin [the Cossack leader] and a Cossack military dictatorship.”
Robins replied that unless he was mistaken there would be a very different kind of dictatorship.
“You mean Lenin, Trotsky, and this Bolshevik soapbox stuff,” Knox said.
“That is what I mean,” Robins said.
“Colonel Robins, you are not a military man,” Knox said. “You don’t know anything about military affairs. We military men know what to do with that kind of agitation and agitators. We shoot them.”
“Yes,” Robins replied, “if you catch them you shoot them.”49
It was a dialogue of the deaf, between a British general who refused to acknowledge the growing mass support behind the Bolsheviks, and the American social worker with his ear close to the ground, who saw a Bolshevik victory as inevitable.
John Reed, the hyperactive former captain of the Harvard water polo team and cheerleader for the football team, arrived in Petrograd in September 1917 on assignment from the Socialist newspaper the Call. If we think of cheerleading as a form of propaganda, he found his calling early. Upton Sinclair called him “the playboy of the revolution,” but he was more than that; he was a chaser of stories all over the map, whether it was Pancho Villa, the Paterson silk strike, or the Bolshevik Revolution, with a penchant for getting a little too involved in what he was covering.
Autumn in Petrograd meant a chill fog, dull gray skies, and damp winds from Finland. Reed patrolled the streets and heard ladies in tea shops wishing that the Czar would return. A woman on a streetcar threw a fit because the conductor called her comrade. At a café on Tverskaya, the waiter refused a tip. At the Alexandrinsky Theater, the Imperial Box was empty and the statue of Catherine the Great had a little red flag in its hand. In the Smolny Institute, the former finishing school where the daughters of the rich learned how to curtsy and a hundred doors were still marked “ladies’ classrooms,” the unladylike banging of boots echoed in the vaulted corridors, and Lenin drew up his plans. Reed had arrived during that peculiar interval when the two regimes co-existed side by side.50
On Tuesday, November 6, Smolny was humming as the noon cannon boomed from Peter and Paul Fortress. The streetcars were running on the Nevsky and shops were open. The bustle of the capital seemed normal, but during the night, the Bolsheviks had captured the Telephone Exchange, the Baltic railroad station, and the Telegraph Agency, and Kerensky had fled. Reed saw squads of soldiers with fixed bayonets, but could not tell whether they belonged to Kerensky or the Red Guards.
The next day Reed managed to get inside the Winter Palace, where the same old ushers in their brass-buttoned blue uniforms were still on duty. He walked through the long halls and paneled rooms, under crystal chandeliers and gilded cornices. The Provisional Government was abolished that day and those of its members still in their offices were arrested.51
That evening, Robins was walking along the bank of the Neva when he saw gunboats coming up from Kronstadt, the naval base on Kotlin Island under the command of sailors who had murdered their officers. He watched the shells explode on the walls of the Winter Palace, and wrote his wife that the scene belonged to the Dark Ages. There had been nothing like it since the birth of Christ.52
On the morning of November 8, after the final taking of the Winter Palace, Rogers Smith of the National City Bank saw prisoners being led out by sailors from Kronstadt. He saw factory workers outside military barracks converting soldiers to the new platform—bread, peace with Germany, and land for everybody. Smith was arrested in December, when the Bolsheviks took over the bank. They sent a squad of men over and the squad leader told them they were all arrested and the bank was arrested. National City had deposits of 300 million rubles, which the state confiscated. The jewels and gold and silver in the safe deposit boxes were also confiscated.53
Oliver Saylor, the theater editor for the Indianapolis News, happened to be in Moscow that November, where the fighting was much heavier. He personally saw five hundred red-draped coffins buried in a long, trenchlike grave. But within a week life had settled into a kind of desultory disorder. On the Arbat, Saylor saw an endless procession of soldiers in olive drab marching between railroad stations on their way home. Nine out of ten carried rifles that they were taking to their farms.54
