The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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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 Crimean War, and Russia returned the favor by sending a naval fleet as a signal to the British and French to desist from their plans to intervene 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