Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/15

 representatives (with the exception of the Japanese) informed the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs that their Governments considered the Czecho-Slovak forces as Allied troops under their protection and that the disarming of these troops would be considered an unfriendly act toward the Entente powers.

An unbearable situation was created in the Murman region. Entente ships had remained there from the time when Russia was participating in the war, and through Murman there were gradually departing the Entente military missions and technical units and generally those auxiliary military forces which were still left in Russia. Loath to accelerate, the crisis between Soviet Russia and Great Britain,the Soviet Government did not take any decisive steps to insist on the evacuation of Murman by the British and the other Entente nations. Moreover, the Soviet forces there were insufficient to force the British out. But after the decisive change of the Entente policy, manifested in the official support by the Entente Governments to the Czecho-Slovak counter-revolutionary insurrection, which gave the Entente a splendid opportunity for a more violent policy in Russia, the Soviet Government could no longer allow any further postponement of the evacuation of Murman which was required by Russia's neutral position. The German Government at this time began to look upon the situation in Murman with great anxiety, expecting from this side an attack by the British on their extreme left flank, namely, their army of occupation in Finland. The activity of the German submarines in the Murman waters had already increased in May, and in June, when this question became acute, Germany assured the Soviet Government that if the Entente would evacuate this region the German fleet would not hinder the sailing of our fishermen. The activity of the German submarines deprived them of all possibility of engaging in fishing or of bringing fish from Norway, and thus condemned the whole region to starvation. In the meantime, Great Britain seduced the chiefs of the Murman Soviet by a promise of food