America's Secret War against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920

by David S. Foglesong

Release Date: 28 February, 2001

Edition: Paperback

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Quite A New View of Wilsonian Diplomacy

Though those like myself who have long studied Wilsonian meddling and moralistic posturing during the Mexican Revolution will not be surprised by the revelations in this book, I must admit it is a bit dry and I have yet to finish it but I have dipped into it enough. ... Woodrow Wilson was one of the biggest pious fakes ever to serve in the White House. His saintly reputation still prevails long after the messianistic image of John F. Kennedy has crumbled with the revelation of his philandering. But being a secret libertine and hedonist is far from being a moralistic racist who will "teach lesser breeds to elect good men" as Wilson said in regard to Mexico.
These superior attitudes were the basis of the prejudiced policies toward Huerta in Mexico, the Indian head of a mongrel nation (sic) and toward Lenin, offspring of the Mongol hordes of old. No matter that, however bad they were, they were not attacking their neighbors but their own citizens and that was then thought to be internal business by most people. The US public opinion in those days was sorely divided on intervention in Mexico and mostly opposed, so why would Wilson expect any public support for open intervention in faraway Russia when he could not muster support for open intervention in a country next door?
No matter that the Russian social and economic system had collapsed of its own weight and that was the Russian's concern. Wilson and the allies were going to set things right by any means necessary, including open armed invasion, and clandestine and open aid to Lenin's enemies.
Every time the US has tried to pacify or set things right in modern times by clandestine or open means it has been a failure. Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Bosnia, wherever. As long as there is innate social injustice and maldistribution of the national output there will be unrest. And throw in racial and ethnic factors and it is even worse, the Balkans and the Middle East.

An important intelligent contribution

This is important book which shed much light on the origins of the cold war and will probably do much to hurt Wilson's reputation. Based on 128 sets of private and governmental papers, coming from archives from three countries, Foglesong's book show a story of deceit and self-deception. Wilson has sometimes been seen as sympathetic to the cause of Russian freedom; indeed he has been sometimes seen as sympathetic to the Bolsheviks(for example by Richard Pipes, in The Russian Revolution). Quite false, for Foglesong shows how Wilson combined his trademark moralism, no less sincerely believed in for being trite and shallow, with working with reactionairies and militarist whites to crush the revolution.

Foglesong starts off with a chapter on Wilson's illusions in Mexico, during which American officials sought to use Japanese agents to poison Pancho Villa. The next chapter looks at the origins of American Anti-bolshevism; Foglesong looks at it a melange of Wilson, Lansing and the American elite's salon style anti-socialist chatter, its nativists prejudices, and its smug puritanism. We go on to see how this influenced American Anti-Communist propaganda, with its fatuous anti-atheism and its fear of racial equality. A passage on the State Department's susceptibility to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and choice comments from Lansing and Hoover are, as they, well worth the price of reading alone. But this is only the beginning. The United States completely failed to recognize that Russia had no choice but to leave the war; bullying the desperate Provisional Government was the last thing it needed and helped make its collapse inevitable. Wilson and Lansing supported the Cossack Kaledin, unaware that the cause of his Volunteer Army was hopeless. Wilson and Lansing constantly used secrecy and subversion, keeping the American public in the dark. The state department was contemptous of the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) the winner of the elections to the Constituent assembly and, as Geoffrey Swain has provocatively argued, the only group who could have possibly stopped the Bolsheviks. Instead Americans on the scene talked of favoring a "military dictatorship," and shed no tears when the SRs were overthrown by Admiral Kolchak, whose gross inadequacies as a leader have to be read in the invaluable monograph by Jon Smele to be believed. The Americans used food as a weapon, used the defeated Germans to prevent the Soviets from reoccupying the Baltic States, and indulged in further illusions about the incompetent and brutal Iudenitch.

Foglesong writes in a dry matter, but he is well worth reading. In the end he is quite successful in showing that far from making the world safe for democracy and for open diplomacy, Wilson's activities were a major stage in the creation of "secret wars." Quite unsuccessful the first time, the same methods of secrecy, rhetorical support for democracy, hard support for vicious, reactionary and incompetent rulers would be used again and again in the future.