Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [48]
Lloyd George would have preferred to include Russia in the Peace Conference. As he told Clemenceau at their meeting in London in December 1918, they could not proceed as if the country did not exist. He had, he said, great sympathy for the Russian people. “Their troops had fought without arms or munitions; they had been outrageously betrayed by their Government, and it was little to be wondered at if, in their bitterness, the Russian people had rebelled against the Alliance.” Russia was a huge country, stretching from Europe to Asia, with almost 200 million people. If the nations with claims on Russian territory were to be allowed to come to Paris, then surely the Russians themselves deserved the right to be heard. That might mean inviting the Bolsheviks. He did not like them, Lloyd George told the Supreme Council, but could they refuse to recognize them? “To say that we ourselves should pick the representatives of a great people was contrary to every principle for which we had fought.” The British government had made the same mistake after the French Revolution, when it had backed the émigré aristocrats. “This,” Lloyd George said dramatically, “led them into a war which lasted about twenty-five years.”12
His arguments did not go down well with Clemenceau, who loathed the Bolsheviks, partly because he saw them as tools of the Germans and partly because he abhorred their methods. For Clemenceau revolution was sublime when it was the one of 1789, despicable when it fell into the hands of the Jacobins, with their Robespierres and Lenins, who used the guillotine and the noose to create perfection. He had lived through the mob violence and the bloody suppression of the radical Commune of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. From that moment on he had broken with the extreme left. In 1919 he, like the other Allied leaders, also had to heed his own public opinion. If the Bolsheviks sent representatives to Paris, he told Balfour in a private interview, the extreme radicals would be encouraged and the middle classes would panic. There would be rioting in the streets, which his government would have to put down with force. That would not be a good atmosphere for the Peace Conference. If his allies insisted on going ahead with such an invitation, Clemenceau warned, he would be obliged to resign.13
And did the Bolsheviks speak for all the Russian people? They controlled only the core Russian lands, along with the great cities of St. Petersburg (soon to become Leningrad) and Moscow. They faced rival governments: that of the White Russians, as they were commonly known, in the south, under General Anton Denikin, one of the better tsarist generals, and another in Siberia under Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. In Paris itself, Russian exiles, from conservatives to radicals, had formed the Russian Political Conference to speak for all non-Bolshevik Russians. Sergei Sazonov, who had been a foreign minister under the tsar, found himself working with Boris Savinkov, a famous terrorist. Sleek, fashionably dressed, a gardenia in his buttonhole, Savinkov was much admired in Paris. Lloyd George, who always liked efficiency, said: “His assassinations had always been skilfully arranged and had been a complete success.”14 Unfortunately, the Russian Political Conference got only grudging support from the rival governments of Denikin and Kolchak (which also spent much time trying to outmaneuver each other) and none at all from the Bolsheviks.
On January 16, Lloyd George brought the whole question of Russia before the Supreme Council. It seemed to him that they had three choices: first, to destroy