3

GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY

From the start of the First World War, Russia had been an important ally of France and Britain. Having come to power largely as a result of the war in February 1917, the Provisional Government confirmed its commitment to the Triple Entente. In April, the United States entered the war, and the Wilson administration supplied weapons and gave loans to the Provisional Government. Both Wilson’s adviser for foreign policy, Edward House, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing came to believe that Russia could become an American partner, a member of the belligerent “community of democratic nations.”¹ Voicing support for the Provisional Government of Russia, in August 1917 Wilson called for a revolution in Germany, which he thought could be modeled on the Russian revolution.

Instead, the Bolshevik Revolution came in November. The Wilson administration saw in this event the strategic success of Germany. A separate peace between Germany and Russia could seriously weaken the coalition of democratic powers, so the Wilson administration continued to recognize the overthrown Provisional Government and refused to negotiate with the new regime. Wilson came to Paris disturbed about the new Russian revolution, a view shared by British prime minister David Lloyd George. The Reds and their civil war with the Whites were very much in the news and minds of the Allies. According to Kennan, the president pictured Russia “as a country of frustrated idealists,” and it was in the focus of Wilson’s “emotional-political complex.” Because Wilson treated the Bolsheviks as agents of the German government, their victory forced him to resort to a policy of unconditional surrender.²

On their part, the Bolsheviks immediately stopped fighting on the German front. One day after their revolution, they published the Decree on Peace, which proclaimed “an immediate peace without annexations and without indemnities.” The decree eloquently defined annexation as “every incorporation of a small or weak nation into [a] large or powerful state without the . . . wish of that nation, irrespective . . . of the degree of development or backwardness of the nation . . . and irrespective, finally, of whether this nation is in Europe or in distant, overseas countries.” The decree’s call for emancipation applied to every land and nation, whether it was “forcibly annexed” by a stronger nation or “forcibly retained within [its] borders.” These definitions made the Decree on Peace a comprehensive call for the decolonization of the former Russian Empire and of the entire world. In December 1917 the Bolsheviks started negotiations with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk. It was in response to this situation that Wilson issued his program of peace, the famous Fourteen Points.

In his speech given to Congress on January 8, 1918, Wilson applauded Russian peace efforts, offered help to the Russian people, and called for friendly dialogue with Bolshevik leaders. “Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace,” said Wilson. In the same speech, he rejected all secret treaties between the Allies, including the promise of Constantinople that had kept the former rulers of Russia at war. Praising the Russian people and hoping to stop their “present leaders” from signing the separate peace, Wilson appealed to the same ideas of national self-determination and peace without annexations and indemnities. Wilson’s Fourteen Points developed these ideas in juridical terms, articulated by House and his team of university professors. A huge public success, the Fourteen Points program brought Wilson popularity in Europe and a Nobel Peace Prize.

Having stopped the war on their side of the front, the new government in Petrograd tried to balance Wilson’s sublime words with the very real threat of a new German offensive. While holding negotiations with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk, the commissars also hoped to get American help. Lenin, who had just returned from his long emigration to Switzerland, was eager to cede territories to the Germans in exchange for armistice. Trotsky, who had returned from the United States, strove to drag out the Brest-Litovsk talks. Like Wilson, these Russians were idealists who confronted grim realities on the ground; swelling with pride, they read what the eloquent American president said to Congress. There is a voice, Wilson said, “more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people. . . . Their conception of what is right, of what is humane and honorable for them to accept, has been stated with . . . human sympathy which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind.”³ No American president had talked about Russia with such enthusiasm.

Like the Bolshevik Decree on Peace, Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for the general decolonization of the world on the principles of universal self-determination. One point declared Russia “the acid test of good will” and demanded that all belligerents (which at the moment meant primarily the German troops) evacuate Russian territory. Wilson advocated for freedom of navigation and equal opportunities for both the winners and the losers of the war. He did not blame the enemy for starting the war, nor did he demand retribution. The key to achieving global peace was the creation of a new international organization, the League of Nations.

A descendant of Philadelphian coal magnates, Bullitt looked to wartime Germany as a model for social justice. When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia, his New York friends, social radicals such as John Reed and Lincoln Steffens, applauded the revolution. The Wilson administration continued to support the overthrown Provisional Government, but the American Left preferred the new rulers of Russia. Some of these people had known Leon Trotsky in New York, where he spent the spring of 1917 before sailing across the Atlantic to foment revolution in Russia; others were surprised by the unexpected victory of Russian Marxists in an agrarian empire. But American support for the new wave of Russian revolution extended far beyond Greenwich Village society; some of the City bankers, such as Jacob Schiff, gave money to the Bolsheviks and lobbied for their recognition.

An ambitious polyglot who knew and loved Europe, Bullitt strove to deal with Russia even though he did not speak Russian and did not understand its political turmoil. “I wish I could see Russia with as simple an eye as [John] Reed. I am unable to win through the welter of conflicting reports about the Bolsheviki to anything like a solid conviction,” he wrote in his notes in February 1918.⁴ A friend and rival of Reed, Bullitt hoped to find a role for himself in the reconstruction of Russian-American relations, which were rapidly changing with the revolution in Petrograd. Throughout 1918, Bullitt wrote several memos to President Wilson and Secretary of State Lansing, advising them on how to deal with Trotsky and the Russians.

