The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano

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СКАЧАТЬ 13th Yorkshire Regiment under a Colonel Lavoi refused orders to fight, which inspired mutiny in a French company in Archangel. On March 30, I-Company in the 339th American infantry followed suit in refusing orders, asserting they had accomplished their mission defeating Germany and were by now “interfering in the affairs of the Russian people with whom we have no quarrel.” Col. George Stewart allegedly responded that he had “never been supplied with an answer as to why they were there himself, but that the reds were trying to push them into the white sea and that they were hence fighting for their lives.”⁵⁸ Though apparently satisfying, this response ran counter to the lies of the Wilson administration that the United States was only in Soviet Russia for defensive purposes and to safeguard war material and property.

      Peter Kropotkin, the celebrated Russian writer, told a British labor delegation that progressive elements in the “civilized nations” should “bring an end to support given to the adversaries of the revolution” and refuse to continue playing the “shameful role to which England, Prussia, Austria and Russia sank during the Russian Revolution.” Kropotkin was an anarchist opposed to the Soviet undermining of the worker and peasant councils that initially supported the revolution, but noted that “all armed intervention by a foreign power necessarily results in an increase in the dictatorial tendencies of the rulers.… The natural evils of state communism have been multiplied tenfold under the pretext that the distress of our existence is due to the intervention of foreigners.”⁵⁹

      In the United States, critics of the intervention were prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts passed under the Wilson administration that made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the U.S. form of government, constitution, military or naval force or flag.” Radical journalist John Reed and New York State Assemblyman Abraham Shiplacoff (the “Jewish Eugene V. Debs”), who said American troops were perceived by Russians as “hired murderers and Hessians,” were among those jailed. Also imprisoned were six Socialist-anarchist activists—Jacob Abrams, Jacob Schwartz, Hyman Rosansky, Samuel Lipman, Mollie Steimer, and Hyman Lachowsky—who were beaten, given long sentences, and deported for distributing antiwar leaflets condemning Wilson’s hypocrisy and urging strikes in munitions plants. The jailings and deportations were upheld in a Supreme Court ruling.⁶⁰ This case shows how intervention in Soviet Russia not only helped sow conflict abroad, but also resulted in the suppression of domestic civil liberties in a pattern that would extend through the Cold War.

      It is ironic that we in the United States have always been led to fear a Russian invasion when Americans were in fact the original invaders. In May 1972 on a visit to the Soviet Union promoting détente, President Richard Nixon boasted to his hosts about having never fought one another in a war, a line repeated by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union address. A New York Times poll the next year found that only 14 percent of Americans said they were aware that in 1918 the United States had landed troops in northern and eastern Soviet Russia, a percentage probably even lower today.⁶¹

      James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong found that none of twelve high school history textbooks he surveyed mentioned the “Midnight War.” In two cases, the U.S. troop presence in Russia was mentioned but only as part of U.S. war strategy and not as an effort to roll back the Russian Revolution. The National World War I Museum in Kansas City meanwhile has only a tiny backroom display, which claims that U.S. soldiers in Archangel “found themselves fighting the Bolshevik Red Guards as well as the anti-Bolshevists,” which is inaccurate. A separate discussion of Siberia claims that U.S. soldiers performed guard duty and protected the railways from Bolshevik forces and that they “followed Wilson’s policy of non-aggression closely, only fighting when provoked small-scale but fierce actions resulting in 170 American dead.” These comments do not properly capture the nature of the war, with no mention at all of atrocities, the soldiers’ poems, mutiny, nor General Graves’s dissent.⁶²

      Deeper public awareness of history in the United States might force us to rethink the direction of our policies and the current slide toward renewed confrontation with Russia, and could enable us to see the world from Russia’s perspective, potentially opening possibilities for engagement. During the Second World War conferences, Stalin is said to have referred to the Wilson administration’s intervention.⁶³ His policies were not consequently based on paranoia, but a real security threat. George F. Kennan, the Father of the Containment Doctrine, was one of the few policymakers to acknowledge the importance of the “Midnight War,” though it was after he had been removed from any position of power. In 1960, Kennan wrote:

      Until I read the accounts of what transpired during these episodes, I never fully realized the reasons for the contempt and resentment borne by the early Bolsheviki towards the Western powers. Never surely have countries contrived to show themselves so much at their worst as did the allies in Russia from 1917–1920. Among other things, their efforts served everywhere to compromise the enemies of the Bolsheviki and to strengthen the communists themselves [thus] aiding the Bolshevik’s progress to power. Wilson said, “I cannot but feel that Bolshevism would have burned out long ago if let alone.”⁶⁴

      These latter comments remain dubious. However, it is clear that after sending troops to quell the revolution, the Soviets would never again trust the United States, predominantly for good reasons, as later history would prove.

      CHAPTER 3

      Provoking Confrontation: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War

      In his June 24, 2015, Times column, “Cold War Without the Fun,” Thomas L. Friedman lamented that the new confrontation between the United States and Russia has so far lacked some of the drama of the twentieth-century version, such as “Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging, a race to the moon or a debate between American and Soviet leaders over whose country has the best kitchen appliances.”

      According to Friedman, the new “post-post-Cold War has more of a W.W.E.—World Wrestling Entertainment—feel to it, and I don’t just mean President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s riding horses barechested, although that is an apt metaphor. It’s just a raw jostling for power for power’s sake—not a clash of influential ideas but rather of spheres of influence.”¹ Friedman’s remarks promote a nostalgic view of the twentieth-century Cold War characteristic of the U.S. political establishment. Cast aside is the horrific human costs that led Mikhail Gorbachev to conclude that the Cold War “made losers of us all.” These costs include the millions of deaths in Korea and Vietnam, the destabilization of Third World countries, the overmilitarization of the U.S. political economy, abuse of civil liberties, and wide inequality.

      Carl Marzani, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) and State Department employee convicted of lying about involvement with the Communist Party, described in his 1952 book We Can be Friends how the United States became thrust into “semi-hysteria” amid a manufactured “war psychosis” with “dog tags on children, airplane spotters on twenty-four-hour duty … roads marked for quick evacuations, buildings designated as air raid shelters, air raid drills everywhere in streets, in stores, in schools.”² The twentieth-century Cold War was not really fun at all if we consider all this. Certainly not for victims like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish couple unjustly executed as atomic spies, thousands of Americans who lost their jobs because of left-leaning political views, or political activists around the world who experienced torture or were “disappeared.”

      The next four chapters will provide a pocket history of the Cold War, showing how Gorbachev was sounder in his assessment than Friedman, America’s “imperial messenger,” as he is named in a book by Belen Fernandez, and others of his ilk. We will begin by looking at the breakdown of U.S.-Soviet relations following the Second World War, and the origins of a conflict that in hindsight we believe, like the current U.S.-Russian standoff, was avoidable.

      While СКАЧАТЬ