Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/10

 with its troops and, crushing by superior numbers and technique the desperate resistance of the Red troops, as early as April reached the provinces of Great Russia and commenced to move into the latter. The following months witnessed a further gradual advance and infiltration of Germany to the east and south-east. Its aid to the counter-revolutionary forces, which were formed in south Russia or moved there from the territory occupied by the Germans, resulted in the creation of fictitious republics in the Caucasus and of a fictitious Don government, which served to cover the further encroachment of German and, in the Caucasus, also of the Turkish imperialism. The formation of the Skoropadsky government in Kiev rose before Soviet Russia as a concrete threat of an all-Russian restoration, to be sup-ported by the German military command in the Ukraine. The latter furnished Krasnov with military supplies and tried to extend its connections with the counter-revolutionary elements further to the east. German military supplies found their way even to the counter-revolutionary forces which had aligned themselves with the Entente. Parallel to this gradual unfolding of the German policy of encroachment, developed the daily and hourly struggle to dam this encroachment or to change its direction so that it would not menace the existence of Soviet Russia and in general, to put an end to the indefiniteness which resulted from the Brest treaty and to fix the relations with Germany. This process of fixation passed through a number of successive stages, which culminated in the treaties of August 27. Simultaneously an effort was made to fix the relations with the countries which masked the German encroachment—with the Hetman's Ukraine and with Finland, which was continually sending White guard bands to the Murman and Olonetz regions and which had attempted to transform the Ino fort into a Finnish fortress menacing Petrograd. The first step in this direction was the arrival of the German diplomatic representative Mirbach in Moscow on April 25 and the almost