For Frank Keddie, who was doing relief work for the Quakers, it had all evolved in a natural, almost inevitable way. First the Czar abdicated. Then the soviets came to life. Then Kerensky cried “one more offensive.” Then the soldiers deserted. Then a little Russian gunboat came up the Neva and the soviets became the government. It had all evolved out of the war weariness of the people. Then the soldiers came home in a mad rush, in carts, on horseback, on top of trains. When their money ran out they knocked at large landowners’ castles for food, and if the watchmen fired on them, they fired back. They arrived in their village and found their cottage in a wretched state. The government had failed to pay the family allowance and the wife had sold a horse or a cow. And here they were, back after three years in the trenches, minus an arm or a leg, to find this mess.55
So far as the clergyman–war correspondent Albert Rhys Williams could see, the only ones who rallied to the Kerensky government were a few Cossacks and the Woman’s Battalion inside the Winter Palace. The Bolshevik Revolution, he estimated, was accomplished in Petrograd with only about eighteen people killed, most of them Bolsheviks standing outside the Winter Palace, who were shot from bunkers on the inside. Even Lenin commented on how easy it was, like “lifting a feather.”56
Raymond Robins did not know what to make of this strange upheaval and the crackdown that followed. “Think of it,” he wrote his wife in November, “the most extreme semi-anarchist government in all the world, maintaining its control by the bayonet, proscribing all publications…arresting persons without warrants and holding them for weeks without trial…. It is a wild and stormy ride.”57
Frederick H. Hatzel, who ran the condensed milk operation for the Red Cross mission, could testify to the general lawlessness that followed the revolution. He had 500,000 cans of condensed milk in a warehouse and had to put a new label over the Bordens label on each one, saying it was from the Red Cross and was not to be sold. He also had three thousand barrels of salted beef intended for Romania, but the Bolsheviks broke into the warehouse and stole it. They left the milk alone, more interested in raiding wine cellars. Later they opened stores to sell the stolen goods to the public.
Life was not safe. If you carried a package, the Red Guards took it. People were shot at night in the streets for no reason. Hatzel himself had crawled into a doorway on his knees three times, right on Nevski Prospect, their Broadway. One day, walking past the canal on his way to the warehouse, he saw a crowd of men and women yelling like fiends. They had a long pole that they were pushing up and down in the water and Hatzel asked one of them what was going on and he said they were just killing a thief. They threw him into the canal and pushed him down with the pole.58
Robins saw quite clearly from the beginning that the Bolsheviks were there to stay. In his comings and goings, he could tell that the people were for the revolution. Lenin and Trotsky were in the saddle. He knew nothing about Marxism, but judged events as he would have in Chicago, in terms of power politics, and these fellows couldn’t be worse than some of the ward-heelers he’d dealt with back home.
On November 8 he told Thompson: “Chief, we’ve got to move pretty fast. Kerensky is as dead as yesterday’s 7000 years. We either have to work with Lenin and Trotsky or pack our grips and go home.” Thompson, who had so wholeheartedly (and expensively) backed Kerensky, was now persona non grata, vilified in Pravda as a Wall Street shark trying to get his hands on the Russian economy. He could no longer be of any use. But both men agreed that the mission should soldier on and lobby the new regime to stay in the war at a time when America’s soldiers were dying on the Western Front. Thompson put Robins in charge and left at the end of November.59
Trotsky, the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was the Bolshevik leader who could give the green light for the Red Cross mission to continue its work. Although he had described Trotsky as a “dangerous leader of the extreme left” in a letter to his wife, Robins was prepared to sup with the devil. In Chicago, he had worked with bigger crooks.
On November 10, three days after the Bolshevik coup, Robins and his interpreter, Alexander Gumberg, went to see Trotsky at Smolny, a great stone building with an iron fence around it. Lions’ heads on the keystones looked down on them as they climbed the twelve steps to the twenty-foot-high arches at the entrance, where guards positioned behind heavy machine guns inspected their documents. Inside, the ornate anterooms and corridors were now barracks and arsenal, smelling of gunpowder and tobacco. In the gilded dining room, with its French doors and parquet floors, Red Guards and People’s Commissars sat at long tables, sharing bread and cabbage.
