In the winter of 1917-18 the
Committee on Public information, which was the official American propaganda
agency of World War I, stationed in Petrograd
a special representative, Edgar Sisson, formerly an editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. In February and
March 1918, Sisson purchased and removed from Russia a number of documents and
photographs of documents purporting to prove that the leaders of the Bolshevik
government were paid agents of the German General Staff. Translations of
sixty-nine documents of this nature, accompanied in some instances by
facsimiles of the originals, were published in the fall of that year by the
Committee on Public information in a pamphlet which formed a part of its
official “War Information Series.” The following is an effort to appraise, in
the light of evidence available today, the authenticity and significance of
these documents.
I.THE NATURE AND BACKGROUND OF
THE DOCUMENTS
…
II. EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHENTICITY
А. General
historical implausibility
The state of affairs suggested in
the main body of the documents is of such extreme historical implausibility
that the question might well be asked whether the documents could not be
declared generally fraudulent on this ground alone.
Whoever credits the authenticity
of these documents must be prepared to accept following propositions:
1.That all times between the
November revolution and the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the
Soviet leaders actually stood in a position of clandestine subservience to the
German General Staff – a relationship which they succeeded in concealing not
only at the time but for decades to come from even the most intimate of their
party comrades;
2.That this subservience went so
far that the German General Staff actually controlled the elections of a large
group of people, including most of the Communist leaders;
3. That the German General Staff
secretly maintained, during this period two full-fledged offices in Petrograd
(one of them being its own “Russian division”) which succeeded in establishing
and observing such fantastic security of operation that no hint of their
existence ever leaked out from any other source;
and
4.That the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations, together with the negotiations conducted simultaneously in Petrograd by Count Mirbach and admiral Keyserling, were
an elaborate sham, designed to deceive public opinion everywhere, the Soviet
negotiators being actually under clandestine German control the entire time
through other channels.
It hardly needs to be said that
such state of affairs cannot conceivably be reconciled with known historical
truth. Surely no one familiar with the life of Lenin, the history of Bolshevik
movement, and the internal debates among the Russian communist leaders over the
problems presented by the Brest-Litovsk negotiations could question the reality
from the Soviet standpoint of the issues at stake in Brest-Litovsk talks or the
sincerity of the discussion on them in senior Communist circles. It is not
conceivable that in these moments of deepest crisis Lenin should have concealed
from his associates political circumstances of highest relevance to the great
question at hand. Lenin, whatever one may think of him, was not a conspirator
against the Russian Communist movement.
Similarly, from the German side,
the captured German foreign office files dealing with the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations, which appear to include practically all relevant material,
contain nothing to indicate that any of the Germans concerned with these
negotiations – including Foreign Minister Kuhlmann, the German military
leaders, and the kaiser himself – was aware of any such relationship to the
Bolshevik leaders as that suggested by the documents, with the known facts of
the tremendous tension between two governments that marked and accompanied the
Brest-Litovsk negotiations. It is wholly absurd to suppose that the Germans, at
that time absorbed in preparations for their great final offensive in the west
and having most urgent need for establishment of a clear and dependable
military situation on the east, would have failed to exploit the utmost any
such clandestine channel of authority over Bolshevik leaders as that indicated
in the documents. Yet nowhere do the documents suggest that the Germans used
this extensive implied authority in Petrograd to break the recalcitrance of the
Soviet negotiators at Brest .
It should also be noted here that
had there existed, as between the Germans and the Bolsheviki, any such
relationship as that suggested here, this situation could not have failed to
become subject of attention in the subsequent German parliamentary
investigation into the causes of the German breakdown in 1918. In this
investigation the policies of the German high command with relation to the
Brest-Litovsk talks were subjected to a intense and critical scrutiny to which
any clandestine channels of authority over Bolsheviki would have been highly
pertinent. Yet no mention of the Sisson documents or the situation they suggest
seems ever to have been made in all this prolonged and intensive inquiry, the
authors of which had access to all the relevant secret German files.
