tyovan
09-22-2008, 12:43 AM
The United States intervened in the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1920. The stated objectives of the intervention were to secure war materials sold to the Russian government on credit, assist the Czech Legion in Siberia, reopen the Eastern Front against the Germans, and support democratic forces in Russia. The objectives supported American military and economic goals. Reopening the Eastern Front would reduce the pressure on American, British, and French forces on the Western Front. A democratic, pro-American government in Russia would ensure that American businesses would continue to enjoy an Open Door for trading and would also be able to recoup their investment in bonds issued by the Imperial and Provisional Russian governments.
Professional historians accept that the stated objectives were why the United States chose to intervene against Bolshevik forces. Some historians also acknowledge the ideological animosity against Bolsheviks, and radicals in general. The animosity towards radicals, due to the unrest of labor radicals within the United States, does not receive as much recognition as it deserves. This is due to the era in question, between Reconstruction and the beginning of World War One, being largely omitted from history education and America’s collective historical memory. American history courses often focus on the periods between the Jamestown settlement and the end of the Civil War and on American entry into the First World War to approximately the end of the Vietnam War.
During the late 19th century, labor radicals fought battles against state and Federal troops within the United States. American elites felt that they faced a real threat from labor radicals. This fact is often brushed over by historians. However, a visceral hatred of labor radicalism played a prominent role in the decision to intervene against Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War.
President Woodrow Wilson, as commander-in-chief, had the final authority to order American troops to intervene against the Bolsheviks. Wilson did not hesitate to use his power to intervene in Haiti in 1915, in Mexico and the Dominican Republic in 1916, and in Cuba in 1917. He did not hesitate to order any interventions because his belief in ‘Missionary Diplomacy’ came close to assuming American principles and interests were absolute, that different cultural traditions and national aspirations were simply wrong. The fundamentally undemocratic character of Bolshevism was a direct challenge to Wilson’s hopes for liberal democracy not only for Russia, but for Europe and the whole world. As exemplified by his numerous interventions, Wilson embraced Progressive Imperialism. It suited his belief in the white man’s calling and his notion of presidential government.
Wilson entered the United States into the war in April 1917. At this time, Russia was a democratic republic led by Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky had been the leader since February when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. Kerensky, against overwhelming Russian popular opinion to the contrary, vowed to keep Russia in the war on the side of the Allies. At the time of American entry into the war, Russia and the United States were allies. However, in November 1917 a famished and war-weary population overthrew Kerensky’s government in favor of the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. The Russian populace supported the Bolshevik goal of withdrawing Russia from the war.
On 3 March 1918, the new government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans. Russia left the war and surrendered Finland, the Baltics, Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Bessarabia. Russia lost 60 million people and half of its industrial capacity. This situation brought some relief to the Russian populace and greatly strengthened Germany’s strategic position. By liquidating the Eastern Front, Germany could shift millions of troops to the Western Front and try for a knockout blow before the Americans arrived in force. The Allies never forgave the Bolsheviks for this betrayal. In a speech at an Aldwych Club luncheon in 1919, Winston Churchill proclaimed, “Every British and French soldier killed last year was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky, not in fair war, but by the treacherous desertion of an ally without parallel in the history of the world”.
The new government did not simply leave Russia’s former allies holding the bag militarily, they also forced Allied governments to hold the bag economically. Trotsky announced that the new government was confiscating foreign capital and renounced debts from the tsarist government. Americans held $75 million in bonds issued by the Imperial Russian government, and $150 million in bonds issued by Kerensky’s Provisional Government. Investors wanted American troops to intervene to force the new government to recognize the validity of the bonds. The Allies had also sold massive amounts of war materials to the Russians to use against the Germans. The war materials had been sold on credit. The Bolshevik government had no interest in continuing the war against the Germans, or in paying for the materials. The British had sent £20 million worth of munitions to Russia. In Murmansk, 160,000 tons of war materials were stockpiled, including priceless stocks of metals that had been sold on credit by the United States to Russia. In Vladivostok there were 800,000 tons of supplies stored all over the city. The Soviets began to move these materials into Russia’s interior. This angered the Allies, since these materials were to be used to fight the Germans.
The United States regarded the Soviet government as a ruthless clique that had confiscated American property without compensation, repudiated lawful debts, and sent agents abroad to forment communist revolutions. The turning point toward American intervention occurred during a White House conference on 6 July 1918. The conference received a Supreme War Council report stating that intervention was necessary to assist Russia in preventing German military domination, shorten the war by reconstituting the Eastern Front, preventing the isolation of Russia from Western Europe, preventing supplies reaching Germany from Siberia, and assisting the Czech Legion forces in Siberia.
Wilson had been under pressure in the press to intervene prior to making this decision. The pressure began even before the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In January 1918, A.A. Boublikoff, a former member of the Russian Duma, wrote in the NY Times, “We can never forget that in Russia already thousands and thousands of innocent women and children are dying, and if Bolshevism is not stopped immediately, millions will die with terrible suffering. Left alone, Russia will fall into reaction, even monarchical restoration. Only the aid of Allied democracies can save the democratic idea in Russia. Bolshevism is an international danger, that must be fought for the sake of the whole of mankind. No country is assured against this plague, and it is easier to fight it in Russia than at home”. Ambassador Boublikoff was appealing to American humanitarianism, democratic principles, messianic vision, and interests regarding its own defense.