In front of Trotsky’s office, a young captain stood guard. “Say to the commissioner that I know a corpse when I see one,” Robins told him. “I believe the Kerensky government is dead and I regard the commissioner as holding the effective power in Russia. Does he want the American Red Cross to remain? If not, we will get out.” Trotsky, a short, brisk man with a small goatee, thick curly hair, and beady eyes behind a pince-nez, beckoned them in. The apostle of social justice and Christian charity came face-to-face with the Jewish atheist revolutionary, but Robins wanted to discuss practical problems rather than ideology or religion. “I want guards around my supplies, to protect the supplies from being stolen,” he told Trotsky. “Will you give me the guards, and will they take my orders?” Taken aback by this peremptory American, but seeing the advantage of Red Cross supplies in a time of food riots, Trotsky promised to provide the guards. The Red Cross warehouses, so tempting to looters with their stocks of food, clothing, and medical supplies, were kept under armed Bolshevik guard.60
In acting on his own to establish contact with the Bolshevik leadership, Robins was going against the instructions of Secretary of State Lansing to avoid all contacts that might be construed as recognition. Ambassador Francis obeyed the letter of the law, writing Lansing: “I live in the embassy and since the beginning of the revolution have not left it except to attend a meeting of the diplomatic corps and to take an occasional walk after dark.”61
“Our diplomacy is past speaking about,” Robins wrote to his wife. “I, a Red Cross man, am the only person in any authority that is permitted by our government to have any direct intercourse with the de facto government that has complete control of over three fourths of Russian territory.”62
The Soviets declared a unilateral cessation of hostilities on November 26, 1917. An armistice was signed with the Central Powers on December 15, and peace negotiations opened on December 22 in the German-held city of Brest-Litovsk, but quickly bogged down.
The Allies were stunned by the Bolshevik defection, which might prolong the war by several years, and struggled to formulate a suitable policy. One plan, favored by the French, was to back anti-Bolshevik forces in the south of Russia. In London, the War Cabinet was split, with Prime Minister David Lloyd George fearing that backing dissidents would throw the Bolsheviks into the arms of the Germans, while Lord Robert Cecil, the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, saw a chance to dethrone Lenin.63
It was in the midst of this conundrum that William Boyce Thompson left Moscow for London on November 26. Under the influence of Robins, Thompson was now a convert to cooperation with the Bolsheviks and hoped to bring about a change in British policy. At lunch with Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street, Thompson made his case. “At present they are nobody’s Bolsheviks,” he said. “Don’t let us let Germany make them her Bolsheviks. Let’s make them our Bolsheviks.” Lloyd George seemed to like the idea and repeated: “Let’s make them our Bolsheviks.”64
For the moment, the British decided on a two-track policy, one track maintaining unofficial relations with the Bolsheviks, and the other funding the Cossacks in the south.
In Washington, President Wilson, under the influence of the rigidly anti-Bolshevik Lansing, adopted a policy of no contacts and no recognition. Thompson briefly saw Lansing, who called him “a crank.” Wilson would not see him, saying that he did not want Thompson plugging recognition at him. Thompson tried to spread the word around the State Department that good relations with the Bolsheviks might keep them in the war, but got nowhere.65 The irony was that in Russia he was viewed as a Wall Street pirate, while in Washington he was seen as an apologist for the Bolsheviks.
The Bolshevik leadership, while friendly to Robins, seemed to be deliberately trying to antagonize the United States. Here was a regime about to sign a separate peace, abandoning its allies, repudiating hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of debt owed by the Kerensky government, and calling for a worldwide proletarian revolution.
Ambassador Francis thought the Bolsheviks were demented. They violated diplomatic immunity by seizing the Italian ambassador, Diamandi, on January 13, 1918, and ordered that all telegrams from American consulates in Russia be sent in clear instead of cipher. The Red Guards were given license to steal and kill. They broke into homes and stuck bayonets through works of art. Francis could do nothing to protect the American colony.66
The Reverend George A. Simons, pastor of the Methodist Episcopal church in Petrograd, now had to dress in a workman’s old Russian shirt that hung down to his knees and a beat-up slouch hat so that he looked like a Bolshevik and could move freely among the people. He found that the average man had not the slightest clue as to what the revolution was about. In January 1918, Simons was in his office talking to the head deaconess when, out the window, he saw some Red Guards shoot two Russian soldiers right in front of the church. From then on, Simons kept a little friend in his back pocket by the name of Browning. When the Red Guards came around to extort money, he had two fox terriers doing police duty and was taxed 50 rubles per dog. If you had a piano or a bathtub it had to be registered. Then he was fined 500 rubles for not shoveling the snow on his sidewalk and had to appear before a workmen’s court. The three judges said, “We do not want to hear your testimony. You are a bourgeois. We want to hear what your dvornki [servant] says.”67
Roger E. Simmons, a Department of Commerce trade commissioner, was stationed in Russia from July 1917 to November 1918, studying the timber industry. Very soon after the revolution it became impossible to satisfy labor demands in the lumber mills. Men who floated logs up to the skidder in the millpond demanded the same wages as the skilled laborer who handled the saw. If there were no class distinctions, everyone had to be paid the same. In Moscow the orderlies in the hospitals wanted to be paid as much as the doctors. The mill that Simmons was studying had to be shut down.
