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There would have been better ground for assisting Finns, Letts, Esthonians, and Ukrainians against Bolshevik imperialism; but it was to Koltchak, Denikin, and their north Russian friends, rather than to the little peoples that help was sent, and a powerful motive in the discrimination was the pledge of the Russian conservatives to resume responsibility for Russia's debts to her Allies, particularly France, which the Bolsheviks had repudiated.
Poland is lost to Russia, and the Donetz Basin was in the hands of Denikin, who so destroyed the mines before retreating that they are still not in working order. The result is a practically complete absence of coal. Oil, which is equally important in Russia, was also lacking until the recent recovery of Baku.
He led off by a direct and furious onslaught on the railway workers in general, demanding work, work and more work, telling them that as the Red Army had been the vanguard of the revolution hitherto, and had starved and fought and given lives to save those at home from Denikin and Kolchak, so now it was the turn of the railway workers on whose efforts not only the Red Army but also the whole future of Russia depended.
He volunteers for any difficult or dangerous work which needs to be done, such as clearing away piles of infected corpses left by Kolchak or Denikin. In spite of his position of power and his control of supplies, he lives an austere life. He is not pursuing personal ends, but aiming at the creation of a new social order. The same motives, however, which make him austere make him also ruthless.
We have, in some degree, to thank Kolchak and Denikin for that. They are in favor of the Soviet Government, but hanker after Free Trade, not understanding that the two things are self-contradictory. Of course, if they were a united political force they could swamp us, but they are disunited both in their interests and geographically.
There has been very little sympathy in England for armed intervention in Russia; the Ironside expedition, the Judenitch folly, the vast undertakings with regard to Koltchak and Denikin, were highly unpopular with the masses if indulged in by society.
They were all agreed in considering that the action of the men of the old regime, and especially Denikin, was directed at the suppression of the independent States and to the return of the old forms, and they attributed to this the aversion of the Russian people to them.
The menace to our own armies in France had disappeared; there was, I suppose, no longer an urgent necessity to re-establish the Russian front, though the possibility of such re-establishment had kept huge German forces practically demobilised near the Russian and Ukrainian frontiers. Koltchak and his gallant comrade Denikin had served the Entente purpose.
Then there is an entertaining wagon, showing Kolchak sitting inside a fence in Siberia with a Red soldier on guard, Judenitch sitting in a little circle with a sign-post to show it is Esthonia, and Denikin running at full speed to the asylum indicated by another sign-post on which is the crescent of the Turkish Empire.
His defeat ruined our plans in North Russia, and at last convinced the Allies of their folly in seeking to impose a government on the Russian people; and evacuation became the order of the day. In South Russia Denikin, unassisted by foreign legions, met with more native support and greater success. The Bolsheviks were driven from the shores of the Black Sea, and the Ukraine recovered Kiev.
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