April 2008
Issue
An American diplomat overlooks the largest revolution
of the 20th
Century.
June 1917 can be considered a time in history in which America
entered a new era of foreign policy, military strategy, and diplomatic
power. President Woodrow Wilson had all but given up on his isolationist
stance at the urging of his foreign policy adviser, Edward “Colonel” House
and former President Teddy Roosevelt, among others.
By this point, the United States was two months into World War
I after Congress declared war on Germany after seven U.S. merchant
ships were attacked by German forces. While many American soldiers
headed to the frontlines in France, there was another frontline that
was emerging that wasn’t covered by Wilson’s war propaganda
machine, the Committee on Public Information (CPI).
Czar Nicholas was ousted and all hell broke loose as Russia became
embroiled in a revolution, whose victor would evolve into what would
eventually become America’s biggest nemesis. An enigma to the
U.S. government, Russia was split in a civil war with American interest
at stake. To find out more on the events taking place in ‘Mother
Russia,’ Wilson requested the help of Elihu Root, a Washington
insider and a holdover from the William McKinley administration. Root
was placed at the head of an international fact finding commission
that would later bear his name.
Departing Washington, D.C. for Russia on May 15, 1917, the Root
Commission began their “special diplomatic mission.” In
their 1989 analysis of a series of episodes in America’s espionage
history entitled Secret Intelligence, Ernest Volkman and Blaine Baggett
stated, ”Somehow, Root entirely missed the Bolsheviks, who already
had won wide spread support among workers and peasants and did not
even bother mentioning them in his report.”
 The Man of the Hour: Elihu Root
When reports of the commission’s arrival in Russia reached the public,
more was mentioned on their efforts to work with Russian leaders in distributing
American aid towards industrial projects like the railroad. In the July 4, 1917
edition of The New York Times, Russia’s finance minister simply known as
M. Nekrassoff at the time, said, “I shall discuss with the commission our
great railroad construction program…I regard the arrival of the commission
as a most important event, both for Russia’s successful conduct of the
war and her economic development afterward.”
T
he Bolsheviks (Reds) marching on Red Square, 1917
Upon Root’s return, President Wilson’s foreign policy towards Russia
(or lack thereof) was a clear indication of the quality of intelligence the president
was receiving from the elder statesman Root and his commission. In his 1987 book,
Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, Michael Hunt wrote, “After the Bolsheviks
took the Russians out of the war, Wilson refused for a time to take counteraction,
despite persistent lobbying by his allies for efforts to revive the eastern front.”
The Bolsheviks or the Reds as they were also called, would undo the efforts of
the expansion of Western influence began by Peter the Great years before and
transform Russia into a more isolated nation. Russia in itself would become an
intelligence juggernaut through the Cheka, the predecessor of the KGB, which
was deemed far more advanced than the United States’ Army Military Intelligence
Division (MID).
The White Russians would go on to find themselves surrounded by the Reds. President
Wilson would send troops to support the Whites, a fleeing group that was on the
brink of destruction and failed by corrupt leadership. According to Volkmann
and Baggett, Cosmopolitan magazine editor Edgar Sisson brought back fraudulent
documents that he believed were authentic claiming that Reds leader Vladimir
Lenin was a spy for the Germans.
This news was initially believed as fact in the United States. As a reaction,
the American public went into a state of paranoia, as the nation would enter
its first “Red Scare.” Immigrants were treated as scapegoats and
tagged as Communist sympathizers. Meanwhile American troops were split between
the battlefront of World War I and a more hidden battle in the middle of war
torn Russia. These soldiers had the sweet joy of fighting in Siberia to protect
the very same railroads that the Root Commission was planning to invest in after
World War I.
 1920s ‘Red Scare’ propaganda
British soldiers were sent to support the effort as well, but some considered
their tactics brutal. “The Americans were appalled to see British troops
moving Russians out of ‘suspected Bolshevik villages’ and burning
down their houses,” stated Volkmann and Baggett.
Siding with the Whites, the Allies never had a chance at victory. By the time
American troops were withdrawn from the region, 139 U.S. soldiers were dead.
It’s not hard to realize why these numbers were not written about as much
as those who died in “The Great War.” The soldiers left disgraced
and the Communist influence in Russia would be handed down for generations from
Lenin to Trotsky to Stalin and all the way to Michael Gorbachev before the empire
would fall in the late 1980’s. The international political climate during
the age of Wilson was little different than today. One can’t simply study
a policy blunder of this magnitude just through its long-term effects, but also
its ‘root’ of origin.
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