“One faction is as bad as another,” was the way our spokesmen put it. That was a comforting phrase, but not true. It meant blaming our own ignorance on the factions. It was on the same scale as the statement made so often after the outbreak of the war: “Europe has gone war-mad--one nation is as bad as the other,” a frame of mind which helped Germany. How the Bolshevist leaders must have chuckled when they heard that the United States classed them as no better and no worse than the Russians who were actively fighting Bolshevism, and opposing it in other ways. And the gallant Czechs were amazed and discouraged by our failure to coöperate with them to the extent they had been led to believe that we would. Kalmikoff and Semenoff, more particularly the former, carried on executions by the wholesale. It was a system of eliminating such persons as might oppose them. Some of the victims were probably Bolshevists, but many of them were decent and orderly Russians from our viewpoint. They dared whisper their suspicions against the Cossack chiefs--that was enough to send them to the execution party. For instance, men and women of Khabarovsk protested to Colonel Styer that Kalmikoff had their friends and relatives in prison and would shoot them. Colonel Styer took the matter up with Kalmikoff. That night fifteen or twenty men were chosen at random from the prison, taken out into a grove, and shot down. They did not know what they had been arrested for, they had never been tried. This sort of thing went on for months after our forces were stationed in Khabarovsk. But with Washington giving strict orders that there should be nothing in the nature of “interference,” what could Colonel Styer do? Yet at the same time we were assuring the “loyal” Russians that our troops were on the ground for their protection. To the Russians, who could not possibly fathom our policy and could not know what was going on between our commanders and Kalmikoff, it looked as if our troops were there to protect Kalmikoff while he decimated the population. And Kalmikoff continued to lift himself into power by the simple process of killing off everybody who objected to his assuming autocratic powers. Yet Kalmikoff and Semenoff, if properly dealt with from the first, might have joined forces with us against the Bolshevists. They could not have opposed us. They both have certain qualities as military leaders, and while they undoubtedly are monarchists or “men on horseback,” they are certainly anti-Bolshevist. And if we had adopted an anti-Bolshevist policy from the start, this policy would have given us a point of contact with the Cossack chiefs. We could have demanded that they behave themselves, get busy and fight Bolshevists at the front.