Colonel House supported Bullitt and shared his interest in the Russian revolutionary movement. In February 1918, their mutual friend, the famous journalist and poet Lincoln Steffens, told House that the challenge for American diplomacy was the fact that the Bolsheviks did not trust Wilson’s new initiatives. With House’s approval, Steffens sent a telegram to John Reed in Moscow: “Trotsky making [an] epochal blunder doubting Wilson’s literal sincerity. I am certain President Wilson will do whatever he asks other nations to do. If you can and will change Trotsky’s and Lenin’s attitudes you can render historical international service.”⁵ Another mutual friend, the New York journalist Max Eastman, later spent many years working for Trotsky as a translator and literary agent.⁶ Liberal, broad-minded, and also secretive, House attracted journalists and activists who were far to the left of his politics.

The assurances Trotsky received from his American friends significantly influenced his position in Brest-Litovsk. While Lenin advocated a quick agreement with the Germans, Trotsky dragged out the talks: he was waiting for help from the Allies, for Germany’s surrender, or for peace talks with the Entente. None of these materialized, and only Germany’s threats were real. Finally, Trotsky approved the separate treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Signed on March 3, 1918, the German-Russian peace weakened the Entente. The Germans transferred their divisions from Russia and Poland to their Western Front. By signing this peace, Bolshevik Russia renounced not only its recent claims over Constantinople but also its colonial domains in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic. With Russia withdrawing from the war, only the intervention of American troops could stop the German offensive in France.

The Bolsheviks consoled themselves with hopes of world revolution that would level the playing field between the war’s winners and losers, abolish covert diplomacy and eliminate governments, armies, and borders. But the cynical Europeans and the idealistic Americans understood the peace of Brest-Litovsk to be a regional victory for the enemy. The German Empire imposed a peace that was defined by annexations and indemnities that Lenin and Wilson equally feared. Signed by the new Muscovite leaders, the treaty turned Russia from an ally of the Entente into a traitor. Now led by the United States, the Allies refused to recognize the new authorities as the legitimate government of Russia.

Europe was still at war. The talks in Brest began a year before the Paris talks that ended the First World War. The anti-imperialist slogans of the Bolsheviks, advocating an end to annexations, national self-determination, and so on, chimed with Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but they were incomprehensible to Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Paris Peace Conference demonstrated that Russian and American ideas of peace were also alien to the British and French leaders. With Brest-Litovsk, Germany extended its influence over Eastern Europe, forming a line of “buffer” states, from the Baltic to Poland, Ukraine, and Turkey. At this juncture, the European leaders of the Entente seemed to have forgotten Wilson’s points and returned to their secret treaties. Suspecting the Bolsheviks of aiding the Germans, the Allies landed troops in Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Vladivostok in 1918. The Wilson administration supported the troops under Admiral Kolchak, who had spent a large part of 1917 in America, and expected him to defeat the Bolsheviks. The French and the British also had their favorites among the White anti-Bolshevik forces fighting the civil war in the former Russian Empire. In October 1918, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs passed a note to President Wilson, via America’s attaché in Norway. Using a similar tone to Wilson’s manifesto, the Bolsheviks demanded the evacuation of Allied troops from Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, and Siberia. The Bolsheviks also reneged on all Russian debts—including the biggest one, to France.

In this difficult context, Bullitt acknowledged the responsibility of the Allies, especially the United States, for events in Russia and Europe. In November 1918 he prepared two detailed memoranda, one about the “Bolshevik movement in Europe” and the other about the situation in Germany. Both memos recognized the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, which Bullitt saw as a fait accompli. He predicted that the Bolsheviks would come to power in the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine as soon as the Germans retreated. In Sofia, socialists had come to power, he pointed out, and the same was bound to happen soon in Budapest, followed by Tyrol, Croatia, and Bohemia. Strikes and demonstrations under the Red banner were occurring throughout Europe, from Sweden to Italy. Mass starvation was creating a breeding ground for pan-European Bolshevism, Bullitt wrote. Bolshevism now posed a threat not only in defeated Austria and Turkey but also in France and Wales, where powerful forces that Bullitt called “half-Bolshevik” were also on the rise. Social Democrats controlled many German lands, and Bullitt suggested that the Wilson administration should support them because only they could effectively resist the Bolsheviks. If America did not support moderate German politicians, Bullitt warned, “Germany will become Bolshevist. Austria and Hungary will follow Germany’s example. And the remainder of Europe will not long escape infection.”⁷ Revolution was rising in Europe, and Bullitt hoped American aid would help moderate socialists and stop Bolshevism. He was probably right in this judgment, though he could not predict that, without “material and spiritual support” from America, German socialism would lose to a particularly virulent form of Nazism.

