Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Volume I: Russia Leaves the War
513
Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Volume I: Russia Leaves the War
513Paperback(REPRINT)
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Overview
These four months, which witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's departure from the warring powers, set the stage for future relations between the two emerging superpowers. Volume 2 of Soviet American Relations, entitled The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, 1958), explored U.S. intervention in northern Russia and Siberia between 1918 and 1920.The distinguished scholar and public servant George F. Kennan opens the way to an understanding not only of these events but of the subsequent pattern of Soviet-American relations and the complex process of international diplomacy generally.
Kennan became the U.S. government's key analyst of the Soviet Union after a two-year stint in the Foreign Service there (1944-1946), which had been preceded by service in the American embassy in Moscow before World War II. His "long telegram" to his superiors at the State Department, written in 1946 and published a year later in revised form in Foreign Affairs as the famous "X" article, was perhaps the most influential statement in the early years of the Cold War.
After leaving the Foreign Service, Kennan joined the faculty at the School for Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he wrote Russia Leaves the War and subsequent books.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691008417 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/21/1989 |
| Series: | Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920 Ser , #1 |
| Edition description: | REPRINT |
| Pages: | 513 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Russia Leaves the War
Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920
By George F. Kennan
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1956 George F. KennanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-00841-7
CHAPTER 1
THE IMMEDIATE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The seizure of power in Petrograd by the Bolsheviki on November 7–8, 1917 constitutes the formal point of departure for this narrative. But it was, of course, only the final phase of a revolutionary process which had begun with the collapse of the Tsarist system several months earlier. Before we proceed to examine the course of Soviet-American relations, it will be useful to glance briefly at the American reaction to the earlier phases of this revolutionary process.
The events that marked the fall of Tsardom in March 1917 (usually referred to, by virtue of the difference in calendar, as the February Revolution) constituted one of the most amazing, least foreseen, and to this day least understood of the great political changes of history. To attempt to describe these events would surpass the purposes of this study. But there are certain features of the February Revolution worth noting here.
First of all, it was not a contrived revolution. No one planned it. No one organized it. Even the Bolsheviki, who for years had dreamed of such a day and had conceived of themselves as professionals in the art of producing revolutions, were taken wholly by surprise. The February Revolution was simply the sudden, crashing breakdown of an old dynastic-imperial system, caught between the stresses of a major modern war, for which it was inadequate, and the inertia of an imperial court that had lost its orderliness of procedure, its feel for events, its contact with the people, and even the respect of the ruling bureaucracy.
A great many Russians had dreamed — like the Bolsheviki — of revolution in one form or another and to one degree or another, and had chafed under what seemed to them the interminable delay in its arrival; but from the standpoint of the ideals to which most of these people aspired, the February Revolution may be said to have come, if not prematurely, then at a most inopportune time. For one thing, the country was endeavoring to conduct a major war, involving extensive mobilization of manpower and a great strain on the entire economic and administrative system. This was an involvement which, as the Bolsheviki were later to learn to their sorrow, would not be easily liquidated and which could not fail to add to the burden of any new regime assuming power at that time. But beyond that, there was no adequate unity among the various political groups available to share in, or compete for, the inheritance of the Tsar's power. There was not, as among them, even that modicum of consensus on the terms of political competition that would have been necessary to make possible any orderly transition to some stable form of representative government. The Russian political society that had simmered under the crust of Tsarist power and had yearned for its disappearance or moderation was actually riven, itself, by tragic and scarcely reconcilable divisions. The events of the abortive revolution of 1905, and more recently the stresses of the First World War, had carried the Russian socialists to a point where their hatred and distrust of the "bourgeois" parties was extreme. Their very attachment to their country had been weakened in favor of concepts of political obligation based on class rather than on nation. The non-socialist elements, on the other hand, tended to view the socialist leaders as irresponsible demagogues, little short of traitorous. The situation was further complicated by separatist tendencies in many parts of the Russian Empire — tendencies inflamed by the unhappiness of the time and now greatly stimulated by the disappearance of the dynastic center that had been at least the symbol, and the only symbol, of political unity.
