4

BETWEEN VERSAILLES AND THE KREMLIN

In Paris in 1919 the victors wished to end the world war. However, their objectives were different, as happens among friends. Guided by secret treaties, the European allies were fighting the war to redivide the former colonial world. Most of them believed in an old, but still popular, idea that their natural resources were insufficient and that their national economies depended upon revenue from the colonies. For some those colonies were overseas, in Asia and Africa. For others they were in Europe—in Ukraine, Poland, and the Balkans. The war was fought over all of them. A young John Maynard Keynes, then economic adviser to the British delegation in Paris, believed that in contrast to other continents Europe was not self-sufficient—its agriculture could not feed its growing population and its mines could not supply its booming industries. This worldview inspired Keynes’s understanding of the causes of the First World War. In his 1919 book, Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes wrote that the growth of the North American population diminished America’s role as a supplier of grain to the Old World. Germany and Austria-Hungary depended on grain from Russia and Romania. But the war halted the supply, and a famine was threatening Europe, Keynes argued.¹

In fact, the supply of natural resources such as grain, coal, and oil depends on scientific discoveries and technological progress. Some British, French, and German strategists were guided by theories of political economy that stemmed from eighteenth-century mercantilism, refreshed by the modern regulations governing passports and visas, border guards, and customs fees. In contrast, Keynes proposed to complement the new League of Nations with a “Union of Free Trade” that would cover the whole of Eurasia; he believed that relieving maritime and terrestrial trade from duties and tariffs would benefit everyone. Led by Wilson and House, the American Progressive movement shared this ideal. Decolonization and free trade would allow all the participants of the conflict, including Germany, equal access to the resources of former colonies, from Indonesian rubber to Ukrainian grain. During talks in Paris, the Americans unsuccessfully tried to impose their ideas onto the older, selfish European countries.

The Paris Peace Conference was a sumptuous event, the first European summit in which the Americans took part; in fact, they played a leading role, though they may not have realized it. The event involved an amazing collection of future celebrities: many prospective European and American leaders started their careers by serving in the Paris delegations, where they witnessed meetings and speeches, bluffs and conspiracies, friendships and conflicts. Paris marked one of the first international events in which technical espionage, bugging, and clandestine recording played a role. With his predilection toward undercover diplomacy, Colonel House was particularly interested in secrecy. As his old novel, Philipp Dru, demonstrates, House was much concerned with these unfortunate aspects of modernity; the plotline starts with the corrupted American president wiretapping his opponents. Bullitt shared these concerns, and some participants of the Paris Conference reminisced that he was “obsessed” with the dangers of dictograph and undercover wiring. He remained anxious about these issues throughout his diplomatic career, and usually for good reason. However, in 1919 his concern about secrecy and microphones seemed exaggerated; Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal historian of the younger generation, dismissed the “obsession” with wiring as Bullitt’s idiosyncrasy.² In the twenty-first century we have seen, sadly, that these technologies and anxieties have become a routine part of modern politics; retrospectively, the concerns of House and Bullitt look prescient.

In Paris, negotiations dragged on, moving further and further away from Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Subverting Wilson’s vision, British and French leaders blamed Germany for starting the war, dismantled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and focused on the annexations and indemnities. France claimed the disputed lands in Western Europe, Britain wanted the German possessions in Africa, and everyone was thinking about the former Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian colonies in Eastern Europe.

President Wilson understood—but was not able to defend—the argument that House, Bullitt, and Keynes were making: if Germany turned into a failed state, a new war would emerge. Bullitt would later dramatize Wilson’s dilemma in a play, “Tragedy of Wilson.” A young secretary advises the president how to talk to the Allies: “Say to them: I came here on a signed contract with Germany to make peace on the Fourteen Points upon which Germany asked for an armistice. If you gentlemen have no intention of keeping that promise, I shall return to Washington.” In the play Wilson objects: it would be a defeat, he says, one that would waste America’s war efforts, as well as his own speeches. “That’s better than making all ideals and idealists a joke,” responds his secretary.³

