File No. 861.00/2855
The Consul at Archangel (Cole) to the Secretary of State
[Received October 1.]
Sir: I have the honor to make the following report as to the political situation in Archangel before the kidnaping of the members of the sovereign government of the northern territory took place. I think it necessary to make the report even now, after the crisis due to the coup d’etat has passed, in order to show into what inflammable material the bomb fell.
On the afternoon of August 2, when General Poole and the Allied troops and war vessels entered the city and harbor, there was considerable enthusiasm shown but it was plain to be seen that this enthusiasm was confined to certain classes. The General was greeted on the quay by a guard of honor hastily gotten together and consisting of peasants armed and clothed, as to uniform, in a makeshift way. There was also a large crowd of enthusiastic middle-class persons. Thus the General’s landing immediately revealed what classes favored his coming, namely those two classes, the peasantry, and the city “intelligents” and bourgeois, who had suffered most under the Bolsheviks. The working class was patently absent. As the General’s yacht approached the quay a few tugs whistled but the great majority of tugs and river craft kept silence. During the march of the Allied officers through the streets to the government building the absence of the city working class was even more conspicuous.
The feeling that there was something new in the city, something new about which people were enthusiastic, lasted only a few days. The populace soon sank back into the apathy that had become habitual with it. This apathy continued until the coup d’état when the populace became aroused again, but in a very different sense.
After the troops had received the check administered to them at Obozersk by the Bolsheviks the apathy deepened into what almost approached dissatisfaction in some quarters and blame was laid to the Allies for not having brought more troops. The arrival of a food ship in these first days would have done much to relieve the situation but no such ship came.
One of the first orders issued by the Allied military aroused much disapprobation, without at the same time accomplishing much. This was the order forbidding the display of any flags anywhere except the white, blue, and red national ensign, the navy Andreievski cross flag and the Allied flags. What struck the Russian populace [Page 528] (and it also looked strange to persons who had been in Russia continuously before the Allies’ entrance) was the total absence of red flags. It was expected that the Bolshevik emblem, a red flag with white or yellow letters, R.S.F.S.R., would be forbidden but the plain red flag was not a Bolshevik but a universal socialist emblem. As a prominent Menshevik leader, who had been in the Food Supply Ministry under Kerensky, and a prominent local Socialist Revolutionist of the right, who had been in prison under the Bolsheviks for pro-Ally sympathy, said to me: “The order is understandable to intelligent persons who realize that the Allied military intend it as a measure against the Bolsheviks and not against the socialists who invited the Allies into Russia.” But they said it actually operated against those socialists and that the masses unfortunately understood it in this sense, and that the Bolsheviks were active in so interpreting it to the masses. They regretted that the Allied military did not understand that after eight months of uninterrupted Bolshevik control in Russia the masses actually saw more meaning in the red flag than in the white, blue, and red one. The Allies, they said, had come to change this and the moderate socialists wished to change it, but it could be done only with time, and the order in question merely hindered instead of helping the convalescence from Bolshevism.
The same men pointed out that they themselves, prominent pro-Ally leaders, and all their pro-Ally colleagues, were seriously handicapped in their struggle against Bolshevism by the fact that the military governor general would issue no permits for any political meetings whatsoever. They declared that there was no open propaganda by the Bolsheviks in the sawmill villages below the city where the immense majority of the workmen of the region around Archangel are located. The men stated that in the two meetings that had been held in the day or two before the order was issued forbidding meetings not a single Bolshevik had appeared to heckle or argue against the moderates. According to them, however, before the mill opening in the morning, during the lunch hour and after the close of work, wherever a few workmen would gather together or group themselves on their way home, a Bolshevik workman or agitator would appear and agitate against the moderates and against the Allies. The two strongest Bolshevik arguments were continuously the forbidding of the socialist flag and the non-appearance of food ships. The two men referred to declared that were absolute freedom of meeting allowed it would be the most effective means of combating Bolshevism as unless in absolute control the Bolsheviks had always thriven best in a state of conspiracy and that repression [Page 529] had been proven to be the food on which they best throve. It was also stated that were the free publication and sale of any and all newspapers permitted no Bolshevik organ would appear.
