Foust-Rescue Russia

On 14 December 1917 a group of 215 seasoned American railway men arrived in Vladivostok, Siberia, on 14 December 1917, having been recruited to help the Russian war effort by speeding up the transport of badly backlogged materiel from that city across the Trans-Siberian Railway. They were known as the Russian Railway Service Corps (RRSC). When they were organized, the hope was two fold: that tine Eastern Front of World War I could be bolstered, and seizure of political power by radicals averted. But when their ship dropped anchor, the latter was already a done deed, and the former was being negotiated at Brest Litovsk, For most of the men, they never stepped foot ashore before their transport left for Nagasaki.

By late February 1918, the American railway leader on the scene - the aging but still vigorous John Frank Stevens, the erstwhile key engineer of the Panama Canal - together with State Department officials in Washington decided to risk the RRSC men working on a sector of the Trans-Siberian that seemed fairly safe: the Chinese-Eastern Railway that crossed Manchuria. Half of the men from Nagasaki arrived in Harbin in two echelons on the 2nd and 3rd of March.

Coincidentally on that latter day, far to the west, representatives of the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers signed the fateful Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Almost at once Lenin and Trotsky recognized their need for outside help, allied help, to meet the challenge of German forces racing into Ukraine, Russia's breadbasket and the route to Caucasian oil. But there was no Red Army, no Red Fleet, and feelers soon reached out to the allies to provide leadership in cobbling together some adequate forces, and refurbishing the main means of transport -rail.

It was in this setting that, shortly, a strange and little remarked event occurred. They had met a number of times earlier but this morning, Monday, 18 March, two days after the Soviet ratification of Brest Litovsk, Trotsky was joined in the Kremlin by one Raymond Robins. Robins, a well-to-do Chicago lawyer and social worker, had arrived in Russia the previous August as member of a medical mission. (I might mention here as an aside that Robins and his wife spend most of their later lives as their favorite earthly spot, Chinsegut Hill, at Brooksville, Florida, now the University of South Florida's Conference and Retreat Center.) Robins now was head of the small Red Cross organization in Russia, hence his courtesy title of colonel and tidy uniform. Robins' daily diary, never expansive, notes only that on this day Trotsky:

Ask[s] for five [American] officers for inspection of Army Drill. Wants railroad men & supplies. Wants material later when canvass is complete (inventory).[1]

Robins' longtime friend and biographer, William Hard, fleshed out Robins' late night notation on railway men, as follows:[2]

[Trotsky:] Haven't you Americans got a Russian Railway Mission, of Americans, somewhere?

[Trotsky:] Yes, they think I'm a German agent. Well, now, suppose I am. Just assume, for argument, that I am. You admit I have never told you I would do a thing and then failed to do it. My motives may be bad, but my actions go with my promises. Is that right?

[Trotsky:] Well, then, out of some motive, which you may assume to be bad, I am willing to share the railway system of Russia half-and-half with the United States; and if you will bring your Railway Mission into Russia I promise you that I will give its members complete authority over half the transportation of all the Russia of the Soviets.

[Trotsky:] I mean this: I will accept anybody you Americans want to name as your railway chief and I will make him Assistant Superintendent of Russian Ways and Communications, and his orders will be orders. Then, as well as we can, we will divide all our available transportation facilities into two equal parts. You will use your half to evacuate war-supplies from the front and to carry them away into the interior, so that the Germans will not be able to get them. We will use our half, you helping us, to move our food-supplies from the places where we have a surplus to the places where we have a deficit. You see?

[Robins:] Clearly. You want us Americans to reform and restore your railway system for you, so that it can carry food successfully and so that you can feed your people and keep your government going.

[Trotsky:] Yes. But I propose to pay you in precisely the coin you most need and want. Colonel Robins, have you ever seen a gun-map of our front?

[Trotsky:] There it all lies... It's of no more use to us. Our army does not fight in any more foreign war just now. Lenin says the Germans will advance. If they do, they will take all that stuff. We cannot move it back. We can do small things on our railways now, but not big things. Most of our technical railway managers are against us. They are against the revolution. They are sabotaging the revolution. Our railways are headless. The whole point is: our railways need new heads. Will you supply them?

[Trotsky:] But be sure you make this clear: My motive, whether good or bad, is entirely selfish. I get a reorganized and effective railway system for Soviet Russia. And your motive, so far as I am concerned, is entirely selfish, too. You save a mass of munitions from all possibility of falling into the hands of the Germans. You get a benefit. I get a benefit. Mutual services, mutual benefits, and no pretenses! What do you say?

And so Robins did, through the American ambassador, David R. Francis, then in Vologda, east of Petrograd, for safety from possible capture by advancing German forces.

In less than three weeks the soviet government thus, had traveled far from its primitive origins - implacable revolutionary opposition to all things capitalistic - and now professed a desire for dozens of American railroad men to assist in restoration of Russia's lamentable railways. It was a case of either political pragmatism or supreme cynicism, using the capitalists against themselves.

