Alexander S Khodnev. World Affairs. Volume 158, Issue 1, Summer 1995.
The League of Nations was one of Woodrow Wilson’s finest legacies in international politics. However, the work of the League of Nations was hampered by the Russian’s deep suspicions about Wilson’s motives. The Russians were poorly informed about Wilson’s ideas and were too preoccupied with developments in Western Europe and imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. After the revolution, the Russians overestimated Wilson’s opposition to the Bolshevik government and underestimated his internationalism as embodied in the League of Nations.
My goals in this article are threefold: to survey the reactions to the ideas and the legacies of Woodrow Wilson in Russia; to define the manifold legacies of Wilson’s finest creation, the League of Nations, in Soviet Russian history; and to confront exactly why Soviet Russia’s attitudes toward Wilson have been so complicated and, in many ways, so hostile. One of my central questions explores how Russians evaluated the League of Nations, the most popular and tragic outcome of Wilson’s efforts at the peace conference in Paris.
My findings argue that Russians, both before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and after, never really understood Wilson. Before the Revolution, Russians were poorly informed about and underestimated Wilson’s ideas and politics. They were too preoccupied with European issues in the West and with imperial ambitions in the East. After the Revolution, they overestimated his enmity toward the Bolshevik government. They had, after all, begun an ideological war against Wilsonian internationalism and his creation, the League of Nations. Up to now, Russians have not been able to break out of this cycle of misunderstanding.
Through the twentieth century, what exactly could Russian and Soviet readers learn about Woodrow Wilson and his ideas? Elite perspectives of the legacies of Wilson and the League of Nations have changed with each successive generation of Russians, who for the first time became acquainted with his works before World War I and his presidency.
Until the first Russian Revolution of 1905, the publication of Western books, especially those in the field of law and government that specialized in the analysis of parliamentary systems, was virtually nonexistent in Russia. In that year, the great paradoxes in Russian life—between the results of the “great” reforms in society and economy after 1861, which began to modernize Russia, and the constraints of the old monarchical system of government, which had led to the loss of the war with Japan—resulted in a revolutionary crisis. I should add that this crisis was only made worse by Russia’s economic and political backwardness, summarized in the weakness, or absence, of her middle class. This led to the polarization of society and to the unlimited authority of the Russian bureaucracy, brilliantly shown by the great writers, N. Gogol, A. Chekhov, and L. Tolstoy.
In this context, Russia was ready to read Wilson’s works by 1905. His book, The State, was published in 1905 in Russia under the editorship of Professor A. S. Yashenko. The foreword to the book was written by the famous Russian liberal scholar, Maxim Kovalevsky, whose works in history, law, and economics were always met with great interest by academics, students, and the educated public alike. Kovalevsky’s dedication to the work was meant to direct liberal-minded society’s attention to it.
Yashenko and Kovalevsky had studied at Moscow University, where they were members of the school of Count L. Kamarovsky, a Russian professor of international law and a pacifist who was renowned at the turn of the century. The school could be called “Westernist” according to the typical definitions from the cultural and ideological disputes of the nineteenth century. Kovalevsky traveled widely in the United States, in 1881 for the first time and in 1901 for the second, where he acquired most of his liberal ideas in politics and scholarship.
In the preface to Wilson’s book, Kovalevsky wrote that the civil and especially political rights of the people presupposed their participation in elections for local and national representative bodies of power, and the protection of their civil and public rights in the law courts. “These are the distinguishing features of that state order which publicists call legal,” Kovalevsky wrote. He further examined the methods and approach of Wilson’s research about the state, and noted that American authors considered it important to show how the historical contexts of different nations really formed their present governments. Kovalevsky stressed that the book was not about present governmental systems but about their genesis and origins. Kovalevsky also remarked that Wilson strove in his work to compare the gains of modern nations with the experiences of classical Greece and Rome.
Kovalevsky did not hide the fact that he disliked the last chapter of the book and its final conclusions. He doubted that it was worthwhile to conduct such an immense research task to arrive at such well known truths that government is essentially an executive body of power, or that contemporary life excludes aristocracy and the absolute monarchy as models of the modern state. Kovalevsky recognized the importance of the book not in its general conclusions, but in its useful and condensed narrative about how such states as Britain and America evolved. He also expressed his favorable judgment about Wilson’s first book, Congressional Government, which had not yet been translated into Russian. Kovalevsky even compared Wilson with de Tocqueville.