Bullitt wrote this tragic play in three acts around 1925, but he never attempted to publish or stage it. Lively, with fast dialogues and realistic scenery, the play depicts Wilson and his entourage at the Paris Peace Conference. Some characters bear the real names of their historical antecedents; other characters had their names changed but remained recognizable. The same goes for their words: Bullitt took some quotes from historical sources, some he quoted from memory, and others he made up. The play depicts negotiations in the Council of Four and in Wilson’s Paris residence in detail, including the tricks that British and French leaders played on the president, his capricious changes of mind, and his lofty but flirtatious attitude toward male secretaries. “We fight in order to establish the peace that will put an end to all wars,” Wilson says. His fictional young secretary gives a touching twist to the story. Wilson loves him like a son; patriotic and dignified, the secretary leaves for the war. In the next act, he returns wounded and blind. “It is not so bad if I can think it will never happen to anybody again and that I helped a little,” he says. He does help: looking at him, Wilson realizes the injustice he has brought upon this boy and the world. He stops the negotiations and orders the presidential steamer to bring him back to the States. But Allied leaders threaten the president: if he leaves the conference he would see “Bolshevism all over Europe,” they warn. According to the play, Wilson mourned the huge difference between the Versailles treaty and the Fourteen Points. Mixing flattery with deception, the European leaders persuade him to continue the negotiations. The play ends back in America, where a semi-paralyzed, delusional Wilson gives a long oratory to a random flock of sheep. Bullitt invested complex ideas in this text, such as Wilson’s obsessive self-identification with Christ, the analogy between the Paris Peace Conference and the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), and the belief in the structural incapacity of the League of Nations—or of any international organ in which great powers have the power of veto—to confront one of these powers. Mostly lively, sometimes moving, and deprived of romantic plot, the play buckles under the weight of its message.⁴

Wilson’s failure to act according to his own principles, which he offered to the world so convincingly, struck many observers. Lenin wrote that Wilson “turned out to be a perfect fool, whom Clemenceau and Lloyd George twirled like a pawn.”⁵ In their psychobiography of Wilson, Freud and Bullitt argued much the same, though using more sophisticated language. They followed in detail, almost on a daily basis, how Wilson’s inability to confront the pressure of his allies led him to moral collapse and physical paralysis. Rarely in human history, they wrote, did the fate of the world depend so much on a single individual, as it did in Paris in the spring of 1919.

During the war Freud’s sons were fighting for Austria-Hungary and Bullitt interviewed the leaders of Germany. Their personal experiences were very different, but they were equally critical of the American involvement in the war. Indeed, their book all but mourned the defeat of Germany in the First World War. The coauthors argued that the war aims of Britain (to suppress the German competition and take its colonies in Africa), France (to return Alsace), and Russia (to capture Constantinople) were all at odds with the interests of the United States. Although coming from different starting points, Freud and Bullitt agreed in their strategic analysis, which foresaw the next world war and blamed the Paris Peace Conference for laying the groundwork for a new catastrophe in Europe.⁶ Writing their book during the Nazis’ rise to power, they saw the radicalization of Germany as a product of the Versailles treaty. They believed that, had America not gone to war, the countries of the Entente would all have had to sign something resembling the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

Writing in the late 1920s Freud, then in his seventies, and Bullitt, in his thirties, were both convinced that history would have been different if only Wilson had held firm to his principles. His “fear was overwhelming,” they wrote. “He had exaggerated the danger of fighting and minimized the chance of fighting successfully. One threat to leave France to face Germany alone might have brought Clemenceau to compromise; one crack of his financial whip might have brought Lloyd George to heel. But . . . he feared that his withdrawal would result in an immediate renewal of war, . . . that starving French armies would in the end dictate a peace far worse than the peace he faced, . . . that the whole Europe would succumb to Bolshevism.” Freud and Bullitt characterized Wilson’s fears as childish, emphasizing his fear of Bolshevism foremost among all. “He hated and feared Communists far more deeply than he hated and feared militarists. There was no spark of radicalism in his body,” they wrote.⁷

