Introduction
The dissolution of the German, Austrian-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian Empires led to a series of revolutions, civil wars and border conflicts that lasted from 1917 until 1923. Historians have come to refer to this period as the Greater War or Long First World War, to capture the ways in which this violence was both a continuation and transformation of the Great War.Footnote 1 The breakdown of political order and ongoing internal violence produced cascading human crises, and thus these years were also a crucial period in the development of humanitarianism. Both private and state-funded humanitarian organisations created significant new models for aid delivery and reimagined older racial and gendered visions of imperial order.Footnote 2 This period transformed the international Red Cross movement’sFootnote 3 position on civil wars and other ‘social and revolutionary troubles’.Footnote 4 For decades the movement was ambiguous about its role during civil wars. Geneva Convention drafting states deliberately excluded civil wars from its scope and the Red Cross followed suit.Footnote 5 Nonetheless, from 1863 to 1912 both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and national Red Cross societies became involved in internal conflicts on an ad hoc basis. The Russian Civil War, above all, posed an existential threat to the Russian Red Cross Society and the founding ideals of the Red Cross as a whole, provoking institutional action. In 1921 delegates gathered at the Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross in Geneva passed official declarations that the Red Cross had a right and duty to assist victims of civil wars. Resolutions also asserted that political prisoners of internal conflicts merited humane treatment stipulated in the Hague Convention of 1907. The 1921 conference thus gave the ICRC an explicit mandate to involve itself in civil wars and other internal conflicts.
Most interpretations of the 1921 resolutions, including my own, focus on their significance to the laws of war and the twentieth-century expansion of legal protections to victims of internal conflicts. Scholars such as Giovanni Mantilla and Boyd van Dijk regard these resolutions as a ‘crucial precedent’ for Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which regulates non-international armed conflicts.Footnote 6 Although not legally binding, the 1921 resolutions encouraged both the ICRC and national Red Cross societies to engage in internal conflicts, making civil wars ‘increasingly internationalized’.Footnote 7 The 1921 resolutions also set the ICRC up to advocate for international legal regulation of civil wars.Footnote 8 This transformation in action, policy and eventually law marks the 1921 resolutions as crucial.Footnote 9
The purpose of this article is to refocus attention from the results of the resolutions to their specific origins. I argue that these resolutions were a direct response to the Russian Civil War and enabled humanitarian interventions against Soviet Russia and other communist revolutionaries. Red Cross experiences during the Russian Civil War created a template that conference delegates focused on in Geneva. At the Tenth Conference delegates discussed specific past or future interventions against Soviet Russia or other communist revolutionaries, not other civil wars or civil wars in general. While the resolution text used language about humanity and suffering, conference records make clear that the intent was anti-Bolshevik. The ICRC then immediately intervened in Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, while 1921 conference attendees used ‘humanity’ as shorthand for ‘anti-Bolshevism’, other parties embraced their resolutions and applied them to struggles against colonial and state repression, conflicts not envisioned by the 1921 Red Cross delegates. The ICRC was therefore reluctant to become involved in such further cases unless welcomed by all fighting parties. This occurred rarely, only when conflicts were roughly symmetrical and warring parties had reciprocal interests in neutral protection for their prisoners and civilians. The anti-Bolshevism of the 1921 resolutions is revealed in the hesitancy of the ICRC to expand beyond anti-Bolshevik interventions.
Historiographical Background
Existing scholarship does not detail how anti-Bolshevik motivations shaped the resolutions’ application. Both François Bugnion and Jacques Moreillon acknowledge that the Russian Civil War dominated the 1921 conference but argue this led to renewed calls for neutrality.Footnote 10 Mantilla and van Dijk note that the anti-Bolshevik motivations of Dr Georges Lodygensky, a member of the Tsarist Russian Red Cross Society, influenced the ICRC’s decision to place civil wars on the agenda.Footnote 11 Mantilla also notes that delegates had a ‘latent concern’ about inadvertently legitimising communist revolutionaries but believes the resolutions focused on humanising internal conflicts by aiding victims.Footnote 12 I contend that anti-Bolshevism was the primary motivation behind these resolutions for all delegates. This interpretation expands beyond that of Jean-François Fayet, who views the 1921 resolutions as an effort by Lodygensky and his collaborator Nikolaï Czamansky to legitimise White Russian plans to aid Kronstadt Rebellion insurgents.Footnote 13
This research adds to the findings of David S. Foglesong, E. Tutku Vardağli and Tomás Irish, who link humanitarianism and anti-Bolshevism during this period.Footnote 14 However, their work focuses on American and British state-funded organisations or, in the case of Irish, intellectual elites. This article addresses instead what Irish has termed the ‘mechanics of how humanitarianism sought to roll back the advance of Bolshevism’.Footnote 15 The principal actors are from Switzerland and various newly emerging (or recently defeated) central, eastern and southern European nations.