Kovalevsky praised Wilson for his research that showed that the state was not static, but developed into its modern forms of representative democracy and law through a dynamic process. Precisely because of this, he recommended the book for the Russian reader. Russians, he believed, should be interested in achieving the same results, not in building a “Chinese Wall” against the progressive gains of Western civilization.
Yashenko and Kovalevsky correctly assumed that they would soon publish Wilson’s first book, Congressional Government. It was perhaps ironic that Woodrow Wilson’s works, which never dealt with revolution, could be published in Russia only during the years of Russia’s first revolution. According to the Tsar’s “October Manifesto” of 1905, a new parliamentary body, the Duma, was established in Russia. Some of the most oppressive rules of censorship were also lifted. These events made possible the publication of Wilson’s Congressional Government in 1909 during the years of the Stolypin reforms. Its preface was once again written by Kovalevsky.
Let me give a short narrative of this interesting document, which helps us to appreciate the reception of Wilson’s ideas in Stolypin’s Russia. Kovalevsky admitted that Wilson’s creation gave the Russians a true presentation of the American Constitution and raised an important issue. Was it inevitable for all governments built on the separation and balance of powers to come to democracy and parliamentarianism? Kovalevsky considered that Wilson’s answer was affirmative. Wilson argued that, after England, parliamentary government was rooted in republican France and monarchical Belgium, Spain, Italy, and the Scandinavian states. He considered that the evolution of the state system in Germany should result in a parliamentary system, but for Emperor Wilhelm’s interference in domestic and foreign politics. “Apparently only in Russia there was no coincidence between the policy of the government and the desires of the majority of the people’s representatives,” wrote Kovalevsky, with all the pity of a Russian liberal. But he expressed his hopes that the Third Duma and the Stolypin government would help Russia follow the above pattern.
Contemporaries noted that both books informed Russian readers about conceptions of lawful government, a topic of significant debate in the years after the Russian Revolution of 1905. I can say this, as I have seen the margin notes in the books of Wilson left by the professors and the students of the Yaroslavl Demidov Liceum, a law school in Yaroslavl that awarded MA degrees in the nineteenth century and just before World War I.
The World War was a turning point in Russian history. It led the country to its deepest revolutionary crisis. During the war, Russia cared more about its own domestic and war problems than about the details of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Moreover, the war events reinforced a tradition in the diplomatic relations between the two countries. Even growing economic ties between Russia and the United States did little to improve their political relations, which remained, in the words of a Russian newspaper, in a state of “a cold indifference.”
But V.I. Lenin, the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks who was in exile in Switzerland during the war, paid special attention to some of Wilson’s speeches. Wilson’s name was mentioned in Lenin’s article written at the end of 1916. Lenin expressed sarcasm at Wilson’s pacifism. He said that there was something like a holiday on pacifism street. All pacifists expressed their triumph as “Wilson himself ‘paraphrased’ the appeal to peace of the Italian Socialist Party”—said Lenin, denouncing the ideas of pacifism. This was the first time Lenin mentioned Wilson’s name in an article, and he spoke about him without future hostility. I do not need to mention that every one of Lenin’s words, on any subject, soon became a kind of dogma for Soviet historians and Russian readers.
The Russian Revolution of March 1917 put the issue of war at center stage. Thus began the next period of Russian interest in Wilson and his ideas. After March 1917, Russian society experienced conditions of ever-deepening anarchy. The Russian army suffered greatly and could not continue the war; the whole Russian economy, especially peasant agriculture, was in deep crisis. It seems that the Allied states did not understand this situation and asked the Provisional Government to go on with the war. The Bolsheviks took advantage of this and seized power in the two Russian capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, in November 1917.
The “Decree on Peace” accepted unanimously by the Second Congress of Soviets on 8 November was the Bolsheviks’ debut in diplomacy. It was a strange document: a sincere and general appeal to all governments on behalf of peace, and a revolutionary appeal shot over the heads of the governments to the working masses. It was one of the first documents combining both diplomacy and propaganda. Perhaps it was even the beginning of the dual policy of Bolshevik Russia: arousing world revolution while establishing normal relations with the rest of the world’s governments.
