Russia as an autocracy remained the political 'other' of Western democracy and republicanism, and it was with great joy and relief that liberals, including President Woodrow Wilson, greeted the February Revolution of 1917 as 'the impossible dream' realised. Now the new Russian government could be enlisted in the Great War to make 'the world safe for democracy'.[5] But the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd turned the liberal world upside down. For Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lansing, Bolshevism was 'the worst form of anarchism', 'the madness of famished men'.[6] In the years immediately following the October Revolution the first accounts of the new regime reaching the West were by journalists and diplomats. The radical freelance journalist John Reed, his wife and fellow radical Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty of the San Francisco Bulletin, the British journalist Arthur Ransome and Congregational minister Albert Rhys Williams all witnessed events in 1917 and conveyed the immediacy and excitement of the revolutionary days to an eager public back home.[7] After several trips to Russia, the progressive writer Lincoln Steffens told his friends, 'I have seen the future and it works.' Enthusiasm for the revolution propelled liberals and socialists further to the Left, and small Communist parties emerged from the radical wing of Social Democracy. From the Right came sensationalist accounts of atrocities, debauchery and tyranny, leavened with the repeated assurance that the days of the Bolsheviks were numbered. L'Echo de Paris and the London Morning Post, as well as papers throughout Western Europe and the United States, wrote that the Bolsheviks were 'servants of Germany' or 'Russian Jews of German extraction'.[8] The New York Times so frequently predicted the fall of the Communists that two young journalists, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, exposed their misreadings in a long piece in The New Republic.[9]
The Western reaction to the Bolsheviks approached panic. Officials and advisers to the Wilson administration spoke of Russia as drunk, the country as mad, taken over by a mob, the people victims of an 'outburst of elemental forces', 'sheep without a shepherd', a terrible fate for a country in which 'there were simply too few brains per square mile'.[10] Slightly more generously, American ambassador David Francis told the State Department that the Bolsheviks might be just what Russia needed: strong men for a people that do not value human life and 'will obey strength . . . and nothing else'.[11] To allay fears of domestic revolution the American government deported over two hundred political radicals in December 1919 to the land of the Soviets on the Buford, an old ship dubbed 'the Red Ark'. The virus of Bolshevism seemed pervasive, and powerful voices raised fears of international subversion. The arsenal of the Right included the familiar weapon of anti-Semitism. In early 1920 Winston Churchill told demonstrators that the Bolsheviks 'believe in the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jews'.[12] Baron N. Wrangel opened his account of the Bolshevik revolution with the words 'The sons of Israel had carried out their mission; and Germany's agents, having become the representatives of Russia, signed peace with their patron at Brest-Litovsk'.[13]
Western reading publics, hungry for news and analyses of the enigmatic social experiment underway in Soviet Russia, turnedto journalists and scholars for information. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had accompanied a delegation ofthe British Labour Party to Russia in 1919, rejected Bolshevism for two reasons: 'the price mankind must pay to achieve communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible; and secondly, . . . even after paying the price I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.'[14] Other radical dissenters included the anarchist Emma Goldman, who spent nearly two years in Bolshevik Russia only to break decisively with the Soviets after the repression of the Kronstadt mutiny in March 1921.[15]
The historian Bernard Pares had begun visiting Russia regularly from 1898 and reported on the beginnings of parliamentarianism in Russia after 1905. As British military observer to the Russian army he remained in the country from the outbreak of the First World War until the early days of the Soviet government. After service as British commissioner to Admiral Kolchak's anti- Bolshevik White government, Pares taught Russian history at the University of London, where he founded The Slavonic Review in 1922 and directed the new School of Slavonic Studies. A friend of the liberal leader Pavel Miliukov and supporter of constitutional monarchy in Russia, by the 1930s Pares had become more sympathetic to the Soviets and an advocate of Anglo-Russian rapprochement. Like most of his contemporaries, Pares believed that climate and environment shaped the Russians. 'The happy instinctive character of clever children,' he wrote, 'so open, so kindly and so attractive, still remains; but the interludes of depression or idleness are longer than is normal.'[16] In part because of his reliance on the concept of 'national character', widely accepted among scholars, journalists and diplomats, Pares's influence remained strong, particularly during the years of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. But with the coming of the Cold War, he, like others 'soft on communism', was denounced as an apologist for Stalin.[17]
In the United States the most important of the few scholars studying Russia were Archibald Cary Coolidge at Harvard and Samuel Northrup Harper of the University of Chicago. For Coolidge, the variety of 'head types' found among Slavs was evidence that they were a mixture of many different races, and while autocracy might be repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon', it appeared to be appropriate for Russians.[18] After working with Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration (ARA) during the famine of 1921-2, he concluded that the famine was largely the result of the peasants' passivity, lethargy and oriental fatalism, not to mention the 'stupidity, ignorance, inefficiency and above all meddlesomeness' of Russians more generally.[19] The principal mentor of American experts on the Soviet Union in the inter-war period, Coolidge trained the first generation of professional scholars and diplomats. One of his students, Frank Golder, also worked for Hoover's ARA and was an early advocate of Russia's reconstruction, a prerequisite, he felt, for ridding the country of the 'Bolos'. Golder went on to work at the Hoover Institution of War, Peace and Revolution at Stanford University, collecting important collections of documents that make up the major archive for Soviet history in the West.[20]
5
On American views of Russia and the revolution, see Lasch,
6
Arno J. Mayer,
7
John Reed,
8
Walter Laqueur,
9
'Thirty different times the power of the Soviets was definitely described as being on the wane. Twenty times there was news of a serious counter-revolutionary menace. Five times was the explicit statement made that the regime was certain to collapse. And fourteen times that collapse was said to be in progress. Four times Lenin and Trotzky were planning flight. Three times they had already fled. Five times the Soviets were "tottering." Three times their fall was "imminent" . . . Twice Lenin had planned retirement; once he had been killed; and three times he was thrown in prison' (Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, 'A Test of the News',
12
13
14
Bertrand Russell,
15
Emma Goldman,
16
Sir Bernard Pares,
20