went to Vienna. Of these, as of the earlier negotiations, I soon heard details; and, at the moment, the important thing was that Warsaw had taken up a position hostile to the Allies—a hostility expressed, moreover, in Polish disagreement with the Allied policy of intervention in Russia. The strengthening of Russia would have impeded the Warsaw policy of compensation which aimed at securing possession of Lithuania, White Russia and parts of the Ukraine.
Though this Warsaw policy was psychologically and historically comprehensible to me, my own view, as expressed in my general programme, was that Warsaw had been too hasty in giving up Galicia and Poznania to Austria and to Germany (as early as the summer of 1918 the Austrian Emperor had thought he would lose Galicia) and I descried a danger for Poland in the acquisition of so much Russian territory. These circumstances led to constant discussion of the Polish question with Allied politicians and statesmen, for the representatives of Russia repeatedly raised it We had relations, too, with the Little Russians of the Ukraine, Hungary and Galicia, including Sitchinsky who, some years earlier, had shot Count Andrew Potocki, the Lord-Lieutenant of Galicia. Sitchinsky lived in America and was an unexpectedly pleasant and sensible man. The Poles in America treated him very decently, albeit with comprehensible reserve; and I had to be extremely careful not to annoy them by my intercourse with him and the Little Russians.
Cordial, though less frequent, was our intercourse with the Russians. Since the Bolshevist Revolution, the position of M. Bakhmetieff, the Russian Ambassador, had been peculiar. The American Government recognized him, though not unreservedly, possibly because not a few influential American journalists and politicians were, in theory, favourably disposed towards Lenin and the Bolshevists. Their sympathies went out to the adversaries of Tsarism, but they were sympathies nevertheless. The peculiar relationship of the American Government to the Bolshevists was illustrated by the case of Professor Lomonosoff who had been sent to the United States by the Kerensky Government in 1917. After the Bolshevist Revolution he joined Lenin’s party and attempted to open relations with the American Government as an official representative of the Soviets. Towards the middle of June 1919, in a big meeting at New York, he declared himself a Bolshevist and ceased to be a member of the Russian Mission. Thereupon the American Government interned him.
