The Bolshevists made no progress during six years with the United States. The Wilson administration declared that the Moscow Soviet did not represent Russia and could not be recognized in any way because its doctrines and practices were incompatible with those of civilized nations. Bolshevist emissaries were deported. The matter ended there. It has been easy for the United States under the Harding administration to maintain the same policy. We have taken a generous humanitarian interest in feeding the Russian people, but we do not feel impelled to have anything to do with Lenin and his associates. We can wait years longer, maintaining rigidly the policy of non-intercourse, because we do not have important economic and political interests at stake.
With the Entente Powers the situation is different. They have been called upon, separately and collectively, to decide their attitude toward the Moscow Soviet. France, Italy, and Great Britain, being in Europe and a part of Europe, and Japan, being in Asia and a part of Asia, have not been able to maintain the fiction that the Moscow Soviet is not the Russian Government. They know it is. Ostracizing Russia cuts off their goods from vast markets. Ignoring Russia, as we have seen above, makes uncertain of fulfilment, if not invalid, the results of all diplomatic negotiations among themselves and with the neighbors of Russia.
The British, admirable realists in international politics, were first to grasp the cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face danger of keeping Russia in Coventry. British trade was suffering, and the Russians were in a position, which was daily growing stronger, to stir things up unpleasantly against the British in India and Mesopotamia. A Soviet delegation was received in London, and as soon as the British saw that Kolchak had followed the fate of Yudenitch and Denikin they signed a trade agreement and brought into court a test case to convince the Bolshevists that what they exported would not be confiscated for claims against the former Government. The British began to trade with Russia, and British and Russians mutually promised to abstain from propaganda against one another.
Italy and smaller countries soon followed suit. France made the mistake of backing Baron Wrangel, still one more will-o’-the-wisp, and the question of the enormous debt of the Czarist régime, most of it widely distributed among French peasants, made it impossible for the French Government to renew relations with Russia. On the other hand, France’s persistence in backing counter-revolutionary movements, her support of Poland, her effort to control the Little Entente, her commercial treaty with Finland, her rôle at the Genoa Conference, and her treatment of Germany combined to increase the bitterness between the closely allied nations of pre-war days. In the summer of 1922 France began to make overtures to Moscow; but these did not go far. The invasion of the Ruhr, following upon the Lausanne Conference, widened the breach.