An incident that occurred on the 15th of August created a great deal of anger against certain circles among the Allies. This anger was felt not among the Bolsheviks, who, I am told, used the occurrence to point their “I-told-you-so “statements, but among the pro-Ally socialists. General Poole issued a proclamation to the people and it was criticized in No. 3 of the Vozrozhdenie Severa (Rebirth of the North). This paper is the semiofficial organ of the government, reflecting more or less the political views of the members of the government. The article appears on the second page of the number mentioned, beginning at the top of the third column. It is distinctly a criticism but not a malicious one. On the afternoon of the 15th, a French officer, M. le Comte de Luberzac, of the Allied Counter-Espionage Bureau, appeared at the newspaper office and apparently demanded the arrest of the author of the article. It is reported that high words resulted on both sides. So far as I know nothing ever came of the matter and the incident only attains its full significance in the light of later events. It left, however, in the minds of the moderate socialists connected with the paper, all of whom stand close to the government, an impression of an acute hostility already existing between them and certain Allied officers in the group to which Luberzac belonged.
On the other [hand], after General Poole’s entrance the Russian political leaders, the majority of whom had been in hiding until August 2, did not display a proper understanding of the fact that such an attitude actually existed among trusted and powerful Ally counselors regardless of the rightness or wrongness thereof. These men who had been shut tight for months in a conspiracy and unable to express their views openly were rather too eager to enjoy the full freedom to express their opinions that they took for granted after the Bolshevik overthrow. They were, however, very circumspect after all, but not as circumspect as they should have been, knowing as they did of the existence of the bitterness against them and their kind on the part of influential Allied officers as mentioned above.
It was during these days, but probably without any connection with the incident above referred to, that desertions began among the Russians who had enlisted in the British-Slavic Legion. An undoubted part in these desertions was played by the failure of the expedition on the railroad and river to make rapid progress which would have had an extremely beneficial effect on the situation in its entirety and prevented the loss to Allied military prestige which occurred at this time.
[Page 530]Among the mass of the populace, however, none of the above factors, all of them unfavorable to the Allied cause in Archangel and northern Russia, played so strong a role as the apparent indifference of the Allied authorities to the food situation. No food ships had come in with the troops. No word as to the near approach of any such ships had been, or could be spread, among the people. At this time the Allied command and the Allied diplomatic corps did not itself know what would be sent. This uncertainty was a trump card in the hands of the Bolsheviks who argued that the Allies could not furnish food being themselves on the verge of starvation and needing every ounce of food to use at home to prevent the outbreak of those hunger riots which would soon develop into the world revolution so long predicted by the Bolsheviks and which latterly was their only reliance. America, said the B[olshevik]s, would furnish nothing, she being only interested in strengthening her own financial, military and commercial position vis-à-vis the weakened nations of Europe, and in furthering her own imperialistic aims in Siberia. Great anxiety was constantly expressed by the moderate socialists and cooperative leaders in the food-supply committees, who did not doubt that food would be sent but feared it would come too late to avoid a severe pinch of a week or so. They justly argued that the food question was a vital one and one on which they had based a great deal of their pro-Ally propaganda against the Bolsheviks and that delay in bringing food would block their agitation in favor of the intervention. They feared that it was not sufficiently realized that the mere arrival of food ships in the harbor did not mean food in the peasants’ huts as time must elapse between the ship’s arrival and the receipt by the consumer, due to the necessary work of distribution, etc. In a word the delay and uncertainty concerning food worked a good deal of injury to the Allied cause here.
These, then, were the factors causing the cessation of enthusiasm for the Allies that once existed among moderate socialist and bourgeois liberal circles, and which prevented the birth of enthusiasm among those classes where it had never existed. Into this unhappy situation burst the attempted coup d’état which definitely ruined the Allied cause for the time being and left a situation which only the presence of an overwhelming number of American troops and the vague consciousness among the people that great, democratic, friendly America was at Russia’s side made bearable even to the pro-Ally Russians.
I have [etc.]