WOODROW WILSON'S SECRET WAR AGAINST THE SOVIETS
Woodrow Wilson, president from 1912-1920, was in some ways a progressive administrator who enacted many reforms. He was also an outspoken white supremacist who reversed many of the gains blacks had made since the Civil War and encouraged the formation of the new (modern) Ku Klux Klan, a hypocrite whose repeated interventions against elected governments in Latin America belied his famous stances on self-determination and democracy, and a tyrant who enacted legislation that brought America closer to being a police state than it ever had been before in its history (under his administration, Robert Goldstein served ten years in prison for producing "Spirit of '76", a film about the Revolutionary War which depicted the British, then our allies, unfavorably.) He was also the first rabidly anti-Communist president, starting the waves of propaganda which would transform the word "communism" in America from a radical left-wing theory of economics and government to an epithet that stood for everything evil in the world.
Why did Wilson, and the leaders of many other Western governments, react so hostilely to the Soviet takeover in Russia? It is true that the Russian civil war caused the collapse of the Eastern front in World War I, allowing fresh waves of German soldiers to move west and come closer to Paris than they had been since 1914, but this seems an unlikely reason for hatred of the new regime - the Soviets were hardly pro-German, and American involvement won World War I fairly handily despite that setback.
A far more likely cause is that when the Soviets took over they nationalized Russia's petroleum resources. This was, of course, intolerable to the true ruler of America, Standard Oil, and along with its allies (such as British Petroleum, leader of Britain), SO pressured the elected officials to do something about the problem.
Another likely cause was the fear that if the Russian Revolution was successful, it would spark similar rebellion at home. At the time, this was not an unreasonable worry at all. Even from the heady, wealthy perspective of 1925, it should be pretty easy to remember just how bad things were five to eight years before. The end of WWI, unlike WWII, brought not prosperity but a major recession, coupled with a massive influenza epidemic that in some places killed a third of the population. The disparity between rich and poor had vastly increased - the rich were richer, and the poor poorer, after thirty years of the "Progressive" era, than they had been during "The Gilded Age". Business interests were controlling many government policies, and people knew it; that Standard Oil ruled America is not just a retroactive perspective, but a not uncommon belief of the time - there were as many protests that World War I was fought for the oil interests as there were later about the Gulf War. Many of Wilson's policies were greatly disliked both at home and abroad, and his popularity was at an all time low.
The rumblings of rebellious thought in America itself were growing louder.
So, pressured by powerful oil interests to keep Russia open, and seeing it as being in his own best interests to keep Russia from becoming an example of a successful anticapitalist revolution, Wilson decided to try to do something about it.
At first, in 1917, he started sending secret monetary aid to the "White" side of the Russian civil war (the side fighting to reinstate the old government.) That apparently didn't prove effective enough, so in the summer of 1918 he started a naval blockade of the Soviet Union and then actually sent troops to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution, a move supported by both Britain and France. America then fought a war against the Soviets for two years. In a joint command with Japanese soldiers, Anerican forces fought westward from Vladivostok all the way to Lake Baikal, supporting the Czech and White Russian troops that had declared an anticommunist government headquartered at Omsk. They briefly maintained front lines as far west as the Volga, but then the White Russian army disintegrated towards the end of 1919, and American troops were finally pulled out on April 1, 1920.
The war wasn't exactly secret - people who were alive at the time, such as everyone in our group, would have known about it - but it has been downplayed ever since in the American press and history; I think it's safe to say that few Americans alive today have even heard about it (Russians remember the war very well, and were still claiming damages for it as late as 1989.) It was a critical point in Soviet-American relations, however, because it was a root cause of the tensions which eventually led to the cold war. As one historian puts it (in the book 'The Unknown War'), "The immediate effect of the intervention was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of additional lives and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered society. And there were longer-range implications. Bolshevik leaders had clear proof . . . that the Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance."
The successful Russian Revolution did not, of course, spark revolution in America (although it did continue to enrage the oil interests for decades to come.) The Americans, as they so often do, decided to express their disapproval with ballots rather than bullets, and in 1920 people were so fed up with Wilson and his policies that his chosen successor, James Cox, was crushed by nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even campaigned, in the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential politics (Harding got an astounding 64% of the major-party vote.) While Warren G. Harding was not exactly the most stellar chief executive the nation has ever seen, he did manage to usher in a new age of prosperity which, for the moment, quieted down enough of the revolutionary rumbling that the continuing anticommunist propaganda from the White House was successful in making communism seem less and less like a viable alternative and more and more like a danger to the world. And so on to Calvin Coolidge and so it stands in 1925.
Four years later, of course, an awful lot of starving Americans will begin to think that maybe a few socialist programs aren't such a bad idea after all . . . and an awful lot of Russians in the prison camps will begin to realize that a bit more democracy in the process of selecting leaders isn't such a terrible plan . . .
Pleasant dreams.
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