Finally, this article explains the ICRC’s reluctance to apply the 1921 resolutions to the Rif War (1920–6), the Irish Civil War (1922–3) and political prisoners in fascist Germany and Italy. Scholars have attributed this to the ICRC’s unwillingness to alienate powerful European states, a Eurocentric prioritisation of conflicts between ‘civilized nations’ and the antisemitism of International Committee members.Footnote 16 I emphasise instead that the drafters and supporters of the 1921 resolutions never intended for them to be interpreted as broadly as they subsequently were.
This article is based on archival documents and published and unpublished articles, reports and conference proceedings from the Archives and Library of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland. It prioritises the perspective of the International Committee, ICRC delegates in the field and national Red Cross delegates who attended the 1921 conference in Geneva. My argument regarding anti-Bolshevism pertains to these groups, not to all the organisations engaged in humanitarian activities during the Russian Civil War. Other sources would be needed to access the perspective of local actors, as well as the Soviet Russian Red Cross Society, which boycotted the 1921 conference. In the following sections, I first provide a brief overview of the Red Cross movement’s early positions on civil wars. I then discuss Red Cross involvement during the Russian Civil War, focusing on the experiences of international actors. Next, I analyse the civil war debates and resolutions at the 1921 Geneva conference. I conclude by comparing how the ICRC implemented the 1921 resolutions over the next five years in Upper Silesia, Soviet Russia, the Irish Free State and Morocco.
The Red Cross and Civil Wars, 1863–1912
The international Red Cross position on civil wars was ambiguous until 1921. The movement deferred to governments’ decisions to exclude civil wars from the Geneva and Hague Conventions. Unofficially, Red Cross societies undertook ad hoc interventions in internal conflicts. In 1863, the five Genevan philanthropists who founded what would become the ICRC decided ‘first and foremost … no action should be contemplated during civil wars’.Footnote 17 Avoiding unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states and deference to established governments was characteristic of the first fifty years of the movement.Footnote 18 In 1873 the Bulletin of the Red Cross noted that the Geneva Convention did ‘not in any way concern civil wars’ but also considered the principles of charity and aid to the wounded applicable to ‘internal struggles’.Footnote 19 At the 1884 Third International Conference of the Red Cross, the Dutch Red Cross Society drew a distinction between national aid during insurrections, the prerogative of the national Red Cross society, and international aid, which was prohibited.Footnote 20 However, the Third International Conference ran out of time to discuss the issue. From 1863 to 1912 national Red Cross societies and the International Committee were involved in over twenty different ‘civil wars’, ‘insurrections’ or ‘massacres’.Footnote 21 These included the Second Carlist War in Spain (1872–6), the Herzegovina Uprising (1875), the Transvaal War (1880–3) and the Cuban War of Independence (1897). Further research would be needed to identify patterns: the Red Cross societies involved, motivations for sending aid and perspective on the legitimacy of the conflict varied.
The movement first officially discussed the Red Cross role in civil wars in 1912, at the Ninth International Conference in Washington, D.C. Drawing from the examples of American Red Cross aid to Cubans during their 1897 war of independence, American and Cuban Red Cross societies sought a new international convention governing civil wars. This new convention would ensure that the neutrality of medical personnel was respected and that aid would be distributed impartially, irrespective of political divisions.Footnote 22
Other delegates vehemently rejected this proposal, maintaining the movement’s deference to national governments. In their view, giving food or medical aid to rebels recognised them as legitimate, and only governments should decide legitimacy. The delegate from the Russian Empire went so far as to suggest Red Cross aid to rebels was an act of treason.Footnote 23 This strong statement reflected the extent to which the Tsarist regime saw the Russian Red Cross Society as an agent of the state, despite its private, voluntary status. As the next section shows, it was only after the Russian Civil War that the movement officially declared that the Red Cross had a right and duty to assist victims of civil war.