An editorial in the New York Times on 25 May 1918 warned of the strategic importance of Russia regarding Germany, “If Russia remains in her present condition, if German domination is consolidated, then nothing can avert the penetration of Asia by Germany which will give physical foundation for a victim of militarism over democracy. We shall have lost the war, whatever success we gain on the Western Front. Eastern Europe and Central Asia will become a reservoir of German world power”. The fears of a German domination of Russia were furthered by not only the Russian Army’s collapse, but of the fact that there were 1.6 million German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war in Siberia. Some in the military also feared German domination. Colonel John Ward, commander of the Middlesex Regiment, regarded the Bolsheviks as German agents anyway and never for an instant doubted that the destruction of communist power in Russia represented something in the nature of a sacred duty for the Allies.
In the days before Wilson made his decision, there was a flurry of media activity urging intervention. On 21 June 1918, M. Malakhoff, the Russian Ambassador at Paris wrote in the New York Times that, “As long as the eastern front remains open to the Germans, the victory of the Allies will be compromised. The Germans will be taking all they want out of Russia, food supplies, raw materials, and labor. Thus the action of the Allies in Russia is necessary, not only in the interests of Russia, but also in the interest of a victorious issue of the war”. The next day, The New York Times editorialized that Americans had a religious duty to help Russia, using the analogy of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. The Good Samaritan, the Allied intervention force, would be nothing more than a nucleus to rally White support, giving Russians confidence and inspiring them to defend themselves. Russians themselves would do the work of redeeming Russia and restoring democracy. On the 23rd, the Times Editors wrote that American intervention will be welcomed by all patriotic Russians. The situation in Russia was compared to a house burning down, and immediate American action was urged. The types of appeals being made then, sound eerily similar to appeals made by the media in the run-up to the present-day war with Iraq. Also like the situation in Iraq, the few dissenting voices in the media were ignored. On 30 July, the London Daily News warned that if the Allies go to Russia they will add to their difficulties and lose the good-will of Russians for generations.
Wilson made the decision to intervene in internal Russian affairs, hypocritically going against his own beliefs as articulated in Part 6 of his 14 Points speech. Part 6 stated, “The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing, and more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy”.
Action was undertaken to provide direct and indirect aid to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. The aid was Anti-Bolshevik in origin and purpose. Wilson intended to prevent the establishment of Bolshevism in Russia. He used the Liberty Loan Act of 1917 to underwrite British and French campaigns against the Bolsheviks. He allocated $10 million of his own war funds for use in Siberia, much of which went to fund White armies. America participated actively, but unofficially, in a blockade to starve out Communist-controlled regions and manipulated relief programs to the same end.
Ambassador Bakhmatev stated that Wilson ignored the advice of his ‘liberal’ friends who urged him to reach an accommodation with the Soviet government. Instead he tried to destroy it.
Wilson agreed to commit 15,000 troops to Russia. The campaign was designed to reopen the Eastern Front and overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The campaign failed, and resulted in a lasting Russian distrust of the West. The intervention had the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of rallying democratically-inclined Russians to fight the Bolsheviks, the blockade and intervention drove the opposition, Right Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, to give temporary support to the Communists. Foreign intervention caused patriotic Russians to drop their opposition to the Bolsheviks and rally round the Soviet government in defense of the revolution. Occupation by non-Bolshevik troops turns the occupied population into Bolsheviks. William C Bullitt, Jr, an American diplomat who later served as the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote in 1919 that, “Perhaps the most striking fact in Russia today is the general support given to the government by the people in spite of their starvation”. The intervention was of dubious value. Foreign arms and supplies aided the Whites, but were insufficient for victory. Foreign troops on Russian soil allowed the Reds to pose as defenders of Mother Russia.
The Allies landed in 1918 at Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, and Vladivostok. Their original mission was to protect wartime supplies sent to the Provisional Government and make sure the supplies were not shipped to the Germans. In June, their mission was expanded to include helping the Czech Legion. The Czechoslovak Brigade revolted in May 1918. It had previously been part of the Russian Imperial Army, and after the revolution was the best-organized force in Russia. The Czechs had wanted to travel East around the world to the Western Front to continue the fight against the Germans. Along the way, they fought with the Bolsheviks, seized the Trans-Siberian Railroad, cleared the Bolsheviks from most of Siberia, and aided White forces The loss of the Trans-Siberian Railway was a serious setback to the Bolsheviks, since their seizure and retention of power was railway-based. After seizing control of Siberia and supporting Kolchak’s conservative regime there, the Czechs tried to go to Murmansk, but were stopped by the Reds in the Urals. To Wilson, the Czechs were innocent and idealistic, and in every way eligible to be patronized. The American soldiers deployed to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to intervene were mainly Polish-Americans from Wisconsin and Michigan. They were equipped with British uniforms and Russian rifles and marched to the front directly from their boats. The Arkhangelsk intervention resulted in 139 American deaths.
