File No. 861.00/2651
The French Ambassador (Jusserand) to the Secretary of State
[Received September 5.]
Mr. Secretary of State: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your excellency’s note on the subject of the coordination of the Allies’ action in Siberia and northern Russia. I hastened to communicate it to my Government.
If I correctly understood your excellency’s idea in the passage of the note wherein it is stated that the Federal Government, which has ever since the Russian revolution maintained a strict impartiality among the parties, deems that any cooperation in a political action in Russia would be neither useful nor desirable, it seems as if your excellency may have thought that in speaking of political difficulties to be settled my communication of August 12 referred to preferences to be made between this or that government or local grouping. I wish to specify in this regard that the only difficulties which the French Government, anxious, like the Federal Government, to abstain from any interference in Russian internal affairs, had in view are those which the presence of the Allies may render inevitable with each one of the governmental elements with which we may have to deal on this or that point, and whose regulation it seems to us more appropriate to leave to a civil commission than to the commanders of the armed forces.
Please accept [etc.]