The Russian Civil War’s Threat to the Red Cross, 1917–21
The international Red Cross movement’s ambiguous position on internal conflicts was upended by the dissolution of the Russian, German, Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires after 1917. The 1912 belief that Red Cross aid to rebels was a criminal act continued but became highly problematic as multiple governments and Red Cross societies vied for legitimacy. The determination of criminality was dependent on which side of the civil war one was on or which army happened to have occupied the town most recently.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil war had a particular impact on the Red Cross movement because it posed an existential threat. The Russian Red Cross Society was one of the most established (founded in 1867), with long-standing ties to the ICRC.Footnote 24 The Bolshevik regime rejected the bourgeois charitable ideas upon which the Red Cross was founded and in 1918 sought to dissolve the national society. The Russian conflict was also long, complex and inspired other socialist revolutions. Red and White Armies fought on multiple fronts. Bolshevik world revolution and nationalist declarations of independence clashed in the Polish–Soviet War (1919–21), Ukrainian–Soviet War (1917–21), Finnish Civil War (1918), Béla Kun’s communist revolution in Hungary (1919) and the Soviet invasion of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1921). Declarations of national independence splintered the Russian Empire and divided the Russian Red Cross, leading to new and competing organisations on contested territories. Multiple organisations claimed ownership of the Russian Red Cross’s buildings, supplies and cash accounts located throughout the former empire.
The Russian Civil War dissolved and divided the Russian Red Cross Society and threatened the principle of neutral medical aid. Society leadership drew from the aristocracy and imperial family. Although it was a voluntary organisation, it received significant government subsidies.Footnote 25 After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks condemned the society as a stronghold of the old regime. In December 1917 the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) ordered the demobilisation of all Russian Red Cross personnel. On 6 January 1918 Sovnarkom dissolved the society, seized its property and imprisoned its leadership.Footnote 26
In addition to the dissolution of the Moscow society, the political and military divisions that fuelled the Russian Civil War directly impacted the operations of the Russian Red Cross. The White Armies of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, General Nikolai Yudenich and General Anton Denikin had two Russian Red Cross societies aiding their soldiers: the Provisional Directorate for the Affairs of the [Russian] Red Cross in the south and the Provisional Directorate General of the Russian Red Cross in the north. In contested territories like Ukraine, the landscape was even more complicated. The Ukrainian Red Cross Society supported the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was at war with both the Red and White Armies.Footnote 27
In territories that successfully declared independence from the Russian Empire, the personnel and resources of the Russian Red Cross formed national Red Cross societies. When Pehr Evind Svinhufvud’s first senate declared Finnish independence in December 1917, medical units of the Russian Red Cross in Finland de facto became the Finnish Red Cross.Footnote 28 When the Finnish Civil War began, Finnish Red Cross doctors and nurses remained attached to the White Army, although they provided medical care to all wounded soldiers.Footnote 29
The neutrality of Red Cross work and personnel was undermined by the ideologically polarised nature of the conflicts. As in prior non-international conflicts,Footnote 30 while neither the Geneva nor Hague Conventions directly applied, Red Cross workers believed that their neutrality should be respected. Nevertheless, Red Cross personnel reported numerous attacks against medical institutions, the pillage and looting of medical supplies and the arrest and execution of personnel.Footnote 31 Respect for humanitarian work and attacks intermingled in unpredictable ways. For example, the Ukrainian Red Cross continued to operate twenty-six hospitals in and around Kyiv under Red Army occupation from February to August 1919. Yet when Anton Denikin’s White Army seized Kyiv in late August 1919, military authorities seized control of institutions and medical material from the Ukrainian Red Cross. Only after the Red Army returned to Kyiv in December 1919 could the Ukrainian Red Cross resume its work.Footnote 32
The dissolution and division of the Russian Red Cross Society, combined with violent threats to neutral humanitarian aid, prompted the ICRC and other neutral national Red Cross societies to intervene directly and substantially in the Russian Civil War. After the dissolution of the Russian Red Cross Society in 1918, the ICRC appointed Edouard A. Frick its delegate in Russia. The ICRC thought the civil war’s horrors were ‘one hundred times more terrible’ than the Great War’s and they were needed more than ever.Footnote 33 Frick was a Swiss businessman living in Russia who had assisted the Russian Red Cross during the Great War. His mandate was to help the society continue its humanitarian activities. The International Committee admitted that they could not advise Frick how to accomplish this.