By the beginning of 1918, the year of Wilson’s peace proposal—the “fourteen points”—the situation in Russian foreign policy turned dangerous. German armies were marching on practically defenseless Moscow and especially Petrograd. The Bolshevik government went to the Soviet-German negotiations in Brest-Litovsk ready to sign a very harsh treaty of peace.
It has been a commonplace in the works of Western historians, first of all of American origin, that in 1917-1918 there occurred the first hostility between two views of world events after World War I. I mean two ideologies: Wilsonianism and Leninism. Both “isms” were products of the war and depended on each other. American historian G. Levin considers that the main outline of American foreign policy was shaped decisively by the ideology and the international program developed by the Wilson administration in response to world politics in 1917-1919. In the midst of the main events of the period—World War I and the Russian Revolution—Wilsonians laid the foundations of a modern American foreign policy, whose main goal from 1917 on may be characterized as an effort to construct a stable world order of liberal capitalist internationalism, well centered and safe from both the threat of imperialism on the right and the dangers of the revolution on the left. Thus the Wilson administration, which had to give a response to the challenges of war and revolution, became merged with liberal ideology. And Wilson’s desire to use America’s moral leadership to construct a liberal world community emphatically challenged Lenin’s belief in the inability of the international capitalist system to peacefully resolve its own contradictions through gradual, rational reform.
Wilson had developed his liberal, anti-imperialist vision of the League of Nations prior to the emergence of Leninism as a global ideology. Yet after 1917, the League of Nations also became, through Wilson’s own statements, implicitly and explicitly an anti-Leninist effort to resolve the contradictions of the Western world by means of reform without revolution. Wilson also worked to transform the Entente’s struggle against the Central Powers into a crusade for international liberalism, in direct opposition to Lenin’s desire to transform the war into a world revolution.
For these reasons, Wilsonianism and Leninism came into direct conflict after 1917 as two opposed methods of solving the problems and challenges of the war. So when Wilson’s Fourteen Points address appeared, the background to the hostilities with the Bolsheviks already existed. Wilson’s address was delivered on 8 January, just at the time when the Brest-Litovsk talks had been recessed following the reevaluation of Germany’s imperialistic demands toward Russia. Before this, by December 1917, according to Lansing, he and Wilson had agreed in principle that the recognition of a Bolshevik regime per se in Russia was out of the question. This was not only because the Bolsheviks had upset the liberal Provisional Government, but also because the secretary of state saw Bolshevik authority as merely that of a minority faction which had imposed class despotism on parts of Russia by force.
The 8 January 1918 Fourteen Points peace program made a powerful appeal to the Russian people with a memorable statement of American war aims. The address was at once telegraphed to Petrograd to Ambassador David R. Francis with instructions to have it conveyed unofficially to L. Trotsky, who was People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and who headed the Russian delegation at the Brest-Litovsk talks. The Fourteen Points were published in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda and were freely quoted by other Russian newspapers. The explanation was simple. Lenin had approved of Wilson’s message and, as the embassy replied three days later, he agreed to telegraph Wilson’s entire speech to Trotsky at Brest. Why the brief rapprochement? The Bolsheviks were sensitive to the respect with which Wilson had treated Bolshevik peace principles, writes B. Unyerberger. But Levin explains that Colonel House was responsible; his approach to the Russian government in the text of the Fourteen Points address made few clear distinctions between liberal Russia and Bolshevik Russia.
However, in view of their past attack on Wilsonian bourgeois pacifism, the Bolsheviks combined their brief friendliness toward Wilson with a deep distrust of his noble words. Their propaganda did its work, and in several years only the rare person in Russia could remember that the United States had its own peace program and that Lenin’s Decree of Peace could only remotely be compared with Wilson’s Fourteen Points as a just list of demands (rather than an imperialist program). One of the famous Bolshevik publicists, M. Pavlovich, confessed in 1923 that the average Russian reader did not know even the main ideas of Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
Yet in 1918, the Bolsheviks did expect an encouraging response from America. The initial Soviet reaction to the United States already contained elements that were to persist for the next half century, and even up to now. America was thought to be the least imperialist of the belligerents, her people the most sensitive to democratic slogans and arguments. American rulers were seen as the most naive and least experienced among those of the Great Powers. It was assumed that America was least likely to intervene in Russia; on the contrary her interest was to preserve Russian territorial integrity, especially against the Japanese.
