Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [55]
On February 17, House told Bullitt that he had been chosen to lead a small secret mission to talk to the Bolshevik leaders about what sort of conditions they might accept to make peace with the Allies. Bullitt was delighted. His job in Paris had been routine; now, as he saw it, he was moving onto center stage. A product of the privileged, insular world of the Philadelphia upper classes, he had enormous confidence in himself and his own judgment. Something of a prodigy, or so his doting mother thought, he had sailed through Yale University. His contemporaries thought him brilliant, although some also noticed that there was something cold and calculating in the way he used and discarded people. He admired Wilson and his principles tremendously, but wondered if the president was up to defending them.39
Together House and Kerr outlined a list of subjects the mission was to discuss. “Bullitt was going for information only,” House assured other American delegates. He failed to make this sufficiently clear to Bullitt himself, who maintained, even when his expedition came to grief, that he had a mandate from both House, speaking on Wilson’s behalf, and Lloyd George to negotiate conditions of peace with the Bolsheviks. Steffens, who went on the mission, concurred: “Bullitt’s instructions were to negotiate a preliminary agreement with the Russians so that the United States and Great Britain could persuade France to join them in an invitation to a parley, reasonably sure of some results.” Steffens, not for the first time, was wrong. Neither House nor Lloyd George had given up hope of some sort of settlement, but they were not about to alienate either the French or their own domestic opinion if the Bolsheviks proved recalcitrant. A small mission headed by an insignificant twenty-eight-year-old might bring back good news. It was expendable if it did not.40
Bullitt and Steffens spent a wonderful week in Moscow: accommodation in a confiscated palace, piles of caviar, nights at the opera in the tsar’s old box and during the day discussions with Lenin and Chicherin themselves. The Bolsheviks, Steffens believed, were getting rid of the causes of poverty, corruption, tyranny and war. “They were not trying to establish political democracy, legal liberty, and negotiated peace—not now. They were at present only laying the basis for these good things.” Bullitt agreed that a great work had been started in Russia. Both men were deeply impressed with Lenin. He was “straightforward and direct,” said Bullitt, “but also genial and with a large humor and serenity.” Steffens asked about the terror against the Bolsheviks’ opponents and was moved when Lenin expressed regret; he was, thought Steffens, “a liberal by instinct.” 41
By the end of the week Bullitt had, he thought, a deal. There would be a cease-fire and then concessions on both sides. The Allies would withdraw their troops, but the Bolsheviks would not insist on an end to the various White governments in Russia. (Since the terms called for an end to Allied assistance to the Whites, the Bolsheviks could afford to be generous.) It is doubtful that the Bolsheviks were negotiating in good faith; Lenin had shown with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk that he was prepared to make concessions only to buy time. Bullitt and Steffens were “useful idiots,” their mission helpful at least for propaganda.
Bullitt proudly bore his agreement, and Steffens his rosy picture of the future, back to Paris. House, as usual, was encouraging, but other members of the American delegation had their doubts. Wilson himself, by now back from the United States, was simply too distracted by the difficult negotiations over the German treaty to pay much attention. He would not make time to see Bullitt. Lloyd George, who had him to breakfast on March 28, was getting very cold feet indeed. Béla Kun’s seizure of power in Hungary the weekend before had reawakened fears about Bolshevism spreading westward. News had leaked out about Bullitt’s mission; rumors were circulating that Britain