One of the many problems that members of the Paris talks tried unsuccessfully to ignore was the fate of the most troubled of the belligerent countries, Russia, still embroiled in a civil war involving international troops. Bloodshed had been continuing unabated there since the start of the First World War. Famine had set in more recently. Allied troops stationed there faced attack. In July 1918, protests against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty led to an armed uprising in the new Russian capital, Moscow, which the Bolsheviks brutally repressed. The victors of the war feared that due to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Germany had received undeserved and untold benefits from Russia. On January 16, 1919, Lloyd George raised this question: “It would be manifestly absurd,” he said at a formal meeting, “to come to any agreement and leave Paris when one-half of Europe and one-half of Asia is still in flames. Those present must settle this question or make fools of themselves.”⁸ The British prime minister proposed to invite “the representatives” of all Russian forces, Red and White, to Paris. Some believed that if the Bolshevik delegates came to Paris, they “would convert everyone to Bolshevism”; this would not happen, Lloyd George promised. Meanwhile, the senseless British, American, and Japanese landings in the distant harbors of the Russian Arctic and Pacific continued for almost a year. The commanders leading those missions sent back conflicting messages: one dispatch requested permission to withdraw the troops and ships; in another, reinforcements were demanded.

Unlike the British government, which was actively developing intelligence in Russia, the Wilson administration had no agents there. The American ambassador and his staff had left Petrograd in 1917. Two American representatives of the Red Cross, Thomas Thacher and Raymond Robbins, forwarded Bullitt lengthy reports that were unusually sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. They believed that the Bolshevik regime was stable and popular, and they predicted a new conflict between Russia and Germany, which would turn the Bolsheviks into allies of the Entente. The pro-Bolshevik position of these Americans was distinctly different from that of British agents, who detested Bolshevism and were determined to overthrow it by force.⁹ However, Lloyd George was against a full-scale intervention in Russia. He proclaimed in Paris that the British working class would not support it; if he issued such an order, he said, he would face mutiny.¹⁰

Wilson proposed to invite “the representatives” of all sides of the Russian conflict to a separate conference to be held some place far away, perhaps on the Turkish island of Prinkipo. Clemenceau objected to the plan—he did not want to deal with Russia because the Bolsheviks were refusing to pay their debts to France. In February Clemenceau barely survived an assassination attempt; the assassin was an anarchist, not a Bolshevik, but the lesson to be drawn was clear. The French leader saw Bolshevism as a contagious, incurable disease that had to be quarantined.

Freud and Bullitt later wrote that whenever Wilson faced a problem, his response was to suggest setting up a discussion club like the one he chaired in his student years at the University of Virginia. Following his instructions, the American delegation sent invitations to a number of Russian leaders. When the responses came back, Wilson learned the difference between a debating club and a civil war: those who were killing each other in Russia had no interest in talking to their enemies abroad.

In the meantime, six thousand Americans were still in Arkhangelsk. In a memo Bullitt advised House to withdraw them. Failure to do so, Bullitt wrote on January 30, would entail a new catastrophe, a “northern Gallipoli.”¹¹ The British objected to that plan, and troops were withdrawn only in the summer. Since the Russian conference failed to materialize, Bullitt proposed an alternative plan to House. He advised sending an Anglo-American fact-finding mission to Russia, geared toward assessing the situation on the ground and the intentions of the Bolsheviks. Given Clemenceau’s hostility toward the Bolsheviks, he suggested, it would be better to keep this plan secret from France.

At that moment the Bolsheviks’ future was not clear to anybody, not even to themselves. One of their enemies, the self-declared “supreme ruler of Russia,” Alexander Kolchak, had American support. With British help, another White leader, Nikolai Yudenich, threatened Petrograd. In spring Yudenich met in Stockholm with the representatives of the Entente and requested further assistance. Czech troops controlled the Trans-Siberian Railway. Southern Russia was changing hands, and pogroms were incessant. When the Bolsheviks arrested the American consul in Tashkent, it became clear that they had power over parts of Central Asia. Watching this storm from Paris, some hoped that the Bolsheviks would soon vanish into thin air; some feared that the power vacuum in Russia would benefit Germany; others were afraid of the world revolution that Russians would bring to Europe. Nobody, not even the educated experts who worked for Wilson and House, could keep track of Russian events, let alone predict their outcome.

