Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/14

 in the formation of the counter-revolutionary Siberian Government. On April 25 the Soviet Government asked England, France and the United States to recall their consuls at Vladivostok, to investigate their activity, and to define the attitude of these powers to the counter-revolutionary actions of their agents in Russia. The French Ambassador Noulens, the chief advocate of a consistent interventionist policy, in his famous interview of April 22, impudently defended the Japanese landing. On April 28 the Soviet Government demanded his recall, and, when this demand was not heeded, began to regard him as a private person, absolutely ignoring his political status. During the whole month of May, French agents were working energetically to unite and to organize the counter-revolutionary forces. At this time the antí-Soviet bourgeois parties of Russia definitely entered into a close alliance with the Entente, and the conference of the Socialist-Revolutionists adopted the well known resolution in favor of armed intervention in Russia by the Entente. At the end of May the storm broke out. The counter-revolutionary insurrection of the Czecho-Slovaks took place, and they rapidly occupied a large part of the railway net of Western Siberia. On May 29 the Czecho-Slovaks revolted in Penza and Zlatoust and occupied the railway station in Syzran. Almost concurrently there occurred a number of counter-revolutionary insurrections—among others, in Saratov,—all of which were the result of the work of the secret agents of the Entente, at that time mainly of the French agents. Martial law was declared in Moscow, and on May 30 was made public the discovery by the all-Russian Extraordinary Commission of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy by the "Alliance for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom".

The Entente threw off the mask and openly sided with the counter-revolution. On June 4 the Allied