In July 1918 Simmons was in the forest district outside Vologda, some three hundred miles east of Petrograd, when he was arrested for no apparent reason and sent to Moscow for trial before the Special Council to Combat Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation. Taken to Lubyanka Prison, he was thrown into a holding cell with eighty other men, most of whom did not know why they were there either. One was a peasant who had refused to give up the grain he had grown. Another was a mechanic on marine engines who had worked for the Czar’s navy. Also, five British sailors who had been on reconnaissance on the White Sea in a gunboat when they were overtaken by a Red cruiser and sent to Moscow. But the one Simmons would never forget was Valenkin, the lawyer for the British consulate, who had been sentenced to the firing squad. He woke Simmons up at two in the morning and said, “Will you talk to me? I die at six. Tell me about America…. Tell me anything to occupy my mind.” At six, the soldiers came and led him out in the usual formation. Not a day passed without someone being taken out.
The American diplomats had left Moscow, but Simmons wrote a letter to the Swedish consul and gave it to a guard with a 100 ruble note. The guard pushed it into his boot. Thirty-six hours later a package came with a loaf of bread and some toilet articles and a note that said: “Hold your nerve. We will have you out soon.” Four hours later the consul arrived and obtained his release.68
When the Russian Revolution erupted in November 1917, Boris Bakhmeteff, the ambassador to the United States for the Provisional Government, was in Memphis on a speaking tour to sell Americans on the Russian war effort. He hurried back to Washington in the hope that Kerensky would rally and return to power, but that hope was short-lived. The Wilson administration immediately suspended credits and contracts to Russia, which now might go to the Bolsheviks. The aid to Kerensky had been conditional on his staying in the war. Between March and November, the United States had promised Bakhmeteff $325 million in credits, of which $188 million had been delivered. Much of that money he had spent on military matériel, but he still had between $60 and $70 million on deposit at the National City Bank in New York.69
What could Bakhmeteff do now? He was in the odd position of being an ambassador without a government. It all hinged on President Wilson, whose mind seemed to contain two airtight compartments, one for the expression of lofty sentiments and the other for carrying out covert maneuvers. There was Wilson the high-minded Big D Democrat, and Wilson the cunning back-channel schemer. “Everything great and small must be referred to the President,” one official in the State Department observed, “who receives no one, listens to no one, seems to take no one’s advice.”70
For all his secretive ways, however, Wilson did listen to the information arriving from his envoys in Russia. On November 9, 1917, a dispatch arrived from Felix Willoughby Smith, the U.S. consul in Tbilisi, the principal city south of the Caucasus Mountains. Smith reported that the population in trans-Caucasian Russia was anti-Bolshevik. The Cossack general Ataman Kaledin was rallying troops, but needed funds. This information reinforced Lansing’s belief that the Bolshevik regime could not survive, and he began to consider the possibility of an anti-Bolshevik trans-Caucasian government. But how could they get funds to Kaledin without alerting Congress and the press and without antagonizing the new regime? Thus, the stirrings of an anti-Bolshevik covert policy dawned only a few days after the revolution. At the State Department, Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips noted in his diary on November 20: “A feeling of misrule is arising among the people, and a military dictatorship is expected soon.” The next day the New York Times proclaimed Kaledin “Russia’s New Man of the Hour.”71
In the meantime, Bakhmeteff, eager to clarify his situation, went to see George Creel on November 24. He argued that the Bolsheviks did not represent the whole of Russia and that he did not intend to recognize their authority. He hoped, he told Creel, that President Wilson would distinguish between this upstart regime and the great Russian people. As a result of this meeting with Creel, an arrangement was made whereby Bakhmeteff would stay in the embassy and continue to operate as though nothing had happened. There was no official announcement, but the information was leaked to the Times, which reported on November 25 that “the administration does not recognize the Bolsheviks but does recognize the ambassador.” Bakhmeteff could continue to make payments from the funds at his disposal, so long as he had State Department approval. The details of this arrangement were worked out with the State Department counselor, Frank Polk, who told Boris he could pay for supplies for which he had already contracted if he submitted a weekly list. One reason for this unusual agreement was to protect U.S. firms from losses on contracts. Another was that the funds could be used to assist anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia, circumventing Congress and the press. Boris Bakhmeteff thus became a disbursing agent for President Wilson’s private slush fund and the Russian embassy became a dummy corporation to secretly finance and assist anti-Bolshevik armies.
