Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/28

 to have any representatives in Germany, not even excepting the Red Cross Commission. We have since then repeatedly declared our readiness to restore at any time normal relations with Germany, but without any effect. The care of the Russian war prisoners was entrusted by the German Government to a private bureau, which was composed of elements for whom we could not take responsibility. In January the office of the Rosta was raided and looted. Shortly after this event, the office of the private bureau for the care of war prisoners, which was created by the German Government itself, was also looted. The White Guard bands seized the headquarters of our Embassy in Berlin. Finally the Entente took upon themselves the care of our war prisoners in Germany, hoping to find in them a source from which to fill the ranks of the Russian counter-revolutionary armies, although in the vast majority of cases they met resolute resistance from the war prisoners themselves. Parallel with this took place the arrests and the deportations of our commissions for the care of the war prisoners and of the Red Cross commissions in Austria, Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia.

The most important question which divided us and Germany was the actual assistance which the German Government was willing to give the Entente in the effort of the latter to replace the former in the policy of aligning against us the counter-revolutionary border provinces. The Entente wanted the German troops to remain in the districts which had been occupied by them, until such time as they would be replaced by Entente troops. After the defeat of Germany a formidable danger was moving on us from the side of the Entente. Against us world imperialism was literally mobilizing. "Revolutionary" Germany was supposed to furnish the world counter-revolution with the necessary aid in this. The German troops were to surrender the South and West of the former Russian Empire to the troops of the Entente imperialism. This plan failed owing to the German troops themselves, who