So long as the structure of Tsarist power held together, the latent antagonisms among these divergent elements were in part concealed and disguised by their common hope for a change; but, once Tsardom was gone, there was nothing to keep the manifold antagonisms from coming out into the open, greatly accentuated by the unexpected competition for the succession into which the various elements suddenly found themselves thrust.
The situation was rendered peculiarly complicated by the fact that in the period immediately following the collapse of Tsardom neither of the two major camps of political contenders was in a position to get along, for the moment, without the other. The nonsocialist parties included within their following the overwhelming portion of the political and administrative experience available in the country. They alone could muster the knowledge, the insights, and the international connections requisite to the immediate establishment of a new governmental system on the ruins of the old one. It was natural that they should take the initiative — as they did — in setting up the framework of a provisional government; and it was natural, in the circumstances, that this government should draw its legitimacy from the last Tsarist duma, or parliament, a body primarily non-socialist in its composition.
But it was the socialists, united in the various ad hoc "soviets of workers' and peasants' deputies," and outstandingly in the Petrograd Soviet, who commanded the confidence of the mass of industrial workers in the large cities and of the politically conscious portions of the rank and file of the armed forces. The importance of both these latter elements had been greatly heightened, from the standpoint of the struggle for political power, by the fact that the old Tsarist police force had been shattered in the process of the February Revolution, leaving the maintenance of order in the urban areas largely at the mercy of the soldier and worker elements — the only elements having disciplined young manpower and, usually, arms.
Thus it was the non-socialist parties alone who were able to provide the essential forms of the new provisional governmental power — a fact which the socialist groups, themselves not yet ready for the assumption of governmental responsibility, were fully prepared to recognize. Yet the substance of domestic power, in the sense of ultimate control over the behavior of the armed forces and ultimate domination of the city streets, rested with the socialist elements, who had their own independent organ of legislative and executive power in the form of the Petrograd Soviet and the other city soviets amenable to their influence. The Petrograd Soviet, while almost wholly socialist, was at the outset not yet Bolshevik-dominated (the Bolsheviki were still only a minority among the parties there represented), but it constituted an independent force, not really subject to the authority of the government; and many of its members held feelings of deep bitterness and suspicion toward the entire non-socialist sector of Russian society, including most of the members of the Provisional Government.
In this way there came about that dangerous duality of political authority — the so-called dvoevlastye — which characterized the months immediately following the fall of Tsardom. The Provisional Government was permitted to function as the titular repository of state power and the external exponent of Russian interests. But internally its authority depended in many respects on the support of the Petrograd Soviet, which it could not control, which was prepared to support it only "insofar as" it served socialist purposes, and which stubbornly refused to be lured into accepting any formal responsibility commensurate with its real power. Between these two parallel governments there was no ordered relationship, no intimacy, no consensus — only distrust, hostility, and an uneasy jockeying for position.
This situation had two major implications from the standpoint of the United States. First, it meant that the chances for political stability in the new regime were small indeed. Plainly, such a state of affairs could not endure for long. The fall of Tsardom had been only the prelude to the real struggle for power. Particularly ominous was the fact that the attachment to the principles of parliamentary government was weak or non-existent in large sections of the Russian public. The common people had little conception of what political freedom meant. Many socialists were not sure that the "bourgeois" elements ought to have any share at all in the political life of the state. The monarchists were sure that the "internationalist" socialists ought not to have any such share at all. Only in limited "bourgeois-liberal" circles, soon to be left isolated and helpless by the rapid drift of power to the left, was there any real conception of parliamentary democracy in the western sense.