The United States also sent 9,000 troops to Siberia, mainly to counter the 72,000 Japanese troops there. The United States wanted to restrain Japanese imperialists from seizing territory in Siberia and North Manchuria. The Japanese resented the American chaperonage. This was part of the beginnings of the Japanese-American conflict over the Open Door that ultimately erupted on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan had entered the war to expand at Germany’s expense. Japan was interested in seizing Germany’s colonies of the Marianas, Marshalls, Carolines Islands, and Tsingtao on the Chinese mainland. Now their sites appeared to be set on taking advantage of the instability in Russia.
This was not the first time the United States acted to restrain Japan’s ambitions on Russia’s territory. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the United States supported Japan. The Japanese were supported because the Russians were attempting to close Manchuria to foreign trade. America feared though that an overwhelming Japanese victory could also threaten American interests. President Theodore Roosevelt skillfully negotiated a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, an act for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
After the war ended, there were some mutinies among the Allied troops who did not want to die after the Central Powers were already defeated. They were withdrawn in 1919 and 1920, except for the more expansionist Japanese forces in Siberia. Allied intervention in the Russian Far East achieved nothing but the confirmation in Soviet eyes of the West’s fundamentally anti-Bolshevik policy. The Allies continued to equip White forces long after the Great War had ended. Interventionists, such as Churchill, believed that prolonged White resistance had stalled world revolution.
The intervention produced an international stalemate since neither the Allies nor the Bolsheviks could destroy the other. The stalemate continued after the war. Diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and the outside world ceased during the foreign intervention. Conservatives, religious believers, as well as liberals and democratic socialists who loathed communism were all against recognition of the Bolshevik regime. Allied leaders endorsed the border changes in Eastern Europe, such as the reconstitution of Poland, because the new countries provided an anti-communist buffer between Soviet Russia and Western Europe. Britain did not diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union until 1924. The United States itself did not diplomatically recognize the Soviet Union until 1933.
The intervention against labor radicals in Russia comes as no surprise during this era. The recent history of the Progressive period was one that included mass labor unrest and the widespread use of American troops to violently suppress American labor agitation. The intervention against Russian Bolsheviks was not a wide corner that was turned in American history, but was an extension of American domestic policy into its foreign policy.
American troops were used to intervene against American strikers as early as 1806. State militias, renamed the National Guard in 1903, were created in the 1870s to intervene as an industrial police force in strikes and demonstrations. Often armed police forces, hired and paid by the employers, such as the Pennsylvania Coal & Iron Police, were the official public police force. In 1877, 45,000 militia in eleven states were called up during that year’s railroad strike. During that strike, the Pennsylvania militia fired into crowds, killing over 40 people in one incident. The entire Pennsylvania militia was eventually mobilized, Federal troops were sent in, and Marines landed in Philadelphia. More than 10,000 troops finally broke the strike. Troops were in New York City, Buffalo, the Midwest, Chicago, and St Louis. The New York Times described Chicago as a “city in possession of communists”.
During the 1894 Pullman Strike, which Eugene Debs helped organize, there were more than 14,000 men under arms in Chicago. There was fighting across the city, including fighting involving Federal troops. Colorado militia were involved in the Ludlow Massacre during the 1914 Colorado miners strike. The militia machine-gunned the tents of strikers, and set their camp on fire. 33 people were killed, including women and children, and more than 100 were seriously injured. In the Pacific Northwest, the US Army broke striking loggers support for the Industrial Workers of the World. IWW meeting halls across the country were raided in September 1917. Two hundred IWW members were convicted in mass trials, crippling the Union.
Labor activists were not limited to action in American streets. In Ireland, under British occupation until 1922, James Connolly, a socialist leader, paralyzed Dublin with a strike from August to December 1913. Connolly had previously worked with Eugene Debs in America. After the strike, he formed a workers militia known as the Citizens’ Army. It was the Citizens’ Army that seized Dublin’s city center during the Easter Rising of 1916. Connolly was subsequently executed by the British.
Allowing Communists to gain a foothold anywhere posed a threat to capitalism everywhere due to Communism’s inherently international nature. The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. The Communist Manifesto ends with the appeal, “Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Many American radicals were outspoken in sympathy to the Bolsheviks while the general public became increasingly convinced of its evils. Conservatives would be frightened about a Communist-inspired revolution in America by reading Debs’ writings. In Day of the People, Debs wrote “In Russia and Germany, our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution, which knows no race, no color, no ***, and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for world-wide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromises within our own ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death. From the crown of my head, to the soles of my feet I am a Bolshevik and proud of it.”
In Arouse, Ye Slaves!, Debs threatened a revolution in America produced by a million revolutionists with guns. He wrote, “Every state in this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution” and “Get ready, comrades, for action! No other course is left to the working class.” In The Gunmen and the Miners, Debs wanted to arm American mine unions with the latest high power rifles, 500 rounds of ammunition per man, and machine guns. Lastly, in Views on the Double Attack on Russia, Debs wrote ““If the Russian people could at one stroke rid themselves of their landlords, their capitalists, their exploiters, and their profiteers of all description, the people of all the other countries would speedily follow their example.”
