CHAPTER VI

COUNTERING THE GERMANS IN FALLEN RUSSIA

With the complete surrender of Bolshevist Russia to the Germans, through the notorious Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, there was presented to the Allies the problem of supporting those elements in the country still disposed to resist the Teutonic invasion. Military intervention, by way of Siberia, with the active assistance of the Japanese, was proposed, but met with the determined opposition of President Wilson, whose strong democratic principles deterred him from interfering with the internal affairs of Russia under any pretext whatever. Subsequently he modified his views on this point, being largely influenced by the Czecho-Slovak movement, one of the most remarkable and picturesque features of the entire war.

As already stated in previous installments of this work, the Czecho-Slovaks were Slavic soldiers of the Austrian armies who had been taken prisoners by the Russians, and who, after the fall of the Czar, volunteered to fight against the Central Powers with the Allies because of their desire to obtain independence for Bohemia and Slovakia, parts of the dominions of the Austrian empire. They look a leading part in the offensive which Kerensky attempted against the Teutons, and which failed so disastrously on account of the broken morale of the Russians. When the Bolsheviki seized the reins of government, the Czecho-Slovaks refused to lay down their arms and asked that they might be permitted to retire from Russia by way of Vladivostok, whence they hoped to be transported to France and allowed to take their place with the Allies on the western front. To this arrangement the Bolsheviki agreed, and the Czecho-Slovaks began at once embarking on trains over the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But before even the first contingents had safely reached Vladivostok, friction broke out between them and the Bolsheviki, which presently took on the aspect of an armed conflict, with remarkably successful results for the Czecho-Slovaks, who gained almost complete possession of the railroad and large areas of Siberia.

The Bolsheviki maintained that Allied intrigues had caused the Czecho-Slovaks to turn on them, while the Allied representatives laid the blame to German pressure applied to the Soviet Government. Captain Vladimir Hurban, an officer of the Czecho-Slovak Army, who came to Washington to report to Prof. Masaryk, President of the National Council of the Czecho-Slovaks, supplies details which are not only of vivid interest in themselves, but assist in fixing the responsibility for the bloodshed which resulted in such advantages to the Allied cause.

"When the Bolshevist Soviet Government signed the peace treaty in the beginning of March, 1918," says Captain Hurban, in his personal narrative, "our army of about 50,000 was in Ukrainia, near Kiev.... The Germans advanced against us in overwhelming numbers and there was danger that we would be surrounded.... The Bolshevist Red Guards had seized the locomotives and were fleeing east in panic. Under these circumstances Emperor Charles sent us a special envoy with the promise that if we would disarm we should be amnestied and our land should receive autonomy. We refused to negotiate with the Austrian emperor.

"As we could not hold a front, we began to retreat to the eastward.... When we arrived at Bachmac the Germans were there waiting for us. There began a battle lasting four days, in which they were badly defeated and which enabled us to get our trains through. The commander of the German detachment offered us a forty-eight hour truce, which we accepted, for our duty was to leave Ukrainia. The truce was canceled by the German chief commander, Linsingen, but too late; our trains had already got away. We lost altogether about 600 men in dead, wounded, and missing, while we buried 2,000 Germans in one day.

"In this manner we escaped from Ukrainia. Our relations with the Bolsheviki were still good. We refrained from meddling in Russian internal affairs, and we tried to come to an agreement with the Bolshevist Government with respect to our departure, or passage through Russia. But already signs were visible that the Bolsheviki, either under German influence or because we then represented the only real power in Russia, would try to put obstacles in our way. It would have sufficed to order one of our regiments--our army was then, in March, near Moscow--to take Moscow, and in half a day there would have been no Bolshevist Government; for then we were well armed, having taken from the front everything we could carry, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Germans.... To prove indisputably our loyalty we turned over to the Bolsheviki everything, all our arms, with the exception of a few rifles (ten rifles to each 100 men). The equipment we turned over to the Bolsheviki, including arms, horses, automobiles, aeroplanes, etc., was worth more than a million rubles, and it was legally in our possession, for we took it away from the Germans, to whom it had been abandoned by the fleeing Bolsheviki. This transfer of the equipment was, of course, preceded by an agreement made between us and the Moscow Government by which we were guaranteed unmolested passage through Siberia, to which the Government pledged to give its unconditional support....

"Under such circumstances we began our pilgrimage east. I was in the first train--there were then eighty trains of us--which was to prepare the way. We were determined to leave Russia without a conflict. Notwithstanding that we kept our word, that we surrendered all arms except the few necessary, our progress was hindered, and unending negotiations had to be repeated in every seat of a local soviet. We were threatened by machine guns, cannon, but we patiently stood it all, though the Bolsheviki Red Guard could have been disbanded by a few of our volunteers. After fifty-seven days of such tiresome travel our first train arrived at Vladivostok, where we were enthusiastically received by the Allied units stationed there.

