Page:Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin - Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920).pdf/31

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in Russia was the Danish Red Cross, which left Russia in the summer of 1919.[1]

During this time we made a large number of peace proposals. Shortly after our note to Pouget of August 5 we took advantage of the departure of the Norwegian representatives from Kiev to make an attempt through them to start oral negotiations with the powers attacking Russia. In the well-known note to President Wilson, of Oct. 24, 1918,[2] containing an exhaustive criticism of the whole American policy toward Soviet Russia, we asked a definite question: Precisely by what means could we buy the cessation of the attacks on us by the Entente Powers? On November 3 the Soviet Government, through all the neutral representatives who were then in Moscow, proposed to the Entente Governments to open peace negotiations. This step was approved by the Sixth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which on November 8 solemnly addressed to the Entente powers a peace proposal and authorized the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs to take all necessary steps in this direction. Comrade Litvinov, who went to Sweden on a mission from the Soviet Government, on December 23 sent a circular note to the Entente representatives in which he proposed the opening of preliminary negotiations with the view of removing all the causes of conflict. Subsequently he sent a special dispatch to Wilson on the same subject. On January 12, having learned through a radio of the speech by the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at Washington regarding the causes of intervention in Russia, we sent a radio to the American Government, pointing out that all the motives


  1. The Danish Red Cross Commission in Russia was unfortunately guilty of many acts favoring the counter-revolution, and even now, after its exclusion from Soviet Russia, has done much to embitter the lot of Russian prisoners of war still held in Vienna, Austria, whom it is supposed to shield from harm.
  2. The Liberator, New York, January, 1919, prints an English translation of this note, which was forwarded through Mr. Christiansen, Norwegian Attache in Moscow.

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