Secondly, this situation meant that the prospects for Russia's continued participation in the war were very poor. The attempt to continue the war effort would have taxed the resources of even a unified and firmly entrenched regime. To suppose that such an effort could be carried out by a government lacking real authority over the troops, acting through an officers' corps which had lost face with the rank and file — this in face of the fact that the mass of the soldiers were war-weary and largely indifferent to the issues of the war, and in face of the further fact that a considerable portion of the socialists, to whom the soldiers looked for leadership, were already committed to the view that the war was an imperialist one, serving no useful purpose — to suppose this was to be optimistic indeed.
Yet the fact is that neither of these realities was widely noted in the United States; it is, indeed, not an exaggeration to say that the policy of the United States government toward the Russian Provisional Government was founded largely on ignorance of both of them and on the hope that just the opposite would be the case: that Russia would evolve rapidly, that is, in the direction of democratic stability, and that she would continue to prosecute vigorously, as a loyal and enthusiastic member of the western coalition, the war against Germany. In these misunderstandings will be found the roots not only of much of the ineffectiveness of American policy toward the Provisional Government but also of the difficulty experienced by many Americans at a later date in adjusting to the realities of Soviet power.
The misunderstandings were in no way unnatural. There was nothing in the traditional American political philosophy to make Americans aware of such virtues as the Tsarist system may have had or to cause them to doubt that the removal of this system would be followed by rapid progress in the direction of parliamentary democracy. It had never occurred to most Americans that the political principles by which they themselves lived might have been historically conditioned and might not enjoy universal validity. Interest in Russia among the American public had been confined largely to a sympathetic following of the struggle against autocracy. It had centered in two main groups. One was composed of what might be called the native-born American liberals, men whose sympathies had been captured by the sufferings of the Russian oppositionists of an earlier date. A number of American figures, including the elder George Kennan, Samuel Clemens, and William Lloyd Garrison, had come together in the early Nineties to set up a private organization called "The Friends of Russian Freedom," the purpose of which was to bring aid to the victims of Tsarist oppressions. This organization had endured up to the time of the Revolution. Such of the original members as were still living when the Revolution came were older people. Their impressions of the Russian revolutionary movement, based largely on observations made by Kennan in the 1860's and 1880's, related to the pre-Marxist phase of the struggle. In the period just before the Revolution, their sympathy and aid were addressed mainly to the Social-Revolutionaries who, comprising a socialist but not Marxist party, appeared to them as the spiritual heirs to the earlier populist tendencies in the Russian revolutionary movement. They had little idea of the implications of the latter-day Marxist domination of Russian revolutionary thought.
In this respect, the older liberals differed particularly from the other group of Americans, or American residents, interested in Russia. These were the newly immigrated Jews — consisting chiefly of people who had removed to this country since the 1880's in order to escape racial discrimination or political persecution, or both. In large proportion they were people affected by the Marxian doctrines that had made so profound an impression on the Jews of the Russian "pale." They were predominantly Social-Democrats, rather than Social-Revolutionaries. They differed from the American liberals in that their conception of the opposition movement in Russia was oriented toward social revolution in the sense of the shift of power to a given social class, rather than toward general political liberty in the American sense. They shared with the others only the intense desire that Tsarist absolutism should be swept away. Between them, these two groups pretty well dominated the formation of American opinion with respect to Russian matters.
These circumstances would in themselves have been enough to assure an eager and unquestioning welcome of the fall of Tsardom in almost all shades of American opinion. But to them was added the close coincidence of the first Russian Revolution with America's entry into the First World War. From the standpoint of the needs of American statesmanship at that particular time, the Russian Revolution, as generally viewed and understood in the United States, could not have come more opportunely. President Wilson, it will be recalled, was then just approaching the end of the long agony of decision involved in the determination of America's relationship to the European war. In the first weeks of 1917 the tide of events had run relentlessly in the direction of America's entry into the war on the Entente side. The German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, on February 1, 1917, had in fact deprived American statesmanship of the last area of maneuver, and had virtually sealed the issue. After that, it was only a question of time.
