Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/33

 our military action, but without any guarantee that this would not be taken advantage of by the opponents of the Soviet order for new attacks, we gave our consent to Nansen's proposal in our reply of May 7 and asked him to state the place and date to meet representatives of his commission, qualifying this consent only by the remark that the negotiations regarding the cessation of military activities could not be conducted with his politically irresponsible commission, but only with the Entente Governments themselves. However, all our attempts were fruitless. Immediately after Bullitt's visit to us, we had Kolchak's offensive, which restored the hopes of the Entente, and this, in turn, was followed by Denikin's offensive.

The soldiers of the Entente, when they were sent to advance on Ukraine, refused to fight against the workers' and soldiers' revolution, just as the German soldiers had refused to remain in the occupied provinces until the appearance of the Entente. The provinces cleared of the German troops of occupation were only partly occupied by the troops of Soviet Russia. Ukraine was occupied by the Ukrainian red troops; Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania—by the red troops of these Republics. On December 24, 1918, the Military Central Executive Committee triumphantly recognized the independence of the Esthonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Soviet Republics. On January 28 the Ukrainian Soviet Government issued a manifesto, in which they proposed to all peoples to enter into diplomatic relations with them. At that time we were carrying on negotiations with the representative of the Petlura Government, Mazurenko, as a result of which we proposed to act as intermediaries in peace negotiations between the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and Petlura's Government. The latter, however, having lost all its territory, fell into the power of reactionary agents, who at that time made it impossible to reach an agreement. The Polish Republic was formed when the German revolution broke out and the first Polish Government, composed of social-patriots, began