The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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“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 “greatly heartened” by the November 1918 coup Kolchak launched, with British backing, in Omsk, Siberia, believing that at last real military power might emerge in Russia that could “restore orderly existence.”19 Wilds P. Richardson, commander in northern Russia, claimed that “the Russian mind generally speaking [was] several hundred years behind the mind of Western Europe and the United States in the matter of free or democratic government and that [it would] take some generations to develop it.”20
Declaring himself “Supreme Ruler of Russia,” Kolchak received thousands of machine guns, hand grenades, and explosives from the Allied stock. His cause was championed by, among others, Winston Churchill, the New York Times, the U.S. consul general in Irkutsk, and J. P. Morgan.21 The Omsk group, however, represented the “minority and ancient imperialists who were obstinately impervious to the new Russia flaming in revolution against age-long abuses and tyrannies,” as a lieutenant in the 339th Infantry put it. According to General Graves, “Kolchak did not possess sufficient strength to exercise sovereign powers without the support of foreign troops.”22
The American ambassador to Japan, Rowland Morris, reported that all over Siberia under Kolchak’s rule, there was an “orgy of arrests without charges; of executions without even the pretense of a trial; and of confiscations without the color of authority. Panic and fear has seized everyone. Men support each other and live in constant terror that some spy or enemy will cry ‘Bolshevik’ and condemn them to instant death.” Among those killed were former members of the constituent assembly, and railroad workers who had struck for higher wages. In Ekaterinburg, where the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas II and his family, Kolchak allowed Cossacks to massacre at least two thousand Jews, part of a larger wave of pogroms.23
Unconcerned about these atrocities, President Wilson set up a “little war board” to expedite arms shipments to Admiral Kolchak. He provided military support without congressional sanction through Kerensky’s former ambassador to the United States, Boris Bakhmetev, who controlled over $200 million in assets. Historian Robert Maddox wrote that “by conserving and augmenting the embassy’s resources, the Wilson administration established what amounted to an independent treasury for use in Russia … [which was] immune from prying congressmen. The ambassador of the Russian people had now become the quartermaster for the Kolchak regime.”24 In short, the “Midnight War” was waged by executive power, setting an early precedent for today’s imperial presidency.
To keep the Bolsheviks at bay, the State Department established an intelligence apparatus, headed by an American businessman of Greek-Russian extraction, Xenophon Kalamitiano, which infiltrated Soviet-controlled territory and promoted anti-Bolshevik propaganda. Under future president Herbert Hoover, head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), humanitarian aid was positioned to assist the anti-Bolshevik cause.25
The intervention in Russia was formative in the development of covert action. Two major figures in the history of American intelligence, “Wild” Bill Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer and future director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and John Foster Dulles, whose brother Allen later headed the Central Intelligence Agency, served as military intelligence officers, with Donovan undertaking undisclosed missions in Siberia. He concluded that the “time for intervention had past [as] we were a year too late,” though “we [could] prevent a shooting war [next time] if we take