Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Volume II: The Decision to Intervene

Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Volume II: The Decision to Intervene

by George Frost Kennan
ISBN-10:
0691008426
ISBN-13:
9780691008424
Pub. Date:
11/21/1989
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
ISBN-10:
0691008426
ISBN-13:
9780691008424
Pub. Date:
11/21/1989
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Volume II: The Decision to Intervene

Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Volume II: The Decision to Intervene

by George Frost Kennan
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Overview

In 1918 the U.S. government decided to involve itself with the Russian Revolution by sending troops to Siberia. This book re-creates that unhappily memorable storythe arrival of British marines at Murmansk, the diplomatic maneuvering, the growing Russian hostility, the uprising of Czechoslovak troops in central Siberia which threatened to overturn the Bolsheviks, the acquisitive ambitions of the Japanese in Manchuria, and finally the decision by President Wilson to intervene with American troops. Of this period Kennan writes, "Never, surely, in the history of American diplomacy, has so much been paid for so little."


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691008424
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 11/21/1989
Series: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920 Series , #2
Edition description: REPRINT
Pages: 513
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

The Decision to Intervene

Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920


By George F. Kennan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1958 George F. Kennan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-00842-4



CHAPTER 1

THE RUSSIAN NORTH


The outbreak of the World War in 1914 effectively closed the Russian Baltic ports as channels of access for Russia to the Atlantic Ocean. Northern and western Russia were left with no direct maritime approach to the Atlantic other than by the bays and inlets of the Barents Sea, on the Arctic coast. As of 1914 there was only one port of any significance in this region. This was Archangel, situated at the head of the Duna Gulf on the White Sea.

Founded in 1584 by Dutch merchants, Archangel soon developed into an important harbor for trade between Russia and the West. It served as an alternative to the port of Narva, on the Finnish Gulf, and its importance was of course greatest at those times when traffic through Narva was interrupted. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of developments — Russia's acquisition of the Baltic provinces with the excellent and well-established port of Riga, the development of a new port at St. Petersburg, and the initial orientation of Russian railway construction toward the Baltic harbors — all served to diminish the activity and significance of Archangel. But at the beginning of the present century a railway was built linking Archangel to the general Russian railway system; and the activity of the port was spurred by the rapid growth of the British market for timber and forest products. By 1914 the place had become, despite its remote location, the administrative and commercial center for the entire Russian North. It had a population of nearly 50,000. It handled, to be sure, only a tiny proportion of Russia's foreign trade by value; but its shipments were large in bulk, and they involved a sizeable port activity.

Archangel is situated on the eastern bank of the Northern Duna (in Russian, Dvina) River, just at the point where that great stream broadens out into an island delta. Several channels wind their way another forty miles through the islands to the open water of the White Sea. The area is a fine natural port, with protected anchorage for hundreds of ocean-going vessels and with great expanses of potential dockside area. Town and harbor are laid out on the sweeping scale of all the newer Russian cities, and exhibit that careless generosity of the horizontal dimension which is the outstanding characteristic of the North Russian landscape generally.

In 1914 the docks and warehouses of the port already stretched for thirteen miles along both banks of the river. The town itself, though composed like all North Russian communities primarily of log structures, could boast of a main street, the Troitski Prospekt, conceived on the impressive pattern of the great Petrograd avenues. It extended for nearly three miles parallel to the river bank, and was lined with a number of relatively modern and permanent structures.

Aside from its remote location, Archangel's most serious handicap as a wartime port was its icebound condition throughout nearly half the year. Navigation closed, as a rule, in November, and could not be resumed until late May, sometimes even June. By use of modern icebreakers it was possible to whittle a few days off this icebound period at both ends. A certain further alleviation could sometimes be achieved by the use of discharging areas near the mouth of the delta. But the fact remained that the inner harbor, constituting the main dockside area, was normally closed to navigation for a period of nearly six months in each year.

The activity of the port of Archangel increased greatly in the early war years, with the development of munition and supply shipments from the western Allies to European Russia. During the summer of 1916 more than six hundred vessels visited the port. In 1917, for the first time, American vessels — members of the rapidly growing war merchant marine — were included among the many ships arriving at Archangel with war supplies.

Prior to 1917 the United States had had no regular official representation at Archangel. There had been, in the earlier war years, only a local resident, a Danish businessman, who had performed American consular services as a side line, under the title of American Consular Agent. By the summer of 1917 the Dane had contrived, deservedly or otherwise, to get himself on the black books of the Allied intelligence services as a likely German agent. For this reason, and because American vessels were now beginning to visit the port, the United States government decided to replace the Consular Agent with a regular consular representative. Mr. Felix Cole, one of the young wartime vice consuls on the staff of the Petrograd Consulate, was accordingly detailed to Archangel in late summer. Cole, a Harvard graduate, had been five years in Russia on private pursuits prior to his entry into the service, and had a good working knowledge of the Russian language. With his arrival in Archangel the United States government acquired for the first time an independent source of information on developments in the northern area.

