Dear Sir:

You have stated many times that the west supported communism early on, and overtly backed it throughout its development, fighting it only when it threatened to develop into an alternate trading bloc. What is your view then, on the Allied intervention in Russian politics at the end of World War I?

Ivan Mikhailovic
St. Mary’s, KS

Dear Ivan:

Thanks for a first rate question on a highly misunderstood topic. In all the textbooks of European history, the Allied intervention is referred to as an “anti-communist event,” in keeping with the well rehearsed mythology that the west was anti-communist. As is so often the case with the textbooks, it is deliberate misinformation. The west supported the USSR in both humanitarian, technical, and financial aspects from 1920 to the bailout of Brezhnev by Archer-Daniels-Midland in the 1970s. It remains true that Stalin refused to be a part of the Marshall Plan, this was because it required the USSR to open its financial records to the west. Instead, there were other grants-in-aid and, especially, technical support given to the USSR even as the Korean War was being fought.

The primary purpose of the Allied landing was to keep Russia in the war against Germany. According to all reigning Allied heads of state without exception, this was the purpose; ideology was not, nor had it ever been, a concern. Woodrow Wilson, following his mentor, Col. Mandel House (a self-described Marxist), openly praised the Bolsheviki, and the US delegation to Russia, under former Missouri Governor Francis, openly praised them as well, even claiming, according to George Keenan, that the Bolsheviki were the “Abraham Lincolns” of Russia. Similar rhetoric could he heard from the French ambassador, Sadoul.

Even further, the Allies assisted in the reimposition of the Left SR government in 1918 after it had been kidnaped, en masse, by the Whites and put out to sea. (Cf. Keenan’s Russia and the West, 86). In fact, Keenan notes, there was so much aid given to the Left SR state, that the Bolsheviki had to deal with a substantial debate over whether Marxists can accept aid from western governments! Since this flew in the face of Marxist theory, it was completely untrodden ground. Needless to say, Trotskii/Bronstein and Lenin agreed that accepting the aid was prudent.

Moreover, there was a small contingent of Marxists who claimed that western intervention should be solicited, and even aided wherever possible, since this might be a good bulwark against Japanese intervention in the east, especially given the military chaos in Russia at the time. As the Chekists were rounding up clergy and anti-Soviet elements and shooting them en masse, the British government, through its attache in Petrograd, said this:

. . . .when we understand that it [the Bolshevik revolution] is, when we know the facts behind it, when we do not libel it or slander it or do not lose out heads and become its advocates or defenders, and really know what it is, and then move forward to it, then we will serve our country and our time. (Quoted in Keenan, 64)

After the overthrow of the (generally pro-Allied) Soviet by the Bolsheviki in Archangel, the Bolshevik Soviets immediately confronted the Allies there. The British, for their part, told the Marxists that they would be aided in their consolidation of power in the north in exchange for the release of military supplies to the British for use against the Germans. In 1918, the British fought alongside the Soviets against the Finnish whites who were seeking to take the port city of Murmansk. The British supplied and fed the Bolshevik Soviet government in that region, as well as at the larger city of Archangel, having completely abandoned the anti-Bolshevik Soviets throughout the North.

As far as the separate intervention in Siberia was concerned, Allied governments made it clear that it was protecting the new “Russian” state against Japanese aggression, while serving British interests in China at the same time. Furthermore, Wilson was convinced that Siberia would be lost to the Germans since there were almost 2 million prisoners of war living and working in Siberia by the Summer of 1918. They could easily have toppled the Soviet government, but they needed, according to the Allied mentality, to be fought. Nevertheless, it was also clear that the Soviets in the port cities were drifting away from the Soviet government in Petrograd, and so it became murky who spoke for the “Soviet Government” so popular in western capitals. They either saw the Soviets as requesting Allied aid to continue the war, or the alternative, “anti-communists” in the west merely thought that the Bolsheviki were agents of the German state. Ideology was never, ever a factor.

According to Keenan, the battles, few indeed, of the Allies in Siberia were directed at both Whites and Reds. Against the Whites (and Gen. Graves was resolutely opposed to a White victory) due to their perceived support of the Japanese, and the Reds, because it was perceived they were uninterested in pursuing the European war (though western capitals waffled on this issue). As a matter of course, Gen. Graves make it clear that he generally supported a unified Red victory, and then promises of aid to have them continue the war. Graves view was not heeded, and, after Lenin made it clear he was not going to continue the war, the Allies supported, briefly, Kolchak in Siberia. But once his resistance began to fail, Allied support was quickly withdrawn.

