Part One--What was the Lenin-Bullitt agreement?
(All quotes from John M. Thompson, *Russia, Bolshevism and the Versailles Peace* [Princeton UP 1966] unless otherwise indicated.)
V. I. Lenin had mixed feelings about the Allied victory in the autumn of 1918. He thought the defeat of the Central Powers opened up new opportunities for proletarian revolution, especially in central Europe, but he also feared that the Allies were now free to mount an all-out assault on Soviet Russia. As he put it on October 22, 1918: "The Soviet power stands in a peculiar position; on the one hand, we have never been so close to the international proletarian revolution as at present; and on the other, we were never in such a dangerous situation as now." These two calculations largely determined Soviet policy in the winter of 1918-19. On the one hand, the Soviet government tried to foment revolution in Europe; on the other hand, it tried to dissuade the Allies from further intervention through negotiation and compromise. For the latter purpose, Lenin was at times willing to make what look like startling territorial concessions in order to assure his regime's survival and buy time until the expected European revolution came about. The obvious analogy was Brest-Litovsk, and Lenin himself referred to this on March 13, 1919:
"..that policy, which led us to accept the Brest peace, the most atrocious, outrageous, humiliating peace, turned out to be entirely correct. I think that it is not without value to recall this policy just now, when our situation with reference to the Allies is similar..."
Two days after saying this, Lenin met with a young American named William Bullitt. Bullitt was a member of the Allied peace delegation whom Wilson's close friend and adviser Colonel House had chosen to lead an American delegation to Bolshevik-controlled Russia. So far as House and Wilson were concerned, this was simply to be a fact-finding mission, but Bullitt was under the impression that he had a commission from Wilson and Lloyd George to negotiate a peace agreement with the Bolsheviks.
With respect to fact-finding, Bullitt was hardly the ideal person to provide unbiased information about Russia, being strongly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, this bias was so obvious in his report--which said for example that the Red Terror was over, and blamed starvation in Soviet Russia *solely* on the civil war and the Allied blockade--that it helped to discredit the peace agreement he reached with Lenin. Among opponents of the agreement, the very fact that someone like Bullitt had negotiated it was proof that it must be pro-Bolshevik. Yet in some respects he was a hard bargainer; he warned Lenin that unless he was willing to make major concessions, the Allies, especially the French, would never go along. In any event, here is the Lenin-Bullitt agreement, as summarized in Thompson, pp. 169-170: There was to be an armistice followed by a peace conference to be convened in a neutral country. At the proposed conference, peace was to be discussed on the basis of the following seven principles, which would not be subject to revision by the conference:
(1) The retention by all *de facto* governments in Russia of control of territories they occupied (see the attached map, scanned from Thompson's book, for the approximate areas of control at the time) unless the conference decided on territorial changes or the peoples therein determined to change their governments. No attempts were to be made by any government, including that of Germany, to upset by force any other government.
(2) The lifting of the Allied economic blockade, and the restoration of trade relations with Soviet Russia, with the proviso of equitable distribution of Allied supplies in Russia and of Allied inspection of this distribution.
(3) The guaranteeing of unhindered transit for the Soviet government on all railways and through all ports in Russia.
(4) The right of free entry and full security for Soviet citizens in Allied countries and in all Russian territories, provided they did not interfere in deomestic politics; a reciprocal right in Soviet Russia for Allied citizens and for all nationals of the territories of the former Russian Empire. Also, the mutual right of sending official agents with immunity, but not diplomatic representatives, into each other's countries.
(5) A mutual general amnesty of political opponents and prisoners, including Allied nationals who aided Soviet Russia and Russians who aided the anti-Soviet armies, and mutual repatriation of prisoners-of-war and other nationals.
(6) Following the signing of peace at the conference, the withdrawal of Allied armies from Russia and the cessation of Allied military assistance to the anti-Soviet governments in Russia. The demobilization of Soviet and anti-Soviet Russian armies to a peace footing under methods of inspection and control to be determined by the conference.
