Paris Peace Conference 184.02202/6: Telegram
Mr. William C. Bullitt to the Commission to Negotiate Peace
[Received in Paris March 18, 1919, 6:10 p.m.]
Bull 6. For the President, Secretary Lansing, and Colonel House only. Supplementing my Bull 5.
As a result of personal observation in Petrograd and Moscow and discussions not only with Communists, but also with leaders of opposition parties and other observers, I submit for your consideration the following conclusions upon which there is general agreement:
1. The Soviet Government is firmly established and the Communist Party is strong politically and morally. There is order in Petrograd and Moscow. There have been no riots and no uprisings for many weeks. Prostitution has disappeared. Robberies have almost ceased. One feels as safe as in Paris. The opera, theaters and ballet are performing as in peace, except that they are managed under the department of education, which prefers classics and sees that the common people and children attend, fully instructed.
2. The Soviet Army is growing, high-spirited and well-equipped. The soldiers, 12,000 of whom we saw in Petrograd, and the common people no longer have the beaten, doglike look which marked them under the Tsar. They carry themselves like free men and very like Americans. Recruiting for the army and for the Communist Party is said to be easiest in those regions which, having once lived under the Soviet, have been overrun by anti-Soviet forces, Russian or foreign, and then been retaken by the Soviet Government.
3. The chief opposition parties, the Menshiviki and the right Social Revolutionary Party, are now supporting the Government. Their opposition ceased largely because Russia was being attacked from outside and threatened by more drastic intervention. They have published formal declarations against foreign intervention, against foreign help to anti-Soviet Government and against the blockade as the true cause of the miseries of Russia.
I have with me a formal statement written in my presence by Volsky, leader of the right Social Revolutionary [Party] and late president of the Assembly of Members of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, denouncing the campaign for intervention which Breshkovskaya, a member of his party, is making in America, saying that his party will oppose intervention arms in hand to the last man and the last woman, and desires nothing from a foreign government except the lifting of the blockade, and a chance to dispute peaceably for control of Russia with the Communists, after the normal economic life of the country has been restored. I have a similar statement from Martov, leader of the Menshiviki. My discussions [Page 82] with men like these have convinced me that by intervention in Russia, by support of anti-Soviet Government and by the blockade we are working against the will and the needs of the united, common mass of the Russian people, to help whom is our one desire.
There is no constructive opposition to the Communists, The Cadets have abandoned the country. The left Social Revolutionary Party occupies the destructive position commonly attributed to the Communist by the outside. This party demands the extermination of the Bourgeoisie. It rages against the employment by the Communists of administrators, army officers and upper-class experts and managers who have offered their services to the Soviet Government and been accepted at salaries higher than Lenine, Trotsky or any other Communist is allowed by law to receive. The left Social Revolutionary Party opposes particularly all the compromises which experience has forced upon the more practical and responsible Communists. The first, extreme clique of the left Social Revolutionary Party is for a declaration of war on the Allied and Associated Governments and all other non-revolutionary governments and the spread by force of the revolution over the world. They are at present a small group of fanatical leaders, without mass support, who exist only because they are able to play upon the hunger which seizes all Russia.
5. If the position of the Soviet Government is strong politically and morally, the economic conditions of Soviet Russia are tragic. And this is due to the blockade.
The inhabitants of Petrograd and Moscow get but half a pound of bread a day; no butter, no sugar and very little meat. Everyone, including the people’s commissaries, is pitifully under nourished. Only the children, who are fed at school, get enough to eat once a day. This food shortage is due in part to the prevention of shipments to Petrograd by the blockade, but primarily to the desperate transport situation. There is food in Russia but it cannot be sent to the great centers.
Before the war Russia used 22,000 locomotives. To-day there are but 5,500 in running order and most of these are engaged in army work, as are the most expert engineers and organizers. Furthermore, the locomotives must be fed with wood instead of coal, because Soviet Russia is cut off from the coal of Perm, and because Krasnoff72 and Denikin destroyed the mines of the Donetz Basin before evacuating that region. Such locomotives as the Soviet Government possesses are used skillfully. On both our trips we made the run between Petrograd and Moscow in thirteen hours. [Page 83] In addition to the lack of locomotives and the total absence of coal, transportation is made more hopeless for want of gasoline and oil, due to the British occupation of Baku. Because of this, transportation by automobile and by the great fleet of oil-burning boats on the Volga and the inland canals is impossible, and will continue to be impossible when the waterways open in the spring.
There are no medicines; men, women and children die by hundreds who might otherwise be saved.
6. That the masses of Russia, not only the Communists but also the Menshiviki, the right Social Revolutionary Party and members of other parties, stand by the Soviet Government in spite of these privations, shows vividly the hold the Soviets have upon the hopes of the Russian people. As one man put (it) to me, “we are ready to add another phase of starvation to our revolution.”
It is the conviction of all the men with whom I have talked, and it is my conviction that the Soviet Government is the only constructive force in Russia to-day. It is generally agreed that enough expert administrators, who formerly opposed the Soviet, are now working with the government to conduct successfully the economic life of the country, if only they had the material things with which to conduct it. I was particularly struck by Lenine, who is a straightforward man of the quickest intelligence, and a certain serenity, humor and broad-minded views.
We can overthrow the Communists if we are considering to continue the blockade and intervention indefinitely, we can produce such famine, such hunger riots and battles for bread that the Anarchists and left Social Revolutionary Party will rule for a moment over the mind of Russia, for starvation will drive Russia to the left, not to the right. We can destroy the Communists only by producing anarchy. Then we shall finally have to intervene over the dead bodies and dead hopes of the simple Russian people to set up a form of government they do not want and against which they will revolt whenever strength returns to them.
The other course, which is open to us, is to make an offer of peace along the lines of the proposal of the Soviet Government transmitted in my foregoing cable. The Communists are ready to meet us half way and to assist compromise, not because they fear the ascendancy of any other party in Russia, but because they know that if they do not compromise and if the blockade is not lifted, they will go down with the rest of the Russian people into anarchy.
But they do not despair yet. They are hopeful. They received me because they had gathered the impression that President Wilson was beginning to see through the lies against them to the very simple [Page 84] truth that a dull, inexperienced, a young people were trying rudely but conscientiously and at the cost of great suffering to themselves to find a better way to live for the common good than the old way.
- Peter Nikolaevich Krasnov, ataman of the Don Cossacks.↩