A first withdrawal was made in November 1917—£3 million to cover the cost of rifles previously ordered in London for the Provisional Government. Further payments were made in December—$325,000 to the Remington Company for rifles and $2,075,000 to J. P. Morgan in connection with a Westinghouse arms contract. The goods not already dispatched to the Kerensky government would now end up in the hands of anti-Bolshevik forces. A memo explaining this hidden policy was later written by two assistant secretaries of the treasury, Nicholas Kelley and Van Mark-Smith, on August 6, 1920: “Our understanding of the fiction of the Russian Embassy was that it represented the ‘Russian people’ at present submerged under a despotic minority…we felt convinced of the wisdom of asking the continued existence and functioning of the embassy.”72
At the same time, it was evident from Wilson’s remarks at cabinet meetings that he was souring on the Bolshevik regime. On November 26, he told the cabinet that he thought the “actions of Lenin and Trotsky sounded like opéra bouffe.” On November 27, he read aloud a speech by Trotsky charging that America had intervened in the war when “the finance capitalists sent an ultimatum to Wilson.” This was an insult to the image of an unselfish America making the world safe for democracy—but any response would imply recognition. On November 30, Wilson felt the situation in Russia was “too chaotic to act yet,” but he added that he was paying “sympathetic attention” to the efforts of Kaledin, while he found the Bolsheviks “insulting and naive.”73
By this time, any dissenting opinion was dismissed. On December 4 Wilson heard from the astute military attaché General William Judson. In a cable to the War Department, Judson said that “any plan to form fronts with…Kaledins et cetera, appears most chimerical,” and of no benefit to the Allies, since Russia was “past carrying on the war” against Germany. Judson held the view, shared by Robins and Thompson, that the Bolsheviks were in control and that the Wilson administration was uninformed as a result of the no-contact policy. He believed, as he wrote Ambassador Francis on December 26, that the United States should “enter into helpful, sympathetic and friendly relations” with the regime. This was not what Wilson wanted to hear. Moreover, Judson had broken the no-contact policy by meeting with Trotsky on December 1. Lansing had him recalled in January 1918 and reemphasized to Ambassador Francis on December 6 that “the President desires American representatives [to] withhold all direct communications with the Bolsheviks.”74
The U.S. consul in Moscow, Maddin Summers, also on the Kaledin bandwagon, cabled on December 9, 1917, that Kaledin and another Cossack general, M. V. Alekseyev, “had formed a well equipped army of 50,000 cavalry and a trusted infantry force.” This was wishful thinking at best, but on the basis of Summers’s information, Lansing sent Wilson a memo on December 10 presenting the case for aiding the Cossacks in south Russia. Lansing still believed that overturning the Bolsheviks could keep Russia in the war, which would mean “the saving to this country of hundreds of thousands of men and billions of dollars.” He worked on Wilson all week, seeing him daily to press his case and comparing Kaledin to Ulysses S. Grant, who had restored the Union. Wilson came around, appalled by the reports he was getting of lawlessness in Petrograd. He had been told that Ambassador Francis had faced down a mob at the door of the U.S. embassy with a pistol in his hand and his loyal valet at his side. At a cabinet meeting, Wilson read a cable from Francis saying that “in Petrograd people broke into the Winter Palace and took all the wine and got drunk and went around shooting up the town.” This was indeed the Wild East.75
Lansing felt that his mission in life was to prevent a populist rabble from taking power in his own country, and was now applying his principles to a distant land. He was explicit in his opinion that only a military dictatorship could save Russia. But what of Wilson, the champion of self-determination? At a cabinet meeting on December 11, 1917, he said he “hated to do nothing about Russia but was puzzled how to take hold.”76
