Whereupon the visitor on the porch would reply: “If I do anything rough I will hurt somebody’s feelings. I don’t want to do that. But if you kill the robbers, then you have settled the affair yourself, with my moral support. But I am not quite sure the robbers are not in the right. I am your friend, if you win this fight; if the robber wins it, I want to make friends with him. In the meantime, I can supply you with a Red Cross nurse to bind your wounds if you escape alive; I can give you food if the robber steals or destroys all you have to eat; I can send you ministers to bury you with prayers if you are killed, or to preach to you if you are spared. I am a Good Samaritan but I must not interfere.”
While we were thus pausing and surveying the wreckage, human and material, various Cossack chiefs, schooled in the methods of the old régime, seized power and began building up principalities of their own—Kalmikoff as governor-general of the Ussuri district, and Semenoff as boss of the Trans-Baikal.
They used the old tricks of autocracy—swords and ceremony—which the people feared and by which they were impressed with demonstrations of physical power. Then to catch the imagination of the nations which wished to see Russia rehabilitate herself speedily, they began to talk in a patter, the key-note of which was, and is: “I stand for a free and reunited Russia, a Russia greater than the old.” Whereupon they proceeded to deny anything in the nature of freedom, and to disunite Russia. All they stood for, and still stand for, is their own glorification and reward and the gambler’s chance that they will inherit the throne of the Czars. If they cannot attain to such ambitions, at least they hope to sell out their usurped powers in case some figure of imperial lineage comes out of hiding to take the shattered crown.
We kept assuring the Siberians that our government stood as their friend, at the same time neither denouncing, nor interfering with these usurpers. The people, for all their abysmal ignorance, knew perfectly well what was going on—they recognized autocracy because they had to submit to it. And, speaking generally, the attitude of the United States was: “Why cannot you people get together and settle up this mess—all you have to do is come to an agreement, and reunite Russia!”
This while several civil wars were being fought in the country!
At home our press and public were making a hue and cry against Bolshevism. Yet in Siberia were Cossack chiefs with little armies opposed to the Bolshevists, but inactive because they were not sure what we might do. Our failure to throw in with these chiefs, led the Bolshevist leaders to hope, if not actually believe, that we favored Bolshevism, or at least did not dare fight it. At any rate, our “do nothing” policy allowed the Bolshevist leaders, crafty in intrigue, propaganda and organization, to whisper to their wavering adherents that the United States was passively favoring them and that recognition of the Bolshevist government was only a matter of time.
In effect, our operations for nearly a year, were a subsidy to Bolshevism. Our civilian-aid agencies were unwitting helpers to the secret Bolshevists of Siberia, for they gave comfort and encouragement to the idea that Bolshevism in Siberia was a success. We repaired a lot of damage that Bolshevism had done, before the people of Siberia could realize what the destruction meant—before they could learn for themselves what a mess they had made of things.
Our government did relief work, and became actually thereby an ally of the Bolshevist régime, though maintaining an attitude of non-interference—neutrality.
“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.