Russia, U.S. Intervention in

Origins of the War and Pressure for Intervention

When the autocratic government of Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in a popular revolution in March 1917, many Americans hoped that a democratic Russia, led by a liberal provisional government, would fight more vigorously against the Central powers (led by Germany and Austria–Hungary). After the United States entered the war against Germany in April 1917, however, the Russian Army and Navy grew increasingly demoralized, even mutinous, while Russian society became polarized between radical and reactionary camps. The U.S. government tried to buttress the provisional government with $300 million in loans and pro-war publicity campaigns, but radical socialists seized power in November. The new Soviet regime, headed by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, quickly opened peace negotiations with Germany and Austria–Hungary. Alarmed by the prospect that German forces would be transferred from the Russian front to help deliver a knockout blow in France before large U.S. contingents could cross the Atlantic, British and French leaders urgently called for military intervention in Russia to re-create an Eastern Front (and later to remove the Soviet government).

U.S. Resistance to Direct Military Intervention in Russia

Although President Wilson secretly authorized indirect financial support for anti-Bolshevik forces in southern Russia in December 1917, he repeatedly rejected Allied proposals of direct military action for several reasons. First, U.S. military leaders argued insistently that World War I was going to be won on the Western Front, that diverting U.S. forces from France would be a mistake, and that Allied proposals to regenerate an Eastern Front with demoralized Russian soldiers were hopelessly impractical. Second, Wilson feared that overt foreign intervention would provoke a nationalist reaction and push Russia further toward an alliance with Germany. Third, Wilson and his top advisers worried that joining or even approving military intervention in Russia would undermine American public support for the war against Germany by seeming to contradict the idealistic Wilsonian principles of nonintervention and self-determination. Finally, Wilson and his closest aides believed that calling on Japan to intervene in Siberia—a centerpiece of many Allied proposals—would endanger the U.S. policy of preserving an open door for American commerce in Northeast Asia and also be vehemently opposed on the U.S. West Coast, where anti-Japanese sentiment was intense. Thus, American public opinion was one of the key constraints on the Wilson administration's approach to intervention in Russia.

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