But as soon as the military defeat of Germany was official, the victorious countries lost interest in Russia’s problems. During the war it had been strategically important to keep Russia as an ally, because doing so forced the Central Powers to fight on two fronts. But when Russian soldiers abandoned the German front, the Entente happily forgot its promise to give Constantinople to Russia; after all, the British had protected it from the Russian Empire for centuries. In Paris the Allies faced plenty of other problems, and many of them—dismantling the Austro-Hungarian Empire, creating a new Poland, mapping the Baltic and Balkan states—were easier to resolve without Russia at the negotiating table. Russia was irrelevant when it came to resolving the deepest causes of the war, such as the dispute about colonial possessions and the elimination of German submarines. In these disputes the United States was to be the arbiter, Wilson’s favorite role. But when Britain insisted on annexing the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific, directly contradicting the Fourteen Points, all the American president could do was edit the treaty so that the detested words “annexation” and “colony” were erased. Distributed between Britain, France, and Belgium, the former German colonies were now to be ruled as “mandate territories.”

The left-leaning British leader, Lloyd George, still made some efforts to include representatives of the Bolsheviks in the peace process, and Wilson supported his initiative. Wilson’s friend and early biographer William Dodd produced a revealing account: “That would have meant that the Lenin government would become less eruptive . . . as all radical government have done in the past when they became ‘legitimate.’” It would also have meant, Dodd wrote, that “Russia would have become another economic bonanza as the Rocky Mountain regions was to the North after the American Civil War.” According to Dodd, Edward House promoted this project within the American delegation. If it were accomplished, “Wilson, Lloyd George and Lenin, strange as this comment may seem to some, would have rearranged the world and written the terms of peace. It was a great dream that came near the realization.” Dodd blamed Clemenceau, who wanted Russia to repay its debts, and Japanese leaders, who wanted to control Siberia, for defeating the project. “Far-seeing Liberals thus lost a great chance,” Dodd wrote in 1922.¹²

Wilson presented the charter of the League of Nations in Paris on February 14, 1919. Years later, Freud and Bullitt wrote ironically that Wilson had modeled himself after Christ, leading “the world to new peace and himself to immortality.”¹³ This sublime task, however, necessitated a new initiative toward Russia. Four days after Wilson’s speech, Secretary of State Lansing asked Bullitt to lead a mission to Moscow. The official purpose of this mission would be to explore political and economic conditions in the country. However, both Lenin’s revolution in Russia and Wilson’s revolution in international relations invited more than fact-finding.

Together with Lloyd George’s personal secretary, Philip Kerr, Bullitt formulated the task of this mission. According to the terms of the Russian truce drafted by the two young men, all existing authorities in Russia—Trotsky, Kolchak, Yudenich, Mannerheim, and others—would end their hostilities and remain in power in the territories they controlled on the hypothetical day of the armistice. In exchange, they would all receive international recognition. On February 21, Kerr enumerated the points he had informally discussed with Lloyd George in a letter to Bullitt: “1. Hostilities to cease on all fronts; 2. All de facto governments to remain in full control of the territories which they at present occupy.” Kerr’s other conditions included freedom of ports and trade and amnesty for all political prisoners and prisoners of war. Bullitt received a general approval of this plan from House. To make the plan more attractive to the Bolsheviks, Bullitt proposed deferring the discussion about the Russian debts, and House agreed.¹⁴ The mission was supposed to be kept secret, though newspapers learned of it quickly.

On this trip to Russia, Bullitt was to be accompanied by journalist Lincoln Steffens and W. W. Pettit, a military intelligence officer. Both were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. Steffens was a popular writer and poet who openly proclaimed his socialist views. Pettit spoke Russian and had previously visited Petrograd as an officer; on this trip, he was ordered to wear civilian clothes. Bullitt received five thousand dollars for their expenses. On February 22, 1919, the three men set out from Paris to London, then sailed from Newcastle to Bergen before finally reaching Stockholm. There, Bullitt met the Swedish Communist Charles Kilborn, who had spent several months in revolutionary Russia. Kilborn helped establish contacts with the Bolshevik leadership by telegraph. On March 5, the men made it to Helsinki, and from there it took three more days to reach Petrograd. “Journey easy,” Bullitt telegraphed from the road. “Reports about frightful conditions here ridiculously exaggerated.”¹⁵ In Petrograd, Bullitt and his companions met the Bolshevik leader of the city, Grigory Zinoviev, as well as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, and his deputy Maxim Litvinov. Chicherin spoke French; Litvinov, who had spent years in London and was married to a British woman, spoke English. A little later, all except Zinoviev traveled to Moscow to meet with Lenin. Bullitt and his companions spent three days in Moscow, the new capital.

The Bolsheviks were under siege. For them, early spring 1919 was the worst part of the civil war that followed the socialist revolution. They desperately needed international recognition of their power, and welcomed their American guests. Lenin and his comrades perceived Bullitt to be an official representative of the American government; this was the first but certainly not the last time that Bullitt exercised his skill at bluffing. The negotiations were quick, direct, and unexpectedly constructive. The Bolsheviks fed them bread and caviar; no other food was available in the Kremlin. Caviar became Bullitt’s favorite treat; everywhere he went, in America and Europe, he welcomed guests with caviar and champagne. As it happened, the self-proclaimed “people’s commissars” accepted the Bullitt-Kerr project almost without alteration. Beating Bullitt’s expectations, they even promised to pay off Russia’s debt to France, provided that Kolchak and other White leaders would share this responsibility. However, the debt became a secondary concern in light of the enormous shift in the military and political situation on the ground that could result from these negotiations. The Bolsheviks in Moscow went further than anybody in Paris could have expected, and indeed further than the Kremlin would ever agree to fulfill in the future.

On March 14, Bullitt received an extraordinary document from the Kremlin that contained the Bolshevik consent to his proposal. The Central Executive Committee of the Bolshevik Party, chaired by Lenin, discussed and approved “The Projected Peace Proposal” offering to cease military activity across the territory of the former Russian Empire. They proposed that the Allies recognize all authorities operating on Russian territory as legitimate governments over the areas they actually controlled at the date of the armistice. In exchange for international legitimacy, the Bolsheviks agreed to recognize the jurisdictions of Kolchak, Yudenich, Denikin, and other White leaders. They also agreed to national self-rule for almost all colonies of the former Russian Empire, from the Baltic to the Caucasus and Central Asia. In addition, they agreed to a continuation of the occupation of Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Vladivostok by the Allies. The Bolsheviks would have been satisfied to control the territories that they actually ruled in the spring of 1919: Moscow, Petrograd, and several surrounding provinces. Twenty-three parallel wars in the former Russian Empire would be stopped in a single moment, according to Bullitt’s count. The Bolshevik draft also offered general amnesty and free movement of people across the former Russian Empire. According to the document, the commissars agreed to acknowledge the Russian debt, provided that the Bolsheviks shared this responsibility with the new states. Lenin’s government wanted to get an answer to this offer before April 10, 1919, from the Paris Peace Conference. A week after the armistice, the Bolsheviks agreed to attend an international conference about Russia; they proposed to organize it in Oslo. The new independent states would be recognized at this conference.¹⁶ The document was as much of an official decision that an unelected, unrecognized power could proffer.

Bullitt immediately sent Pettit to Helsinki, where he cabled the document to Paris. Bullitt and Steffens also hastened to leave. On March 17, Bullitt cabled House: “If you had seen the things that I have seen during the past week and talked with the men with whom I have talked, I know that you would not rest until you had put through this peace.” House sent his congratulations.¹⁷

Bullitt returned to Paris on March 25. He left Pettit in Petrograd to liaison with Shklovsky, the local representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, who had recently returned from his emigration to the United States. From Petrograd, Pettit sent investigative reports that said many people he met in Russia supported the Bolsheviks. He was arrested on the Finnish border when returning from Petrograd; the Finns searched him, identified his rank, and released the gallant but credulous captain. Bullitt’s reports from Russia closely mirrored Pettit’s; both narrated the revolution with much optimism. “The destructive phase of the revolution is over,” Bullitt wrote, “and all the energy of the government is turned to the constructive work. The terror has ceased. . . . Executions are extremely rare.” Bullitt saw Lenin as a moderate politician like Wilson, almost a centrist. “Lenin, indeed, as a practical matter, stands well to the right in the existing political life of Russia.”¹⁸ To illustrate his point, Bullitt described how Lenin’s government had abandoned its earlier plan to nationalize land, reestablished the banks, and intended to pay foreign debts. Bullitt was right: two years later, Lenin began implementing his New Economic Policy. He was more pragmatic than many of his comrades, which he probably made clear to Bullitt when they talked over bread and caviar. Unlike John Reed, who admired Trotsky, Bullitt preferred Lenin, writing of the Bolshevik leader as a direct and sincere man—high praise. Even later in life, when Bullitt became sharply critical about the Soviet regime, he still made an exception for Lenin.