Frick and the Central College of the Administration of [Russian] Red Cross Affairs sought to convince the Bolshevik authorities to save the Russian Red Cross. Their negotiations had some success. In May 1918 Lenin reversed the order dissolving the society but ordered a reorganisation, with new pro-Bolshevik leadership.Footnote 34 He also decreed that his government would adhere to the Geneva Convention,Footnote 35 even though the Bolsheviks had repudiated most other international treaties and Tsarist commitments. In November the reorganised Russian Red Cross Society Assembly in Moscow ratified articles of association, emphasising continuity with the former society.Footnote 36
These actions brought practical benefits to the Soviet regime. Continued adherence to the Geneva Convention could benefit the thousands of un-repatriated Russian Great War and Red Army prisoners. If Lenin repudiated the convention, these prisoners would no longer benefit from reciprocal protections. The Bolsheviks also hoped to use official recognition of the (Soviet) Russian Red Cross Society as a step toward international recognition of their government. Only one Red Cross society was permitted per state, so recognition of the Soviet society could be read as legitimising the Soviet government.Footnote 37 This is why the November 1918 articles of association emphasised continuity with the previous organisation. The Bolsheviks hoped that the ICRC would decide that the reorganised society could inherit the previous Russian Red Cross Society’s official recognition.Footnote 38 They were sorely disappointed. The ICRC, aware that official recognition had a controversial political corollary, decided that the reconstituted society in Moscow had to reapply for recognition. This soured relations between Geneva and Moscow until 1921.Footnote 39
Frick and other Red Cross delegates also formed international committees across the former Russian Empire to preserve Red Cross activities amidst the internecine violence. These committees were most successful early on, before Bolshevik victory was certain. All focused on political prisoners, adapting the Great War practice of neutral inspections of prisoners of war to the civil war. As a Red Army victory became more likely, Bolshevik authorities had less and less to gain from tolerating this work.
In June 1918 Frick organised a committee of delegates from the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Red Cross societies in Moscow to work while the Russian Red Cross was in disarray. The most pressing needs were feeding children and visiting political detainees. In Moscow and Petrograd, delegates from this committee visited foreign and Russian prisoners, advocating for improved conditions and release. By December 1918 more than 1,000 prisoners were released.Footnote 40 ICRC delegate Paul Piaget hoped to establish a sanitary barrier against epidemic diseases from Moscow to Sochi. The All-Russian Zemstvo Union, a civil society organisation established in 1914 that worked alongside the Red Cross, provided sanitary material, transport and 400 medical personnel. Piaget provided diplomatic support and negotiated with Ukrainian, Caucasian and German authorities. With the permission of Edouard Odier, the Swiss Minister in Petrograd, their sanitary train travelled under both Swiss and Red Cross flags. Swiss and Danish delegates were sent to the Czechoslovak front to investigate reports that the White Army and Czech troops were committing abuses against Red Cross personnel. The Swedish and Danish Red Cross societies also sent a mission to Siberia (Omsk). This mission included Swedish nurse Elsa Brandström, who remained there at great personal risk until summer 1920.Footnote 41
In 1919 Bolshevik authorities cracked down. Frick left Moscow in October 1918.Footnote 42 By March 1919 the Russian Red Cross was fully adapted and subordinated to the requirements of the Red Army.Footnote 43 In April 1919 Russian Red Cross and neutral society delegates were arrested. The last remaining neutral representative in Moscow, Dr Martini of the Danish Red Cross, left that month.Footnote 44
A similar international committee formed in Ukraine. Its work was also most successful in the early years of the civil war. On 10 January 1919, less than a month before the Red Army occupation of Kyiv, representatives of the Danish, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish Red Cross societies created a Committee for the Relief of Victims of the Civil War. Gabriel Jenny, the Swiss consul in Kyiv, served as honorary president. Diplomats from the Italian and Spanish consulates in Kyiv also joined as honorary members.Footnote 45 Dr Georges Lodygensky, a Russian doctor and former member of the Tsarist Russian Red Cross, ran the Kyiv committee until February 1919, when nurse Madame O. Losiewsky took over.Footnote 46
