From "Russian Sideshow: America's Undeclared War, 1918-1920," by Robert L. Willett, 2003, p. 5.
- Then came a change: In February 1918, Germany reattacked Russia in the Ukraine, although Germany was still in negotiates with Bolshevik Soviet . . . The threat of German attack brought some harmony to the three diverse Murmansk groups--the government, rebellious military, and allies--as they recognized the need for British defense and supply. At this time, an American, Lt. Hugh Martin, a passport control officer, was the senior U.S. representative on the scene. A few other Americans were there also: Allen Wardell of the Red Cross had made his second appearance in the new city, while YMCA official Reverend Jesse Halsey was a more recent arrival.
- But by this time all was turmoil and confusion in Petrograd. Robins had left the city before the message was received. There was no immediate reply. For the moment, therefore, Wardwell continued to reside in his car in the railroad yard. Martin and a representative of the American Y.M.C.A., the Reverend Jesse Halsey, both lacking adequate accommodations, moved in with him. On March 4, the little party was joined by another member of the Red Cross Commission, Major Thomas D. Thatcher accompanied by the commisioner's Cossak interpreter, Captain Ilovaiski.
- Life took a sort of colorful course in the railway yards where the Americans were residing. From time to time trainloads of refugees, in boxcars, lumbered in from the distant south. Cosmopolitan Petrograd was now disgorging, in its extremity, all those international elements that had no place in the world of Bolshevism. No other quarters being available in Murmansk, the refugees remained in the boxcars, in the snow-covered yards. There were among them all shapes and sizes of humanity. The scenes recall, to the contemporary mind, the Lisbon of WWII. "We have nearly every nationality here now," Wardell wrote on March 5.
- On September 20, 1918, Wilson received a caution from a Red Cross worker in north Russia that "unless the Allies [sic] program of intervention is made strong enough not to appear ridiculous, it is fore-doomed to failure." Jesse Halsey recognized that "intervention is not the word to use," and he noted approvingly that "the troops have paid attention to the feelings of the people." However, friendly relief work was not sufficient. Substantial foreign forces were needed, in part because of the disheartening fact that "the moderately well to do classes hold aloof from everything that is going on in Russia except what is immediately before them."
- Wilson thought enough of Halsey's statements to take a copy of it with him to Paris. He was undoubtedly more sympathetic to the ideas of avoiding the word "intervention" and attending to Russian feelings than to the recommendation of stronger foreign military forces. Only a few days before receiving Halsey's memorandum, Wilson had ruled out sending reinforcements to north Russia. In late September and again in October Chaikovskii appealed for more American troops to enable him "to form a serious Russian army" and to strengthen the faltering "struggle against Bolshevism." However, discouraged by the reported apathy of anti-Bolsheviks and later troubled by the rise of nationalist support for the Bolsheviks, Wilson refused to expand the size or scope of American intervention.
- The treaty--signed July 6 by Rear Admiral Thomas Kemp, British commanding officer of Allied troops at Murmansk; French Captain Petit, and the Reverend Jesse Halsey, United States YMCA representative in Murmansk--assured Alexei Yuryev, the Chairman of the Murmansk Regional Soviet, of Allied support against both Germans and Bolsheviks. Despite the unorthodox nature of its negotiation and the rather shaky basis of U.S. representation in its signing, it was officially approved by the U.S. government in October 1918, and served as legal basis for U.S. intervention in the Murmansk region.
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