Did Wilson Have a Russia Policy?

Abstract

The historical argument over Woodrow Wilson's often ambiguous approaches to a Russia in revolution was first clearly articulated with the publication of William Appleman Williams's seminal essays, American Intervention in Russia, 1917-1920, published in Studies on the Left.' In those essays Williams boldly attacked the prevailing orthodoxy of George E Kennan's Russia Leaves the War (1956) and The Decision to Intervene (1958) by asserting that Wilson did have a Russia policy, and that it was anti-Bolshevik and not primarily driven by World War I or the British and French. The argument sparked by this exchange shows no sign of abating, despite the end of the ideological hostility that marked Cold War historiography and the sharp divisions between so-called orthodox and revisionist schools. Although John Lewis Gaddis (most notably in Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History, 1978) and others have tried to blur the distinction, a new generation of historians, digging deeply into archives on both sides of the Atlantic, has found ample materials with which to continue to demonstrate the complexity of America's response to revolutionary events in Russia.