The most important aspect of the Kyiv committee’s work was on behalf of political prisoners. The committee sought to register all arrests within twenty-four hours and advocated for individuals to be moved to better facilities. It provided clothing, underwear, soap, towels, meals and medical care via nurses to prisoners in the Lukyanivska Prison hospital.Footnote 47 During Anton Denikin’s advance in April 1919, the Red Army evacuated hostages from Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv and other southern Ukrainian cities. The Kyiv committee gained Bolshevik authorisation to send nurses accompanying these hostages back to Moscow. The Kyiv committee also organised material aid for prisoners’ families: cash assistance, a canteen, a children’s shelter and a linen and food depot. In late 1919 the committee was serving 1,500 hot meals daily to families of those detained by both the Red Army and Denikin’s White Army. It ran a free ambulance and a medical–food train on the front line. The committee also cared for Jewish pogrom victims and their children in Ukraine. These detachments went under the Red Cross flag because Kyiv Jews feared attack if they sent aid directly.Footnote 48
The ICRC intersected with the Kyiv committee as the White Russian advance faltered. Dr Lodygensky travelled to Rostov in September 1919 to expand the committee’s work, but by December Denikin’s army had evacuated the city. Lodygensky was forced to ask two ICRC delegates, Max de Muller and Anton Simonett, to protect the hospital.Footnote 49 They agreed and the Swiss Consul de Rampach informed the Bolsheviks that the ICRC was running the hospital. Thanks to de Rampach, ‘no excesses’ were experienced by the sick and wounded during the first month of Red Army occupation.Footnote 50
Soon after the Kyiv committee ceased operations. In his final report, Lodygensky argued an external, neutral organisation like the ICRC needed to organise relief work during a civil war because in a civil war it became ‘a serious crime, as soon as the political situation changed’ to assist victims.Footnote 51 Lodygensky lobbied the ICRC in Geneva from 1919 to 1920 to get this topic on the agenda of the next International Conference of the Red Cross.Footnote 52
ICRC experiences in Ukraine provided further evidence that international protection could facilitate humanitarian work. In 1919 and 1920 the ICRC partnered with the Ukrainian Red Cross, which was affiliated with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, to send two anti-epidemic sanitary trains to combat a typhus epidemic.Footnote 53 The second train arrived in Kam’yanets’-Podil’s’kyi on 4 July, days before the city fell to the Red Army.Footnote 54 ICRC delegates fled and the retreating Ukrainian Army, bandits and Red Army soldiers all looted the train in succession. The head of the Ukrainian Red Cross Mission, Dr Kholodny, was permitted to transport his medical material and personnel to Kyiv only because he was ‘under the protection of the ICRC’.Footnote 55
Finally, the ICRC successfully intervened in Hungary on behalf of prisoners during the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik regime of Béla Kun. Rodolphe Haccius was sent to Budapest in March 1919 as part of the ICRC’s mission to repatriate prisoners of war.Footnote 56 Three days after his arrival Béla Kun led a communist coup and imprisoned thousands of ‘bourgeois’ foreigners and Hungarians. Haccius and Georges Burnier, sent from Geneva to help, successfully negotiated the release of all foreign hostages and all Hungarian prisoners who were sick or over sixty and obtained improved rations and medical care for the remaining prisoners. When Béla Kun’s regime fell in August, Haccius gained access to Bolshevik prisoners and found that they were beaten daily by guards. He appealed to the authorities and in April 1920 reported that beatings had ceased.Footnote 57
By 1921, Red Cross delegates had drawn three lessons from these experiences. First, the dissolution and division of the Russian Red Cross Society indicated that the movement could not ignore civil wars, as civil wars would not ignore them. Second, the success of the Moscow and Kyiv international committees and the ICRC’s direct intervention suggested that neutral, international organisations should be involved in future conflicts. Third, the protection of political prisoners loomed. Delegates ignored the fact that most successful humanitarian actions happened before any single party had dominance in the conflict. This fourth lesson was not a focus in 1921 but its significance would be realised during the interwar years.
Anti-Bolshevism at the Tenth International Conference, 1921
From 30 March to 7 April 1921 Red Cross delegates gathered in Geneva for their first international conference since 1912. The conference’s Third Commission discussed the role of the Red Cross during civil wars and its recommendations were adopted unanimously by the Plenary Assembly on 6 April.Footnote 58 The language of these resolutions gave the impression of broad support for humanitarian intervention on behalf of victims in a wide variety of conflicts. However, conference records make clear that these resolutions were specifically intended to justify intervention – already underway and planned – against Soviet Russia and future communist revolutionaries.
