Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

This exposition of what was going on in Chita may appear to be bad form on the part of one who was a guest. But in effect I was the United States at that banquet, and the people of the United States were paying me as an officer to learn as much about Siberia as I could, and the people of the United States have a right to know what I learned.

My hosts knew I was an official guest, and their hospitality was not really hospitality to me in the proper sense, but an attempt to gain my esteem by proving to me that they were good fellows. They thought that champagne would gain for them a favorable report from me. But the future of Russia, and more particularly future relations and understandings between the United States and Russia, should not rest on the good-fellowship of wine. I can report on the splendid hospitality of the Siberians, as dispensed on their own understanding of hospitality. I cannot say I would commend Semenoff’s officers as suitable administrators. It is quite likely that while the band was playing, they were having several persons executed in a grove. Festivity has been known to be used as a cover for firing squads.

Semenoff and others had lost hope that the United States would coöperate with them against the Bolshevists, and had turned to other agencies from which they might expect financial aid and moral support.

We demanded that an ideal government be formed before we would recognize any. If an actual honest and competent government had been formed I doubt if we would have recognized it, because no government could, or will be formed, which will not be criticized by some Russian faction. And all some Russian had to do in order to discredit with us any government or leader that rose, was to whisper that such was “monarchists,” or “not representative,” or “reactionary.” And all of those charges would be true, for the simple reason that in any group of Russians which can be gathered together there are bound to be among them some who are monarchists, or not representative of all Russia, or reactionary.

Kolchak formed a government at Omsk in November, 1918. He has not been recognized yet by the United States. Some say he is a monarchist in his sympathies. A former officer of the Czar’s fleet, his training and sympathies are bound to be monarchistic in tendency. He feels that a firm hand is necessary in dealing with the Russian situation. If we had recognized him promptly, and backed him up, Semenoff and Kalmikoff and other lesser lights would have had to adhere to him at once. All power for the regeneration of Russia would have been coördinated, and all ambitions of Cossack chiefs to become local princes, would have been swept away. They would have had to join the parade, and the other Allies would have been willing enough to follow our lead. And a lot of bickering and killing would have been stopped.

For that matter, to give Semenoff and Kalmikoff their due, if they had been recognized, with limitations of their authority, those leaders would have given up much of their petty intriguing from the first, and swung into line behind the United States. They would have listened to our advice.

The whole question when our expedition first landed, was “What will the United States do?” The answer in a couple of months was: “The United States will do nothing—let us start something ourselves, which will repay us for the trouble we have had fighting the Bolshevists.”

So the secret trading began, the forcing of loans from banks got bolder, there was aid which we deprecated from certain quarters to these Cossack chiefs. We played a dog-in-the-manger game, with Christmas-Tree decorations in the form of Red Cross aid, and Y. M. C. A., and Committee on Public Information, and Trade Boards. We conferred and commissioned and sent official representatives in military uniform to various places to make friends, while Bolshevists killed off a vast population, and Cossack chiefs, under the plea of exterminating Bolshevists, executed personal enemies.

We sent two or three hundred railroad engineers into the country, they all thinking that they would be in the army. When they applied for government insurance, they were told they were not in the army. But they wore the uniforms and insignia of our army officers, and when some of them wanted to get out of the country and go home, they were not allowed to quit their jobs. Members of this organization told me that they had been given to understand that if they insisted upon resigning, they could do so, but that they need never again expect to hold a job with an American railroad. And the Russians said that Russian money was paying the salaries of these men—and that these Americans were there to steal the railroad from the Russians. That may sound absurd. But such absurdities thrust at men in Siberia are not pleasant. They reveal to some slight extent the difficult environments in which Americans found themselves in Siberia.

So while in January the temperature hung around seventy degrees below zero, the social atmosphere was about as cold. Some weeks before, having replied to a request that I class myself for discharge or for permanent commission in the army, I had requested discharge.