This is exactly what Lenin and Trotsky were hoping to inspire. War-weary Europe, especially Germany, seemed ripe for revolution. The New York Times reported in January 1919 that Bolsheviks spread propaganda to deceive the workingman in every nation. Bolshevism in Russia will lead to Bolshevism in Germany. It is impossible to say where it will stop, if not in Russia. The international reach of Bolshevism was exhibited when British, French, and Italian labor leaders protested Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks.
There was a fear in the United States that American labor could begin marching to the Bolshevik tune. After signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks called for the “immediate cessation of hostilities everywhere through universal proletarian revolution and the dissolution of all capitalistic governments.” American entry into the war was unpopular. Oklahoma farmers took up arms, rebelling against the war. Millions of Irish and German-Americans were also very opposed to the war. The Bolshevik appeal for an end to the war could have sounded quite appealing to these American dissenters. There was also a group in the Midwest know as the Nonpartisan League. The League was a radical agrarian group demanding state control or ownership of banks, grain elevators, and flour mills. Some Americans wanted their members shot, other broke up their meetings and beat and jailed their leaders.
Any dissent was seen as treasonous and dangerous to American national survival. Unreasoning conformity helped prompt attacks against radicals. 1917’s Espionage Act was used to crush dissent and criticism. The Sedition Act, enacted the following year, was based on state laws designed to suppress labor radicals. Attorney General Thomas Gregory made little distinction between traitors and radicals. Eugene Debs was sentenced to prison for his dissent against the war. By the war’s end, one third of the Socialist party’s national leadership was in prison, leaving the party in shambles. Attorney General Gregory also enlisted the help of vigilantes to purge radicals from economic and political life. Groups such as the American Protective League engaged in anti-labor activities such as burglarizing union offices.
Attorney General Gregory was not alone in his hatred of radicalism. Secretary of State Robert Lansing was an outspoken anti-Bolshevik. He believed Bolshevism was “the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived”, and that it is “a monster which seeks to devour civilized society and reduce mankind to the state of beasts”. Civilized society at this time was explicitly limited to Christianity. Bolsheviks were not only opposed to the economic and political basis of mainstream American life, but were also intent on eradicating its religious foundations. Attorney General Palmer believed that a Communist-inspired revolution was threatening American homes, churches, and morality.
There were fears that the revolution could spread to the United States. In 1919, the communist Third International was founded to promote international communist revolutions. American socialists also founded the American Communist Party. The fear of revolution was so great that by 1919, the very symbol of the revolution, the red flag, was made illegal in at least 24 states. In New York City, two elected Socialists were expelled from their seats in city government. New York’s state legislature expelled five Socialists. Victor Berger was elected as a Socialist to the House representing a district in Wisconsin. In 1918, the House refused to seat him. After he won a special election in 1919, the House still refused to let him take his seat. He was finally able to take his seat in 1922.
Revolutionaries chose May Day 1919 as a symbolic day to attack. Bombs were mailed anonymously to prominent people, including to Attorney General Palmer. The government also used May Day 1919 to attack the labor activists. In Cleveland, army trucks and tanks were driven into a crowd of demonstrators, killing two and seriously injuring hundreds more. Later that year, in November, the government launched raids against American subversive groups. 249 radicals, including Emma Goldman, were deported to Soviet Russia.
More than four million workers went on strike in the United States in 1919. The United Mine Workers were on strike, as were 365,000 AFL affiliated steelworkers in Pennsylvania in September 1919. Their political enemies claimed that these labor radicals were influenced by Bolshevism and received Bolshevik financing to destroy the American economy. Judge Gary, the head of the US Steel Corporation, wrote of the 1919 Steel Strike that, “the whole movement of the steel strike was a movement of red radicals… The only outcome of the victory for unionism would be Sovietism in the United States and the forcible distribution of property.”
For most of the 20th century, the American government believed that communists were dangerous radicals, social revolutionaries who threatened American interests and the existing social order throughout the world. All Americans are well aware of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Most are also aware of the Red Scare during the era of McCarthyism. Few contemporary Americans are aware of the first Red Scare during Palmer’s era. Fewer still are aware of the invasion of the early Soviet Union by the United States Army. The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union did not begin at Yalta or in Berlin, they began when American troops landed in Vladivostok, Arkhangelsk, and Murmansk.
The United States intervention failed. Instead of rallying Russians to join the White Armies and fight for democracy, patriotic Russians were incensed at the foreign invasion of their Motherland and put aside their differences with the Bolsheviks and joined forces with them to fight the invaders. The Eastern Front was not reopened, although this did not particularly matter since the Central Powers were defeated. American businessmen were not able to recoup the millions of dollars they invested into Imperial and Provisional bonds, nor were they able to enjoy the Open Door of capitalism in the lucrative Russian market. The only success the intervention had was in deepening the divisions between the new Soviet government and the capitalist world.
The revolution did not spread to the United States. There were acts of terrorism committed by radicals, but there was never any widespread socialist revolution such as those occurring in Ireland in 1916 or in Russia in 1917. This was a very real fear among the American business and government elite. Though largely forgotten by contemporary audiences, the era between Reconstruction and the Roaring 20’s was one of tumultuous and massive labor unrest within the United States.
