HELP RUSSIA NOW
June 20, 1918
Russia has been thrown under the iron tyranny of German militarism and capitalism by the Bolshevists of the Lenine type. The Russian people are slowly awakening to this bitter truth. The far-sighted, the Russians of genuine patriotism, have long been awake, but the peasants, who are at heartgood, but who are ignorant and misled, are now awakening also. Plenty of them, especially among the Cossacks, are well aware that submission to Germany now means death for Russia. Plenty of them are eager to fight and know well that only by successful war on a grand scale can Russia now be saved and regenerated, but they must have help and the help must be given immediately or it may be too late, and America can best give the help.
A Russian peasant woman who can hardly write her name is here to ask that the help be given immediately and that it be given in Siberia. She is a remarkable character in her strength, her simplicity, her direct straightforwardness, and her intense earnestness and entire disinterestedness. She was a major in the Russian army until the Russian army was betrayed and dissolved. Her peasant husband was killed in the ranks. She served in the ranks of a regiment of men. She commanded in a regiment of women. She has been wounded four times. She was born in Tomsk, Siberia. She is a peasant of the best class, in habits of thought and belief and life and sympathy. But she has a wide outlook. She knows that America will keep her word about Siberia, just as America kept her word about Cuba. She asks that for our own sake, just as much as for Russia’s sake, we now send an army to Siberia, entering through Vladivostok or Harbin, or through both. She asks us to announce that after the war is over we guarantee to return to Russia her country with the right for her people to decide for themselveshow they are to be governed, and that in the war we fight with and for all the Russians who will fight against Germany for Russia, and that we fight to the death against the Germans and against all Russians who side with the Germans.
Siberia is in chaos. Eastern Siberia has plenty of food and contains large elements of the population, especially Cossacks, who would promptly join with an Allied force which they believed would, in good faith, aid in the reconquest of Russia for the purpose of giving it back to the Russians themselves. West of Lake Baikal is a region dominated by a German army, some twenty thousand strong, composed of former German prisoners of war, who are organized under the name of the German Red Guards and who are the permanent adherents of German autocracy, but who help the cause of Russian anarchy in order to conquer Russia for the German autocracy. West of these again a stretch of country, which includes the passes of the Ural Mountains, is held by the splendid Czechs, who, by the way, must at the end of this war be rewarded by seeing an independent Czech-Slovak commonwealth established, just as there must also be a great Jugo-Slav commonwealth.
At once there should be in East Siberia an American army of say thirty thousand men with a Japanese army of the same size and a British imperial army of as nearly the same size as possible. If there was difficulty as to the command of the Allied forces, borrow some man of great reputation, Joffre, forinstance, from France. Let the woman major above spoken of and other Russian friends of the peasants and of a Russian republic go in advance to make clear that the Allied army comes only to restore Russia to the Russians. Let all Russians who join be paid by the United States on the same scale as our own troops, and if necessary let the United States guarantee the payment of the Japanese. Move against the German Red Guards as quickly as possible and then push instantly to join the heroic Czechs in the Urals. Let the railroads be organized back of the army by our best railroad men and let them carry immediately behind the army immense quantities of clothing, boots, and farm machinery. Siberia has food and it will furnish hundreds of thousands of soldiers who will rally around such an Allied army as a nucleus. Before this army reached the Urals, the Germans would have to prepare to meet it and their pressure on the Western front would thereby be relieved.
Russia is at this moment lost, so that no change in Russia can make things worse for the Allies than they now are. We ought to have acted with energy and intelligence on her behalf a year ago. Let us at least act now, for no possible action can be worse than our inaction. She does not need talk and envoys to study the situation. She needs an army to serve as a nucleus around which she can create her own immense armies. The above plan is better than none. If our Government can devise a better, let them do so, but let us act at once.