History's Lost Opportunity

THE DECISION TO INTERVENE (513 pp.)

--George F. Kennan--Princeton University Press ($7.50).

The strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.

--Winston Churchill, 1949

In Russia Leaves the War, the first of a three-volume study-in-progress of Soviet-American relations (1917-20), scholarly ex-Diplomat George F. Kennan described the birth of Bolshevism in Russia. Volume II, The Decision to Intervene, tells the fascinating story of how the Allies irresolutely attempted to strangle the newborn Red monster.

Scarcely a single, clear-cut, concerted decision was taken by the leading Allies (Britain, France, Japan and the U.S.) during six months (March through August 1918) of diplomatic maneuverings leading up to joint troop landings on Russian soil. Author Kennan makes plain that the initial urge to intervene was based not on the Bolshevik but the German menace. The treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war and left the Germans free to mount what was to be their last massive offensive on the Western Front. The Allies also feared that the port of Murmansk and tens of thousands of tons of war supplies in Archangel and Vladivostok would fall into German hands.

Nowhere was the "confusion and complexity" of when, how, why. and if to intervene more strikingly illustrated than in the American diplomatic camp. U.S. Ambassador David R. Francis was an aging (67), old-line Missouri politician with a passion for poker. British Agent Bruce Lockhart recalled that after dinner, "Francis began to fidget like a child who wishes to return to its toys. His rattle, however, was a deck of cards." Ambassador Francis' poker-faced response to the Russian enigma was to hole up 250 miles north of Moscow in the town of Vologda, where he received garbled telegraphic reports from his Moscow subordinates.

Occupational Therapy. His two chief informants canceled each other out. Maddin Summers was U.S. consul general in

Moscow, a stiffly honorable diplomat who was not on speaking terms with the key Bolsheviks and believed them to be nothing but German agents. Raymond Robins was the supercharged head of the American Red Cross mission and had become chummy with Lenin and Trotsky. Robins seems to have believed that the exercise of power was a form of occupational therapy for the Soviet leaders and "that they could be made, over a short time, into reliable and effective allies."

To this wealth of misconceptions. Ambassador Francis sometimes added a weird and wily nugget of his own. On one occasion, he authorized the chief of the American military mission to help Trotsky in the formation of the new Red army on the ground that such an army could "by proper methods be taken from Bolshevik control and used against Germans, and even [against] its creators." Nevertheless, since official Washington offered scant guidance. Historian Kennan gives Francis high marks for showing as much "fidelity, persistence, courage" as he did.

Idealistic Swivet. As early as May 2. Ambassador Francis made a forthright plea for intervention, asking rhetorically "whether [the] Allies can longer afford to overlook principles [of worldwide social revolution] which Lenin is aggressively-championing."

But President Wilson was in an idealistic swivet. In Kennan's view, he cherished an "image of the Russians as a simple people, clothed in a peculiar virtue compiled of poverty, helplessness, and remoteness from worldly success--a mass of mute, suppressed idealists languishing beneath the boot of the German captor." The real boot, of course, was the Soviet reign of terror; Lenin and Trotsky, between hasty Kremlin lunches "of salt pork, buckwheat grits, and red caviar," were stamping out all political opposition. Wilson might never have heeded Anglo-French pleas for intervention had it not been for "sentimental" considerations involving the Czechs, to whose postwar birth as a nation Wilson was passionately dedicated.

Czech Mates. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had stranded a Czechoslovak legion in the Ukraine. Before long, these displaced Czech soldiers were locked in combat with the Reds. Wilson believed that they were fighting against bands of German war prisoners who had rearmed themselves, and when he finally gave the order to intervene on July 6, 1918, the U.S. commitment was mainly limited to "aiding the Czechs against German and Austrian prisoners" and "guarding the military stores at Kola," a village near Murmansk. (There were no military stores at Kola.) When a battalion of U.S. doughboys slogged into combat positions in knee-deep water 100 miles from Archangel, posters provided by British General Headquarters proclaimed that their enemies were Bolsheviks--"soldiers and sailors who, in the majority of cases are criminals . . . Their natural, vicious brutality enabled them to assume leadership."

For his third volume, Historian Kennan reserves the melancholy story of "the fate of these young Americans" engaged in "a foreign civil war in the endless swamps and forests of the Russian Arctic."

Too Little, Too Late. Despite Kennan's strenuous objectivity, one inescapable conclusion leaps from the pages of his book--taken rapidly and resolutely, the decision to intervene would have snapped Bolshevik power like a twig. More than a score of separate Russian governments were contesting Lenin's right to rule on Russian soil. The Russian people were famine-ridden and war-weary. Lenin himself relied on endless improvisation. If this was one of history's great lost opportunities, the chief culprit was Wood-row Wilson. Democrat Kennan admits: "[Wilson] drew onto himself, ultimately, the blame for the failure of the entire venture (on the ground that the United States' contribution had been too little and too late)."

Author Kennan's own thinking about Russia has not advanced as far as might be expected beyond Wilson's. This is demonstrated in Kennan's BBC lectures about the need for "disengagement" (TIME, Dec. 23), now published in book form as Russia, the Atom and the West.

But Historian Kennan's massive scholarship spills over into dozens of mood vignettes that give the Russian scene-cold, bleak, vast, secretive, despotic--an almost fictional verisimilitude. For the rest. Kennan relies too heavily on the modern liberal cliche that the tragedies of history are largely failures of communication. "Keep the diplomatic talks going," seems to be his version of "Keep your powder dry." Yet, talk is a language the Russians have never understood.

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