Russian people with the Bolsheviks, causing them to throw in their lot openly with the enemy. 17' For this reason, it was deemed essential that intervention should be by more than one of the Allied Powers.

When in December 1917 Japan and the United States were asked for their views, Japan favoured intervention (but without American participation). President Wilson opposed any action, either jointly with Japan, or by the Japanese alone. Months passed with the issue undecided, until the Bolsheviks, at German instigation, sought to disarm the Czechs in Russia' The Czechs, who had been guaranteed safe passage through Russia, resisted this attempted treachery with violent counter-attacks. By 6 June 1918 they were in possession of the Trans-Siberian Railway from a hundred miles west of the Ural Mountains eastward to Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia-a distance of more than 1500 miles. On the 28th one of their detachments seized Vladivostok, and by 13 July the advance of their main force towards the Pacific had reached Irkutsk, beside Lake Baikal.” No link had yet been established between Irkutsk and Vladivostok.

On 2 July 1918 a further appeal to President Wilson by the Supreme War Council was successful. The President, apprehensive that the victorious Czechs were in imminent danger of being annihilated by hordes of German and Austrian former prisoners of war whom the Bolsheviks had set free, proposed the dispatch of an international force "to restore and preserve the communications of the Czechs". Three days later the United States announced its decision for a limited intervention in Siberia. It was finally agreed that

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