Russia Leaves the War

 I remarked last month on the oddity of a book reviewer suggesting that America's intervention at Murmansk and Archangel was unknown, basing my argument on George F. Kennan's The Decision to Intervene. About New Years, I took from the shelves its predecessor volume Russia Leaves the War. I had mistakenly thought that I had already read this book. 

 I'm glad that I now have. The book gives a very readable account of America's relation to Russia from the time of the overthrow of the Provisional Government on November 3, 1917 through the Soviet ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in mid-March 1918. It makes a good deal clearer some of the personalities one encounters in the The Decision to Intervene. It also revisits themes that recur in American history, some of which Kennan has taken up elsewhere.

For example, there is the habit of appointing the politically connected as ambassadors. Sometimes this works out splendidly, as when one sends a John Quincy Adams to St. Petersburg. For the most part, it seems to be inefficient, sending to an important country someone who knows nothing about that country, commonly not the rudiments of its language. (I doubt J.Q. Adams knew much Russian; but as Tolstoy says, the Russian aristocracy of that day was more comfortable in French than in Russian.) David Francis, a sometime governor of Missouri and generally an estimable man, was not really suited to represent the United States in St. Petersburg in 1916.

There is the tendency of a president to suppose that he can address the people of a foreign country directly, and achieve results beyond what he would be dealing with its government. Wilson may have been given to this more than most presidents. It did not work well with Russia, where those who counted were the Bolshevik leadership and in principle opposed to Wilson's government.

There is the habit of working through unofficial envoys. To be fair, this is not solely an American weakness, for one reads in The Decision to Intervene that the the French government sent Henri Bergson to the US to work on President Wilson. But perhaps the French were trying to imitate our amateur ways. (It is not clear from the book that Bergson and Wilson ever met. Nor can I imagine what they would have discussed, had they met. They were both academics, but nothing in Wilson's background that I have heard of suggested an interest in speculative thought.)

During the period covered by The Decision to Intervene, the United States dabbled in influencing the Russian government by means of

• The Root Commission, a delegation of prominent men led by Elihu Root, sometime Secretary of State and Secretary of War
• The Red Cross
• The Office of Public Information

The US also sent the Stevens Railway Mission, though this spent most of the period covered in Yokohama, making it to Harbin in March 1918.

Between its reluctance to recognize the Bolshevik government and its need to communicate with it, the US ended up using Raymond Robins, an official of the Red Cross, as its unofficial liaison. Robins was an intelligent and patriotic man, but out of his depth in assessing the situation. It is unlikely that anyone more qualified at assessment would have done better under the circumstances, though.

The two volumes of Soviet-American Relations 1917-1920 make for fascinating reading. Unfortunately, Princeton University Press has them available only through print-on-demand, at about $70 per volume. They are not hard to find used, though, for nearer $10.