American government, whether at the Federal or state level, had no compulsion using extreme violence to suppress organized labor’s demands. Striking miners in Colorado were considered to have been such a threat as to warrant being machine-gunned and burnt. Troops were deployed into American cities, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, to fire into crowds and subdue labor subversives.
Professional historians accept that the stated objectives were why the United States chose to intervene against Bolshevik forces. Some historians also acknowledge the ideological animosity against Bolsheviks, and radicals in general. The animosity towards radicals, due to the unrest of labor radicals within the United States, does not receive as much recognition as it deserves. This is due to the era in question, between Reconstruction and the beginning of World War One, being largely omitted from history education and America’s collective historical memory. American history courses often focus on the periods between the Jamestown settlement and the end of the Civil War and on American entry into the First World War to approximately the end of the Vietnam War.
During the late 19th century, labor radicals fought battles against state and Federal troops within the United States. American elites felt that they faced a real threat from labor radicals. This fact is often brushed over by historians. However, a visceral hatred of labor radicalism played a prominent role in the decision to intervene against Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War.
President Woodrow Wilson, as commander-in-chief, had the final authority to order American troops to intervene against the Bolsheviks. Wilson did not hesitate to use his power to intervene in Haiti in 1915, in Mexico and the Dominican Republic in 1916, and in Cuba in 1917. He did not hesitate to order any interventions because his belief in ‘Missionary Diplomacy’ came close to assuming American principles and interests were absolute, that different cultural traditions and national aspirations were simply wrong. The fundamentally undemocratic character of Bolshevism was a direct challenge to Wilson’s hopes for liberal democracy not only for Russia, but for Europe and the whole world. As exemplified by his numerous interventions, Wilson embraced Progressive Imperialism. It suited his belief in the white man’s calling and his notion of presidential government.
Wilson entered the United States into the war in April 1917. At this time, Russia was a democratic republic led by Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky had been the leader since February when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. Kerensky, against overwhelming Russian popular opinion to the contrary, vowed to keep Russia in the war on the side of the Allies. At the time of American entry into the war, Russia and the United States were allies. However, in November 1917 a famished and war-weary population overthrew Kerensky’s government in favor of the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. The Russian populace supported the Bolshevik goal of withdrawing Russia from the war.
On 3 March 1918, the new government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans. Russia left the war and surrendered Finland, the Baltics, Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Bessarabia. Russia lost 60 million people and half of its industrial capacity. This situation brought some relief to the Russian populace and greatly strengthened Germany’s strategic position. By liquidating the Eastern Front, Germany could shift millions of troops to the Western Front and try for a knockout blow before the Americans arrived in force. The Allies never forgave the Bolsheviks for this betrayal. In a speech at an Aldwych Club luncheon in 1919, Winston Churchill proclaimed, “Every British and French soldier killed last year was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky, not in fair war, but by the treacherous desertion of an ally without parallel in the history of the world”.
The new government did not simply leave Russia’s former allies holding the bag militarily, they also forced Allied governments to hold the bag economically. Trotsky announced that the new government was confiscating foreign capital and renounced debts from the tsarist government. Americans held $75 million in bonds issued by the Imperial Russian government, and $150 million in bonds issued by Kerensky’s Provisional Government. Investors wanted American troops to intervene to force the new government to recognize the validity of the bonds. The Allies had also sold massive amounts of war materials to the Russians to use against the Germans. The war materials had been sold on credit. The Bolshevik government had no interest in continuing the war against the Germans, or in paying for the materials. The British had sent £20 million worth of munitions to Russia. In Murmansk, 160,000 tons of war materials were stockpiled, including priceless stocks of metals that had been sold on credit by the United States to Russia. In Vladivostok there were 800,000 tons of supplies stored all over the city. The Soviets began to move these materials into Russia’s interior. This angered the Allies, since these materials were to be used to fight the Germans.
The United States regarded the Soviet government as a ruthless clique that had confiscated American property without compensation, repudiated lawful debts, and sent agents abroad to forment communist revolutions. The turning point toward American intervention occurred during a White House conference on 6 July 1918. The conference received a Supreme War Council report stating that intervention was necessary to assist Russia in preventing German military domination, shorten the war by reconstituting the Eastern Front, preventing the isolation of Russia from Western Europe, preventing supplies reaching Germany from Siberia, and assisting the Czech Legion forces in Siberia.
Wilson had been under pressure in the press to intervene prior to making this decision. The pressure began even before the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In January 1918, A.A. Boublikoff, a former member of the Russian Duma, wrote in the NY Times, “We can never forget that in Russia already thousands and thousands of innocent women and children are dying, and if Bolshevism is not stopped immediately, millions will die with terrible suffering. Left alone, Russia will fall into reaction, even monarchical restoration. Only the aid of Allied democracies can save the democratic idea in Russia. Bolshevism is an international danger, that must be fought for the sake of the whole of mankind. No country is assured against this plague, and it is easier to fight it in Russia than at home”. Ambassador Boublikoff was appealing to American humanitarianism, democratic principles, messianic vision, and interests regarding its own defense.
