Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? by Tina Cassidy

Author:Tina Cassidy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria / 37 Ink

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

* * *

The Russians

The train rolled to a clanging, chuffing, grinding halt at Washington’s Union Station. Despite the smoke of the engine and the crush of other passengers climbing off the railcars, the eight Russians were easy to identify on this fine June day in 1917. There was Ambassador Boris A. Bakhmetieff, with his distinctive white mustache; military officials in uniforms of khaki coats, navy pants, and black knee boots; Russia’s ministers of finance and foreign affairs; and several of their wives. The American delegation, along with regular travelers who happened to be in the station, greeted the Russians with cheers. The U.S. contingent, comprised of Secretary of State Robert Lansing and his assistants, also brought with them two Cavalry troops, mounted police, and members of the Secret Service, offering protection in addition to hospitality.

The genuine welcome was comforting to the Russians. For the last three years, their country had been locked into a brutal war they were not prepared for and could not sustain. Their population had been decimated, with 1.7 million people killed and 5 million wounded. Peasants were starving and freezing due to food and fuel shortages. The army was in revolt, and a man named Vladimir Lenin, a champion of the working class, was leading his Bolshevik Party in protests against a corrupt and ineffective monarchy. And he was succeeding. Just three months before this Russian mission had arrived in Washington, the Bolsheviks had forced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate his throne, replaced with a provisional government led by Prince Georgy Lvov.

In the five weeks it had taken this Russian mission to journey to America, however, the situation back home had deteriorated further. The Russian army, in a desperate act of self-preservation, was putting all of its focus into a new and risky strategy: fighting German soldiers burrowed into trenches along the Austro-Hungarian line. The enemy, protected by machine gun nests, sniper hideouts, and a vast network of communication tunnels, would be difficult to defeat. Now that America’s fate was aligned with the Russians, this intense campaign, known as the Brusilov Offensive, had the United States on edge, hoping the Russians would win a badly needed victory on the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, America was supporting Russia in other ways, sending money and supplies for the war effort and dispatching diplomats, including Elihu Root, who had been secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt, to meet with the new government. Root had arrived in St. Petersburg the previous week.

Now that the Russians had pulled into Washington, the United States was proud to show off its own government’s stability and congratulate the guests on revolting against a monarchy to establish liberty and democracy, just as America had done in 1776. But Russia’s revolution had produced one outcome that the United States’ had not. In the weeks after Lvov had been installed as the country’s new leader, forty thousand women clogged the streets of St. Petersburg and demanded voting rights. Lvov, facing a popular uprising, granted them suffrage the next day.

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