Americans, English and French paid for those documents I do not know; but an expert eye could see from their very contents that our friends had bought forgeries—as was very clearly proved. The alleged documents, coming ostensibly from different countries, were all written with the same typewriter! It is true that, in these matters, the Bolshevists were no better. After the Revolution they began to publish the secret archives of the Russian Foreign Office and announced the publication as a great event. In point of fact, nothing came out that was not already known; and Trotsky's offensive against Tsarist secret diplomacy was somewhat childish.
My dealings with Russia, in all the phases through which she passed, were governed by our national policy and by my knowledge of Russian conditions. Though it was unpleasant not to be understood immediately in the West, the general result proved me not to have been wrong. The Russian situation, and the way Bolshevism necessarily grew out of it, were not known in Paris and London, though many Frenchmen and Englishmen who were in Russia and observed the position there, took less inaccurate views.
Finally, as regards the relationship of the Germans to the Bolshevists, it is wrong to say that the Bolshevists enjoyed German support from the outset and unconditionally. It is true that the Germans turned the Bolshevist Revolution to account, just as they had done with the agitation and the struggle against the Tsarist and the Provisional Governments. But their tactics were short-sighted; and not all German statesmen and military authorities were of one mind. The German middle-class parties, the Monarchists and the Social Democrats were anti-Bolshevist. Nor could the Bolshevists, at first, go hand in hand with the German Monarchists, politically or militarily. The Germans distrusted the Bolshevists and feared them to some extent, as may be seen from the Brest-Litovsk negotiations and from the fact that, in the spring of 1918, the Germans kept in Russia considerable forces which they could have put to more profitable use in France. In order to discover what the German-Bolshevist relations really were, I did my utmost to find out the real strength of the Austrian and German armies in Russia. Several Russian officers at headquarters estimated it at a million; my own estimate was about half a million—surely enough to make one wonder why the Germans kept up so strong a front in the East. I thought it was not merely as a precaution against the Bolshevists, for, at that time, the Germans reckoned with the possibility that
