File No. 861.00/2957

The British Embassy to the Department of State

[A copy of the following telegram was handed by the Counselor of the British Embassy to Mr. Auchincloss of the office of the Counselor for the Department of State on July 30, 1918:]

The British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Balfour) to the Ambassador at Washington (Reading)

The following memorandum has been approved by the Imperial War Cabinet:

His Majesty’s Government recognize to the full the spirit in which the aide-mémoire of July 171 is conceived, and they sincerely welcome the decision of the United States to assist towards safeguarding the Czecho-Slovak Army, though they entertain serious misgivings that the proposed force may prove inadequate for its purpose.

They are also in complete accord with the President’s proposal to send an economic mission through Vladivostok in order to supply material assistance to a people sorely tried by the miseries of war and revolution.

These are in themselves most admirable schemes, which deserve and will assuredly receive the gratitude of America’s allies. His Majesty’s Government [Page 316] have, however, never concealed their view that they are insufficient in themselves to cope with the Russian situation, regarded as an element in a great military and political problem with which the Allies are confronted. The arguments, indeed, which have led us to this conclusion have been so often stated by the European Allies that it seems neither necessary nor desirable to repeat them on the present occasion. But there are two points, the one military and the other political, on which the aide-mémoire seems so seriously to misconceive the attitude of the Entente powers as to require further comment and explanation.

The military misconception bears on the relations between the western and eastern theatres of operations. His Majesty’s Government are entirely in accord with the aide-mémoire in thinking that of these two theatres, the western is the more important. They admit to the full that it is on the west that the great effort must be made, and they believe that to endanger successes in the west in the hope of securing advantages in the east would be not only foolish but suicidal. But for this very reason they desire Allied intervention in Russia. Their scheme is not designed to diminish the relative strength of the Allied armies in the west by sending to Russia American troops who might be fighting in France or Italy, but to increase our relative strength in France by retaining in the east important bodies of Germans and Austrians, achieving this purpose by utilizing forces that are not available for the western front. In our view this can only be done on a considerable scale by enabling Japan, should she be willing, to employ her unused military strength against the common enemy. If this were possible the gain would be incontestable, and nowhere would it be more appreciated than in the western theatre of war. It may be too sanguine an expectation that Russia can, with Allied aid, recover the military strength she possessed before the revolution, but it is not unreasonable to look forward to a recovery which would constitute a real menace to German occupation of conquered territories, thus absorbing considerable German forces which would otherwise have been employed in France. If this could be accomplished the task of French, British, and American forces in France next year would be materially lightened.

The second misconception which (as it seems to us) pervades the aide-mémoire, is that the Allies, in advocating intervention in Russia are not thinking of Russia, but solely of themselves. “Military intervention,” says the aide-mémoire, “even supposing it to be efficacious in its repeatedly avowed object of delivering an attack upon Germany from the east, would be merely a method of making use of Russia, not a method of serving her.”

If this statement is based upon the assumption that the Allies wish to make use of Russia merely for their own purposes His Majesty’s Government must observe that their attitude has been misunderstood. In our view, Germany has used and misused the struggle for liberty of the Russian people to serve her own selfish end. Herself the great example of efficient autocracy, she has sedulously fostered in Russia every influence, from extremes of socialism to extremes of reaction, to paralyze the national will and destroy the national integrity. She has forced the country into a degrading and disastrous peace. Even that peace she has refused to keep. Russian territories which she has forcibly taken under protection she is treating with characteristic brutality. Russia is to her no more than a conquered area from which she can squeeze supplies, and the Russian people are no more than a subject rabble, to be stripped and plundered in exact proportion to Germany’s strength and Russia’s weakness.

To His Majesty’s Government, therefore, it seems that an attack on German forces in Russia would confer upon the Russian people the most signal service that could be imagined. If Russia is ever to develop along her own lines, if she is ever to regain her self-respect, she must first be free from an alien domination, the whole object of which is to shatter her political fabric and exploit her material resources.

The aide-mémoire also seems to carry a possible suggestion that intervention has a political as well as a military object; and even that it may be in some fashion calculated to foster reaction. We had hoped that our reiterated declarations upon this subject made doubts about our policy impossible. Above all things we desire to keep free from party disputes, by which Russia is torn. There is no principle on which we have laid greater stress than that she should manage her own affairs. We wish her to choose her own form of government and to pursue in her own way her own line of self-development. But, unless [Page 317] all the information which reaches us is worthless, the best hope—perhaps the only hope—of allowing the voice of the Russian people to be heard, lies in the cleansing of the country by [from] German influences supported by German soldiers. This, it seems to us, can only be accomplished by foreign aid. Were it accompanied by a proclamation of the kind approved by the President, and repeatedly suggested by His Majesty’s Government, there should be no error or misconception as to the motives of the Allies; and there seems no reason to doubt that all the best elements in the country, whatever be their political opinions, would rally to the Allied standard and make use of Allies’ support.

We desire to acid that in making admittance of the great difficulty of the Russian problem, we know how deeply it has engaged the attention of the President, we rejoice to recognize the spirit of disinterested cooperation which animates all his policy, whether in the west or in the east, and we firmly count upon its continuance. We have, however, thought it right to deal briefly in this memorandum with certain points solely for the purpose of removing any possible misconceptions as to the attitude of His Majesty’s Government.

  1. Ante, p. 287.