Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/16

 relief. In June the Soviet Government began to receive more and more information which showed that the British were preparing an expedition to Murman and that new transports with British troops had already left for this region. Soviet Russia accordingly had to take measures for self-defense, and we began to create our northern front. On June 14 we sent a note to Great Britain, France and the United States, demanding the immediate evacuation by them of Murman and our territorial waters. But step by step the Entente was advancing on the path of intervention, and in the second half of June British transports began to arrive with the object of invading Russia through Murman. In a note to Lockhart of June 27 the Soviet Government declared that the toiling masses of Russia wanted peace, that they did not threaten war upon any people, and that Great Britain could have no fear of any menace from them; that the Soviet Government therefore protested the more emphatically against the British invasion of Soviet territory, which was an act of aggression without any justification whatsoever; and that the Soviet troops would never fail in their revolutionary duty and would fight with all their power against foreign invasion. On June 29 the Nashe Slovo published an interview with certain Entente diplomatists in which the latter spoke of a well developed plan of intervention. On the same day, June 29, the Kurgansk newspaper Svobodnaya Misl and the Omsk newspaper Dielo Sibiri published an official statement of commandant Alphonse Guenet, the head of the French military mission attached to the Czecho-Slovak troops, in which he congratulated the Czecho-Slovaks on their actions against the Soviet Government. "Until recently", he wrote, "the representatives of France tried to maintain normal relations with the Soviet authorities, but now these authorities, in the opinion of the Allies and of all the civilized world, no longer deserve it". He greeted the re-establishment by the effort of the Czecho-Slovaks of the "eastern front against Germany".