(7) Recognition by the Soviet and other Russian governments of their joint responsibility for Russia's debts; detailed arrangements for payment to be determined by the conference, with the understanding that Russian gold seized by the Czechs and that delivered to Germany by the Bolsheviks under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and now held by the Allies, to count as part of the share to be paid by the Soviet government.
There were certainly loopholes and ambiguities in the agreement, some of which I will discuss below, but as strongly anti-Soviet a historian as Ilya Somin has written that "Assuming that the Allies were willing to make vigorous efforts to enforce its terms against inevitable Soviet attempts to circumvent them, this offer represented a much better deal than the one the Allies actually ended up with after the Whites were defeated." *Stillborn Crusade: The Tragic Failure of Western Intervention inthe Russian Civil War 1918-1920*, p. 115. Somin thinks that the Bolsheviks might have had to accept effective enforcement of the agreement, because they feared that if they refused to do so, the Allies would give massive aid to the Whites which would enable the latter to win the Civil War. (In particular, Kolchak's spring offensive, which began around this time, was to cause Lenin great concern in April, so he might not be inclined to take too hard a line against Allied demands at the proposed conference.) Somin thinks that the Allies could and should have given such aid, and that this could indeed have resulted in a White victory (see
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/5P6vCgPEIr4/xjTRq0KSjR4J for some of his ideas) but in any event he regards a rigorously enforced Bullitt agreement as the second-best policy. (Bullitt himself, long since converted from his left-liberalism of 1919 to a strongly anti-Soviet conservatism, nevertheless still maintained in 1953 that the agreement would have been a good deal for the Allies.)
In the end, though, the Allies *both* rejected a peace agreement with Soviet Russia *and* refused to up the ante of intervention to any degree that offered a real hope of defeating the Bolsheviks.
***
Part Two-- Why did Wilson and Lloyd George reject the agreement?
Was there any chance that Wilson and Lloyd George would accept the Lenin-Bullitt agreement? Colonel House told Bullitt that Wilson "had a 'one-track mind' and was occupied with Germany at present, and that he could not think about Russia." Bullitt thought that the real reason was that the Kolchak offensive of March-April led the Allied leaders to think that the Bolshevik regime would soon collapse, so there was no point in making agreements with it.
Another problem was Wilson's health, which gave out on the afternoon of April 3. "[Wilson's physician Cary T.] Grayson found that the president was running a fever of 103 degrees, and he coughed violently throughout the night. Grayson avoided the word *influenza* until he issued a statement to the press two days later, yet it seems clear that this is what ailed Wilson. It was almost certainly not the notorious Spanish flu of the pandemic that had raged worldwide in recent months. Unlike much of the White House staff, the president had escaped that plague the previous autumn [his catching it and dying of it at that time might make an interesting what-if--DT] but his fatigued condition now made him susceptible to a different strain. He spent the next four and a half days confined to his bedroom, the first two in bed.." John Milton Cooper, Jr., *Woodrow Wilson: A Biography*, p. 487. So it is doubtful that Wilson would have had sufficient time to examine the Lenin-Bullitt agreement adequately before Lenin's April 10 deadline for acceptance passed. (Though I suppose it is always conceivable that as long as Kolchak's offensive was making progress, Lenin would be willing to extend the deadline.)
Finally, there was the problem of the anti-Bolshevik mood of public opinion, both in western Europe and the United States. Bullitt later tesitifed to the Senate that "Mr. Lloyd George, however, said that he did not know what he could do with British public opinion. He had a copy of the Daily Mail in his hand, and he said, 'As long as the British press is doing this kind of thing how can you expect me to be sensible about Russia?' The Daily Mail was roaring and screaming about the whole Russian situation..."
http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA66&id=8eURAAAAYAAJ Likewise, in the US, "Russia caused a flare-up in the press at home when anti-administration newspapers published garbled stories about Bullitt's mission to Moscow, with allegations that Wilson was planning to recognize the Bolsheviks." (Cooper, p. 487) "The fear of a spread of revolution was intensified by strikes that paralyzed public life in Great Britain, by Bela Kun's Bolshevik coup d'etat in Hungary on 23 March, 1919, and by Lenin's proclamation of a Communist International. These events met with sharp criticism in Europe, and made it virtually imposible for democratically elected politicians to enter into negotiations with the Soviets." Georg Schild, *Between Ideology and Realpolitik: Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution,* p. 107.
