Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [51]
Although France remained vociferous in opposing the Bolsheviks and their ways, it played no further part in the Allied intervention. Foch came up with a series of increasingly improbable plans to march into Russia with armies variously made up of Poles, Finns, Czechoslovaks, Rumanians, Greeks and even the Russian prisoners of war still in Germany, all of which came to nothing, partly because his cast of extras mostly refused the parts assigned them, but also because of strong opposition from the British and the Americans. 23
French policy became by default the second of the options Lloyd George had outlined: to isolate Bolshevism within Russia. At the Peace Conference and in subsequent years, France did its best to build up states around Russia such as Poland to form, in the old medieval phrase, a cordon sanitaire around the carriers of the plague. This had the advantage, even more important to the French, of providing counterweights to Germany and a barrier in the unlikely event that Germany and Russia should try to join forces. Foch and Churchill were among the few in Paris who took that possibility seriously. Churchill warned about a future combination of a Bolshevik Russia with a nationalist Germany and Japan. “In the ultimate result we could contemplate a predatory confederation stretching from the Rhine to Yokohama menacing the vital interests of the British Empire in India and elsewhere, menacing indeed the future of the world.”24
“We should continue to keep an eye on them,” a weary Clemenceau said of the Bolsheviks to Lloyd George at the end of 1919, “surrounding them, as it were, by a barbed wire entanglement, and spending no money.” Money was always a problem in 1919. Lloyd George tried to dampen Churchill’s enthusiasm for intervention by reporting a conversation with the chancellor of the exchequer, Austen Chamberlain: “We cannot afford the burden. Chamberlain says we can barely make both ends meet on a peace basis, even at the present crushing rate of taxation.” The British spent perhaps £100 million on their Russian adventure; the French under half that amount. “How much will France give?” asked Lloyd George when the question of expanding military intervention came up in February 1919. “I am sure she cannot afford to pay; I am sure we cannot. Will America bear the expense? Pin them down to the cost of any scheme before sanctioning it.” 25
Much of the aid to the White Russians was being wasted through inefficiency and corruption. Petty officials behind the lines took the uniforms intended for the soldiers; their wives and daughters wore British nurses’ skirts. While Denikin’s trucks and tanks seized up in the cold, antifreeze was sold in the bars. Although the Bolsheviks were later able to paint a propaganda picture of world capitalism in all its might arrayed against their revolution, in fact Allied help did very little to stave off White defeat.26
The Allied intervention in Russia was always muddled by differing objectives and mutual suspicions. The Americans were officially against intervention, yet they kept their troops in Siberia after the end of the war, to block Japanese designs. Where the French before 1914 had relied on a strong Russia to keep Germany in line, the British had worried about the Russian threat to India. In 1919 France would have preferred a restored White Russia, but Britain could have lived with a weak Red one. Curzon, who loathed everything the Bolsheviks stood for, was delighted that the Russians had lost control of the Caucasus; the British must, he told Churchill, be careful that Denikin, the White Russian leader in the south, did not get his hands on the area again. The British tended to be suspicious of French motives. The French government, complained Lloyd George, was unreasonably swayed by its own middle classes, who had lost their savings