The resolutions declared the Red Cross’s ‘right and duty to assist in the event of civil war, social and revolutionary troubles’ and recognised that ‘all victims of the civil war or any of the aforementioned unrestricted disputes have the right to be rescued in accordance with the general principles of the Red Cross’.Footnote 59 The delegates also passed a resolution condemning political hostage taking during civil wars, asserting that detainees must be treated according to Hague Convention principles.Footnote 60
Primary responsibility for aiding victims lay with the national Red Cross society of the country in which the conflict had broken out. This same national Red Cross society had the sole right to request, through the ICRC, that other national societies render assistance. International intervention was only permitted in exceptional cases. If the relevant national Red Cross society had been dissolved, rendered impotent or demonstrated ‘ill will’, the ICRC or another national Red Cross society delegated by it could insist that foreign aid be allowed.Footnote 61
If the government in question refused to allow foreign organisations to send aid, the ICRC would make a public statement of this fact. However, there were no plans to contravene the decision of the government beyond a public statement. Instead, the 1921 resolutions called on all national Red Cross societies to undertake a propaganda campaign emphasising Red Cross impartiality. This broad-based understanding was an ‘indispensable condition’ for effective Red Cross work during a civil war or revolution.Footnote 62 This supported an earlier resolution asserting that the Red Cross movement must be independent, despite national societies’ roles as military auxiliaries.Footnote 63
Despite reference to ‘all victims’ and ‘unrestricted disputes’, these resolutions had a specific anti-Bolshevik intent. Representatives of the ICRC sought to avoid overt political actions but did not object to the anti-Bolshevik tenor. The conference took place at a time when all the White Armies had been defeated by the Red Army, but exiled White Russians hoped for anti-Bolshevik intervention. In February 1921, exiled Russian Red Cross leaders established a General Directorate of the Russian Red Cross Society with headquarters in Paris.Footnote 64 On 7 March 1921, days after the start of the Kronstadt Rebellion, this Paris-based Russian Red Cross announced its intention to send supplies to the insurgents.Footnote 65 The Peace of Riga was signed between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Russia and Soviet Belarus on 18 March 1921. That same day, the Red Army completed its invasion of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, forcing its government into exile. These ongoing events heavily influenced the conference proceedings.
The ICRC had not officially recognised any Russian Red Cross organisation as the sole official national society of Russia. It invited the Russian Red Crosses in both Paris and Moscow to send representatives as non-voting guests. Dr Zenovi Soloviev, the president of the Moscow organisation, was offended and refused to attend the conference or send official representatives.Footnote 66 The Paris Russian Red Cross sent two: Nikolaï A. Czamansky, a former member of the Provisional Directorate General of the Russian Red Cross and current General Secretary of the Paris organisation; and Georges Lodygensky, the Kyiv doctor and a strong advocate of anti-Bolshevik humanitarian intervention. These men arrived as non-voting members, but on the second day of the conference the Special Commission of delegates from the Central Committees enthusiastically elevated them to official voting status.Footnote 67
Without the presence of Soviet Russian Red Cross representatives, Lodygensky and Czamansky introduced resolutions to legitimate their organisation and plan for humanitarian intervention into Soviet Russia. The other delegates, who represented Red Cross societies from states either openly or implicitly hostile to Soviet Russia, supported their efforts. On 4 April, Czamansky introduced a resolution to send humanitarian aid to Russia. ICRC President Gustave Ador pointed out that it was futile to pass a relief plan for a country that they could not enter, so the delegates unanimously passed a resolution demanding entry.Footnote 68 Later in the same plenary meeting, Czamansky called upon delegates to officially label the Moscow organisation the ‘Soviet Red Cross’, leaving the Paris organisation as the sole Russian Red Cross. This request was applauded, but Ador intervened. Ador objected that delegates must not ‘enter the political terrain’ by conferring political legitimacy on the White Russian movement.Footnote 69
The Third Commission for civil wars also included many representatives from societies impacted by recent socialist revolutions. The commission comprised two representatives of the ICRC and nine representatives of national Red Cross societies in countries that had experienced civil war, revolution or insurrections.Footnote 70 The Polish, Ukrainian and Finnish representatives all came from territories of the former Russian Empire. Lodygensky represented the Tsarist Russian Red Cross. The Germans and Italians had experienced recent socialist disturbances. Finally, while he was not originally included, a representative of the exiled government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, Antoine Georgeoliani, joined the commission for three out of four meetings.