This complicated attitude toward Wilson and America can be seen in the documents of March 1918. On 14 March, Wilson sent a message to the Fourth Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Soviets in which he encouraged the deputies not to ratify the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. Lenin wrote a draft of the resolution on this issue. He did not appeal directly to President Wilson. Lenin expressed his thanks to the American people and labor groups on the occasion of the feelings of sympathy being passed to the Russian people in Wilson’s message. He believed that the glorious moment of victory of the laboring masses of all the capitalist countries against their exploiters, and the establishment of socialist society, was not too far distant.
The main course of hostility between Leninist Bolshevism and Wilsonianism began after Wilson’s approval, with great hesitation, of the American action in Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War in 1918. Wilson was considered to be one of the chief organizers of the “world’s counter-revolutionary march against the Soviet Republic” and against the revolutionary movement in Europe. This topic was sounded in Lenin’s works in the summer and fall of 1918. In Lenin’s famous “Message to American Workers,” he called Wilson “the chief of American billionaires” and “the servitor of the sharks of capitalism” (prisluzhnik akul kapitalizma), making him into the head of the world counterrevolution. This was a period when Bolshevik ranks believed in the future world, an attitude that made its impact on Soviet foreign politics up to 1921. Wilsonianism was a kind of liberal reform to stop this world revolution, as I mentioned earlier. Perhaps this was the main source of American-Russian hostility. Lenin never respected liberal ideology and considered any reformists as the worst enemies of the revolution. Lenin believed that American workers would not follow Wilson. They were supposed to follow Bolshevism in the civil war against the bourgeoisie.
In another of Lenin’s speeches in December 1918, Wilson was blamed for imposing on Germany a peace treaty worse than that of Brest-Litovsk. Because of this, Lenin branded Wilson as “W. Wilson—the Tiger & Company.” Lenin was very quick in expressing his anger with Wilson and he found very harsh words in writing about him. One can only guess what Russian expressions he used speaking about Wilson to his comrades in everyday life. Lenin’s writings were the beginning of that special kind of ideological and propagandist language characteristic of an authoritarian state. He often used the term “us” and expressions like “our struggle,” “our policy,” and “our enemies” to stress opposition to “them,” “capitalist pacifists,” “imperialists,” to make the context of his speech more expressive and persuasive.
The hostility to Wilson as a leader of the “imperialist world” was strengthened in Soviet Russia in 1919. In January, a few weeks after the end of the war, when the Peace Conference at Versailles was already at work, the news came from Moscow about the establishment of “the general staff of the world revolution of the proletariat,” to be known as the Communist International (Comintern). The Comintern was to hold its founding congress in Moscow in March 1919. It aimed to destroy the political power of capitalism and replace all its institutions with “soviets” of proletarians. The whole concept of the Western democratic state itself would eventually be destroyed and replaced by a world soviet of proletarian nations, with headquarters in Moscow. So the Comintern was seen as a prototype of the future proletariat world soviet government.
But what was going on, from the Bolsheviks’ point of view, in Paris? The heads of the governments of the imperialist states gathered at Versailles to divide the world after the war and to establish a kind of international capitalist unity or even a world capitalist government. Reading Lenin’s works of the time, as well as Trotsky’s, gives us this impression. Lenin wrote in Pravda on 6 March 1919 that the skills of Wilson and Lloyd George as the leaders of “democratic capitalism” could not stop the forward march of the Communist International and the World Revolution.
On 2 March 1919, fifty-two men and women gathered in Moscow to establish the Comintern. There were only five real foreign delegations—those from Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, and Holland. The Congress in form did not look like much of a world force. Lenin made the Congress’s first speech. Trotsky read the manifesto of the Comintern, sharply criticizing the League of Nations as a world parliament of capitalists. He stated that “toiling mankind was to become the bondslaves of victorious world cliques who, under the firm-name of the League of Nations and aided by an ‘international’ army and ‘international’ navy, will plunder and strangle peoples.”
