“A private conversation of about twenty minutes,” so Francis recalled the scene, “and I turned away from him or he turned away from me: I have forgotten which, not in any unfriendly spirit …”
Gumberg, who eventually found a business career in New York more congenial than life under the dictatorship of the proletariat, went along with Robins. He bore a commission from the Moscow government to set up a Russian press bureau in America.
In Vladivostok Robins received a curt message from Washington enjoining him not to talk for publication. In Seattle, at the request so it seems of Lansing himself, Robins and Gumberg were put to the indignity of being searched by the immigration officials. Already anyone who had even talked to a Bolshevik was suspect in America.
W. B. Thompson joined Robins in Chicago and rode with him to Washington to use what influence he could muster, but all he could achieve was a testy interview for Robins with the Secretary of State. The chief preoccupation of the Administration was that Robins should keep his mouth shut. This Robins loyally did. President Wilson’s door remained closed to him.
It wasn’t until the war was over and after Robins had had his say before a congressional committee that he was able to tell a businessman’s luncheon what he’d intended to tell the President in the summer of 1918.
“You believe that private property has a great and useful mission in the world. So do I … That is why I am talking to you today. There is a bomb under this room and under every other room in the world; and it can blow our system — your system and my system — into the eternal past with the Bourbons and the Pharaohs … We are talking about something that can destroy the present social system. Riots and robberies and mobs and massacres cannot destroy the present social system or any social system. They can be stopped by force … The only thing that can destroy a social system is a rival social system — a real rival system — a system thought out and worked out and capable of making an organized orderly social life of its own.”
The only communication that Robins was able to establish with Woodrow Wilson was through a short report setting forth the need for an American economic commission to work with the Bolshevik government in restoring Russian commerce and industry. The President read Robins’ suggestions and noted for Lansing’s benefit that: “they were certainly more sensible than I thought the author of them capable of. I differ from them only in practical details”; and that was the end of it.
If Woodrow Wilson was having trouble finding the right words to deal with the riots and robberies and mobs and massacres daily reported to him from Russia, the German High Command, which had given up words for deeds, was not getting much better results. On the map their successes seemed staggering.
While their representatives were extorting peace terms that seemed to put the Russians at their mercy for ever, their troops were occupying the Aaland Islands to the north and getting ready to give Baron Mannerheim’s White forces the backing which was to prove decisive against the Finnish Bolsheviks. In cooperation with the Turks their military missions were penetrating the Transcaucasian regions with the Baku oilfields as their objective.
At the same time mixed Austrian and German expeditions were pushing east along the railways from the old Galician front to occupy Kiev, the capital of the independent Ukraine with which they had signed a peace early in February.
Further south resistance had ceased in Romania and Moldavia. An armistice was in force and the German generals were drafting peace terms with King Ferdinand’s government which would assure them a ninety year lease on the Romanian oilwells. With the wheat of the Ukraine and the oil of Romania the problem of supplying their armies on the western front seemed solved.
The Bolsheviks had managed during the winter since their seizure of power to achieve a certain amount of order. Up and down the Trans-Siberian, which was the spinal column of what was left of the old empire, the local soviets were controlled by Bolshevik agents. From Murmansk to Baku and from the Volga to Vladivostok, town and provincial governments were in the hands of sympathizers if not of party members. The nobility and the bourgeoisie were disfranchised. Decrees dividing the land among the working peasants, turning factories and industrial enterprises over to workers’ committees, and outlawing the exploitation of one man’s work by another, were being put into effect. The rundown machinery of czarist government fell without much struggle, from the hands of the professional people who had taken it over under Kerensky, into the hands of the Bolsheviks.
Except for a few centers of resistance in the south the dispossessed classes were hiding or in flight. Under the slogans of peace for the soldiers and land for the peasants the Bolshevik triumph seemed complete. Still Lenin hardly dared believe that his revolution was more than a fleeting affirmation of Karl Marx’s immutable principles, doomed like the Paris Commune to extinction, unless help should come from revolutionary movements in Western Europe. Not a moment must be lost in consolidating state power.
At the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik or Majority wing of the Russian Social Democratic party, the sense of continuity with the French Communards in 1871 was given new emphasis by changing the party’s name. Henceforward it should be known as the Russian Communist Party.
Moscow was proclaimed as the seat of government and a Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, made up of Communist-picked delegates, was hastily convened to ratify the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
As fast as the brokendown railroads could carry them, German forces spread over southern Russia, opposed only occasionally by fleeting bands led by Social Revolutionaries or army officers from the old regime. On April 5 the Germans took Kharkov and a few days later the Black Sea port of Odessa.
The invasion did not succeed in adding much to the German food supply. Wherever the German economic missions appeared the countryside blew up into civil war in their faces. Other byproducts of the invasion were even more disastrous to the German cause.
The first result of the German takeover of the Ukraine was the appearance of a Czechoslovak army as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.
Among all the national aspirations of the various peoples of central Europe the demands of the Czechs for independence from Hapsburg rule had, since the beginning of the war, been looked on with particular sympathy by the French. The Slovaks, consisting mostly of slavicspeaking peasants in the hilly region that stretched east from Moravia to the Carpathian Mountains, who had long chafed under Hungarian rule, came to associate their demands for freedom with those of the more urban Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia. Under the Romanoffs panslavic circles in Petrograd assiduously cultivated these enthusiasms; backing the westernized Czechs took a little of the reactionary curse off Russian czarism.
The result was the formation of a Czechoslovak corps in the Russian Army. Czechs and Slovaks deserting from the Hapsburg armies were greeted as brothers. In 1916 a Czechoslovak national council was established in Paris with the blessing of the French and Russian governments. The Czechoslovak corps on the eastern front distinguished itself in Brusilov’s last illfated offensive.
While the Russian armies disintegrated, the Czechoslovak corps, armed with material donated by the Russians and captured from the Austrians, remained intact. Discipline was good. Morale was high. All the Czechoslovak soldiers asked was to fight for the independence of their nation.
Professor Tomas Masaryk, one of their national leaders who had lived in the States and lectured at the University of Chicago, where he was the darling of the large Czech population — Chicago being the largest Czech city after Prague — and who had further friendly connections among university people in England, went to Petrograd. There he made himself welcome to the Soviet Government.