Paris Peace Conference 861.00/190
Memorandum by Mr. William H. Buckler
January 31,
1919
.
According to the wish expressed by the Commission yesterday, I went with Mr. Bullitt to see Mr. Philip Kerr, private secretary to Mr. Lloyd George. I gave him an outline of the information gained from Litvinoff. We learned from Kerr:
- (1)
- that the British are extremely anxious to evacuate their troops from Archangel as soon as possible. They intend to bring them out anyhow on May 1;
- (2)
- that they are prepared to meet at Prinkipo, or anywhere else, the Soviet Government’s representatives, even if no other Russian representatives should accept the recent Peace Conference invitation;
- (3)
- that in view of Ransome’s well-known Bolshevik sympathies the British would not care to bring him to Paris, and if the Prinkipo conference takes place, his coming here would serve no useful purpose;
- (4)
- that the British think one main object of the proposed Prinkipo meeting should be to stop Russian civil war, and to induce the various Russian governments to send delegates for this purpose to an All-Russia convention.
I could not tell Kerr whether the Soviet Government would agree to such a proposal, but said I believed that they might do so, provided it did not involve the abolition of their Soviet constitution, which to them was an almost sacred possession.