Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [52]
While the Allies dabbled fitfully with intervention in Russia, they also explored the option favored by Lloyd George: that of negotiation. On January 21, 1919, Wilson and Lloyd George suggested a compromise to the Supreme Council. The Russians would be encouraged to agree on a common position on the peace settlements for discussion with the Allies. Since the French did not want the Bolsheviks to come to Paris, why not meet them, along with other Russian representatives, somewhere nearer Russia? As long as they refused to speak to the Bolsheviks, Wilson added, the Russian people would believe Bolshevik propaganda that the Allies were their enemies. Clemenceau, supported by Sonnino, objected that the very act of speaking to the Bolsheviks would give them credibility. He was not prepared to break with his Allies over this and so, reluctantly, he would go along. Only Sonnino held out. They must, he urged, collect all the White Russians together and give them enough soldiers or at least the weapons to destroy the Bolsheviks. Lloyd George had a practical question. How many soldiers could they each provide? There was an awkward pause. None, came the answer. It was agreed to proceed with negotiations. Wilson immediately sent for a typewriter. “We conjured up visions of a beautiful American stenographer,” a British journalist recalled, but a messenger appeared with Wilson’s battered old machine, and the president sat in a corner tapping out an invitation. As Clemenceau left the room he snarled to a waiting French journalist, “Beaten!” 28
Wilson’s draft, which talked of the Allies’ sincere and unselfish desire to help the Russian people, was duly sent to the representatives of the major Russian factions, inviting them to meet on the Princes Islands— Prinkipo—in the Sea of Marmara between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The islands were a favorite picnic spot for the inhabitants of Constantinople. They had also been used by the Turkish authorities just before the war as a place to dump the city’s thousands of stray dogs; for weeks, desperate barks and yaps had echoed back across the waters.
An invitation was sent off to the Bolsheviks by shortwave radio, and Paris waited for a reply. It was difficult to gauge what the response would be. Already the Bolsheviks had established what was to become a familiar pattern of rudeness and civility, utmost hostility and grudging cooperation. Lenin believed that the Russian Revolution would set fire to Europe, then the world. Borders, flags, nationalism, the tools of a doomed capitalism for keeping the workers of the world apart, would be swept away. His first commissar for foreign affairs, the great revolutionary theorist Leon Trotsky, saw his new post as a simple one: “I will issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop.” (In an unconscious parallel to Wilson’s call for open diplomacy, he had much fun rummaging through the old tsarist files and publishing, to the considerable embarrassment of the Allies, secret wartime agreements carving up, for example, the Middle East.) The only question for Lenin and Trotsky was one of tactics. If world revolution was going to happen immediately, there was no need to deal with the enemy. If there was a delay, however, it might become necessary to play off one capitalist nation against another. In 1917, the Bolsheviks assumed the first was true; by 1919, even though Lenin summoned a founding congress for a world revolutionary headquarters, the Communist International, they were starting to have doubts.29
The Soviet foreign policy, which reflected this ambivalence, did much to deepen the Allies’ suspicions. In October 1918 Georgi Chicherin, a disheveled, obsessive scholar who had just replaced Trotsky as commissar for foreign affairs, sent a sarcastic note to Wilson, mocking his cherished principles. The Fourteen Points called for leaving Russia alone to work out its own fate; curious,