Ambassador Francis telegraphed Secretary of State Robert Lansing the news of Trotsky's request and, apparently, he also tried to get a wire through to John Frank Stevens in Harbin. The telegram instructed Stevens to send the 100 RRSC men still languishing in Nagasaki to Vologda "if he has [the] authority."

After much backing and filling, the State Department on 23 April finally authorized Francis and Stevens to dispatch to Vologda, not the 100 men contemplated at first, but a small group to consult with Ambassador Francis and, presumably, through him Soviet authorities. Thereby the Department saved face, having vowed in December neither de facto nor de jure recognition of the Bolshevik government, and certainly no material aid. Stevens, for his part, thoroughly and outspokenly opposed the whole venture; he was implacably anti-Bolshevik. But he acceded to orders from back home, although he must have been aghast at the last sentence in one of the secretary's telegrams: "Why could not [the] men at Nagasaki be organized as [a] separate contingent in European Russia?" That would have meant of course working with the Soviets.

In a few days the uniformed head chief of the RRSC, Col. George H. Emerson, erstwhile 48-year-old general manager of the Great Northern, put together a small group to undertake this unprecedented adventure, five carefully selected men of various strengths: a mechanical superintendent, a senior traffic man, i.e. a dispatcher; a locomotive man; and a young telephone and telegraph man.[3] To these he added one Maxwell Bunting, a Baldwin locomotive erection

engineer who had been at Harbin and now co-opted to the RRSC. Bunting, Russian born, both spoke Russian well and knew railroad mechanical engineering. With them traveled Major Homer Slaughter, a military attaché trying to get back to his embassy assignment. Also Emerson took along a young secretary/aide, Ole Bjonerud, who had been a superintendent's secretary on the GN.

They left Harbin in early May headed east because of stiff fighting reported further west and it took them considerable negotiating with Bolshevik representatives at Vladivostok and Khabarovsk to secure a train, but they did and finally rolled westward. On the way, oddly, their train met on the Amur line the train of Raymond Robins headed east out of the country, but Robins and Emerson somehow got crosswise of each other and both quickly pushed on.

Emerson's adventure to the west went smoothly enough until their small train reached Krasnoiarsk on 27 May. There they found the town and rail yard in the hands of Bolsheviks who were in armed conflict with detachments of the famed Czech Legion further west on the line. The local Red leader persuaded the American railroad men to try to mediate between their forces and those of the Czechs. With no dependable contact with consular officials in Irkutsk or Stevens in Harbin, much less Washington, Emerson agreed. There transpired days of high excitement, considerable danger, little sleep, and much riding up and down the rails, until on 4 June at a rail station twenty miles west of Krasnoiarsk, an agreement known locally as the 'Treaty of Mariinsk" accomplished, a truce between Czechs and Russians that allowed the Americans to continue westward.

A couple of thousand miles of the clickety-clack of rails not welded, and they arrived at a lovely resort town in the Ural Mountains, Miass, where they were warmly received by the local townspeople: an open carriage ride into town from the station, songs, huzzahs, tea, cakes, some very choice cherry jam, and the traditional Russian gift of welcome: bread and salt. Try as they did to negotiate their way further west and north to Vologda, they failed. Widespread fighting and disarray prevented them; they could not even communicate with the ambassador.

Returning to the Siberian capital of Omsk they learned some detail of the allied military intervention, of the dedication of that intervention to aid the Czech Legion, and of the Czech successes against Bolshevik units. Their earlier stance of neutrality was totally abandoned. In spite of some sympathy for the Bolshevik cause on the part of Emerson and several others, they increasingly lent their railway skills to Czech needs and, indeed, the important Czech commander Rudolf Gajda even agreed to extend them (and their absent RRSC colleagues) complete operating control over the Trans-Siberian, now largely in the hands of the Czech Legion, an offer Emerson was in no position to accept.

Thus began the final dangerous, difficult, and exhausting trip back east. It took more than two months, largely because of many downed bridges and blown-in tunnels, the worst not far east of Irkutsk, a tunnel that even with the engineering expertise of Emerson and his mates took two weeks to clear. Finally, on the 5th of September, the group rolled into Harbin, worn-out but not worse for the-wear. Their RRSC mates gave them a heroes' welcome.

What was the meaning in the larger scene of this long, difficult and perilous excursion? Not a question so simple to answer. On the surface of it, of course, the entire jaunt failed in its mission. We can never know for certain what might have come from KRSC-Soviet cooperation in the crucial rail transport sector. In the light of the onset of the civil war, of the emergence of seemingly strong White forces in Siberia, the Russian south, and the northwest, it is simply not reasonable to suppose that the U.S. State Department would have sanctioned collaboration with Trotsky and Lenin against them. Nor can we, in spite of that earlier mediation at Mariinsk, expect that Emerson or any others could have diminished Czech-Bolshevik enmities.