At the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd the Allies were interested in Archangel not only for its importance as a channel of entrance and egress for European Russia but also for the fact that here too, as at Vladivostok, war supplies shipped by the Allies to former Russian governments had accumulated in large quantity. At the great military discharging area of Bakaritsa, across the river from the city, and at the advance port of Ekonomia near the mouth of the delta, a total of 162,495 tons of such supplies had piled up and were awaiting removal at the end of 1917. These included valuable stocks of metals: 2,000 tons of aluminum, 2,100 tons of antimony, 14,000 tons of copper, 5,230 tons of lead, etc. Not only had these supplies been provided by the Allies from their own scarce wartime stocks, but they had been in effect paid for as well by the Allies under the credits extended to Russian governments, and had been shipped in the extremely scarce Allied tonnage, desperately needed in other theaters of war. Quite naturally, the Allied governments felt a keen concern for the fate of these stores, and considered themselves entitled to have a voice in deciding what — in view of Russia's departure from the war — should be done with them.

The political situation at Archangel, in the weeks immediately following the November Revolution, was not dissimilar to that which prevailed in Vladivostok. Here, too, a remoteness from the Russian center, the prominent presence and interest of friendly Allied representatives, and the greater cosmopolitanism of a community oriented primarily to foreign trade and shipping, combined to retard the advance of the Bolshevik movement. To these factors there was added the extensive dependence of the city on food supply from overseas — a circumstance which became increasingly important with the dwindling of food shipments from the disorganized Russian interior.

In the face of these circumstances, the revolution at Petrograd found, initially, only a partial reflection in the situation at Archangel. Power was peacefully assumed, at the outset, by a so-called Revolutionary Committee, dominated by the moderate Social-Revolutionaries who — as the elections of delegates to the Constituent Assembly were soon to demonstrate — enjoyed a majority of popular support in the Archangel area. The members of this Committee and of the local municipal administration took a reasonable and friendly attitude toward the Allies and manifested from the start a readiness to solve mutual problems by discussion and agreement.

The Bolsheviki had no sooner consolidated their power in Petrograd than they set about to put an end to this unsatisfactory situation in Archangel. Immediately after the suppression of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 there was despatched to Archangel a high-powered "Extraordinary Commission," headed by a Bolshevik commissar, M. S. Kedrov (Tsederbaum), who from this time on was to bear the major executive and military authority on behalf of the Soviet government for the Northern Region, and who was later to become the leading Soviet historian of the events surrounding the Allied intervention in that area. The Extraordinary Commission was instructed, first, to assure complete Bolshevik control of the city and surrounding region and, second, to arrange for the immediate despatch to the interior of the war materials stored at Bakaritsa.

The reason for this last measure was presumably the desire of the Soviet leaders to get these materials to a place where they could themselves have easy access to them and where they would be safe from recapture by the Allies. The decision was taken without consultation with, or forewarning to, the Allied governments. It came almost simultaneously with the Soviet repudiation of the debts of the former Russian governments. This meant that in addition to appropriating the supplies for purposes which had nothing to do with Russia's war effort, now effectively at an end, the Soviet government was refusing to pay for them.

Kedrov and his associates lost no time in proceeding to the execution of their orders. On February 7 they succeeded, as Cole put it in one of his despatches, in "bulldozing" for themselves a majority in the Archangel Soviet. Using this leverage, they at once proceeded to abolish the Revolutionary Committee and to assume effective power, in the name of the Soviet, throughout the city and the surrounding region. The change was effected without bloodshed, and without immediate challenge to the position of the Allied representatives in the port.

The political situation having been thus brought under control, the members of the Extraordinary Commission proceeded with similar despatch to the removal of the war stores. This was not easy, in view of the general economic disorganization and the low state of efficiency of the Vologda-Archangel railway. But here, as in so many other situations, Bolshevik ruthlessness and determination were effective; by late March shipments were going forward to the interior at the rate of about 3,000 tons per week. Most of them were routed to another storage site on the banks of the Sukhona River, near Vologda.

Early in January 1918, prior to the final Soviet seizure of power in Archangel, the moderate elements then in charge of the city had appealed to the British and American representatives for assistance in the supply of the region with food, pointing out that the Archangel district had received in 1917 only one-half of its usual supply from the Russian interior, and asking specifically for 35,000 tons of foodstuffs, mostly flour. In making this request, the members of the Revolutionary Committee were quite conscious of the Allied interest in the war materials stored at Bakaritsa and Ekonomia, and were clearly prepared to agree that some of these stores should be released and returned to the Allies as a quid pro quo for the food. The British government responded, through its consul at Archangel, with a proposal to send two cargoes of food, in vessels so constructed as to be capable of penetrating the ice at least to the outer port, in return for which the Archangel authorities were to release sufficient quantities of war stores to make up return cargoes. By the time the British reply reached Archangel, however, the Extraordinary Commission had taken over and was busy carting the stores away. Not being particularly concerned for the comfort of a community predominantly anti-Bolshevik in its political sentiments, the leaders of the Commission proved deaf to all entreaties that the removals should cease. The British government, in a bit of wartime confusion, nevertheless despatched the two ships. They arrived in late April, only to find themselves compelled to lie idle in the roadstead for some two months, vainly awaiting settlement of the dispute over the war supplies.