"When the Germans saw that we, notwithstanding all their intrigues, were nearing Vladivostok, they exercised a direct pressure on Lenine and Trotzky; for the things that were committed by the Soviets cannot any further be explained away on the grounds of ignorance. The trains were stopped at different stations, so that they were finally stopped at a distance of fifty miles from each other. Provoking incidents of all kinds were the order of the day. The arming of the German and Magyar prisoners was begun on a large scale. One of the orders of Tchitcherin, Bolshevist foreign minister, reads: 'Dispatch all German and Magyar prisoners out of Siberia; stop the Czecho-Slovaks.' Three members of our National Council, who were sent to Moscow for an explanation of the stopping of our trains, were arrested. At the same time our trains were attacked at different stations by Soviet troops, formed mostly of German and Magyar prisoners.

"I will recall the Irkutsk incident. Our train, with about 400 men, armed with ten rifles and twenty hand grenades, was surrounded by a few thousand Red Guards, armed with machine guns and cannon. Their commander gave our men ten minutes in which to surrender their arms, or be shot. According to their habit, our leaders began negotiations: Suddenly there was heard the German command, 'schiessen!' and the Red Guards began firing at the train. Our men jumped off the train, and in five minutes all the machine guns were in their possession, the Russian Bolsheviki disarmed, and all the Magyars and Germans done away with. The Siberian Government, which resides in Irkutsk and which, as it appeared later, ordered this attack, can thank only the intervention of the American and French consuls that it was not destroyed by our embittered volunteers.

"To what extreme our loyalty was carried is shown by the fact that, although perfidiously attacked, and although we disarmed the Red Guard in Irkutsk, we still began new negotiations, with the result that we surrendered all our arms, on the condition that all German and Magyar prisoners would be disarmed and disbanded, and that we would be allowed to proceed unmolested."

As narrated in a previous volume of this work, the Czecho-Slovaks were thus compelled to engage in military operations against the Bolsheviki, and in doing so obtained possession of large areas in Siberia, including large cities, where they were welcomed by the populations and dissolved the Soviets. On the other hand, however, many large units of them found themselves isolated and unable to proceed on their way to Vladivostok. It was to assist them to extricate themselves from these positions that the United States finally agreed to dispatch a limited military force to Russian territory. Late in July, 1918, an arrangement to this effect was made with Japan. And on August 3, 1918, an official announcement was issued at Washington, in part as follows:

"In the judgment of the Government of the United States--a judgment arrived at after repeated and very searching consideration of the whole situation--military intervention in Russia would be more likely to add to the present sad confusion there than to cure it, and would injure Russia, rather than help her out of her distress. Such military intervention as has been most frequently proposed, even supposing it to be efficacious in its immediate object of delivering an attack upon Germany from the east, would, in its judgment, be more likely to turn out to be merely a method of making use of Russia than to be a method of saving her. Her people, if they profited by it at all, would not profit by it in time to deliver them from their present desperate difficulties, and their substance would meantime be used to maintain foreign armies, not to reconstitute their own, or to feed their own men, women, and children. We are bending all our energies now to the purpose of winning on the western front, and it would, in the judgment of the Government of the United States, be most unwise to divide or dissipate our forces.

"As the Government of the United States sees the present circumstances, therefore, military action is admissible in Russia now only to render such protection and help as is possible to the Czecho-Slovaks against the armed Austrian and German prisoners who are attacking them, and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance. Whether from Vladivostok or from Murmansk and Archangel, the only present object for which American troops will be employed will be to guard military stores which may subsequently be needed by Russian forces and to render such aid as may be acceptable to the Russians in the organization of their own self-defense.

"With such objects in view, the Government of the United States is now cooperating with the Governments of France and Great Britain in the neighborhood of Murmansk and Archangel. The United States and Japan are the only powers which are just now in a position to act in Siberia in sufficient force to accomplish even such modest objects as those that have been outlined. The Government of the United States has, therefore, proposed to the Government of Japan that each of the two governments send a force of a few thousand men to Vladivostok, with the purpose of cooperating as a single force in the occupation of Vladivostok and in safeguarding, as far as it may be, the country to the rear of the westward-moving Czecho-Slovaks, and the Japanese Government has consented.

"In taking this action the Government of the United States wishes to announce to the people of Russia, in the most public and solemn manner, that it contemplates no interference with the political sovereignty of Russia, no intervention in her internal affairs--not even in the local affairs of the limited areas which her military force may be obliged to occupy--and no impairment of her territorial integrity, either now or hereafter, but that what we are about to do has as its single and only object the rendering of such aid as shall be acceptable to the Russian people themselves in their endeavors to regain control of their own affairs, their own territory, and their own destiny."