He was dissembling, for he had by now almost made up his mind to secretly back a dissident general against the established government of Russia. Lansing returned to the White House that night and convinced the President to intervene. The following day, Lansing drafted a telegram to Oscar Crosby, the Treasury Department representative at the U.S. embassy in London. The Kaledin movement, he explained, offered “the greatest hope for the re-establishment of a stable government and the continuance of a military force on the German and Austrian front” and “should be encouraged, but secretly.” It would be unwise to support Kaledin openly, because “this government cannot under the law loan money to him…the only practicable course seems to be for the British and French government to loan them the money to do so.” This plan for covert financing of an anti-Bolshevik army was so sensitive that Wilson and Lansing did not tell their closest aides. No one at the State Department saw the cable to Crosby. But Wilson wrote on Lansing’s draft, “This has my entire approval.”77
On December 11, 1917, Boris Bakhmeteff withdrew $500,000 from his account to buy 3,688,652 ounces of silver, which were handed over to British officials in San Francisco to pay Kaledin’s troops in the Caucasus. Basil Miles, the head of the Russian desk at the State Department, which approved the transaction, wondered about this use of funds “for purposes which may well be regarded as inimical by the Russian people.” He argued that it was “a grave responsibility to direct the City Bank to pay $500,000 for silver to be sent through the British to Kaledin. That involves a question of state.”78
On December 15, Kaledin’s Cossacks and Alekseyev’s troops captured the important city of Rostov-on-Don, four hundred miles northwest of Tbilisi. This seemed like quite a victory, and Maddin Summers, the consul in Moscow, sent his assistant, DeWitt Poole, to Rostov to size up the situation. Poole met with Kaledin, who told him that some of the younger Cossacks were “infected with Bolshevism.” Kaledin wanted to fight, but he had no artillery and practically no infantry—the Cossacks were mounted troops. Poole reported that “the position of the Kaledin government is lamentably weak,” but nonetheless recommended funding it.
On December 17, doubtless cheered by the Rostov victory, Wilson formally approved Lansing’s proposal to help Kaledin. The following day Lansing sent a wire to Sir William Wiseman, the head of British intelligence in the United States, who was then in London. “President believes it is essential to give whatever aid is possible to the Polish, Cossacks and others that are willing to fight Germany,” he cabled, “and while he has no power to lend money directly to such unorganized movements, he is willing to let France and England have funds to transmit to them.”
The time-honored Wilson method was to act through surrogates, in this case by using Bakhmeteff in Washington and his British and French allies. In this way, America would appear to be uninvolved and Wilson could continue to take the ideological high ground in public, as he did on January 8, 1918, when he addressed a joint session of Congress and listed in fourteen points America’s terms of peace. He had already violated the sixth point, “evacuation of Russian territory and Russian self-determination.”
As President Wilson presented his Fourteen Points, the Kaledin forces seemed to be doing well in the Caucasus, with the help of American funds. By December 31, 1917, 1 million rubles had been paid, plus 3 million rubles to buy arms in Teheran. The French had promised Alekseyev 100 million rubles, but had delivered only 300,000. This was a fraction of what was needed, and Poole warned in mid-January that Kaledin had an “urgent need of cash.” The American money pipeline via Oscar Crosby in London did not begin to function regularly until February 1918.
But by that time, Kaledin had suffered serious reversals. At first he lorded it over the Don region north of the Black Sea, where refugees from Bolshevism gathered. But in the homeland of the Cossacks, these bourgeois from the north were seen as intruders, and in an industrial city like Rostov, Kaledin had the workers against him. In late December, the Bolsheviks sent an army to destroy him. The advances of the Red Army, coupled with an uprising in Taganrog, west of Rostov, led Kaledin to withdraw from the Don. In despair, he shot himself in the heart on February 11, 1918. Red forces retook Rostov-on-Don twelve days later.79 President Wilson’s first attempt at a covert operation to overthrow the Reds had turned into a complete fiasco. It could hardly be taken as a good omen, but it would not be his last.