Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [57]
There was one last glimmer of hope: that the Russians themselves might solve their dilemma. Just before the spring thaw turned Russia’s roads to mud, the White Russians managed to coordinate an attack on the Bolsheviks. From his base in eastern Siberia, the White admiral Kolchak struck along a wide front. One force moved north toward Archangel and managed to link up with a small advance guard from a beleaguered White Russian and British force. Another pushed west toward the Ural Mountains. A third went south to join up with Denikin and his armies. By mid-April Kolchak and his allies had pushed the Bolsheviks back out of 300,000 square kilometers of territory. But this was the high point of their fortunes.
The Bolsheviks possessed two crucial advantages: their unity and their location. They controlled the center of Russia, while their heterogeneous opponents were widely dispersed around the periphery. Often, none of the White Russian commanders, mutually suspicious and separated from one another by miles of often hostile country, had any idea of what the others were doing. The Bolsheviks had three times the manpower and most of Russia’s arms factories.48
On May 23, 1919, the Allies decided to extend partial recognition to Kolchak’s government. “The moment chosen,” wrote Churchill later, “was almost exactly the moment when that declaration was almost certainly too late.” A dispatch asking for assurances that democratic institutions would be introduced made its tortuous way out to Siberia and in due course a partly garbled answer came back that seemed to provide the necessary guarantees. What also came back from Russia shortly afterward were reports of defeats. By late June, Red armies had broken through Kolchak’s center and the Whites were falling back hundreds of kilometers.49
By this time, however, the Peace Conference was drawing to a close and the Germans were about to sign the Treaty of Versailles. There was no time to do anything more about Russia. A brief clause was drawn up for the treaty which simply said that any treaties made in the future between the Allies and Russia, or any parts of it, must be recognized. Another clause left open the possibility of Russia’s claiming reparations. Otherwise policy toward Russia remained as confused as it had been all along. The blockade against the Bolsheviks remained in force, but support for the Whites gradually dwindled. Britain and France abandoned Kolchak as a lost cause. (The admiral put himself under the protection of the Czech Legion, still in eastern Siberia; the Czechs handed him over to the Bolsheviks, and he was shot in February 1920.) By October 1919, Denikin was in full retreat in the south. In January 1921, with much prodding from Britain, the European Allies agreed to end military intervention and abandon their blockade. In March 1921, Britain signed a trade agreement with the Soviet government. Even Conservative businessmen, who feared they were losing an opportunity in Russia, supported it. In 1924 Britain and the Soviet Union established full diplomatic relations. France followed reluctantly. America would wait another decade, until FDR.
With hindsight, Churchill and Foch were right about the Bolsheviks and Lloyd George and Wilson were wrong. The governing party in Russia did not become like Swedish Social Democrats. Lenin had established a system of terrible and unfettered power which gave Stalin free rein for his paranoid fantasies. The Russian people,