The Japanese issued a similar declaration a few days later, also disclaiming any desire for territorial aggrandizement at the cost of Russia.

During the first week of August, 1918, about 7,000 American soldiers, most of them regulars from the Philippines, were landed at Vladivostok, the United States Government announcing, on August 7, 1918, that Major General William S. Graves, former assistant chief of the Army General Staff, would have command of the American expedition. The Japanese landed a similar force, under General Kikuzo Otani, president of the famous military technical school of Toyama Gakko, and who, on account of his senior rank, would assume command of the entire Allied force. The French and British landed smaller forces each, the former being native troops from Tonkin and the British being local garrisons from India.

Meanwhile the Czecho-Slovak Army in the interior of Russia continued its operations. On July 26, 1918, they reported the capture of Simbirsk, 600 miles east of Moscow; on the last day of the month they gained possession of a large railroad bridge at Syzram, in the Volga region, and on the following day they took the city of Ekaterinburg, where the czar had been executed by order of the Ural regional soviet. In western Siberia they ordered the mobilization of the classes from 1912 to 1920, at Omsk. It was also reported that they were being joined by thousands of Rumanians and Italians who had formerly been soldiers in the Austrian armies and had later been taken prisoners by the imperial Russian armies. By this time it was generally recognized that the original plan of the Czecho-Slovaks, to withdraw from Russia by way of Vladivostok, had been changed to one whereby they were to remain and form the nucleus about which the anti-Bolshevist elements in Russia and the Allies might reconstruct an eastern front against the German forces.

The Japanese, being the first to land at Vladivostok, were the first to advance into the interior, and they immediately took up their position along the Ussuri River, which forms the eastern boundary of Manchuria with Siberia. The Americans, as soon as they arrived, occupied the railway toward Nikolsk.

At this time, in the middle of August, 1918, the main forces of the enemy, Russian Bolsheviki and German and Magyar ex-prisoners, were located near Chita, in Transbaikalia, numbering about 50,000. Others occupied positions along the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, north of Vladivostok.

On August 24, 1918, the first serious fighting took place, when the Japanese, supported by their allies, drove the Red Guards fifteen miles north from the Ussuri. Here the enemy numbered about 8,000, consisting of infantry and some artillery. Four days later the Japanese occupied Krasnoyarsk and Blagovyeshchensk. On September 7, 1918, the Bolshevist naval base at Khabarovsk was taken by Japanese cavalry, the booty including seventeen gunboats, four other vessels, and 120 guns.

One of the objects of the expedition was to establish communications with the Czecho-Slovaks far in the interior of the country, and this was quickly accomplished by an unexpected success on the part of the Allied forces. The isolated Czecho-Slovak army near Lake Baikal, under Colonel Gaida, had been endeavoring to advance toward Chita. General Semenov, the Russian anti-Bolshevist leader, with a force of Cossacks supported by Japanese, had been coming out of China and was also advancing toward Chita. A delayed dispatch from the American Consul at Irkutsk, dated August 13, 1918, brought word that the Bolsheviki army east of Lake Baikal had been destroyed and on September 4, 1918, telegraphic communication between Irkutsk and Vladivostok was reopened. On the same day it was announced that the Czecho-Slovaks and the Cossacks and Japanese under Semenov had joined hands at Chita and that that main stronghold was taken. This gave the Allied forces entire control of the railways in Siberia as far west as Samara, on the Volga River, a few hundred miles from Moscow.

During this period the anti-Bolshevist elements in Russia were cooperating with these efforts in their behalf. On August 5, 1918, the Russian embassy in Washington announced the formation of a new government in Siberia, whose chief purpose was to oust the Soviets and bring Russia back in line with the Allies against Germany.

"The United Siberian Government," said the statement in part, "states that it was elected on January 26, 1916, by the members of a regional Siberian Duma--representative assembly. The point where this government has temporarily transferred its center is Vladivostok, the other members of it remaining at Omsk. A message from those at Omsk has just been received, stating that, owing to the combined efforts of the Czecho-Slovaks and the military organizations of the Siberian Government itself, the following cities have been liberated from the Bolsheviki: Mariinsk, Novo Nicolayevsk, Tomsk, Narim, Tobolsk, Barnaul, Semipalatinsk, Karkarlinski, Atchinsk, and Krasnoyarsk.... The 'Temporary Government of Siberia' adds a public statement of its political aims, which are: the creation of a Russian army, well disciplined, in order to reestablish, in cooperation with the Allies, a battle front against Germany. Siberia, being an inseparable part of United Russia, the Temporary Government of Siberia believes it to be its first duty to safeguard, in the territory of Siberia, the interests of the whole of Russia, to recognize all the international treaties and agreements of Russia with friendly nations which were in force until October 25, 1917, the moment of the Bolshevist uprising...."