An editorial in the New York Times on 25 May 1918 warned of the strategic importance of Russia regarding Germany, “If Russia remains in her present condition, if German domination is consolidated, then nothing can avert the penetration of Asia by Germany which will give physical foundation for a victim of militarism over democracy. We shall have lost the war, whatever success we gain on the Western Front. Eastern Europe and Central Asia will become a reservoir of German world power”. The fears of a German domination of Russia were furthered by not only the Russian Army’s collapse, but of the fact that there were 1.6 million German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war in Siberia. Some in the military also feared German domination. Colonel John Ward, commander of the Middlesex Regiment, regarded the Bolsheviks as German agents anyway and never for an instant doubted that the destruction of communist power in Russia represented something in the nature of a sacred duty for the Allies.
In the days before Wilson made his decision, there was a flurry of media activity urging intervention. On 21 June 1918, M. Malakhoff, the Russian Ambassador at Paris wrote in the New York Times that, “As long as the eastern front remains open to the Germans, the victory of the Allies will be compromised. The Germans will be taking all they want out of Russia, food supplies, raw materials, and labor. Thus the action of the Allies in Russia is necessary, not only in the interests of Russia, but also in the interest of a victorious issue of the war”. The next day, The New York Times editorialized that Americans had a religious duty to help Russia, using the analogy of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. The Good Samaritan, the Allied intervention force, would be nothing more than a nucleus to rally White support, giving Russians confidence and inspiring them to defend themselves. Russians themselves would do the work of redeeming Russia and restoring democracy. On the 23rd, the Times Editors wrote that American intervention will be welcomed by all patriotic Russians. The situation in Russia was compared to a house burning down, and immediate American action was urged. The types of appeals being made then, sound eerily similar to appeals made by the media in the run-up to the present-day war with Iraq. Also like the situation in Iraq, the few dissenting voices in the media were ignored. On 30 July, the London Daily News warned that if the Allies go to Russia they will add to their difficulties and lose the good-will of Russians for generations.
Wilson made the decision to intervene in internal Russian affairs, hypocritically going against his own beliefs as articulated in Part 6 of his 14 Points speech. Part 6 stated, “The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing, and more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy”.
Action was undertaken to provide direct and indirect aid to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. The aid was Anti-Bolshevik in origin and purpose. Wilson intended to prevent the establishment of Bolshevism in Russia. He used the Liberty Loan Act of 1917 to underwrite British and French campaigns against the Bolsheviks. He allocated $10 million of his own war funds for use in Siberia, much of which went to fund White armies. America participated actively, but unofficially, in a blockade to starve out Communist-controlled regions and manipulated relief programs to the same end.
Ambassador Bakhmatev stated that Wilson ignored the advice of his ‘liberal’ friends who urged him to reach an accommodation with the Soviet government. Instead he tried to destroy it.
Wilson agreed to commit 15,000 troops to Russia. The campaign was designed to reopen the Eastern Front and overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The campaign failed, and resulted in a lasting Russian distrust of the West. The intervention had the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of rallying democratically-inclined Russians to fight the Bolsheviks, the blockade and intervention drove the opposition, Right Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, to give temporary support to the Communists. Foreign intervention caused patriotic Russians to drop their opposition to the Bolsheviks and rally round the Soviet government in defense of the revolution. Occupation by non-Bolshevik troops turns the occupied population into Bolsheviks. William C Bullitt, Jr, an American diplomat who later served as the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote in 1919 that, “Perhaps the most striking fact in Russia today is the general support given to the government by the people in spite of their starvation”. The intervention was of dubious value. Foreign arms and supplies aided the Whites, but were insufficient for victory. Foreign troops on Russian soil allowed the Reds to pose as defenders of Mother Russia.
The Allies landed in 1918 at Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, and Vladivostok. Their original mission was to protect wartime supplies sent to the Provisional Government and make sure the supplies were not shipped to the Germans. In June, their mission was expanded to include helping the Czech Legion. The Czechoslovak Brigade revolted in May 1918. It had previously been part of the Russian Imperial Army, and after the revolution was the best-organized force in Russia. The Czechs had wanted to travel East around the world to the Western Front to continue the fight against the Germans. Along the way, they fought with the Bolsheviks, seized the Trans-Siberian Railroad, cleared the Bolsheviks from most of Siberia, and aided White forces The loss of the Trans-Siberian Railway was a serious setback to the Bolsheviks, since their seizure and retention of power was railway-based. After seizing control of Siberia and supporting Kolchak’s conservative regime there, the Czechs tried to go to Murmansk, but were stopped by the Reds in the Urals. To Wilson, the Czechs were innocent and idealistic, and in every way eligible to be patronized. The American soldiers deployed to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to intervene were mainly Polish-Americans from Wisconsin and Michigan. They were equipped with British uniforms and Russian rifles and marched to the front directly from their boats. The Arkhangelsk intervention resulted in 139 American deaths.
The United States also sent 9,000 troops to Siberia, mainly to counter the 72,000 Japanese troops there. The United States wanted to restrain Japanese imperialists from seizing territory in Siberia and North Manchuria. The Japanese resented the American chaperonage. This was part of the beginnings of the Japanese-American conflict over the Open Door that ultimately erupted on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan had entered the war to expand at Germany’s expense. Japan was interested in seizing Germany’s colonies of the Marianas, Marshalls, Carolines Islands, and Tsingtao on the Chinese mainland. Now their sites appeared to be set on taking advantage of the instability in Russia.
