David R. Francis was a cigarsmoking whiskeydrinking old Kentuckian who had been Secretary of the Interior under Grover Cleveland, had served as Governor of Missouri and promoted the St. Louis World’s Fair. When, as a deserving Democrat with a reputation for business acumen, he was offered the embassy in Petrograd he seems to have felt that with war threatening he could not refuse any service the President asked of him. Not wanting to subject his wife and family to the hazards of wartime Russia he set out accompanied only by a secretary and a faithful colored valet He intrigued the Petrograd diplomatic corps during the last days of the Romanoffs by the simplicity of his establishment, his rough diamond frankness and his penchant for poker.
A further cause for comment was his relationship with a Madame de Cramm, a voluble lady suspected of being a German spy largely on account of her name. She was in and out of the Embassy at all hours, giving the ambassador lessons in French, so it was said; she accompanied him on walks through the broad Petrograd streets on the white nights of summer. The gossip about Madame de Cramm may account for some of the standoffish attitude of Robins and Sisson towards the Embassy staff.
Mr. Francis was no sooner established in the Romanoff capital than the imperial façade crumbled away disclosing a turmoil of ideologies and cutthroat factions which he was no better equipped to understand than any of the other Americans stumbling through the political nightmare. Being a man of some worldly knowledge he might have acquitted himself better if he hadn’t been, intentionally he felt, kept in the dark as to the intentions of the Administration.
About the time of Sisson’s quarrel with Robins the ambassador was approached by a Russian journalist, with a great black beard and a rather unsavory history, who showed him the photostat of a letter of Joffe’s which he claimed proved under the table dealings with the enemy during the Brest-Litovsk talks. Much more interesting material, the journalist implied, could be had for a price. Mr. Francis called up Sisson and asked him to look at the photostat. Sisson brought along the material Robins had turned over to him. The two men put their heads together and decided that genuine or not the stuff should be cabled to Washington. Meanwhile Mr. Francis asked the State Department for twentyfive thousand dollars to spend for undisclosed purposes.
When Lansing showed Wilson the cable the President, who evidently blamed Ambassador Francis for Thompson’s imprudence in so openly backing the wrong horse, noted: “our views and Francis’ have not in the least agreed on the use which should be made of money in Russia.” However he left the decision to Lansing.
The draft was honored and Francis, who probably felt that Creel’s representative knew more about administration policy than he did, gave Sisson his head. Sisson got help from the British secret service and documents poured in. A few samples were cabled to the State Department in the diplomatic code. Secretary Lansing expressed interest, so with redoubled zeal Sisson bought every scrap of paper that was offered him.
Sisson’s eager sleuthing was interrupted on February 18 when the German General Hoffmann announced that his patience was at an end and ordered his troops to advance into Russia. In two weeks his armies occupied the Baltic provinces. A German division marched into Narva, less than a hundred miles from Petrograd.
Panic struck the city. In Smolny, behind the rifles of their praetorian guard of Latvian troops, the Bolshevik leaders began packing their records for the move to Moscow.
Allied agents scattered in all directions. The embassy staffs crowded into special trains. The British managed to get through to Sweden before the civil war between Reds and Whites cut off communication across Finland. Monsieur Noulens the French ambassador was forced to turn back, an accident of war which greatly added to his distaste for the revolutionary Russians. Mr. Francis, insisting that since he was accredited to the Russian people and not to any particular government, his business was to remain on Russian soil as long as he could, retired in good order to Vologda.
Vologda was an ancient lumbering town, reported to have more churches than dwellinghouses, about three hundred miles east of Petrograd at the junction of the Trans-Siberian railroad with the line that led north to Archangel. From Vologda Mr. Francis was in a position to retreat either to Archangel or to Vladivostok, if retreat became necessary. The other embassies joined him there and for a few months Vologda became an Allied oasis from which the western diplomats looked out on the chaos about them. Nothing the Bolsheviks could do, not even the threats and blandishments of Karl Radek, their most disarming jokester and their most persuasive journalist, could lure the embassies to Moscow.
Sisson, a wiry dyspeptic waspish little man, by this time a bundle of nerves and selfrighteousness, entrusted his pack of incriminating documents to a friendly Norwegian diplomatic courier and set off in a crowd of refugees for Finland. Sticking to the Norwegian like a leech, after all sorts of hairbreadth escapes, he managed to make his way through the deadly skirmishing of the Finnish civil war and across the ice to Sweden. By early May, Sisson, who described himself as a nervous wreck, managed to reach Washington and to have his portentous package placed in the President’s hands.
On March 3, 1918, at Lenin’s insistence, the Bolshevik representatives had capitulated at Brest-Litovsk and signed a treaty with Germany by which Russia gave up any claim to Poland, Lithuania, Finland, the Baltic Provinces, the Ukraine and to the regions south of the Caucasus. Prisoners were to be turned loose. Diplomatic missions were to be exchanged and trade re-established. Trotsky’s response was to resign his post as Foreign Minister. Immediately appointed Commissar for War, he started building a Red Army.
Robins, still hopeful of attaining Washington’s recognition for Lenin’s government, travelled back and forth between Moscow and Vologda. He too tried to induce Ambassador Francis to move his embassy to Moscow. Francis wouldn’t budge.
Towards the end of April Count Mirbach-Harff, a German career diplomat, arrived in Moscow with a large delegation, and Adolf Joffe installed an equivalent crew of revolutionary propagandists in the old Imperial Russian Embassy in Berlin. Lansing and his counsellors at the State Department took this exchange to mean the complete penetration by German influence of such parts of Russia as were left under Bolshevik control. Robins was requested to come home immediately.
After final friendly interviews with the leading Bolsheviks, Raymond Robins’ Red Cross car was attached to the Trans-Siberian express and started its long rumbling way to Vladivostok. His party was furnished with rifles and ammunition for their protection and also with a pass signed by Lenin himself. In his pocket Robins carried an appreciative personal letter from Trotsky and a document, drawn up under Lenin’s direction, offering a rich bait of mineral concessions in Siberia to American capitalists consequent to American recognition.
The train stopped for fifty minutes at Vologda. Ambassador Francis went down to the station to pass the time of day. The two men walked up and down the platform chatting. Neither man told the other what was uppermost in his mind.
Ambassador Francis had just sent a cable to Washington announcing that he had at last come to the opinion that Allied intervention was necessary with or without the consent of the Moscow government.
Robins’ thoughts were fervid with the hope that the document entrusted to him by Lenin would be the opening wedge for fresh relations between Washington and Moscow. He was planning a campaign of press releases and speeches. Perhaps Ambassador Robins would soon be succeeding Ambassador Francis.