No spokesman for the administration, or anyone else, ever answered or attempted to answer this question.
After Brest-Litovsk, it was generally believed that the ambitions of Germany in Russia were:
1. To recruit her war wasted divisions from the great number of Austrian and German prisoners in Russia.
2. To exploit the great natural resources of the Ukraine, Courland, Lithuania and Estonia.
3. To align on her eastern frontier buffer states from Finland to the Caucasus with Persia as the last link in the chain.
4. To seize great stores of war munitions at Archangel and Vladivostok.
There was also some credence in the rumor that Germany sought to establish submarine bases at Murmansk and Petchenga in Finland.
Murmansk, on the Kola Peninsula, is the only port of North Russia not closed for nearly half the year. During the months of winter, from December until the middle of June, Archangel, Kem, Onega and Kandalaksh on the White Sea are sealed by effective barriers of ice, and even Petrograd, several hundred miles further south on the Baltic, is closed until late in April. But the Cape current of the Gulf Stream swings around the northern coast of the Kola Peninsula, and at Murmansk there is an excellent natural harbor, which is always open, with thirty-two feet of water in shore, and a high coast line, giving splendid protection against storm. From this valuable ice free port, the Murman railway extends three hundred miles to Kem and continues through Petrozavodsk on the west shore of Lake Onega, six hundred miles further to Petrograd.
The completion of this, the most northern railroad, is a triumph of imagination and courage and invincible resolution. The Russian engineer, Goriatchkovshy, inspired by the necessity of his country having a means of inlet for munitions and supplies during the war (for the Trans-Siberian railway could carry only about one-seventh of such supplies), laid the tracks over seemingly bottomless tundra and conquered in the face of most disheartening discouragements.
A great number of German prisoners and one hundred thousand Russian laborers worked to complete the heroic enterprise. Experts predicted that with the melting of the ice in spring, the tracks would disappear in the marshes, but Goriatchkovshy had reckoned with the elements. The Murman railway is operating today. It has a hauling capacity of thirty-five hundred tons a day, the maximum handling facilities of Murmansk port, and many a lonely soldier, snowbound in North Russia, during the tragic winter of 1919, has the Murman railway and its creator, Goriatchkovshy, to thank for the messages from far off America, that came to Murmansk and were brought to Archangel by Obozerskaya on the Vologda railway, and then relayed by droshky and the faithful Russian pony to a solitary sentinel post somewhere in the great white reaches of the interior.