But all this lay in the future. On August 1, when the Kremlin received news of Allied landings in Archangel, the situation looked hopeless. In the east, the Czechoslovaks were capturing city after city and had full control of the middle Volga region. In the south, Denikin’s Volunteer Army, headed by the Don Cossacks under General Krasnov, was advancing on Tsaritsyn, capture of which would allow it to link up with the Czechoslovaks and create an uninterrupted anti-Bolshevik front from the middle Volga to the Don. And now a sizable Anglo-American force was assembling in the north, apparently to launch an offensive into the interior of Russia.
The Bolsheviks saw only one way out of their plight and that was German military intervention. This they decided to request on August i, the day after Helfferich had given Chicherin undertakings of continued German support. The meeting at which this decision was made is described in Communist sources as a session of the Sovnarkom, but as there exists no record of a meeting of the cabinet on that day, it is virtually certain it was made personally by Lenin, probably in consultation with Chicherin. The Russians were to propose to the Germans joint military action against Allied and pro-Allied forces: the Red Army, composed at this time essentially of Latvian units, would take up positions to the northeast of Moscow to defend it from the anticipated Allied assault, while the German Army would advance from Finland against the Anglo-American expeditionary force and from the Ukraine against the Volunteer Army. This decision is known to us mainly from the memoirs of Helfferich, who late on August 1 received another unexpected visit from Chicherin. The Commissar of Foreign Affairs told him that he had come directly from a meeting of the cabinet to request, on its behalf, German military intervention.* According to Helfferich, Chicherin said:
In view of the state of public opinion, an open military alliance with Germany is not possible; what is possible is actual parallel action. His government intended to concentrate its forces in Vologda to protect Moscow. It was a condition of parallel action that we not occupy Petrograd: it was preferable that we avoid Petropavlovsk as well. In effect, this approach meant that in order to enable it to defend Moscow, the Soviet Government had to request us to defend Petrograd.
The Bolshevik proposal meant that German forces, from the Baltic areas and/or from Finland, would enter Soviet Russia, establish lines of defense around Petrograd, and advance on Murmansk and Archangel to expel the Allies. But this was not all.
[Chicherin] was no less worried about the southeast.… Under my questioning, he finally spelled out the nature of the intervention that was requested of us: “An active assault against Alekseev, no further [German] support of Krasnov.” Here, as in the case of the north and for the same reasons, what was possible was not an overt alliance but only de facto cooperation: but this was a necessity. With this step, the Bolshevik regime requested the armed intervention of Germany on the territory of Great Russia.197
Helfferich forwarded to Berlin the Bolshevik request, which he summarized as calling for “silent [Bolshevik] tolerance of our intervention and actual parallel action.”198 Along with it he sent a pessimistic assessment of the situation in Russia. The main source of Bolshevik authority, he wrote, was the widespread belief that it enjoyed the support of Germany. But such a perception did not constitute a sound basis on which to conduct policy. He recommended that Germany pursue talks with those anti-Bolshevik groups which were not pro-Entente, among them the Right Center, the Latvians, and the Siberian Government.199 He was of the opinion that if Germany did nothing more than demonstratively withhold support from the Bolsheviks, their opponents would rise and topple them.
Once again the advice of the Moscow Embassy was overruled, this time by Hintze. The Bolsheviks were not friends, he conceded, but they “abundantly” took care of German interests by helping to paralyze Russia militarily.200 He was so displeased with Helfferich’s recommendations that on August 6 he had him recalled to Berlin; the ambassador never returned to his post, which he had held less than two weeks. Hintze then liquidated the troublesome German Embassy, ordering it to leave Moscow so that it could no longer interfere with German-Soviet relations. A few days after Helfferich’s departure, the embassy packed up and left, first for Pskov and then for Revel, both of which were under German occupation. Without a German mission in Russia, the center of Soviet-German relations shifted to Berlin, where Ioffe served as his government’s spokesman and principal negotiator of the commercial and military accords which the two countries concluded at the end of August.*
