The proposal further insisted that the declaration of policy should be at once followed by the despatch of two or three well-known persons acquainted with Russia and Russian affairs, and enjoying the confidence of European peoples, to inquire into the conditions of the country and make an exhaustive report.  This mission, it was added, need not be official, it might be intrusted to individuals unattached to any government.

If a satisfactory answer to this proposal were returned within a fortnight, an armistice and suspension of the secret pourparlers with Germany would, I was told, have followed.  That this compact would have led to a settlement of the Russian problems is more than any one, however well informed, could vouch for, but I had some grounds for believing the move to be genuine and the promises overdone.  No reasonable motive suggested itself for a vulgar hoax.  Moreover, the overture disclosed two important facts, one of which was known at the time only to the Bolshevist government—­namely, that secret pourparlers were going forward between Berlin and Moscow for the purpose of arriving at a workable understanding between the two governments, and that the Allied troops at Odessa, Archangel, and Murmansk were in a wretched plight and in direr need of an armistice than the Bolsheviki.[263]

I mentioned the matter summarily to one of the delegates, who evinced a certain interest in it and promised to discuss it at length later on with a view to action.  Another to whom I unfolded it later thought it would be well if I myself started, together with two or three others, for Moscow, Petrograd, Ekaterinodar, and other places, and reported on the situation.  But weeks 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.