Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/13

 into the struggle against Germany as their ally. Some of the French military representatives in Soviet Russia sympathized with this policy, which was, however, absolutely rejected by the French Government, which had not for a moment wavered in its unqualified hostility to Soviet Russia and which had consistently striven to crush the latter by means of intervention. While Comrade Litvinov was at work in England, our Ambassador Extraordinary Comrade Kamenev was not allowed to enter France. In the following months the French agents were ceaselessly carrying on underground work, particularly in the South among the Cossacks, and in eastern Russia and in Siberia. French diplomacy had persistently conceived the re-establishment of the eastern front as an outcome of intervention, stepping across the corpse of Soviet Russia crushed by the Entente powers. On April 5 a Japanese force was landed at Vladivostok, after which followed a small British force. This was the beginning of intervention. On April 9 we published secret telegrams of June 1917, which proved beyond doubt that the Japanese Government of Motono-Terauchi had already in March, 1917, resolved to crush the Russian revolution. The next move of the Entente intervention was made through the obedient Chinese Government: on April 6 the latter refused to abide by its promise of March 15 that Semionov would not be allowed to cross the Russian border or to interfere in Russian affairs, and at the same time the Chinese representatives told the Siberian Soviet representatives that they could not permit the Soviet troops to cross the border to fight Semionov. On April 16 the so-called Far Eastern Government was formed at Pekin, with Khorvat as Premier and Admiral Kolchak. Minister of War. On the following day occurred the arrest of Japanese spies in Irkutsk, and it was proved that the Japanese consul was involved in the espionage. In the following days a counter-revolutionary conspiracy was discovered at Vladivostok and documents were seized showing the hand of the