For all their suspicions, the Allied ambassadors did not want to reject the Soviet request out of hand. Communicating frequently with their governments as well as with Trotsky, they reached on April 3 an understanding among themselves on the following principles: (1) the Allies (without the United States, which refused to go along) will assist the organization of the Red Army, with the proviso that Moscow reintroduces military discipline, including the death penalty; (2) the Soviet Government will consent to Japanese landings on Russian soil: the Japanese forces, meshed with Allied units sent from Europe, will form a multinational force to fight the Germans; (3) Allied contingents will occupy Murmansk and Archangel; (4) the Allies will refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Russia.*
While these talks were in progress, on April 4 the Japanese landed a small expeditionary force in Vladivostok. Its ostensible mission was to protect Japanese citizens, two of whom had recently been murdered there. But it was widely and correctly believed that the true objective of the Japanese was to seize and annex Russia’s maritime provinces. Russian military experts pointed out that the collapse of transport and the breakdown of civic authority in Siberia precluded the movement of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, with the vast logistic support they required, to European Russia. But the Allies persisted in this plan, promising to dilute the Japanese expeditionary force with French, English, and Czechoslovak units.
At the beginning of June, the English landed 1,200 additional troops at Murmansk and 100 at Archangel.
Lenin did not give up hope of American economic aid to supplement the military help promised by France. The United States continued to profess amity for Russia even after the Brest Treaty had been ratified. The Department of State notified the Japanese that the United States continued to regard Russia and her people as “friends and allies against a common enemy” although she did not recognize her government.25 On another occasion Washington declared that in spite of “all the unhappiness and misery” which the Russian Revolution had caused, it felt for it “the greatest sympathy.”26 Curious to know what these friendly professions meant concretely, Lenin on April 3 again asked Robins to sound out his government on the possibility of economic “cooperation.”27 In mid-May, he gave him a note for Washington which stated that the United States could replace Germany as the principal supplier of industrial equipment.28 Unlike German business circles, the Americans showed little interest.
It is impossible to determine how far Bolshevik collaboration with the Allies might have gone, or even how seriously it was intended. The Bolsheviks, aware that the Germans knew of their every step, may well have made these overtures to force Germany to observe the terms of the Brest Treaty or risk pushing Russia into Allied arms. Be that as it may, the Germans came around and assured the Bolsheviks that they had no hostile intentions. In April the two countries exchanged diplomatic missions and made ready for talks on a commercial agreement. In mid-May, Berlin, abandoning the hard line advocated by the generals, advised Moscow it would occupy no more Russian territory. Lenin publicly confirmed these assurances in a talk he gave on May 14.29 They paved the way for a Russo-German rapprochement. “When it emerged in the course of German-Russian relations that Germany did not intend to overthrow [the Bolsheviks], Trotsky gave up” the idea of Allied assistance.* From now on, relations between the Bolsheviks and the Allies rapidly deteriorated, as Moscow moved into the orbit of Imperial Germany, which seemed about to win the war.
83. Kurt Riezler.
Rebuffed by Moscow, the Allied missions in Russia had to confine themselves to desultory talks with pro-Allied opposition groups. Noulens, who was the most active in this regard, viewed Russians much like his German counterpart, Mirbach, as inept and passive, waiting on foreigners to liberate them. The Russian “bourgeoisie” impressed him as utterly devoid of initiative.30
In the second half of April 1918, Russia and Germany exchanged embassies: Ioffe went to Berlin, and Mirbach came to Moscow. The Germans were the first foreign mission accredited to Bolshevik Russia. To their surprise, the train in which they traveled was guarded by Latvians. One of the German diplomats wrote that the reception given them by the Muscovites was surprisingly warm: he thought that no victor had ever been so welcomed.31