In such circumstances it will readily be understood that the Bolshevik persistence in removing the supplies was intensely presented in Allied circles. What possible right, it was asked, could the Bolsheviki have to dispose over these valuable stores, sent to Russia at the expense and sacrifice of others for use in a purpose the Soviet government had now abandoned? To this grievance there was added, in many Allied minds, the suspicion that the removal of the stores was inspired by the Germans and that the materials would eventually end up in German hands.

So long as the port remained frozen, there was little that the Allies could do about it. The ice made any armed action unthinkable. It was this fact, together with the realization that with the thawing of the port in June the situation would change, that lent such urgency to the Bolshevik action in removing the stores. Meanwhile the matter naturally rankled in Allied minds and came to constitute one of the factors justifying, in the Allied view, military intervention for the protection of the Allied war interests in the North Russian area.


* * *

In view of Archangel's brief navigation season, it had always represented only a partial alternative to the Russian Baltic ports, some of which were entirely ice-free in normal winters. For this reason the decision was taken, early in the war, to supplement Archangel by the development of a new northern port which could be used the entire year.

The site chosen for the new port was a point on the Kola Inlet of the Murmansk coast, not far from the Finnish border. The Kola Inlet may be described geographically as the easternmost of the larger Norwegian fjords. Stretching some forty-six miles from the open sea to the confluence of the Tuloma and Kola Rivers, it resembles the fjords of the adjoining Norwegian coast in depth, narrowness, and relatively ice-free condition in winter — a product of the influence of the Gulf Stream. But it is extremely remote from all the Russian urban centers. In 1914 it was accessible to central Russia only via Archangel. Furthermore, as of 1914 there was nothing on the Kola Inlet in the way of a town or of a port adaptable to the handling of ocean-going traffic. The little village of Kola, the only inhabited place on the fjord large enough to claim the distinction of being a municipal entity, was wholly inadequate for this purpose. It was thus necessary not only to build an entirely new port city but to connect it with Russia proper by the construction of a new railway bridging the eight hundred miles of sparsely settled northern country, mostly swampland and tundra, that lay between Kola and Petrograd. Despite the obvious difficulty of implementing these projects in the face of the other wartime demands on Russian resources, they were — under the urging of the British — courageously put in hand. For the town, a site was selected on the eastern side of the fjord, some forty miles from its mouth, at a point where the steep, hilly banks receded from the water's edge to make way for a relatively flat, swampy basin.

Construction was begun in September 1915 on both town and railway. In each case the operation was unavoidably hurried and makeshift. The railway construction, in particular, involved formidable difficulties. Twenty-five percent of the line had to be laid through marshland. There were severe technical problems connected with permanently frozen subsoil. To avoid an even higher percentage of swampy foundation, forty percent of the line had to be laid out on curves. The waterways to be crossed seemed innumerable; when the line was completed there were sixteen yards of bridge to every one thousand yards of track. The long Arctic night had to be coped with, at a time when mobile electric illumination was not yet possible. Labor, food, and fodder for draft animals all had to be imported from a distance of hundreds of miles. Despite these obstacles the line was completed, by the spring of 1917, to a point where it was possible to undertake a limited movement of traffic over its flimsy, winding, single track. And this achievement was matched by the completion of housing and port facilities at the new terminus on the bank of the fjord, crude and jerry-built in large part, but sufficient to make possible the loading and unloading of ocean-going shipping on a modest scale and the transshipment of the cargoes to and from the interior.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Decision to Intervene by George F. Kennan. Copyright © 1958 George F. Kennan. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

PREFACE, VII,
PROLOGUE, 3,
I. THE RUSSIAN NORTH, 15,
II. COMPLICATIONS IN MURMANSK, 31,
III. SIBERIA IN MARCH 1918, 58,
IV. THE FIRST JAPANESE LANDING, 84,
V. THE WRAITH OF ALLIED-SOVIET COLLABORATION, 107,
VI. THE CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION, 136,
VII. ROBINS AND SUMMERS, 166,
VIII. ARTHUR BULLARD AND THE "COMPUB", 190,
IX. ROBINS' DEPARTURE, 208,
X. Envoi TO ROBINS, 233,
XI. THE NORTH IN APRIL AND MAY, 245,
XII. THE AMERICANS AND THE CZECH UPRISING, 277,
XIII. CONSUL POOLE AND THE FUTURE OF THE CZECHS, 296,
XIV. PRIVATE AMERICAN INFLUENCES, 322,
XV. THE RIPENING OF THE SIBERIAN QUESTION, 34O,
XVI. DECISION ON MURMANSK AND ARCHANGEL, 363,
XVII. THE DECISION ON SIBERIA, 381,
XVIII. THE DESPATCH OF AMERICAN FORCES TO RUSSIA, 405,
XIX. JULY AND THE FINAL BREAKUP, 430,
XX. THE END AT MOSCOW, 453,
EPILOGUE, 470,
APPENDICES, 475,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 486,
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, 488,
INDEX, 497,

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