The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano

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      CHAPTER 2

      “The Time You Sent Troops to Quell the Revolution”: The True Origins of the Cold War

      Did we declare war upon Russia

      when we took a hand in the game

      I know that we hopped onto Prussia

      And Austria got the same.

      But still I have no recollection

      Of breaking with Russia, I swear

      And cannot help making objection,

      To having our boys over there

      What quarrel have we with that nation?

      Just how did it tread on our toes?

      —GEORGE SMITH, “What About Bringing Them Home,” 1919

      Why are you fighting us, American? We are all brothers. We are all working men. You American boys are shedding your blood away up here in Russia and I ask you for what reason? My friends, and comrades, you should be back home for the war with Germany is over and you have no war with us. The co-workers of the world are uniting against capitalism: Why are you being kept here, can you answer that question? No. We don’t want to fight you. But we do want to fight the capitalists and your officers are capitalists.

      —BOLSHEVIK ORATOR, near Kadish in northern Russia, January 1919

      As a new Cold War heats up today, it is no surprise that the history of the First Cold War has been distorted to fit a triumphalist narrative about U.S. policy, its adverse consequences predominantly overlooked.¹ President Barack Obama, a key architect of the Second Cold War, in his book The Audacity of Hope (2006), praised the postwar leadership of President Harry S. Truman, Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and George Marshall, and State Department diplomat George Kennan for responding to the Soviet threat and “crafting the architecture of a new postwar order that married [Woodrow] Wilson’s idealism to hard-headed realism.” This, Obama says, led to a “successful outcome to the Cold War”: an avoidance of nuclear catastrophe; the effective end of conflict between the world’s great military powers; and an “era of unprecedented economic growth at home and abroad.” While acknowledging some excesses, including the toleration and even aid to “thieves like Mobutu and Noriega so long as they opposed communism,” Obama went on to praise Ronald Reagan’s arms buildup in the 1980s when he himself came of political age, saying that when the “Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him the vote.”²

      Obama’s remarks reflect a strong element of wishful thinking echoed in academic studies that blame Joseph Stalin principally for the outbreak of the Cold War and praise the visionary quality of America’s “wise men” in saving the world from Communism.³ Left out is how U.S. policymakers constantly exaggerated the Soviet threat to justify expanding a U.S. overseas network of military bases, caused serious economic problems through excessive military spending, waged violently destructive wars in Korea and Vietnam, and led the world close to the nuclear brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Obama and others advancing a similar worldview meanwhile neglect the real reason the Cold War started and when it actually broke out, which was at the dawn of the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

      Showing what Wilsonian idealism was really all about, President Wilson deployed over ten thousand American troops to the European theater of the First World War, alongside British, French, Canadian, and Japanese troops, in support of White Army counterrevolutionary generals implicated in wide-scale atrocities, including pogroms against Jews. This “Midnight War” was carried out illegally, without the consent of Congress, and was opposed by the U.S. War Department and commander in Siberia, William S. Graves. He expressed “doubt if history will record in the past century a more flagrant case of flouting the well-known and approved practice in states in their international relations, and using instead of the accepted principles of international law, the principle of might makes right.”⁴

      The atrocities associated with this war and the trampling on Soviet Russia’s sovereignty would remain seared in its people’s memory, shaping a deep sense of mistrust that carries over into the present day. For Americans, the “Midnight War” is a non-event, however, because it does not fit the dominant triumphalist narrative of the Cold War or reflect well on a liberal icon and the tradition he invented.

      As historian D. F. Fleming wrote:

      For the American people, the cosmic tragedy of the intervention in Russia does not exist, or it was an unimportant incident, long forgotten. But for the Soviet people and their leaders the period was a time of endless killing, of looting and raping, of plague and famine, of measureless suffering for scores of millions—an experience burned into the very soul of the nation, not to be forgotten for many generations, if ever. Also, for many years, the harsh Soviet regimentation could all be justified by fear that the Capitalist power would be back to finish the job. It is not strange that in an address in New York, September 17, 1959, Premier Khrushchev should remind us of the interventions, “the time you sent the troops to quell the revolution,” as he put it.⁵

      These comments suggest that the U.S. invasion helped poison U.S.-Russian/Soviet relations and contributed significantly to the outbreak of Cold War hostilities. It laid the seeds, furthermore, for all the destructive policies that were to come—including executive secrecy, the eschewing of diplomacy, burning of peasant villages, and arming of violent right-wing forces—which in turn mark the Cold War as a dark chapter in our history.

      DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the Franklin Pierce administration sent a military delegation to assist Russia during the СКАЧАТЬ