The very suggestion that there
should been actual offices of the German General Staff in Petrograd in the
winter 1917-18 is in highest degree implausible and at variance with known
historical circumstance. It is absurd to suppose that the Germans should have
decided to station highly sensitive military offices, in wartime, in what was
still officially enemy territory, well outside the German lines and removed
from any possible prompt protection by the German army. There were, of course,
two German official missions in Petrograd at
that time, headed by Count Mirbach and Admiral Keyserling. What is known of the
position and treatment of these missions does not check in any way with the
situation suggested by the Sisson documents. The memoirs of Zalkind at that
time Trocky’s deputy in the Soviet foreign office, reveal clearly the drastic
and humiliating restrictions placed on this official German personnel by the Bolsheviki,
despite Mirbach’s earnest protests. This situation is confirmed by the captured
German documents. Clearly, such difficulties could and would have been, in the
same city, German General Staff offices with huge power over the Bolshevik
authorities as the Sisson documents imply. It is further significant that when
the crisis was reached in Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the German official
missions in Petrograd were promptly removed,
in the interest of their own safety; and the resumption of the German offensive
was even delayed pending their safe arrival on German-held territory. Yet the
Sisson documents show the supposed German General Staff offices as remaining
peacefully in Petrograd and exercising
undiminished authority over the Soviet leaders, through the entire period of
resumed hostilities pending final conclusion of the Treaty.
B. Specific instances of
historical plausibility
Both individually and
collectively, the documents abound in specific suggestions that are
irreconcilable with historical fact. It would be redundant to attempt to list
any great number of this. The following is good example. The
Nachtrichten-Bureau series are signed by a certain Colonel R. Bauer. When, at
much later date, Allied officials complained to Semenov that it had never been
possible to discover in the German army lists of any officer who could have
played this role, Semenov explained that the signature “R. Bauer” was only a
cover for one Bayermeister, whose name appears elsewhere in the Sisson
documents. Semenov was undoubtedly referring, here, to Lieutenant A.
Bauermeister, who was indeed a real person – a senior Russian-speaking German
intelligence officer who served in the eastern front in World War I.
Bauermeister’s name had appeared in the Russian press in 1915 in connection
with the charges advances against the Russian officer Myaseydov, executed in
1915 as a German spy; and it was no doubt from this episode that Semenov was
familiar with it.
But the real Bauermeister’s
memoirs have subsequently been published, and while thy are lurid and
unconvincing in many details, there is no reason to doubt the main facts of
Bauermeister’s wartime service as related therein. These facts leave no room
for any such whereabouts and activities as the Sisson documents would suggest.
At the time his memoirs were
written (1933-34), Bauermeister seems to have heard of only one of the
documents of the series: apparently, from his description, one not printed in
the American pamphlet nor present in the American files, but plainly of this
same origin. In this document it was evidently suggested that Bauermeister have
conferred with the Bolshevik leaders in Kronstadt in midsummer 1917. (The
allegation that such conferences took place, with Lenin’s participation, is
found in document No. 5 of the official American pamphlet; it was
unquestionably false, and is another striking instance of a historical
implausibility.) Bauermiester, who was at that time serving as intelligence
officer to the Austrian Third Army in the Carpathians, ridicules the allegation
of his participation in such conference. It is particularly significant that
this is clearly all he had heard, as late as 1933-34, of the Sisson documents.
A real “R. Bauer” would hardly have remained for sixteen years ignorant of the
publication by the United
States government of eighteen of his most
important secret communications to another government.
The Sisson documents were plainly
drawn up by someone who had something more than a good
Petrograd-newspaper-reader’s knowledge of historical fact; and an impressive
effort made to weave this fact in with the abundant fiction. The result remains
nevertheless unconvincing. At every hand one finds serious discrepancies
between circumstances suggested by the documents and the known historical fact.
C. Lack of accord with
normal governmental usage
…
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