policy at the Supreme Military Council and at the conference in Abbeville, they kept to it loyally till July 1918, although some of them in the Far East never lost sight of their own aims in this question, and continued to work on behalf of them.
In the period immediately following the Bolshevik revolution, the French also, from time to time, considered the possibility of intervention. The Press discussed the matter frequently, for the general opinion was that the Germans were helping Bolshevism to power, and that they had had a direct hand in creating it for the purpose of destroying Russia and the Eastern front. Official circles were afraid that the Bolsheviks would negotiate directly with the Germans, or that the Germans, owing to the weakness of the Bolsheviks, would gain control of Russia with all its material resources. Others again regarded intervention as being desirable, because after the Bolshevik revolution and the collapse of the Eastern front the Germans would concentrate their whole strength on the West. Intervention in Russia thus denoted mainly an attempt at renewing the Eastern front against the Germans.
It would be wrong to suppose that the idea of intervention in Russia, originating or upheld in Western Europe, was caused, notably in 1918, only by opposition to the Bolshevik revolution or by the effort to bring the bourgeoisie to power in Russia. Originally, more thought was given to the Germans and to the struggle against them by way of Russia. It was not until after Koltchak’s anti-revolutionary activities that the idea of anti-Bolshevik intervention began to gain ground in Western Europe, for it was then that the direct action of the Bolsheviks, their propaganda and their attempts to undermine the morale of the Allied armies, began to produce definite effects.
In our Czechoslovak circles, both political and military, the situation at the beginning was fairly clear. Although immediately after the Bolshevik revolution there were Czechoslovaks who held that it would be possible to defeat the Bolsheviks and who, if they had had their way, would have brought about the destruction of our army with all its inevitable consequences to our aims, Masaryk realized at once the impossibility of all such schemes, and therefore opposed them rigidly from the very start.
From the moment when, in February and in March 1918, the transfer of our troops to France had definitely become the order of the day, no serious-minded person amongst us reckoned with
