could “restore orderly existence.”19 Wilds P. Richardson, commander in northern Russia, claimed that “the Russian mind generally speaking [was] several hundred years behind the mind of Western Europe and the United States in the matter of free or democratic government and that [it would] take some generations to develop it.”20
Declaring himself “Supreme Ruler of Russia,” Kolchak received thousands of machine guns, hand grenades, and explosives from the Allied stock. His cause was championed by, among others, Winston Churchill, the New York Times, the U.S. consul general in Irkutsk, and J. P. Morgan.21 The Omsk group, however, represented the “minority and ancient imperialists who were obstinately impervious to the new Russia flaming in revolution against age-long abuses and tyrannies,” as a lieutenant in the 339th Infantry put it. According to General Graves, “Kolchak did not possess sufficient strength to exercise sovereign powers without the support of foreign troops.”22
The American ambassador to Japan, Rowland Morris, reported that all over Siberia under Kolchak’s rule, there was an “orgy of arrests without charges; of executions without even the pretense of a trial; and of confiscations without the color of authority. Panic and fear has seized everyone. Men support each other and live in constant terror that some spy or enemy will cry ‘Bolshevik’ and condemn them to instant death.” Among those killed were former members of the constituent assembly, and railroad workers who had struck for higher wages. In Ekaterinburg, where the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas II and his family, Kolchak allowed Cossacks to massacre at least two thousand Jews, part of a larger wave of pogroms.23
Unconcerned about these atrocities, President Wilson set up a “little war board” to expedite arms shipments to Admiral Kolchak. He provided military support without congressional sanction through Kerensky’s former ambassador to the United States, Boris Bakhmetev, who controlled over $200 million in assets. Historian Robert Maddox wrote that “by conserving and augmenting the embassy’s resources, the Wilson administration established what amounted to an independent treasury for use in Russia … [which was] immune from prying congressmen. The ambassador of the Russian people had now become the quartermaster for the Kolchak regime.”24 In short, the “Midnight War” was waged by executive power, setting an early precedent for today’s imperial presidency.
To keep the Bolsheviks at bay, the State Department established an intelligence apparatus, headed by an American businessman of Greek-Russian extraction, Xenophon Kalamitiano, which infiltrated Soviet-controlled territory and promoted anti-Bolshevik propaganda. Under future president Herbert Hoover, head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), humanitarian aid was positioned to assist the anti-Bolshevik cause.25
The intervention in Russia was formative in the development of covert action. Two major figures in the history of American intelligence, “Wild” Bill Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer and future director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and John Foster Dulles, whose brother Allen later headed the Central Intelligence Agency, served as military intelligence officers, with Donovan undertaking undisclosed missions in Siberia. He concluded that the “time for intervention had past [as] we were a year too late,” though “we [could] prevent a shooting war [next time] if we take the initiative to win the subversive war.”26
One of Donovan’s colleagues, Major David P. Barrows, who went on to become president of the University of California, cultivated close relations with a Manchurian detachment headed by Cossack Ataman Gregori Semonoff, who according to Barrows “was capable of great severity” toward the Bolsheviks, whom he had “devoted his life to destroying.”27 A decorated veteran of the tsarist and Kerensky armies nicknamed “the Destroyer,” Semonoff allegedly set up “killing stations,” boasting that he could not sleep at night if he did not kill somebody that day. In Trans-Baikal, according to General Graves, his men shot the men, women, and children of an entire village as if they were hunting rabbits. U.S. Army intelligence estimated that Semonoff was responsible for 30,000 executions in one year, which earned him promotion by Kolchak to the rank of major general.28
Another Kolchak deputy, Ataman Ivan Kalmykoff, roamed the Amur territory robbing, burning, raping, and executing hundreds of Russian peasants without trial, including two Red Cross representatives and sixteen Austrian musicians who allegedly housed a Bolshevik one night. Lt. Col. Robert Eichelberger said Kalmykoff’s “actions would have been considered shameful in the Middle Ages.”29 Graves referred to Kalmykoff as a “notorious murderer” and “the worst scoundrel” he had ever seen. He compared him unfavorably with Semonoff since he “murdered with his own hands,” whereas Semonoff “ordered others to kill.”30 Third on the brutality scale was General S. N. Rozanoff, who would execute the male population and burn down villages that resisted Kolchak incursions.31
Congressional hearings ignored the White Terror, which General Graves predicted would “be remembered by, and recounted to, the Russian people for [the next] fifty years.” Instead, as historian Frederick Schuman summarized, they depicted “Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject slaves completely at the mercy of an organization of homicidal maniacs [the Bolsheviks] whose purpose was to destroy all traces of civilization and carry the nation back to barbarism.” Drawing from these hearings, the press became filled with screaming headlines, claiming the Bolsheviks had even nationalized women. Graves, however, wrote in his memoirs that he was “well on the side of safety” in saying that “the anti-Bolsheviks killed 100 people in Eastern Siberia to everyone killed by the Bolsheviks.”32
A Texan with experience fighting in the Philippines and with the Pershing mission in Mexico, Graves had gone into Siberia believing his mission was to uphold Soviet Russia’s neutrality and protect the Trans-Siberian railway. He became disheartened at how America’s allies applied the word Bolshevik to “most of the Russian people,” including peasants opposed to the Kolchak coup who were “kicked, beaten and murdered in cold blood by the thousands.” This damaged the prestige of the “foreigner intervening” while serving as a “great handicap to the faction the foreigner was trying to assist.”33 Turning against the war, Graves was hounded by the Bureau of Investigation as a security risk when he came back. According to historian Benson Bobrick, “in the whole sad debacle, he may have been the only honorable man.”34
Graves had conducted an investigation which found that Kolchak would force young men into the army. If any resisted, he would send troops into their village to torture men beyond military age through methods like pulling out their fingernails, knocking out their teeth, breaking their legs, and then murdering them.35 Ralph Albertson, the Young Men’s Christian Association secretary with the army in Archangel, said that wide-scale executions by Kolchak’s forces created “Bolsheviks right and left.… When night after night, the firing squad took out its batches of victims, it mattered not that no civilians were permitted on the streets as thousands of listening ears [could] hear the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, and every victim had friends who were rapidly made enemies of the military intervention.”36
Albertson wrote that though he had heard many stories of alleged Bolshevik atrocities that told of rape, torture, and the murder of priests, the only Bolshevik atrocity about which he had any authentic information through the entire expedition was “the mutilation of the bodies of some of our men who had been killed in the early days of Ust-Padenga”—where an entire U.S. platoon was wiped out. U.S. prisoners of war were well treated and released, with the exception of two men who died in a Soviet hospital. Sgt. Glenn Leitzell described how he was allowed to walk around the nearest city dressed in a Russian overcoat and fur cap and encouraged to attend a club where he was “harangued in English on Marxist doctrine and the evils of capitalism,” and then rewarded with plates of hot soups and horsemeat steak.”37
Referring to them as “John bolo” or “bolos,” a euphemism for wild men, American and British troops pioneered the use of nerve gas designed to incapacitate and demoralize the Red
