Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Sisson, a wiry dyspeptic waspish little man, by this time a bundle of nerves and selfrighteousness, entrusted his pack of incriminating documents to a friendly Norwegian diplomatic courier and set off in a crowd of refugees for Finland. Sticking to the Norwegian like a leech, after all sorts of hairbreadth escapes, he managed to make his way through the deadly skirmishing of the Finnish civil war and across the ice to Sweden. By early May, Sisson, who described himself as a nervous wreck, managed to reach Washington and to have his portentous package placed in the President’s hands.

  On March 3, 1918, at Lenin’s insistence, the Bolshevik representatives had capitulated at Brest-Litovsk and signed a treaty with Germany by which Russia gave up any claim to Poland, Lithuania, Finland, the Baltic Provinces, the Ukraine and to the regions south of the Caucasus. Prisoners were to be turned loose. Diplomatic missions were to be exchanged and trade re-established. Trotsky’s response was to resign his post as Foreign Minister. Immediately appointed Commissar for War, he started building a Red Army.

  Robins, still hopeful of attaining Washington’s recognition for Lenin’s government, travelled back and forth between Moscow and Vologda. He too tried to induce Ambassador Francis to move his embassy to Moscow. Francis wouldn’t budge.

  Towards the end of April Count Mirbach-Harff, a German career diplomat, arrived in Moscow with a large delegation, and Adolf Joffe installed an equivalent crew of revolutionary propagandists in the old Imperial Russian Embassy in Berlin. Lansing and his counsellors at the State Department took this exchange to mean the complete penetration by German influence of such parts of Russia as were left under Bolshevik control. Robins was requested to come home immediately.

  After final friendly interviews with the leading Bolsheviks, Raymond Robins’ Red Cross car was attached to the Trans-Siberian express and started its long rumbling way to Vladivostok. His party was furnished with rifles and ammunition for their protection and also with a pass signed by Lenin himself. In his pocket Robins carried an appreciative personal letter from Trotsky and a document, drawn up under Lenin’s direction, offering a rich bait of mineral concessions in Siberia to American capitalists consequent to American recognition.

  The train stopped for fifty minutes at Vologda. Ambassador Francis went down to the station to pass the time of day. The two men walked up and down the platform chatting. Neither man told the other what was uppermost in his mind.

  Ambassador Francis had just sent a cable to Washington announcing that he had at last come to the opinion that Allied intervention was necessary with or without the consent of the Moscow government.

  Robins’ thoughts were fervid with the hope that the document entrusted to him by Lenin would be the opening wedge for fresh relations between Washington and Moscow. He was planning a campaign of press releases and speeches. Perhaps Ambassador Robins would soon be succeeding Ambassador Francis.

  “A private conversation of about twenty minutes,” so Francis recalled the scene, “and I turned away from him or he turned away from me: I have forgotten which, not in any unfriendly spirit …”

  Gumberg, who eventually found a business career in New York more congenial than life under the dictatorship of the proletariat, went along with Robins. He bore a commission from the Moscow government to set up a Russian press bureau in America.

  In Vladivostok Robins received a curt message from Washington enjoining him not to talk for publication. In Seattle, at the request so it seems of Lansing himself, Robins and Gumberg were put to the indignity of being searched by the immigration officials. Already anyone who had even talked to a Bolshevik was suspect in America.

  W. B. Thompson joined Robins in Chicago and rode with him to Washington to use what influence he could muster, but all he could achieve was a testy interview for Robins with the Secretary of State. The chief preoccupation of the Administration was that Robins should keep his mouth shut. This Robins loyally did. President Wilson’s door remained closed to him.

  It wasn’t until the war was over and after Robins had had his say before a congressional committee that he was able to tell a businessman’s luncheon what he’d intended to tell the President in the summer of 1918.

  “You believe that private property has a great and useful mission in the world. So do I … That is why I am talking to you today. There is a bomb under this room and under every other room in the world; and it can blow our system—your system and my system—into the eternal past with the Bourbons and the Pharaohs … We are talking about something that can destroy the present social system. Riots and robberies and mobs and massacres cannot destroy the present social system or any social system. They can be stopped by force … The only thing that can destroy a social system is a rival social system—a real rival system—a system thought out and worked out and capable of making an organized orderly social life of its own.”

  The only communication that Robins was able to establish with Woodrow Wilson was through a short report setting forth the need for an American economic commission to work with the Bolshevik government in restoring Russian commerce and industry. The President read Robins’ suggestions and noted for Lansing’s benefit that: “they were certainly more sensible than I thought the author of them capable of. I differ from them only in practical details”; and that was the end of it.

  The Commune Reborn

  If Woodrow Wilson was having trouble finding the right words to deal with the riots and robberies and mobs and massacres daily reported to him from Russia, the German High Command, which had given up words for deeds, was not getting much better results. On the map their successes seemed staggering.

