It is in this sense that I have always understood the word "intervention": it is in this sense that it has always been explained to me, that I have always been authorised to explain it to our Russian friends. I am sure that such, above all, are the ends pursued by the Entente Governments; but I observe with anguish that in the course of these last months we have let ourselves become entangled in the particular meshes of the struggle against Bolshevism; that is to say, of Russian internal affairs. This gradually makes us lose sight of our first principal aim, and apply ourselves, without any benefit to the interests of the Entente, to a task which can only have one result:—To increase in vain the sufferings and the distress of the Russian people, in all classes without distinction; to aggravate anarchy and famine; to accentuate civil war, White Terror and Red Terror; to sharpen the dissensions between parties; finally, to enfeeble the national powers of resistance at a moment when they were so vigorously raising their head that they had to be taken into account at last by the Soviet Government—whose extraordinary energy in State administration, in face of the most formidable difficulties, I must in all honesty recognise—Such will be the result. Those powers of resistance were openly beginning to prepare for a struggle which could not and cannot, whatever is said or thought, but be directed against the only definite enemy of Russia—that is to say, against Germany, the Germany of Brest, or, in other words, the Germany of Wilhelm and Scheidemann.
This most regrettable distraction of our activity, little by little and, as it were, insensibly leaving the ground of national defence for the barren and in any case subsidiary ground of internal politics, has been manifested gradually. But more and more clearly as time went on one sees from July onwards, after the painful incidents at Jaroslave, where the fight carried on by the White Guards of Savinkoff against the Soviet Government produced in the end no practical result but the massacre of several thousands of Russians, the destruction of numerous churches and considerable artistic treasures, an old city running with blood, the parties whom we were supposed to be supporting discouraged, increased hatred of the Bolsheviks, increased distrust of the bourgeoisie.
I know the particularly painful impression which those unfortunate events left at the time in the mind of the venerable head of the Orthodox Church, the patriarch Tikhon. In this connection, I cannot too heavily underline the fact that, in all the conversations which I had the honour of holding with this eminent man, every time I raised the question of his moral support in the ultimate event of intervention by the Allies, he did not cease to repeat (always putting off his final reply), that the preliminary condition, the sine
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