Allied policy was confusing, but it really only had the single aim of destroying Germany if possible and controlling Japan if necessary, regardless of the government that sat in the capital. As far as Allied states were concerned, there was no ideological difference between the Bolsheviki and the SR movement. They were both revolutionists on one way or another. The SR movement was generally White in orientation, the Reds committed to pulling the country out of the war. If the Allies fought the Bolsheviks, it was to support the SR movement, and vice versa. Their respective ideologies, given no specialized studies on the phenomenon existed at the time, were considered the same.

The proof that the intervention was to place Russia again on a war footing was that, according to Keenan, as soon as the war ended, there was not a single shot fired at the Bolsheviks. After the Russian civil war, the Red Cross and the US government began to feed the Soviet population, given the chaos during the war. Aid of all kinds flowed to the soviet state once the war was over and there was no real reason to oppose the Reds.

To conclude, let Keenan speak for himself:

Soviet historiography portrays the intervention as a major deliberate military effort by the western governments, mustering all the force they could, to overthrow the Soviet government. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Wilson abhorred the very thought of intervention; so did his secretary of state. Lloyd George was on the whole skeptical as to its soundness. . .

As to its motivations, the Allied landings were,

embracing in its motivations many considerations having nothing to do with a desire to overthrow Soviet power for ideological reasons. (114-115).

But even more, US corporate aid to the USSR has a long a sordid history. Dwayne Andreas, longtime head of Archer Daniels Midland and one of the creators of the modern “ecumenical movement” had this to say to the House of Representatives in 1990:

For many years, I have devoted much effort to improving business relationships between the USSR and the USA. Now is a time when it would be clearly in our own best political and economic interest to help meet the real basic needs of the USSR. It should be noted that in 1973, we provided $750 million of credit to the Soviets for grain. This was utilized and repaid with interest. It was profitable for both sides.

Well known author James Bovard wrote this in his seminal “Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study in Corporate Welfare:”

Andreas chose a most unfortunate example to use to show the benefits of giving credits and subsidies to the Soviets. In 1972 the USDA paid the largest export subsidies ($700 million) in history to the Soviets to help them corner a quarter of the American wheat crop. As GAO noted, USDA was supposed to have a reporting system for foreign crop purchases but totally failed to monitor the amount of Soviet purchases and kept subsidizing exports even after the Soviets had cornered the U.S. market. The Soviet wheat sale fiasco drove wheat prices from $1.25 a bushel to $4.75 a bushel and signaled the onset of a decade of world inflation. In 1973, when OPEC announced it would dramatically cut production in order to quadruple the price of oil, OPEC spokesmen justified their decision by pointing at soaring wheat prices.

Politicians and political appointees responded to Andreas's exhortations to continue bankrolling the Soviets and, later, the Russians and other nations of the former Soviet Union. The Agriculture Department extended $5 billion in credits to the Soviet Union and to Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet states between early 1991 and 1993. USDA credits to the Soviets had already been a matter of fierce dispute during congressional deliberations on the 1990 five-year farm bill. At that time Congress enacted a provision requiring that “the Commodity Credit Corporation shall not make credit guarantees available in connection with sales of agricultural commodities to any country that the Secretary determines cannot adequately service the debt associated with such sale.”

“Anti-communism” really had two bases: first, American support for Israel against her neighbors who were bankrolled by the USSR, and second, the rejection of any alternative trading bloc to one dominated by the US. There is no difference between the alleged anti-communist crusade of the 1950s, and the anti-nationalist crusade today. It is one and the same movement, the domination of American interests over all, without exception. Whether the US set its face against South Africa, the USSR, Russia today, Serbia yesterday, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran or Iraq, the movement has been the same–identical in each case–and the ideology of the “offending” states has not mattered in the least. The only thing they have in common is the rejection of American imperialism. South Africa was anti-communist, but, since here economy was autarkic, and she sat un billions of dollars in minerals, the US government worked with the Soviet KGB to destroy that state. The question was not communism v. anti-communism, but rather American corporate interests. Iran today is hardly a Marxist outpost, yet it is part of the same campaign of vilification that allegedly was committed on the USSR in the 1950s. It was never Marxism per se, but rather the interests of an “open,” that is, American dominated, trading empire. The US openly supports Islamic terrorism and drug-dealing in Chechnya and Bosnia, but fights it only when her interests are at stake given the wealth of the Middle East, and the safety of Israel, are at stake.

Its interest, not ideology, that has been at the forefront of American foreign policy since World War I–MRJ