  While their representatives were extorting peace terms that seemed to put the Russians at their mercy for ever, their troops were occupying the Aaland Islands to the north and getting ready to give Baron Mannerheim’s White forces the backing which was to prove decisive against the Finnish Bolsheviks. In cooperation with the Turks their military missions were penetrating the Transcaucasian regions with the Baku oilfields as their objective.

  At the same time mixed Austrian and German expeditions were pushing east along the railways from the old Galician front to occupy Kiev, the capital of the independent Ukraine with which they had signed a peace early in February.

  Further south resistance had ceased in Romania and Moldavia. An armistice was in force and the German generals were drafting peace terms with King Ferdinand’s government which would assure them a ninety year lease on the Romanian oilwells. With the wheat of the Ukraine and the oil of Romania the problem of supplying their armies on the western front seemed solved.

  The Bolsheviks had managed during the winter since their seizure of power to achieve a certain amount of order. Up and down the Trans-Siberian, which was the spinal column of what was left of the old empire, the local soviets were controlled by Bolshevik agents. From Murmansk to Baku and from the Volga to Vladivostok, town and provincial governments were in the hands of sympathizers if not of party members. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were disfranchised. Decrees dividing the land among the working peasants, turning factories and industrial enterprises over to workers’ committees, and outlawing the exploitation of one man’s work by another, were being put into effect. The rundown machinery of czarist government fell without much struggle, from the hands of the professional people who had taken it over under Kerensky, into the hands of the Bolsheviks.

  Except for a few centers of resistance in the south the dispossessed classes were hiding or in flight. Under the slogans of peace for the soldiers and land for the peasants the Bolshevik triumph seemed complete. Still Lenin hardly dared believe that his revolution was more than a fleeting affirmation of Karl Marx’s immutable principles, doomed like the Paris Commune to extinction, unless help should come from revolutionary movements in Western Europe. Not a moment must be lost in consolidating state power.

  At the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik or Majority wing of the Russian Social Democratic party, the sense of continuity with the Fr
ench Communards in 1871 was given new emphasis by changing the party’s name. Henceforward it should be known as the Russian Communist Party.

  Moscow was proclaimed as the seat of government and a Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, made up of Communist-picked delegates, was hastily convened to ratify the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

  The Czechoslovak Legion

  As fast as the brokendown railroads could carry them, German forces spread over southern Russia, opposed only occasionally by fleeting bands led by Social Revolutionaries or army officers from the old regime. On April 5 the Germans took Kharkov and a few days later the Black Sea port of Odessa.

  The invasion did not succeed in adding much to the German food supply. Wherever the German economic missions appeared the countryside blew up into civil war in their faces. Other byproducts of the invasion were even more disastrous to the German cause.

  The first result of the German takeover of the Ukraine was the appearance of a Czechoslovak army as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.

  Among all the national aspirations of the various peoples of central Europe the demands of the Czechs for independence from Hapsburg rule had, since the beginning of the war, been looked on with particular sympathy by the French. The Slovaks, consisting mostly of slavicspeaking peasants in the hilly region that stretched east from Moravia to the Carpathian Mountains, who had long chafed under Hungarian rule, came to associate their demands for freedom with those of the more urban Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia. Under the Romanoffs panslavic circles in Petrograd assiduously cultivated these enthusiasms; backing the westernized Czechs took a little of the reactionary curse off Russian czarism.

  The result was the formation of a Czechoslovak corps in the Russian Army. Czechs and Slovaks deserting from the Hapsburg armies were greeted as brothers. In 1916 a Czechoslovak national council was established in Paris with the blessing of the French and Russian governments. The Czechoslovak corps on the eastern front distinguished itself in Brusilov’s last illfated offensive.

  While the Russian armies disintegrated, the Czechoslovak corps, armed with material donated by the Russians and captured from the Austrians, remained intact. Discipline was good. Morale was high. All the Czechoslovak soldiers asked was to fight for the independence of their nation.

  Professor Tomas Masaryk, one of their national leaders who had lived in the States and lectured at the University of Chicago, where he was the darling of the large Czech population—Chicago being the largest Czech city after Prague—and who had further friendly connections among university people in England, went to Petrograd. There he made himself welcome to the Soviet Government.

  At the time of the German advance the Czechoslovakians, now amounting to more than two divisions, were billeted in the region of Kiev. They helped local Bolshevik elements obstruct the Germans until the signature of the peace. Then they fell back in good order towards Kursk and the Don River. Masaryk signed an agreement with the Bolsheviks for their evacuation across the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok and set off for Washington to try to arrange for their transport across the Pacific and across the United States to the western front. There was tacit agreement with the French and the British that, in return for their help in the war, Czechoslovakia would be recognized in the final settlement.

  When Trotsky arrived in Moscow as Commissar for War the Czechs were already moving east. Needing every scrap of armament he could lay his hands on, he began to revise the arrangement which his government had signed with Masaryk. The Czechoslovak Legion must give up their rifles and guns. They must dismiss counterrevolutionaries and officers who had served under the Czar.

