and unofficial
conversations and acts. When holding converse with Kolchak's authorized
agents in Paris they would lay down hard conditions, which were
described as immutable; and yet when communicating with the Admiral
direct they would submit to him terms considerably less irksome, unknown
to his Paris advisers, thus mystifying both and occasioning friction
between them. In many cases the contrast between the two sets of demands
was disconcerting, and in all it tended to cause misunderstandings and
complicate the relations between Kolchak and his Paris agents. But he
continued to give his confidence to his representatives, although they
were denied that of the delegates. It would, of course, be grossly
unfair to impute anything like disingenuousness to plenipotentiaries
engaged upon issues of this magnitude, but it was an unfortunate
coincidence that they were known to regard some of the members of the
Russian Council in Paris with disfavor, and would have been glad to see
them superseded. When Nansen's project to feed the starving population
of Russia was first mooted, Kolchak's Ministers in Paris were approached
on the subject, and the Allies' plan was propounded to them so
defectively or vaguely as to give them the impression that the
co-operation of the Bolshevist government was part of the program. They
were also allowed to think that during the work of feeding the people
the despatch of munitions and other military necessaries to Kolchak and
his army would be discontinued. Naturally, the scheme, weighted with
these two accompaniments, was unacceptable to Kolchak's representatives
in Paris. But, strange to say, in the official notification which the
plenipotentiaries telegraphed at the same time to the Admiral direct,
neither of these obnoxious riders was included, so that the proposal
assumed a different aspect.

Another example of these singular tactics is supplied by their
_pourparlers_ with the Admiral's delegates about the future
international status of Finland, whose help was then being solicited to
free Petrograd from the Bolshevist yoke. The Finns insisted on the
preliminary recognition of their complete independence by the Russians.
Kolchak's representatives shrank from bartering any territories which
had belonged to the state on their own sole responsibility. None the
less, as the subject was being theoretically threshed out in all its
bearings, the members of the Russian Council in Paris inquired of th