861.00/3768: Telegram
The Chargé in Russia (Poole) to the Acting Secretary of State
[Received January 31, 2:55 a.m.]
812. The following telegram has been sent to Paris as number 28 same date, continuing 804, January 28, 5 p.m.
Public opinion so far manifested concurs Government in rejecting proposal for Princes Island Conference as morally if not practically impossible. There is a deep and wide-spread feeling of injury and resentment, that so-called patriotic elements should be dealt with by the Peace Conference on the same basis as the Bolsheviki. In connection with the Department’s unnumbered telegram January 24, 2 p.m.,38 I had a long talk this morning with Ivanoff, Social Revolutionary, overwhelmingly elected to the Constitutional Assembly a year ago and now one of the more prominent spokesmen of the local radicals. As to Allied intervention, he said critical moment already exists at Archangel in fact. It should not be given up but the control [to the contrary?] extended by the use of more considerable forces. Peaceful settlement with the Bolsheviki is impossible. The Social Revolutionists support the Provisional Government in this, though a bare majority at a meeting last night resolved that it would have been better to accept the Princes Island invitation for the purpose of demonstrating this impossibility before foreign public opinion. Ivanoff and the minority hold that in addition to moral considerations, practical difficulties are too great, especially in respect to the proposed truce. There may be further discussion in conjunction with the Social Democrats but both these parties, the most radical elements of the population, seemed convinced that the conference could in any case serve only to reveal its own futility. In asking Allied intervention on a more generous scale Ivanoff said that to succeed it must be carried out under conditions of less interference by the agents of intervention with the interior life of the country than has so far prevailed in the Archangel enterprise. His complaints relate to matters of British and French interference, especially by the military, upon which I have already had occasion to comment.
President Tchaykowski left here en route to Paris before the receipt of the press despatch concerning the Princes Island invitation and learned of it on arriving at Murmansk. In reply to an inquiry on the part of the Embassy, Admiral McCully has telegraphed from Murmansk the following, based on an informal conversation with him:
“Tchaykowski is of decided opposition to the proposal for a conference of Russian factions on Princes Island. He said to me that [Page 38] this invitation was offensive from his point of view. Unsparingly he was against any conciliation or participation with the Bolshevik Government.”