  Communist agitators were sent down to lure the rank and file into a Congress of Prisoners of War being arranged in Moscow for the indoctrination of Austrian, Hungarian and German soldiers being shipped back to their homelands.

  The Czechoslovaks balked. Some detachments allowed themselves to be despoiled of their artillery, but most of them hid their rifles and machineguns. They retained their officers. As Bolshevik demands grew so did the suspicions of the Czechoslovaks.

  Meanwhile the French recognized what began to be known in the Allied press as the Czechoslovak Legion as part of the Allied forces and with the consent of their national council appointed the French General Janin to command them. In Paris and London the idea dawned that forty thousand Czechoslovaks might well make the spearhead of a force which, by overthrowing the pro-German Bolsheviks, would reconstitute the eastern front. Maps emphasizing the importance of the Trans-Siberian Railroad began to appear at meetings of the Supreme War Council at Versailles. In Washington ever more urgent arguments in favor of intervention were poured into the ears of President Wilson’s advisers.

  Early in April the tense situation at Vladivostok, where the urban soviet was already operating under the guns of British, American and Japanese warships anchored in the harbor, broke out in violence. Some gunmen described as soldiers in uniform, held up a store and killed several Japanese. Claiming that he could get no satisfaction from the local authorities the Japanese admiral landed five hundred marines to protect the lives and property of his nationals. The British followed suit with fifty bluejackets. Under orders from Washington the American commander held off.

  Chicherin, the shrewd little aristocratic bookworm who had taken Trotsky’s place as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, published one of his first appeals to the opinion of mankind. An attack from the old enemy strengthened the Bolsheviks with the newspaper reading stratum of Russian society.

  In Vladivostok itself the presence of the Japanese was overshadowed by the continual arrival of detachments of armed Czechs. Under a certain amount of suspicion and surveillance from the Communist-controlled committees that managed traffic on the railroad, but without too much friction, the long freights and trooptrains of the Czechoslovak Legion continued their slow uncomfortable progress across Siberia.

  The Kremlin of the Ancient Czars

  The stringing of detachments of foreign troops along the very backbone of their dominion immensely complicated the problems of the Communists. As Lenin’s hopes of playing off the Allies against the Germans long enough to obtain the breathing spell he needed began to fade, a spirit of desperation permeated their leadership. They entrenched themselves behind the enormous walls, under the crushing painted vaults, and amid the tarnished splendors of the Kremlin of the ancient Moscow czars.

  In their denunciations of those who disagreed with them, laden as they were with historical references to the French Revolution, terror began to be mentioned more and more as the rightful arm of the proletarian dictatorship. The names of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Fouquier-Tinville began to be pronounced in admiring tones. While Trotsky was training and disciplining his Red Army, Dzerdzinsky developed the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation into a powerful secret police.

  Felix Dzerdzinsky was a cultivated Pole who had received the best possible education in the German universities. As a Social Democrat he had suffered much in czarist prisons. Stories were told of his strange self-abnegation towards the other prisoners. In a cell he was always the one to clean the latrine or wash the floor. He was a wanfaced man with long white hands. Lockhart described the strange stare of his eyes between their unblinking lids.

  Dzerdzinsky threw himself into the work of repression with a total abnegation of all human feelings that culminated in a mystique of massacre for its own sake, a monstrous aberration of the human mind unknown to Europe since the days of the Spanish inquisitors, when Philip II could ask himself on his deathbed if he’d killed enough heretics for the salvation of his soul. Dzerdzinsky made his extraordinary commission so feared that people hardly dared pronounce the initials by which it was known.

  Dzerdzinsky’s first public enterprise, after setting up his headquarters in the office of an extinct insurance company at Lubianka, 11, won the immediate approval of the foreign colony in Moscow. The American Red Cross people, and the small g
roup of foreign correspondents and the members of the French military mission and of the British agencies, that were still carrying on partly aboveboard and partly undercover activities, were, like the rest of the city’s population, intimidated by marauding bands of selfstyled anarchists who set themselves up in the mansions of wealthy merchants, drinking up the winecellars, and sallying forth onto the streets to rob and murder at will. One April night the Cheka, with the assistance of Trotsky’s Red Army, carried out a sudden raid on the anarchist dens, shot down those that resisted and carted the rest off to prison.

  Jacob Peters, Dzerdzinsky’s Latvian assistant, who had learned English working in a London office, was so proud of the job he took Lockhart and Robins around to see the results of his work next morning. The dead still lay among the silk hangings in pools of blood on the ruined Aubusson carpets of the departed rich. In one diningroom, heaped with spilled food and broken bottles, a young woman lay face downwards. “Peters turned her over. Her hair was dishevelled. She had been shot through the neck, and the blood had congealed in a sinister purple clump. She could not have been more than twenty. Peters shrugged his shoulders. ‘Prostitutka,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is for the best.’ ”

  By the time the German ambassador arrived with his suite at the end of April, law and order was perfect in the mediaeval streets of the ancient capital.