In February 1919 Bullitt attended the International Socialist and Labor Conference in Bern. The conference called for disarmament, free trade, democratic elections, and the opening up of the League of Nations to all democracies. From Bullitt’s perspective, this program of the European Left was no different from Wilson’s. In Bern Bullitt met the socialist leaders of Europe and developed a network that would be crucial to his diplomacy. He praised Victor Adler, leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, as a “thoroughly safe man” and “the chief hope” for quelling Bolshevism in Austria. Yet Adler’s position in Vienna was precarious, Bullitt wrote. Young Social Democrats were more radical than Adler, and the miserable conditions of postwar Vienna fed their Bolshevik sympathies. In Berlin the Ebert government also deserved urgent support from America, Bullitt wrote in his memorandum. “The Bolshevik movement in Europe can be combated successfully only by cooperation with the moderate socialist and labor leaders of Europe.” Bullitt proposed to dispatch Herbert Hoover, then head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), to Berlin, arguing that aid from the ARA would decrease the likelihood of a Bolshevik revolution in Germany. Though usually Bullitt’s proposals drowned in piles of bureaucratic correspondence, the ARA did deliver food to Germany and then to Russia. “Economic disorganization and famine are the parents of Bolshevism,” Bullitt wrote. If postwar Europe was going to remain in its miserable condition, nothing would protect it from the murders and robberies that come with the dictatorship of the proletariat, he warned.

In postwar Europe, Bullitt speculated, the struggle between capitalism and socialism had turned into a struggle between moderate Social Democrats and anti-democratic Bolsheviks. “In dealing with the Bolshevik movement in Europe it is necessary to distinguish with the utmost care between the Socialists who advocate the immediate establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat created by force and maintained by murder and terror, and the Socialists who advocate the establishment of democratic movements by peaceful means. . . . The latter variety of moderate socialist is the bitterest opponent of the Bolshevik,” Bullitt wrote. Bolshevism could only be defeated through cooperation with the socialists.

“The movement for social democracy is beginning to occupy much the same place in the political arena of the twentieth century that the movement for political democracy occupied during the nineteenth century,” Bullitt wrote in the same memo. Referring to history, he suggested that revolutionary movements were usually victorious, and that social democracy throughout Europe was also “inevitable.” Moderate European socialists needed support, and democratic America (also a product of revolution, he pointed out) ought to be their ally. With respect to revolutionary Russia, Bullitt had similar advice: the US government “objects strongly to the government by murder and mass terror,” he wrote, but “has no objection to the establishment of a Socialist government in Russia.”

In this 1918 memorandum, Bullitt formulated a strategy of support for the non-Communist Left that, decades later, would become a major element of the European policy of several American administrations. But Bullitt took this idea even further. Together with his patron Edward House, he proposed establishing new departments in American embassies, and later in the League of Nations, that would deal specifically with questions of labor and monitor socialist movements. This idea would grow into the International Labor Organization, an agency of the League of Nations.

It was a revolutionary moment, and Bullitt embraced it fully. From 1918 into the spring of 1919, he sent a stream of memos interpreting the impact of labor conflicts in Germany and elsewhere in Europe—strikes, manifestations, and confrontations between moderates and radicals within the socialist parties—for the American government. He consistently drew comparisons between the developing situations in Germany and Russia, arguing that the German radical socialists who threatened Friedrich Ebert’s government resembled Russian Bolsheviks. “[Karl] Liebknecht represents anti-democratic dictatorship in Germany,” Bullitt wrote. If he won power, the resulting terror and mass murder in Germany would be similar to the Bolshevik Revolution; that was why, in Bullitt’s view, the American government had to support moderate socialists like Ebert.

Re-reading these dusty papers today, one senses the lively feeling of global responsibility that infused young Bullitt’s writings. “Kerensky fell and Lenin succeeded him partly, to be sure, because of Kerensky’s own mistakes, but partly because the Allies and the United States did not take his appeals for material and spiritual aid at their face value. So today there is a grave danger that Ebert will fall because the Allies and the United States will not take his appeals . . . at anything like their face value,” he wrote. Bullitt proposed to support Ebert’s social-democratic government “a little more strongly than the Russian Bolsheviki are supporting the Spartacus group” of Liebknecht. Otherwise, he warned, “Germany will become Bolshevist,” and Austria and Hungary would follow.

Wilson and Lansing were not ready to respond to this entirely new genre of intelligence, but House liked it. Appreciating the young journalist, House included Bullitt in the American delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris and recommended that the State Department hire him in January 1918. Bullitt, then twenty-seven years old, started at the State Department with a salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year. His new position promised a successful career. Bullitt shared the liberal and internationalist ideas held by senior members of the US delegation, who were largely selected by Colonel House. He reported to Lansing, who was significantly more conservative than House; but his actual boss was House, and Bullitt could play on their long-standing rivalry. His new title was Chief of the Division of Current Intelligence, which required him to give daily briefings to Allied leaders. He conveyed news of events at the front, reports from intelligence services, scandals in the press, and word of strikes, demonstrations, and riots happening across Europe. Bullitt appreciated his chance to socialize with the world leaders, but he did not want to be one of them. He wanted more: to change the world.