In short, Bullitt believed that his three days in Moscow would change the world no less dramatically than the ten days in Petrograd depicted by John Reed in his book about the Russian Revolution. Those three days did change his life, but they failed to turn history around. In late 1919 Bullitt gave a detailed assessment of his Russian mission to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the American Senate and then published the proceedings at his own risk. About ten years later, Bullitt included a summary of his Russian mission in the book on Wilson he coauthored with Freud. The summary was a brief and effective presentation of the failed treaty: “Lenin had offered to make an immediate armistice on all fronts, and to accord de facto recognition to the Anti-communist governments, which had been set up in the following areas of the territory of the former Russian Empire: 1) Finland, 2) Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, 3) Estonia, 4) Latvia, 5) Lithuania, 6) Poland, 7) the western part of White Russia, 8) Rumania, including Bessarabia, 9) more than half the Ukraine, 10) the Crimea, 11) the Caucasus, 12) Georgia, 13) Armenia, 14) Azerbaijan, 15) the whole of the Urals, 16) all Siberia. Thus Lenin had offered to confine Communist rule to Moscow and a small adjacent area, plus the city now known as Leningrad.” Bullitt realized, of course, that Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks would violate the deal just as soon as they could afford to do so; still, such a treaty would be a huge breakthrough. “As a Communist, Lenin naturally expected to expand the area of Communist rule whenever he could safely, regardless of any promises he might have made. Yet by reducing the Communist state to an area not much larger than that ruled by . . . Ivan the Terrible, Lenin had offered the West a unique opportunity,” Bullitt and Freud wrote.¹⁹ George Kennan evaluated the proposed treaty in similar terms: it was, he wrote, “not an ideal” option, but it “did offer the most favorable opportunity yet extended, or ever to be extended, to the Western powers” in their dealing with Russia.²⁰

Having consented to Bullitt’s project for peace, the Bolsheviks prioritized their own survival, hoping to consolidate their power in Central Russia and continue their fight for world revolution from there. They also followed the logic of decolonization that inspired both their Decree on Peace and Wilson’s Fourteen Points. In exchange for diplomatic recognition, the Bolshevik government was ready to cede control over the populated and industrialized areas of the former Russian Empire—the Urals, Siberia, Northern Russia, and the Caucasus. Finland had declared its independence from Russia a year earlier; under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Bolsheviks had already retreated from a major part of Ukraine and the Baltic lands.

Had the belligerent powers fighting the Russian Civil War signed on to the peace in Oslo after a more global treaty was signed in Versailles, the decolonization of the world would have gone much further than what even the Inquiry’s most idealistic professors could have expected. The resulting losses of the territory and population of the former Russian Empire would have been much larger than those resulting from the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. If the hypothetical treaty were signed, in Oslo or another suitable place, in the presence of high international representatives, it would be the first accomplishment of the new League of Nations. Had this happened, the League would have earned much higher repute in the US Congress and around the world. The regional success would have had global consequences. The termination of the Russian Civil War would have saved many thousands from dying in combat, from famine or pogroms. Warfronts would have acquired the status of state borders, and about a dozen new states would have appeared on the world map. In conflict with each other, these newly independent states would have had to establish new relations with the outer world, each in its own way. Surrounded by a ring of large and small Russian and non-Russian states, Bolshevism would have become localized and isolated. Internationally recognized, Lenin’s government would have had to compete for people, capital, and might with a panoply of liberal, nationalist, and monarchist neighbors. The Soviet Union would probably never have been formed had this version of history come to pass. The emancipation of Siberia and the fragmentation of European Russia would have changed the balance of power so much that the history of the twentieth century would have been different. And could it have been worse than what actually happened?