There was, of course, not the remotest possibility that the Congress of Soviets, packed with the customary Bolshevik majority, would dare to deprive Lenin of his hard-won victory. The Bolsheviks used the bait to prevent something they genuinely feared—namely, occupation of Siberia by the Japanese and their intervention in Russian affairs on the side of the anti-Bolshevik forces. According to Noulens, the Bolsheviks had such confidence in Lockhart that they permitted him to communicate with London in code, which even official foreign missions were prohibited from doing.85
The first concrete result of the rapprochement with the Allies was the landing on March 9 of a small Allied contingent at Murmansk. Since 1916, nearly 600,000 tons of war matériel sent to the Russian armies, much of it unpaid for, had accumulated here from lack of transport to move it inland. The Allies feared that this matériel might fall into German hands as a result of Brest-Litovsk or the capture of Murmansk by German-Finnish forces. They also worried about the Germans seizing nearby Pechenga (Petsamo) and constructing a submarine base there.
The initial request for Allied protection came from the Murmansk Soviet, which on March 5 cabled Petrograd that “Finnish White Guards,” apparently assisted by German forces, were making preparations to attack Murmansk. The soviet contacted a British naval force and at the same time requested Petrograd for authorization to invite Allied intervention. Trotsky informed the Murmansk Soviet that it was free to accept Allied military assistance.86 Thus, the first Western involvement on Russian soil occurred at the request of the Murmansk Soviet and with the approval of the Soviet Government. In a speech which he delivered on May 14, 1918, Lenin explained that the British and French had landed “to defend the Murmansk coast.”87
The Allied party which disembarked at Murmansk consisted of 150 British sailors and a few Frenchmen as well as several hundred Czechs.88 In the weeks that followed, Britain was in constant communication with Moscow on the subject of Murmansk: unfortunately, the contents of these communications have not been revealed. The two parties cooperated to prevent the Germans and Finns from seizing this important port. Later, under German pressure, Moscow issued protests against the Allied presence on Russian soil, but Sadoul, who was in close contact with Trotsky, advised his government not to take them to heart:
Lenin, Trotsky, Chicherin accept, under the present circumstances, that is, in the hope of an entente with the Allies, the Anglo-French landings at Murmansk and Archangel, it being understood that in order to prevent giving the Germans an excuse for protesting this certain violation of the peace treaty, they themselves will address a purely formal protest to the Allies. They marvelously understand that it is necessary to protect the northern ports and the railroads leading there from German-Finnish ventures.89
On the eve of the Fourth Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks held the Seventh (Extraordinary) Congress of their party (March 6–8). The agenda of this hastily convened meeting of forty-six delegates centered on Brest-Litovsk. The discussions in the intimate circle of the initiated, especially Lenin’s defense of his unpopular position, provide a rare insight into Communist attitudes toward international law and relations with other countries.
Lenin vigorously defended himself against the Left Communists.90 He surveyed the recent past, reminding his audience how easy it had been to seize power in Russia and how difficult to organize it. One could not simply transfer the methods which had proven so effective in the capture of power to the arduous task of administration. He acknowledged that there could be no lasting peace with the “capitalist” countries and that it was essential to spread the revolution abroad. But one had to be realistic: not every industrial strike in the West spelled revolution. In a very un-Marxist aside, he conceded that it was far more difficult to make revolution in democratic and capitalist countries than in backward Russia.