Members of the Third Commission made explicit reference to the Russian Civil War and to the ongoing desire to intervene against the Bolshevik regime. The representative of the Finnish Red Cross, Richard Wilhelm Gottleib Faltin, referred to his government’s recent war against the Reds when he observed that Red Cross detachments could not be attached to insurgents who do not respect the Geneva Convention.Footnote 71 When discussing the legal situation of national societies during civil wars, commission debate centred on Russian Red Cross experience. To their minds, this presented the ‘typical case of the kind of irregular situation a normally organised Red Cross can find itself in when, partially destroyed and refugees abroad, another Red Cross is formed by the new government’.Footnote 72 Lodygensky sought to delegitimise the Moscow Russian Red Cross through an explicit declaration that a newly constituted Red Cross society, like the Moscow organisation, must receive new recognition, irrespective of its governments’ adherence to the Geneva Convention.Footnote 73
Debates at the fourth meeting of the Third Commission concerned future interventions into Soviet-controlled territory. Georgeoliani, using the recent Soviet occupation of his country as an example, asked for resolutions specifying that ‘when a country is divided, there is a legal government and an illegal government’.Footnote 74 The Ukrainian delegate, Tchayka, supported Georgeoliani’s desire to specify Red Cross response when a legitimate government existed alongside a ‘revolutionary government’.Footnote 75 Ultimately, the Third Commission used the term ‘authority’ instead of ‘government’, allowing for the possibility that any party controlling territory (irrespective of its political recognition) could authorise foreign humanitarian aid. Georgeoliani complained that if a government refused Red Cross entry, a stronger response was needed; a protest ‘was nothing’.Footnote 76 Jacques Chenevière, the ICRC representative, noted that ‘moral disapproval’ was the only tool they had since ‘the Red Cross does not have an army’.Footnote 77
The German representative Moritz Schlesinger, Faltin and Lodygensky sought international intervention if a national Red Cross society refused foreign assistance because of ‘impotence or ill will’.Footnote 78 They had the Moscow Russian Red Cross in mind. Lodygensky explained to Chenevière, ‘in Russia, there is a people who suffer and jailers who hold them without worrying about their suffering. Naturally, it is not the people who object to the aid intervention, but the jailers’.Footnote 79 Schlesinger and Faltin further insisted that the ICRC should not be the sole organisation authorised to intervene, because other organisations, such as the Quakers, had been granted entry by the Soviets.Footnote 80 This is why the final resolution gave the ICRC the right to delegate to national Red Cross societies.Footnote 81
Delegates also sought to ensure that humanitarian principles would not constrain governments combatting communists. At the plenary session of 6 April, Lodygensky introduced a motion stating that during civil wars political hostages and detainees ‘must be considered and treated by the belligerents as prisoners of war [emphasis added]’.Footnote 82 The Plenary Assembly adopted it.Footnote 83 The next day, the German, Finnish, Swedish, Swiss and Latvian delegations objected: it gave rebels legal rights. Ador pointed out that while Lodygensky’s resolution was targeting those in Soviet Russian prisons, the delegates had to consider other countries combatting communist revolutionaries. In that case, Ador declared ‘it is difficult to regard these revolutionaries, these rebels, as prisoners of war’.Footnote 84 For this reason, Lodygensky’s language was revised to state that belligerents should treat political detainees ‘according to the principles that inspired’ the Hague Convention of 1907.Footnote 85
In sum, the 1921 resolutions declared the right and duty for the Red Cross to intervene during civil wars, social troubles and revolutionary events. Each national Red Cross society had primary responsibility for aiding victims, but the resolution also gave the ICRC a mandate to intervene and advocate on behalf of political prisoners. Resolution language made no distinction among different types of internal conflicts or the ideologies that fuelled them, hence allowing for their later application to an extremely wide variety of conflicts. However, this later application should not distract from the fact that the historical record shows that the overriding intention in 1921 was to justify humanitarian intervention into Soviet Russia, on behalf of political prisoners held by the Bolsheviks. The delegates supported this interference in the internal affairs of a state because they held the anti-Bolshevik view that a communist government and communist Red Cross society could never be legitimate.
Patterns of ICRC Interventions in Communist and Nationalist Conflicts, 1921–6
While the Tenth Conference resolutions clarified the Red Cross position on civil wars, it also introduced a new ambiguity. The text was open to broad interpretations, though the conference meetings made clear that the resolutions were directed against Soviet Russia and other communist revolutionaries. The ICRC’s interwar reports on interventions on behalf of political prisoners (prisonniers politiques) or political detainees (détenues politiques) include actions on behalf of victims of government repression, civilians taken hostage during internal or international conflicts, fighters captured during internal conflicts and fighters or civilians retained as hostages after the end of hostilities. It is not possible to analyse all these interventions here. However, a comparison of the ICRC’s actions in Soviet Russia/Soviet Union (1921–2), with the Third Silesian Uprising (2 May – 21 July 1921), the Irish Civil War (1922–3) and the Rif War (Morocco, 1921–6) will illustrate the ambiguous interwar legacy of the 1921 resolutions and how the original anti-Bolshevik spirit manifested on the ground.