After that moment, hostility to the League of Nations was one of the main trends of Bolshevik politics and propaganda. In February 1920, Lenin called the League of Nations “that stillborn, non-existing League of Nations.” These were the beginning of the new tactics toward the League. The Bolshevik government considered it not to exist. Sometimes Lenin wanted to find special armies to fight against the League. Let me remind you about his note to Molotov on 11 August 1921. It referred to the American help to the Russian peasants who suffered from starvation, which was to reach Russia through the League of Nations institutions. Lenin wrote to Molotov that he could not work at that moment because of his illness and he asked for the help of Molotov and especially Trotsky in one delicate case. He wanted Trotsky to “slap the League of Nations publicly in the face.” He said that Trotsky could do it with great ability. In his note to Molotov, Lenin suggested how to fulfill that difficult job—to deport any person for any case of interference in domestic politics, or even to arrest them.
Let’s leave aside the moral evaluation of Lenin’s plan to punish the Americans and the activists from the League of Nations. Rather, let’s pay attention to the style of Lenin’s note and methods of struggle with the League of Nations. It really reminds one of wartime tactics. This special attitude to the League of Nations and Wilson’s legacy remained at work in Soviet policy until the 1990s. Sometimes it was more hostile, as for instance in the late 1920s, when the Comintern waged open fighting with the League, as the newly opened Moscow archives reveal. In “the Directive to the sections of the Comintern in connection with the economic conference of the League of Nations,” from 29 March, 1927, the Comintern center in Moscow ordered the communist parties of the world “to expose the plans of imperialists who were going to discuss the issues that are far from the interests of the proletariat.” The communist parties of the Western countries were encouraged to unmask the imperialists. The creators of the document appealed to the communists to defend the USSR, the cause of the Chinese revolution, and the unity of the trade union movement.
The situation changed slightly in the 1930s when Stalin was in power and had to introduce a kind of realpolitik into Soviet foreign policy. The situation in the world in 1933 changed for the worse. On the eastern border of the USSR, Japanese troops captured northeast China and seemed to be pressing on the Soviet Far East. In Europe, Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. So Stalin had to soften his attitude to the League of Nations. In December 1933, he gave his famous interview in which he said that the Soviet appreciation of the League was not always negative. The League could be “a little hillock on the road to war,” and that’s because it can be supported by the Soviet Union, said Stalin.
In the fall of 1934, the Western powers invited the Soviet Union to join the League, and the Soviet government seemed to develop interest in the League. The Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, the most powerful body in Soviet Russia, discussed the issue of Soviet presence in the League: eight times in 1934, twelve times in 1935, four times in 1936, and two times in 1938. On reading these documents in the Moscow party archive one can come to two main conclusions. The first, Stalin’s interest in the League as “a little hillock on the way to war,” declined with time because of the ineffective activities of the League in many cases. The second deduction is connected with the activities of Maxim Litvinov, the foreign commissar (minister of foreign affairs of the USSR), who was considered to be an architect of Soviet policy in the League. His freedom in decisionmaking politics was limited by the Politburo as he himself was never a member of this main party body.
The change in the Bolshevik Party’s attitude to the League of Nations is noticeable in political and history writing after 1934. But there were no changes in the Soviet appreciation of Wilson’s legacy. And with the coming of the next war crisis in the late 1930s, the negative attitude toward the League of Nations in the Soviet Union only increased. In August 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed and Stalin nearly became Hitler’s ally. It was the end of the interest in the League of Nations as “a hillock on the way to war.” The partition of Eastern Europe meant war. On 30 November 1939, the USSR began its war against Finland, its zone of influence according to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The League of Nations expelled the USSR from its body for this aggression.
This was the end of a very short peaceful period in the attitude of Soviet writers about the League of Nations. After that time, the little book of P. Lissovskii set the tone. It was a masterpiece of Stalinist propaganda. But most curiously, Lissovskii’s evaluations dominated Soviet historiography until the 1990s. He called the League of Nations “a farce show,” which diplomats participated in as “clowns,” “tomfools,” and sometimes even as “burglars.”
After World War II, three main books on the topic appeared in the USSR, all three in the 1980s. The historians Z. Gershov and A. Utkin wrote their monographs about Woodrow Wilson; and R. Ilukhina devoted her book to the League of Nations. Soviet historian Z. Gershov evaluated Wilson as an important statesman who played a noticeable part in the American life. In Gershov’s opinion, Wilson lived a hard political life full of difficulties and enemies, but he held the reins of government firmly in his hands and strengthened presidential power. Wilson’s reforms consolidated the positions of the American bourgeoisie and assisted the development of state monopoly capitalism in the United States. Gershov found Wilson’s foreign policy especially active in Latin America and applauded him for helping the economic development of the United States and its transformation into a financial center of the capitalist world. Wilson persistently secured America’s leadership in the world. But Wilson suffered the bitterness of defeat: the Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty and the Statute of the League of Nations. So the politics of destroying Soviet Russia, which Wilson helped to organize, collapsed. Gershov closed his book with the idea that Wilson served the interests of his class. He was a devoted bourgeois and gave all his talents to this service. Unfortunately, that class was cursed to disappear from the stage of history due to its objective laws.
Another famous Soviet historian, A.I. Utkin, stressed that Wilson left an important mark on American foreign policy. Before 1913, Americans had thought very seldom about the issues of the overseas world. Wilson made American foreign policy global. The president himself led foreign politics. Wilson wanted to establish a “Pax Americana.” He dreamed of consolidating the new center of the world on the North American continent. Wilson had the idea of using the League of Nations to increase the trade expansion of the United States to make it the moral and financial leader of the League. Utkin explained that Wilson’s defeat was due to the fact that the American ruling class did not accept his scheme of a global foreign policy. And it took another twenty-five years for American imperialism to believe in its own power.
R.M. Ilukhina wrote the only book on the topic of the history of the League of Nations in post World War II Soviet historiography. This was no doubt because of the ideological taboos of the topic. Moreover, Ilukhina had chosen the period of 1919-1934 for her research to avoid the issues of Soviet politics after 1939. In the book’s interesting pages narrating the various activities of the League we find the echo of the “Soviet war” against the League of Nations. Ilukhina called the League of Nations “an incubator where the future Axis powers gained their might.”
These evaluations were repeated in the general histories published in the USSR. For instance, in the History of the USA Wilsonianism was considered as a variant of the world famous national liberalism, and anti-Sovietism as the main trend of the foreign politics of Wilson. The League of Nations was organized to become the instrument for the protection of the new world order and American leadership.
But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Russian historians offered new evaluations of Wilson’s political activities. V.G. Sirotkin considers Wilsonianism as a liberal internationalism, and he defines it as utopian as Lenin’s world revolutionary communism. I take issue with this noted Russian historian about the practical results of Wilsonianism in the history of the twentieth century, as many of Wilson’s ideas were implemented after World War II. The political activist and scholar G. Starovoitova celebrated Wilson’s achievements in establishing the principle of national self-determination as an international right, this in marked contrast to Lenin’s policies. E.A. Mishina wrote an interesting and innovative article about Wilson. She praised Wilson’s foreign policy; after him nobody called the American president “a home figure,” as presidents became active on a global scale. She considers that Wilson was not an initiator of the anti-Soviet intervention, but accepted this decision under the pressure of Great Britain and France. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were, moreover, a positive program in the development of international relations. Mishina’s article is full of positive evaluations of Wilson’s presidency.
Russian and Soviet historiography about Wilson’s legacy seems to be filled with discrepancies. Russian liberals before World War I and the 1917 October Revolution could not recognize Wilson as a future leader of international liberalism. The Bolsheviks began a fierce war against Wilson’s ideas and the League of Nations. This made a great impact on the whole of Russian historiography. It was easy enough for the Bolsheviks to “defeat” these enemies with words. But the result of this ideological war was nearly complete Russian ignorance about the history of the League of Nations and Wilson’s presidency. The Russian reader knows nearly nothing about these events even now.
This is a sad turn of events, for it would be very useful for Russians to think about liberal goals in international relations, or about the price of isolationism. It would serve Russia well to imagine what the history of the League of Nations might have been like if Russia had participated in it without the burden of communist ideology. The legacies of Wilson and the League of Nations reveal many examples of the tragic misunderstanding and distrust between the world powers that led to new and dangerous wars. Russia’s ignorance about Wilson and the League may have been their most tragic defeat. Let us not repeat these mistakes. The world still needs the ideas and the practices of Woodrow Wilson and his League.