This was not the first time the United States acted to restrain Japan’s ambitions on Russia’s territory. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the United States supported Japan. The Japanese were supported because the Russians were attempting to close Manchuria to foreign trade. America feared though that an overwhelming Japanese victory could also threaten American interests. President Theodore Roosevelt skillfully negotiated a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, an act for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
After the war ended, there were some mutinies among the Allied troops who did not want to die after the Central Powers were already defeated. They were withdrawn in 1919 and 1920, except for the more expansionist Japanese forces in Siberia. Allied intervention in the Russian Far East achieved nothing but the confirmation in Soviet eyes of the West’s fundamentally anti-Bolshevik policy. The Allies continued to equip White forces long after the Great War had ended. Interventionists, such as Churchill, believed that prolonged White resistance had stalled world revolution.
The intervention produced an international stalemate since neither the Allies nor the Bolsheviks could destroy the other. The stalemate continued after the war. Diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and the outside world ceased during the foreign intervention. Conservatives, religious believers, as well as liberals and democratic socialists who loathed communism were all against recognition of the Bolshevik regime. Allied leaders endorsed the border changes in Eastern Europe, such as the reconstitution of Poland, because the new countries provided an anti-communist buffer between Soviet Russia and Western Europe. Britain did not diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union until 1924. The United States itself did not diplomatically recognize the Soviet Union until 1933.
The intervention against labor radicals in Russia comes as no surprise during this era. The recent history of the Progressive period was one that included mass labor unrest and the widespread use of American troops to violently suppress American labor agitation. The intervention against Russian Bolsheviks was not a wide corner that was turned in American history, but was an extension of American domestic policy into its foreign policy.
American troops were used to intervene against American strikers as early as 1806. State militias, renamed the National Guard in 1903, were created in the 1870s to intervene as an industrial police force in strikes and demonstrations. Often armed police forces, hired and paid by the employers, such as the Pennsylvania Coal & Iron Police, were the official public police force. In 1877, 45,000 militia in eleven states were called up during that year’s railroad strike. During that strike, the Pennsylvania militia fired into crowds, killing over 40 people in one incident. The entire Pennsylvania militia was eventually mobilized, Federal troops were sent in, and Marines landed in Philadelphia. More than 10,000 troops finally broke the strike. Troops were in New York City, Buffalo, the Midwest, Chicago, and St Louis. The New York Times described Chicago as a “city in possession of communists”.
During the 1894 Pullman Strike, which Eugene Debs helped organize, there were more than 14,000 men under arms in Chicago. There was fighting across the city, including fighting involving Federal troops. Colorado militia were involved in the Ludlow Massacre during the 1914 Colorado miners strike. The militia machine-gunned the tents of strikers, and set their camp on fire. 33 people were killed, including women and children, and more than 100 were seriously injured. In the Pacific Northwest, the US Army broke striking loggers support for the Industrial Workers of the World. IWW meeting halls across the country were raided in September 1917. Two hundred IWW members were convicted in mass trials, crippling the Union.
Labor activists were not limited to action in American streets. In Ireland, under British occupation until 1922, James Connolly, a socialist leader, paralyzed Dublin with a strike from August to December 1913. Connolly had previously worked with Eugene Debs in America. After the strike, he formed a workers militia known as the Citizens’ Army. It was the Citizens’ Army that seized Dublin’s city center during the Easter Rising of 1916. Connolly was subsequently executed by the British.
Allowing Communists to gain a foothold anywhere posed a threat to capitalism everywhere due to Communism’s inherently international nature. The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. The Communist Manifesto ends with the appeal, “Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Many American radicals were outspoken in sympathy to the Bolsheviks while the general public became increasingly convinced of its evils. Conservatives would be frightened about a Communist-inspired revolution in America by reading Debs’ writings. In Day of the People, Debs wrote “In Russia and Germany, our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution, which knows no race, no color, no ***, and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for world-wide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromises within our own ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death. From the crown of my head, to the soles of my feet I am a Bolshevik and proud of it.”
In Arouse, Ye Slaves!, Debs threatened a revolution in America produced by a million revolutionists with guns. He wrote, “Every state in this Union will resound with the tramp of revolution” and “Get ready, comrades, for action! No other course is left to the working class.” In The Gunmen and the Miners, Debs wanted to arm American mine unions with the latest high power rifles, 500 rounds of ammunition per man, and machine guns. Lastly, in Views on the Double Attack on Russia, Debs wrote ““If the Russian people could at one stroke rid themselves of their landlords, their capitalists, their exploiters, and their profiteers of all description, the people of all the other countries would speedily follow their example.”
This is exactly what Lenin and Trotsky were hoping to inspire. War-weary Europe, especially Germany, seemed ripe for revolution. The New York Times reported in January 1919 that Bolsheviks spread propaganda to deceive the workingman in every nation. Bolshevism in Russia will lead to Bolshevism in Germany. It is impossible to say where it will stop, if not in Russia. The international reach of Bolshevism was exhibited when British, French, and Italian labor leaders protested Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks.
