Status Updates From An American Diplomat in Bol...

"A clarification of our policy toward Russia was rendered urgent at this time [1919] not only by the obvious circumstances, but particularly by the positive attitude of Lloyd George [the British Prime Minister]. He never gave up the idea of getting together with the Bolsheviks, although he jockeyed Woodrow Wilson into being the one who ... made the suggestion of meeting at Prinkipo." - p. 288.

“Nearly all the American troops were evacuated in June [1919] in two transports. I had hoped to have leave when I came out from central Russia in September, 1918. The winter at Archangel hadn’t been too strenuous, in one sense, but it had been a strain, and now I asked for leave which was granted. I went to England on one of the troop ships, turning over the embassy to my very able colleague, Felix Cole."

"In the early stages of the revolution many of the soviets were only partly Bolshevik, and some became at times anti-Bolshevik, as indeed the Murmansk did. It renounced its allegiance to Moscow in July, 1918, and invited the British and Americans ashore at Murmansk. There was a similar event at Archangel in August." - p. 207.

"At the end of August [1918], ... we in Moscow felt that we were pretty close to being in hostile territory, and we exerted ourselves to gather up all Americans in Bolshevik Russia and to get them out." -- pp. 159-160.

"... when the Czechs did establish themselves at the railway stations and the railway yards to defend themselves against the Bolsheviks, under cover of this the local anti-Bolsheviks set up local governments. So the general consequence was that ... certainly by the 1st of July [1918] --- Siberia was entirely out of Bolshevik control and in the hands of anti-Bolshevik Socialists." -- p.125.

"I've read a good deal of Lenin. He's very hard to read, I find. He's very dull. His writing is as dull as his speaking, but of his solidity just as a human engine, of his clear perception, his common sense --- at least in tactics if not in philosophical perception --- and of his courage, there can be no doubt." -- p.93.