Did Wilson Have a Russia Policy?
- Did Wilson Have a Russia Policy?
The historical argument over Woodrow Wilson’s often ambiguous approaches to a Russia in revolution was first clearly articulated with the publication of William Appleman Williams’s seminal essays, “American Intervention in Russia, 1917–1920,” published in Studies on the Left. 1 In those essays Williams boldly attacked the prevailing orthodoxy of George F. Kennan’s Russia Leaves the War (1956) and The Decision to Intervene (1958) by asserting that Wilson did have a Russia policy, and that it was anti-Bolshevik and not primarily driven by World War I or the British and French.
The argument sparked by this exchange shows no sign of abating, despite the end of the ideological hostility that marked Cold War historiography and the sharp divisions between so-called “orthodox” and “revisionist” schools. Although John Lewis Gaddis (most notably in Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History, 1978) and others have tried to blur the distinction, a new generation of historians, digging deeply into archives on both sides of the Atlantic, has found ample materials with which to continue to demonstrate the complexity of America’s response to revolutionary events in Russia.
David S. Foglesong, assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, utilizes newly available Russian, British, and American military intelligence materials to argue that Wilson pursued a coherent, continuous policy of intervention against the Bolshevik regime, but a closely held and secretive one that became “increasingly stern and inflexible” (p. 4) as hopes of the Bolsheviks’ imminent demise were repeatedly dashed. Foglesong argues for an evolutionary Wilson Russia policy in which the President’s “penchant for secrecy” and Col. Edward M. House’s “recommendation of secrecy” (p. 2) gradually became the dominant force, overwhelming any idealistic pronouncements and public statements to the contrary.
Foglesong places Wilson’s Russia policy firmly within the framework of what he argues was a “Wilsonian style of intervention,” first articulated and [End Page 624] developed in difficult circumstances in revolutionary Mexico in 1913. Here he was certainly influenced by Lloyd C. Gardner’s Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (1984), and Gordon Levin’s classic revisionist work on Wilson’s foreign policy, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (1968). Quite simply, in Foglesong’s view, Wilson’s policy combined a public face of anti-intervention and a corresponding reluctance to commit American troops with a robust commitment to covert intervention and to unconventional approaches to forestall revolution and protect American interests and public order.
The centerpiece of Foglesong’s work and its great strength is the emphasis on “secret war” and the uses of American intelligence agents such as Xeno-phon Kalamatiano and the network of sources coordinated by American consul DeWitt Clinton Poole in south and central Russia primarily in 1918. Foglesong begins this account with a clear assertion, strongly backed by British, Russian, French, and American sources, that the United States “was not dragged by its anti-Bolshevik allies into bankrolling a covert financial intervention in south Russia” in the wake of the Bolshevik victory, but rather it was the U.S. that “took the initiative in suggesting covert methods to the British and offering to repay them for any aid they gave” (p. 77). Tracing the story through secret discussions in London and Paris in December 1917 and January 1918, Foglesong establishes convincingly that Woodrow Wilson sided with Secretary of State Robert Lansing and the unofficial advice of Charles Crane to sweep aside the hesitations of Colonel House, U.S. ambassador to London Walter Hines Page, and others concerning the wisdom and efficacy of backing the south Russian forces of A. M. Kaledin against the Bolsheviks. In Foglesong’s account, the key battle within the Wilson administration was not for the mind of Woodrow Wilson, but rather for the bureaucrats who raised obstacles against this policy of covert war.
Even the seeming contradiction of Wilson’s continued openness to unofficial...
