The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano

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СКАЧАТЬ militarily on behalf of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War.⁶ Popular stereotypes about Russia pervaded nevertheless, exemplified in Theodore Roosevelt’s characterization of Russians as “utterly insincere and treacherous … [without] conception of the truth … and no regard for others.” He and his contemporaries feared that an independent Russia could not be counted on to acquiesce to American control in Southeast Asia and designs of opening up the fabled China market.⁷

      The Bolshevik drive to nationalize industry and seize foreign assets was ideologically and economically anathema to the United States, which in 1917 held investments of over $658.9 million in the country, up from $26.5 million in 1913. Historian William Appleman Williams noted that almost all products of American industry were sold in Russia. Baldwin locomotives and U.S. Steel enabled the Trans-Siberian railway and Chinese eastern railways to run smoothly. International Harvester, which controlled the Russian market for agricultural machinery, even requested through the U.S. ambassador an intervention by the tsarist government to break a strike in Russia. The House of J. P. Morgan had given “great impetus to the rise of direct investments” after helping set up the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce in 1916. On the eve of the Revolution, Dean E. F. Gray of the Harvard Business School considered “Russia an inviting field for American business enterprise,” that the Bolshevik takeover threatened.⁸

      The Russian Revolution unfolded in two phases. In February 1917, the tsar was overthrown and Aleksander Kerensky established a liberal provisional revolutionary government. It was deeply unpopular because Kerensky kept Russian forces fighting in the Great War on the side of the Allies when they had begun to mutiny, and he refused to meet the demand for land and wealth redistribution. Following a counterrevolutionary putsch by Lavr Kornilov, whom the New York Times heralded as “the strong man who would deliver Russia from her tribulations,” the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in November 1917, led by Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, who envisioned the creation of a classless utopian society.⁹

      Horrified by the Bolsheviks, American liberals, as Christopher Lasch detailed in The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (1962), were enthusiastic about Kerensky’s bourgeois revolution because it removed a stumbling block to Russia’s effective participation in the Great War on the side of the Allies. The February revolution, Lasch notes, “purified the allied cause,” making it easier for its supporters to conceive of it as a “conflict between the principle of democracy and the principle of autocracy,” as the Springfield, Missouri Republican declared.¹⁰

      To keep Russia in the war, the Wilson administration extended tens of millions in credits for armaments and military supplies to Kerensky’s government, with J. P. Morgan also raising money in direct support of Kerensky’s cause. The influential diplomat George Kennan Sr., author of an exposé of the tsarist criminal justice system that depicted Russia as an embodiment of Dante’s Inferno, lost patience with Kerensky because of his unwillingness to undertake a thorough purge of the opposition. Kennan hoped for the emergence of a strongman who would forcibly suppress every trace of radicalism in Russia. He lamented the Bolsheviks’ strong urging for peace, fearing they would use their popularity in ending the war to proceed with their “crazy plan” for “turning Russia upside down with the proletariat on top.”¹¹

      Secretary of State Robert Lansing, a corporate lawyer married to the daughter of Secretary of State John Foster (making him the uncle of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles) was similarly skeptical of Kerensky, not because he was “incompetent, inefficient and worthless” as British General Alfred Knox considered him, or failed to “reach down roots into the life of Russia,” as Raymond Robins, director of a Red Cross mission, recognized, but because he “compromised too much with the radical element of the revolution.” Like Kennan Sr., Lansing considered Bolshevism a “despotism [born] of ignorance,” that is, of the mob, and a menace that could trigger social unrest “throughout the world.” Lansing asked: “Because wealth unavoidably gravitates toward men who are intellectually superior and more ready to grasp opportunities than their fellows, is that a reason for taking it away from them or for forcing them to divide with the improvident, the mentally inferior and the indolent?”¹²

      Lansing’s viewpoint reflected an engrained class prejudice among America’s foreign policy elite that drove conservative, anti-radical policies. Charles S. Crane, another influential adviser to President Wilson, and who later urged FDR to support Nazi Germany as a “bulwark of Christian culture,” spoke of the “futility of revolution as a means of progressing and the fearful disaster that may overtake a state and all of its citizens if it does not progress in orderly fashion.”¹³

      Releasing its decision to the press weeks after the fact, the Wilson administration initially justified sending troops from the European theater of the First World War into Russia as an extension of the war against Germany. Edgar Sisson, the Petrograd representative of the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda agency set up to promote U.S. involvement in the war, produced a series of sixty-eight documents purporting to prove that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents. Later, however, these were proven to have been fabrications. When the Bolsheviks withdrew from the war, the military campaigns continued with backing from prominent intellectuals, moderate labor leaders like Samuel Gompers, who considered the Bolsheviks to have “used every means to throttle freedom by joining Germany in its efforts to enslave the world,” and business executives like R. D. McCarter, president of Westinghouse and a later associate of President Herbert Hoover who considered armed intervention in Russia “absolutely necessary … as a prerequisite for building grain elevators … refrigerator plants and cars … railway improvements and new railways.”¹⁴

      Raymond Robins, chairman of the Progressive Party Convention in 1916, became a dissenting voice urging accommodation alongside State Department envoys William Bullitt and William Buckler, who reported the Soviets’ willingness to compromise on foreign debt and protection of existing enterprise and to offer amnesty to Whites and cease foreign propaganda if peace were to be secured. Recognizing that “revolutions never go backward,” Robins proposed an economic program designed to tie the Soviet economy to that of the United States, persuading Lenin to exempt the International Harvester Company, Singer Sewing Machine Company, and Westinghouse Brake Company from his nationalization decree. For these efforts, he was recalled and shadowed by agents of the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), a victim of the mounting anti-communist hysteria of the first Red Scare.¹⁵

      Robins nevertheless influenced congressional anti-imperialists such as Senators William Borah (R-ID), Robert La Follette (R-WI), and Hiram Johnson (R-CA), who wondered whether in attempting to destroy Bolshevism the Wilson administration was bent on putting “the Romanovs [back] on the throne? Do we seek a dictator for this starved land?” Johnson continued: “I warn you of the policy, which God forbid this nation should ever enter upon, of endeavoring to impose by military force upon the various peoples of the earth the kind of government we desire for them and they do not desire for themselves.”¹⁶

      President Wilson had long believed in a strong executive, which he considered the only bulwark against the “clumsy misrule of Congress.”¹⁷ He was also a vigorous proponent of U.S. expansion, having previously sent forces to help suppress revolution in Mexico. At one point, he acknowledged that the October Revolution was a “desperate attempt on the part of the dispossessed to share in the bounty of industrial civilization” and that the Russian people had grown impatient with the slow pace of reform, though he fretted about the revolutionary effort to “make the ignorant and incapable mass dominant in the world.” The only remedy for “class despotism in Petrograd,” as Wilson and Lansing saw it, was for a “strong commanding personality to arise … and gather a disciplined military force [capable of] restoring order and maintaining a new government.”¹⁸ Great hope in fulfilling this role was placed with Admiral Aleksandr Vasilevich Kolchak, a famed Arctic explorer and commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Kolchak was known for a rash temper that often led him “beyond the limits of the law.” James Landfield of the State Department was among those СКАЧАТЬ