But was the Great Adventure to the West a stupid, dangerous, and asinine blunder, as John Frank Stevens continued to think? It is at least mildly interesting, though, that he felt it necessary to swallow hard and to wire Lansing on 13 September the following in its entirety:

I have carefully examined [the] complete records [of the] Emerson acts on his western trip and consider that he used excellent judgment in every case under trying circumstances and I heartily approve all that he did.[4]

The passage of time did not mellow John Frank's private judgments. In his autobiography drafted in the late 1920s and early 1930s he wrote:

This was as stupid and dangerous a move that could possibly have been conceived, for the old Russian regime officials of the Chinese Eastern Railway would, and did jump at once at the conclusion that the purpose of our Government in sending these men to Vologda was to work with the Bolsheviki railway people, and I never had the slightest doubt but that was our Ambassador's intention. It was, in effect, an attempt, in a most delicate situation, to carry water on both shoulders, always a dangerous experiment.... But of all the utterly inexcusable, asinine, diplomatic blunders, the one the Ambassador made and which was approved by Washington, this was the worst that could have been imagined as affecting my work.... [It was a] wholly ill advised performance which was made without any reasonable excuse.[5]

From Stevens' wholly negative view of the Bolsheviks, the Armistice ending World War I in another two months, and the escalation of the Civil War in the months thereafter, we can only conclude that it was a vain hope and effort. But a tantalizing and colorful one.[6]

[1] Robins diary, State Historical Society of Wisconsin/Robins papers/reel 1. There is considerable confusion in the secondary literature as to the date of this key meeting, in part, it would seem, because of Robins' persistent use in his diary of both Julian and Gregorian dates throughout the month of March. The old style had been abandoned on 1 February that was declared to be the 14th. Thus Robins was in Moscow, not Petrograd, from 10 March living in the Elite Hotel. Trotsky traveled to Moscow (with Lockhart and 700 Lettish warriors) on Saturday, 16 March. Two days after the Trotsky meeting Robins returned to Vologda, and left again for Moscow on the 24th, the same day Lenin moved there to take up quarters in the Kremlin. Cf. The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, vol. 1:1915-1938 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), 34.

[2]Hard, Raymond. Robins' Own Story, 97-100. The biographer's wording must of course be taken as only suggestive for he was not present at the meeting and Trotsky certainly never left a record. And as far as we know there were no hidden recorders or closeted stenographers, although it is more than likely that Hard spoke with Robins and perhaps Gumberg soon after the interview. A year later almost to the day Robins testified before a subcommittee of the Senate committee on the judiciary charged with investigating bolshevism, and repeated in variant language some of the conversation. Congress, Senate, Committee of the Judiciary, Bolshevik Propaganda, Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee of the Judiciary, 65th Cong., 3d sess., 6 March 1919, especially p. 788. Robins added to Hard's account only that Trotsky specifically promised allied control of the Siberian magistral ("You send in your mission. We will give you control of the Trans-Siberian at all points.") and agreed to allow the field pieces to be transported wherever the allies desired. Raymond Robins' Own Story, 122-23.

[3] For the entire Emerson excursion a few sources are used heavily: The principal official document is the final report, "Report of American Railway Engineers who were in Siberia with the Czecho-Slovacs from May 5th, to September 9th, 1918," 70 pp., dated 28 September 1918 and signed by Emerson and Major Slaughter. A copy may be found in National Archives/RG43/838A/6/DE3, another in Hoover Institution Archives/Emerson papers/1/18, and others elsewhere. Aide Ole A. Bjonerud drafted the report from his extensive notes and his diary: Bjonerud, "My Trip Abroad," 75 (these notes and diary are privately held). B. O. Johnson's log/diary (59 pp., also privately held) is essential for many details and opinions. Also Emerson's five-page letter to former colleague W. Kelly of the Great Northern, 7 March 1919, HIA/Emerson coll. /1 /18-26. The diplomatic documents are found in Stevens' files as president of the later Inter-Allied Technical Board, NA/RG43/838 A/especially box 6, most of which are reproduced in FRUS, 1918, Russia, vol. 3. For a recent account that contributes much to the Czech context of subsequent negotiations, based heavily on the Emerson-Slaughter final report, see Victor M. Fie, The Rise of the Constitutional Alternative to Soviet Rule in 1918, Provisional Governments of Siberia and All-Russia: Their Quest for Allied Intervention (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1998), 306-45. The best secondary account is still - in spite of the passage of a half-century - the magisterial work of George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 279-91. Of course Kennan did not have available to him the Bjonerud and Johnson diaries and a variety of other sources.

[4] Telegram, Stevens to Lansing, 13 Sept, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Russia, 3:248.

[5] Stevens, autobiography, ch. 23, to be found in Georgetown University Archives/Stevens papers/boxes 3 & 4.

[6] It is equally tantalizing to note here this was not the last Soviet effort to solicit American help on Russia's railways during the Civil War period. RRSC lieutenant colonel Frank R. Blunt, who together with a small group of RRSC and Red Cross men, was held by the Red Army about six weeks in January-March 1920, on his release carried back a Soviet proposal for railroad supplies and decapod locomotives unassembled in Vladivostok they presumed to be Russian property, duly paid for.