Ekaterinburg was one of the towns in the path of the Czechoslovak Legion. The month before, as revolt spread through Siberia, the pitiful remnants of the Romanoff family had been brought to Ekaterinburg from internment at Tobolsk, and imprisoned in what had been the mansion of a local merchant. The party consisted of the Czar and Czarina and their daughters and thirteenyearold son. With them was the family doctor and three servants. Most of them were ill from poor food and harsh treatment.
In the middle of the night of July 16 they were awakened by a firing squad acting under orders from the Urals Regional Soviet and told to go down in the cellar. The Czar had to carry his son in his arms as the boy was too ill to walk. There they were lined up against a wall. The leader of the squad told them that they were going to die. The Czar did not understand him, and leaning forward to say “What?” was shot in the face with a revolver. Immediately the executioners emptied their revolvers into the huddled figures. Those who were still groaning were finished off with bayonets. The bodies were hastily covered with quicklime and thrown into an abandoned mineshaft.
A few days later the Czechoslovaks captured the city.
Professor Masaryk had arrived in Washington from Petrograd via Vladivostok and Tokyo early that May. His arrival was eagerly looked forward to by Lansing and his counsellors in the State Department. Here at last was a returning Russian traveller in whose views the President expressed lively interest. Everything Woodrow Wilson heard predisposed him towards Masaryk. He was no arrogant millionaire or flybynight placer miner but a college professor with academic standing. The fact that he came from a small and oppressed country with a profound protestant tradition could not help but arouse the President’s sympathy. The Presbyterian in him was never far beneath the surface. Even so Masaryk had to wait in Washington more than a month, after preparatory luncheons with Lansing and House who both reported favorably, before the President could make up his mind to see him.
Their first interview was in late June. Masaryk, one of the most accomplished international lobbyists of the century, saw to it that he and the President should hit it off.
Masaryk succeeded where the British and French embassies and the Supreme War Council failed. He dramatized the plight of the poor Czechs bravely fighting their way to freedom through hordes of Germans and Hungarians armed by the Bolsheviks. Their occupation of Vladivostok, coming almost on the same day as the action of the Murmansk soviet inviting British intervention “materially changed the situation,” as Lansing cynically put it, “by introducing a sentimental element into the question of our duty.”
The first result of Wilson’s interview with Masaryk was that the cable facilities of the State Department were placed at the disposal of the Czechoslovak representative for a message to Chicherin protesting the failure of the Soviet Government to live up to its guarantee of free and unmolested passage to Vladivostok for the Czechoslovak Legion.
A few days later the President was confiding in House, in the same letter in which he spoke of sweating blood over the Russian problem: “I hope I see and can report some progress presently, along the double line of economic assistance and aid to the Czechoslovaks.”
Wilson had already made up his mind. Two days before he wrote House he called in Secretary Baker and Lansing and Josephus Daniels and General Peyton C. March, now Chief of Staff, to his quiet upstairs study in the White House, ostensibly to consult them, but actually to announce his decision after “thinking through the processes, alone, behind his own closed door.”
“It is the clear and fixed judgment of the Government of the United States,” the President read off a small pad, “that military intervention there would add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it, injure her rather than help her, and that it would be of no advantage in the prosecution of our main design, to win the war against Germany.”
After some cogent arguments against intervening in Russia’s internal struggles, he delivered himself, possibly to the surprise of his hearers, of the proposition that military action was admissible after alclass="underline" “only to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces and get into successful cooperation with their Slavic kinsmen and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defence in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.”
He itemized the sort of assistance he was thinking of: “Assistance by a commission of merchants, agricultural experts, labor advisers, Red Cross representatives, and agents of the Young Men’s Christian Association.” But military action must come first. “The execution of this plan will follow and not be permitted to embarrass the military assistance rendered in the rear of the westward moving forces of the Czechoslovaks.”
What had started as a plan to help evacuate the Czechoslovaks had turned into a plan to secure their Siberian rear while they advanced into the heart of Russia west of the Urals. A discussion of details followed: the Japanese should be encouraged to furnish small arms, machineguns and ammunition to the Czechoslovaks besieged along the railroad. The Americans and Japanese should each furnish seven thousand men to protect the Legion’s communications.
When the President was finished he asked for comments. According to March’s notes Secretary Lansing commended the paper, Secretary Baker (who had argued himself blue in the face trying to talk the President out of it) merely nodded, Secretary Daniels approved and the general himself shook his head.
“Why are you shaking your head, General?” asked the President with some asperity. General March (noting for his private satisfaction that he had never been a yes-yes man) replied that he had already explained that he didn’t think such an expedition was militarily feasible and that besides the Japanese would take advantage of it for territorial gains.
“We’ll have to take that chance,” said the President testily.
The document was circulated to the Allied chancelleries in the form of an aide-memoire but it wasn’t till August 7 that public announcement was made that an American Expeditionary Force was being dispatched to Siberia. Masaryk immediately wrote the President an effusive note. “Your name Mr. President, as you have no doubt read, is openly cheered in the streets of Prague.”
Once a decision was made on Siberia the decision to send a detachment to help the British hold Murmansk came easy. Some lingering doubt must have remained in the President’s mind. In his answer to Masaryk he wrote that the professor’s letter was particularly appreciated because “I have felt no confidence in my personal judgment about the complicated situation in Russia, and am reassured that you should approve what I have done.”
As part of the campaign to arouse popular support for the President’s decision to send troops to Russia the Committee for Public Information began directing towards Reds and Bolsheviks some of the hatred it had stirred up against the Germans. Press reports of the Moscow terror and of the murder of the Czar and his family made this not too hard an assignment.
When Sisson returned to Washington, still tense from his nervewracking escape from Petrograd, he resumed his position as second in command to George Creel at the old house on Jackson Place. Creel further put him in charge of the foreign desk. Sisson arrived big with portent over the globeshaking repercussions he expected from the publication of his documents on the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy.