Immediately after the October Revolution, the imperialists began to prepare an intervention against the Soviet Republic, hoping to drown the Land of the Soviets in blood and dismember the socialist State by means of armed intervention, with the help of internal counter-revolution and other military forces. The imperialists of Britain, the United States, France, and Japan assumed an active role as organizers and participants of the armed intervention. The question of its beginning was formally resolved at the Paris Conference, which opened at the end of November 1917, and was called to work out plans for the defeat of the Soviet state.
In the English archive of the Public Record Office, the author of these lines found a document in French-the original of the well-known agreement of December 23, 1917 between Britain and France on joint intervention and the division of "spheres of influence in Russia". This conference in Paris was attended by: from the British side - Secretary of War Lord A. Milner, Deputy Foreign Secretary R. Cecil, Major-General G. McDonogh, Sir J. McDonogh. The clerk, Lieutenant-Colonel Spears, and the interpreter, Captain Kish; on the French side, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker. Clemenceau, Minister of Foreign Affairs S. Pichon, French Ambassador to London P. Cambon and General F. Foch. As a result of the negotiations, the "Convention between France and England concerning military operations in Russia"was signed. The spheres of intervention - referred to in the convention as the "spheres of influence" of England and France - were defined as: "the English zone: the territory of the Cossacks, the territory of the Caucasus, Armenia, Georgia, Kurdistan; the French zone: Bessarabia, Ukraine, Crimea"1 . Later, additional agreements defined Siberia and the Far East as the spheres of intervention of the United States and Japan, while the British sphere included Central Asia and northern Russia (from Murmansk to the Urals). On December 24, 1917, the Bri ...
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