http://books.google.com/books?id=EzKmEuOU_ywC&pg=PA107
One could easily imagine a healthier Wilson, but I don't know what one could do about the other factors working against acceptance of the Lenin-Bullitt agreement. Too bad, perhaps: Even if the non-Bolshevik governments would ultimately not survive, it is still arguable, as George Kennan was to write in his *Memoirs* nearly fifty years later, that Bullitt "had returned with Soviet proposals that were not ideal but which did offer the most favorable opportunity yet extended, or ever to be extended, to the Western powers for extricating themselves with some measure of good grace from the profitless involvement of the military intervention in Russia and for the creation of an acceptable relationship to the Soviet regime."
http://books.google.com/books?id=Cm6IH1a4oksC&pg=PA34
***
Part Three--Would the agreement have worked?
As I noted, Ilya Somin has argued that *if* the Allies would say to the Soviets, "OK, we'll adhere to the Lenin-Bullitt agreement but if you violate it by sending troops into the territory of the non-Bolshevik governments, we will resume our military aid to them" the agreement might indeed have "worked" in the sense that the Soviet government would reluctantly have been forced to comply with it, and that this would lead to a long-term partition of Russia (which Somin sees as a lesser evil than the complete Bolshevik victory of OTL). Somin argues at
https://books.google.com/books?id=X7ZHIVhazHUC&pg=PA115 that the Soviets seem to have been "sincere" about the offer but "only because of their fear of intervention. Only the possibility that they would lose even more territory than they had already could have possibly brought them to concede what amounted to the bulk of the Russian empire to the Whites and minority group nationalists. Clearly, the Bolsheviks were drirven to make sweeping concessions by the gravity of their predicamant. 'If we do not reach an understanding [with the Allies], Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin worriedly wrote on March 13, 'the policy of blockade will be pressed with vigor. They will send tanks, etc. to Denikin, Kolchak, Petliura...Paderwewski...etc.'" Under those cicrumstances, Somin argues that what the Allies should have done was to step up the scale and effectiveness of the intervention but "As a second best policy, the Allies might have accepted the offer and insisted on tight enforcement and verification measures."
https://books.google.com/books?id=X7ZHIVhazHUC&pg=PA116
However, Richard K. Debo in his analysis of the agreement at p. 48 of his *Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918-1921* has argued that even without Red Army invasions, the agreement would doom the non-Bolshevik governments:
"The Bolsheviks were, in fact, offering a great deal for peace, but not nearly as much as it might first appear. Their proposal was a document of political genius, yet one more example of the 'rotten compromise' for which Lenin was so justly famous. It might just as well have been headed 'A Charter to Bolshevize Russia.' Adoption, in whole or in part, would almost surely have led to the collapse of the anti-Soviet governments even more rapidly than was actually to take place. No one, least of all themselves, believed that they could long exist without foreign assistance. The proposed agreement purported to secure them against the Soviet government and the Red Army. Even if it had, nothing protected them from the Bolshevik party, deeply rooted and active, in all the territories of the former Russian empire. Invigorated by the proposed amnesty, reinforced by added cadres from Soviet Russia, and aided by the instant demoralization which would have swept through the anti-Bolshevik forces once the Soviet government had received some form of Allied recognition, local Bolsehvik organizations would have made fast work of the bogus regimes they confronted. When the inevitable came, it would fall well within the agreement for, of course, it provided that no existing de facto governments were to be altered until such time as the peoples inhabiting their territories 'shall themselves determine to change their governments.' This was self-determination Bolshevik-style with a vengeance.."
http://books.google.com/books?id=gQfUB0CXBO4C&pg=PA48
This certainly seems to have been Lenin's own view: he would acknowledge one year later that "when we proposed a treaty to Bullitt a year ago, a treaty which left tremendous amounts of territory to Denikin and Kolchak, we proposed this treaty with the knowledge that if peace were signed, these Governments could never hold out." David W. McFadden, *Alternative Paths: Soviets and Americans, 1917-1920,* p. 231.
Any thoughts?