But there was still the question of the interpretation to be given officially to this tremendous departure in American policy. Technically speaking, the immediate impulse to our entry into the war lay in violations of our neutrality. But the defense of neutral rights was a confused and uninspiring issue, legalistic, involved, understood by very few. It was an issue, furthermore, on which our grievances against our future allies were only slightly less serious than our grievances against the Germans. Not only was this too narrow and technical a cause in which to lead a great people into battle, but many doubted that it was really the cause at all. There was a general consciousness among American statesmen, on the eve of the fateful step, of a need to find for this departure a loftier and more inspiring rationale than the mere defense of neutral rights, one closer to the solemnity with which Americans experienced that stirring moment, and one more directly related to the needs and ideals of men everywhere — not just to the people of the United States.
Into this questioning, the first Russian Revolution, occurring only three weeks before our entry into the war, entered with important effect because it appeared to alter the ideological composition of the coalition with which we were about to ally ourselves. At the Cabinet meeting of March 20,1917, where it was unanimously decided to ask Congress for a declaration of war, Secretary of State Lansing (according to his own account written on the heels of the event5) argued for the step on the grounds that
... the revolution in Russia, which appeared to be successful, had removed the one objection to affirming that the European war was a war between Democracy and Absolutism; that the only hope of a permanent peace between all nations depended upon the establishment of democratic institutions throughout the world; ...
The moment seemed particularly propitious, Lansing added, because
... action by us ... would have a great moral influence in Russia, ... would encourage the democratic movement in Germany, ... would put new spirit in the Allies....
Wilson was at first hesitant in accepting this thesis that the Russian Revolution gave grounds for presenting America's war effort as a crusade for democracy. "The President said," Lansing's account continued,
that he did not see how he could speak of a war for Democracy or of Russia's revolution in addressing Congress. I replied that I did not perceive any objection but in any event I was sure that he could do so indirectly by attacking the character of the autocratic government of Germany as manifested by its deeds of inhumanity, by its broken promises, and by its plots and conspiracies against this country.
To this the President only answered "Possibly."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Russia Leaves the War by George F. Kennan. Copyright © 1956 George F. Kennan. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PREFACE, vii,PROLOGUE, 3,
I. THE IMMEDIATE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND, 8,
II. PERSONALITIES, 27,
III. FIRST REACTIONS, 71,
IV. THE SOVIET APPROACH TO AN ARMISTICE, 85,
V. FIRST PROBLEMS OF "CONTACT" WITH THE SOVIET AUTHORITIES, 99,
VI. ALLIED DELIBERATIONS IN PARIS, 131,
VII. WILSON AND THE WAR AIMS, 140,
VIII. LANSING AND THE RECOGNITION PROBLEM, 149,
IX. THE PROBLEM OF ANTI-BOLSHEVIK RUSSIA, 160,
X. THE KALPASHNIKOV AFFAIR, 191,
XI. THE FIRST BREST-LITOVSK CRISIS, 219,
XII. THE FOURTEEN POINTS, 242,
XIII. SIBERIA — THE BACKGROUND, 275,
XIV. SIBERIA — THE FIRST EXCHANGES, 291,
XV. JAPAN ASKS FOR A FREE HAND, 316,
XVI. THE DIAMANDI INCIDENT, 330,
XVII. THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, 343,
XVIII. BREST-LITOVSK AND THE AMERICANS, 364,
XIX. WASHINGTON AND THE PROBLEM OF "CONTACTS", 378,
XX. COMPLICATIONS IN PETROGRAD, 397,
XXI. THE BREAKUP IN PETROGRAD, 412,
XXII. THE SISSON PAPERS, 441,
XXIII. SIBERIA AND THE FINAL BREST-LITOVSK CRISIS, 458,
XXIV. ROBINS AND RATIFICATION, 486,
APPENDIX, 521,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 523,
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, 525,
INDEX, 533,