The Bolshevists made no progress during six years with the United
States. The Wilson administration declared that the Moscow Soviet did
not represent Russia and could not be recognized in any way because
its doctrines and practices were incompatible with those of civilized
nations. Bolshevist emissaries were deported. The matter ended there.
It has been easy for the United States under the Harding administration
to maintain the same policy. We have taken a generous humanitarian
interest in feeding the Russian people, but we do not feel impelled to
have anything to do with Lenin and his associates. We can wait years
longer, maintaining rigidly the policy of non-intercourse, because we
do not have important economic and political interests at stake.
With the Entente Powers the situation is different. They have been
called upon, separately and collectively, to decide their attitude
toward the Moscow Soviet. France, Italy, and Great Britain, being in
Europe and a part of Europe, and Japan, being in Asia and a part of
Asia, have not been able to maintain the fiction that the Moscow Soviet
is not the Russian Government. They know it is. Ostracizing Russia cuts
off their goods from vast markets. Ignoring Russia, as we have seen
above, makes uncertain of fulfilment, if not invalid, the results of
all diplomatic negotiations among themselves and with the neighbors of
Russia.
The British, admirable realists in international politics, were first
to grasp the cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face danger of keeping
Russia in Coventry. British trade was suffering, and the Russians were
in a position, which was daily growing stronger, to stir things up
unpleasantly against the British in India and Mesopotamia. A Soviet
delegation was received in London, and as soon as the British saw that
Kolchak had followed the fate of Yudenitch and Denikin they signed a
trade agreement and brought into court a test case to convince the
Bolshevists that what they exported would not be confiscated for claims
against the former Government. The British began to trade with Russia,
and British and Russians mutually promised to abstain from propaganda
against one another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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