ks went by and nothing was done.[264]

I had interesting talks with some influential delegates on the eve of
the invitation issued to all _de facto_ governments of Russia to
forgather at Prinkipo for a symposium. They admitted frankly at the time
that they had no policy and were groping in the dark, and one of them
held to the dogma that no light from outside was to be expected. They
gave me the impression that underlying the impending summons was the
conviction that Bolshevism, divested of its frenzied manifestations, was
a rough and ready government calumniously blackened by unscrupulous
enemies, criminal perhaps in its outbursts, but suited in its feasible
aims to the peculiar needs of a peculiar people, and therefore as worthy
of being recognized as any of the others. It was urged that it had
already lasted a considerable time without provoking a counter-movement
worthy of the name; that the stories circulating about the horrors of
which it was guilty were demonstrably exaggerated; that many of the
bloody atrocities were to be ascribed to crazy individuals on both
sides; that the witnesses against Lenin were partial and untrustworthy;
that something should be done without delay to solve a pressing problem,
and that the Conference could think of nothing better, nor, in fact, of
any alternative.

To me the principal scheme seemed a sinister mistake, both in form and
in substance. In form, because it nullified the motives which determined
the help given to the Greeks, Poles, and Serbs, who were being urged to
crush the Bolshevists, and left the Allies without good grounds for
keeping their own troops in Archangel, Odessa, and northern Russia to
stop the onward march of Bolshevism. Some governments had publicly
stigmatized the Bolshevists as cutthroats; one had pledged itself never
to have relations with them, but the Prinkipo invitation bespoke a
resolve to cancel these judgments and declarations and change their tack
as an improvement on doing nothing at all. The scheme was also an error
in substance, because the sole motive that could warrant it was the hope
of reconciling the warring parties. And that hope was doomed to
disappointment from the outset.

According to the Prinkipo project, which was attributed to President
Wilson,[265] an invitation was to be issued to all organized groups
exercising or attempting to exercise political authority or military
control in Siberia and northern Russia, to send representati