Page:René Marchand - Allied Agents in Soviet Russia (1918).djvu/2



Moscow, August 22nd/September 4th, 1918.

M. le Président,

Encouraged by the goodwill you have been pleased to show me, and by the request you made of me upon a former occasion—to send you information from time to time on the situation in Russia—I have the honour to send you a copy of the letter recently written by me to M. Albert Thomas, and dealing more particularly with the question of Allied intervention. Since the despatch of that letter, as I foresaw, events have almost inevitably taken a course which I regard as unfavourable to the interests both of Russia and of the Allies.

You have taught us, M. le Président, that, under certain circumstances, an honest man ought at the critical moment to satisfy his conscience, whatever may be the cost. That was my reason for writing to M. Albert Thomas the letter you are reading. You know me, M. le Président; you know with what ardent faith I supported the Franco-Russian alliance before and during the war, and with what enthusiasm I devoted myself, with all my heart and soul, with all my energy, to the struggle so odiously provoked and imposed by imperialist, brutal Germany upon my dear Motherland, defender of justice and of oppressed peoples, represented by you with such loyal and essentially pacific dignity!

There is no need for me to tell you, therefore, that to-day, as yesterday, if I saw in the efforts made by the Allies in Russia a supplementary, though weak, means of increasing our chances of victory, or of advancing them—were it by a single hour—not for a solitary moment would the idea have come into my head, notwithstanding my great love for Russia and my poignant sorrow at her sufferings, of writing to M. Albert Thomas the enclosed letter or of taking the extreme liberty of addressing these lines to yourself.

I believe I have been one of those who have criticised with the deepest conviction Bolshevism in its character of violent demagogy. I believe I have been from the day that the idea of intervention was mooted, one of the most ardent, if most modest, partisans of that intervention, without the Bolsheviks and in spite of them, for the purpose of helping the Russian people directly to shake off the German yoke, to reconstruct Russian unity, and to obtain a drastic revision of the abominable treaty of Brest-Litovsk, so fatal to the interests of Russia, so detrimental to those of the Allies.