There was a fear in the United States that American labor could begin marching to the Bolshevik tune. After signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks called for the “immediate cessation of hostilities everywhere through universal proletarian revolution and the dissolution of all capitalistic governments.” American entry into the war was unpopular. Oklahoma farmers took up arms, rebelling against the war. Millions of Irish and German-Americans were also very opposed to the war. The Bolshevik appeal for an end to the war could have sounded quite appealing to these American dissenters. There was also a group in the Midwest know as the Nonpartisan League. The League was a radical agrarian group demanding state control or ownership of banks, grain elevators, and flour mills. Some Americans wanted their members shot, other broke up their meetings and beat and jailed their leaders.
Any dissent was seen as treasonous and dangerous to American national survival. Unreasoning conformity helped prompt attacks against radicals. 1917’s Espionage Act was used to crush dissent and criticism. The Sedition Act, enacted the following year, was based on state laws designed to suppress labor radicals. Attorney General Thomas Gregory made little distinction between traitors and radicals. Eugene Debs was sentenced to prison for his dissent against the war. By the war’s end, one third of the Socialist party’s national leadership was in prison, leaving the party in shambles. Attorney General Gregory also enlisted the help of vigilantes to purge radicals from economic and political life. Groups such as the American Protective League engaged in anti-labor activities such as burglarizing union offices.
Attorney General Gregory was not alone in his hatred of radicalism. Secretary of State Robert Lansing was an outspoken anti-Bolshevik. He believed Bolshevism was “the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived”, and that it is “a monster which seeks to devour civilized society and reduce mankind to the state of beasts”. Civilized society at this time was explicitly limited to Christianity. Bolsheviks were not only opposed to the economic and political basis of mainstream American life, but were also intent on eradicating its religious foundations. Attorney General Palmer believed that a Communist-inspired revolution was threatening American homes, churches, and morality.
There were fears that the revolution could spread to the United States. In 1919, the communist Third International was founded to promote international communist revolutions. American socialists also founded the American Communist Party. The fear of revolution was so great that by 1919, the very symbol of the revolution, the red flag, was made illegal in at least 24 states. In New York City, two elected Socialists were expelled from their seats in city government. New York’s state legislature expelled five Socialists. Victor Berger was elected as a Socialist to the House representing a district in Wisconsin. In 1918, the House refused to seat him. After he won a special election in 1919, the House still refused to let him take his seat. He was finally able to take his seat in 1922.
Revolutionaries chose May Day 1919 as a symbolic day to attack. Bombs were mailed anonymously to prominent people, including to Attorney General Palmer. The government also used May Day 1919 to attack the labor activists. In Cleveland, army trucks and tanks were driven into a crowd of demonstrators, killing two and seriously injuring hundreds more. Later that year, in November, the government launched raids against American subversive groups. 249 radicals, including Emma Goldman, were deported to Soviet Russia.
More than four million workers went on strike in the United States in 1919. The United Mine Workers were on strike, as were 365,000 AFL affiliated steelworkers in Pennsylvania in September 1919. Their political enemies claimed that these labor radicals were influenced by Bolshevism and received Bolshevik financing to destroy the American economy. Judge Gary, the head of the US Steel Corporation, wrote of the 1919 Steel Strike that, “the whole movement of the steel strike was a movement of red radicals… The only outcome of the victory for unionism would be Sovietism in the United States and the forcible distribution of property.”
For most of the 20th century, the American government believed that communists were dangerous radicals, social revolutionaries who threatened American interests and the existing social order throughout the world. All Americans are well aware of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War. Most are also aware of the Red Scare during the era of McCarthyism. Few contemporary Americans are aware of the first Red Scare during Palmer’s era. Fewer still are aware of the invasion of the early Soviet Union by the United States Army. The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union did not begin at Yalta or in Berlin, they began when American troops landed in Vladivostok, Arkhangelsk, and Murmansk.
The United States intervention failed. Instead of rallying Russians to join the White Armies and fight for democracy, patriotic Russians were incensed at the foreign invasion of their Motherland and put aside their differences with the Bolsheviks and joined forces with them to fight the invaders. The Eastern Front was not reopened, although this did not particularly matter since the Central Powers were defeated. American businessmen were not able to recoup the millions of dollars they invested into Imperial and Provisional bonds, nor were they able to enjoy the Open Door of capitalism in the lucrative Russian market. The only success the intervention had was in deepening the divisions between the new Soviet government and the capitalist world.
The revolution did not spread to the United States. There were acts of terrorism committed by radicals, but there was never any widespread socialist revolution such as those occurring in Ireland in 1916 or in Russia in 1917. This was a very real fear among the American business and government elite. Though largely forgotten by contemporary audiences, the era between Reconstruction and the Roaring 20’s was one of tumultuous and massive labor unrest within the United States.
American government, whether at the Federal or state level, had no compulsion using extreme violence to suppress organized labor’s demands. Striking miners in Colorado were considered to have been such a threat as to warrant being machine-gunned and burnt. Troops were deployed into American cities, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, to fire into crowds and subdue labor subversives.