The ICRC’s approach to these four interventions varied considerably. When internal conflicts were driven by nationalist instead of communist ideologies, the ICRC only intervened if welcomed by both sides. Consistent with the anti-Bolshevik intention, the ICRC actively sought access to political prisoners in Soviet Russia, including enlisting the support of neutral and western Allied governments gathered at the Genoa Conference (1922). The ICRC was also pleased to send delegates to the nationalist uprising in Upper Silesia, because their intervention was welcomed by all parties: Polish, German and Inter-Allied. However, the ICRC demonstrated considerable reluctance to act during the Irish Civil War or Rif War. These conflicts did not fit the anti-communist template built at the Tenth Conference because the conflict was driven by nationalist and anti-colonial, not anti-communist, ideologies. Unlike in Upper Silesia, only one side (the Republicans and Rifians) advocated for ICRC intervention. The International Committee eventually acted in ways carefully designed to avoid confrontation with the Irish Free State government and Spanish colonial authorities in Morocco. Neither of these authorities, nor the British or Spanish Red Cross societies, cooperated with the ICRC’s efforts, but the International Committee declined to issue a public condemnation or declare that their obstruction demonstrated ‘ill will’.
In the months following the 1921 conference, the International Committee tried to gain access to Soviet Russia. This was the mission that the Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross delegates had in mind. First, as part of their efforts to solicit foreign food aid during the Volga Famine (Spring 1921–3), Soviet authorities allowed Woldemar Wehrlin to tour Moscow from March through July 1921 as a representative of the International Save the Children Union (Union Internationale de Secours d’Enfants). Upon his return, Wehrlin wanted immediate aid and downplayed concerns about recognising the Moscow Russian Red Cross. Edouard Frick and Paul des Gouttes, the ICRC Secretary General, supported Wehrlin’s recommendation that the ICRC have a permanent delegate in Moscow.
The ICRC officially recognised the Moscow organisation as the sole Russian Red Cross and sent Wehrlin to Moscow. At the urging of the now former Russian Red Cross in Paris, the ICRC instructed Wehrlin to intervene on behalf of imprisoned Russians and foreign nationals. Wehrlin concentrated on 1,200 detainees in Moscow, of whom only thirteen were foreigners.Footnote 86 He sent food but could not negotiate their release. Frustrated, in April 1922 the ICRC lobbied western governments gathered at the Genoa Conference to tie foreign investment in the Soviet economy to international access to political prisoners. Delegates to the Genoa Conference from Sweden, Norway, France and Italy were in favour, but the ICRC was left without leverage when diplomatic negotiations collapsed.Footnote 87 This unsuccessful attempt was the only time that the ICRC received international support to access victims of government repression, but only because Soviet Russia was the repressing government. By August 1922, Wehrlin had given up.Footnote 88 The Soviet government and Moscow Russian Red Cross rejected additional ICRC requests for access in 1924, 1925 and 1927.Footnote 89
In 1921 the Inter-Allied Governing and Plebiscite Commission of Upper Silesia invited the ICRC to intervene in the Third Silesian Uprising. The German and Polish Red Cross societies supported this intervention because they had been forbidden to enter the territory by the Inter-Allied Commission. This conflict was roughly symmetrical; no party in the conflict had a clear upper hand. Both Polish insurgents and German paramilitary Freikorps had taken prisoners and violence impacted both Polish and German civilians. Although the Inter-Allied Commission maintained that it was ‘not, strictly speaking, a civil war’,Footnote 90 the Allies were themselves divided. The French government supported Polish claims to weaken Germany, while the British and Italians worried that the loss of Silesian industry would prevent Germany from paying war reparations demanded in the Treaty of Versailles.Footnote 91 Since no party in the conflict was winning, Polish and German forces had a reciprocal interest in the neutral humanitarian protection of prisoners and civilians under occupation. It was this reciprocal interest – not the legitimacy of the civil war, the anti-communist origins of the Freikorps or the humanitarian rights of victims – that led multiple parties to support ICRC involvement.
The ICRC sent Lucien Cramer and Lucien Brunel to Opole (Oppeln) in June. They met with Wojciech Korfanty, Polish insurgent leader and Karl Höfer, leader of the German paramilitary Freikorps. They received permission from both to visit prison camps and distribute food, clothing and medicine to civilian victims. Korfanty and Höfer respected the neutrality of medical units, provided they wore ICRC badges. After inspecting prisoner camps run by both Poles and Germans, Cramer and Brunel arranged for a prisoner exchange. From 16 June to 2 July, more than 2,000 civilian internees and captured fighters were freed. With the exchanges complete, Cramer and Brunel returned to Geneva and were replaced by Henri Cuénod and Woldemar Wehrlin. Cuénod and Wehrlin located all remaining political detainees to secure their release.Footnote 92 ICRC delegates received access because the Germans and the Poles in Silesia both benefitted from allowing prisoner exchange and humanitarian aid distribution in Silesia.
In the Irish Civil War, however, the ICRC faced a conflict fuelled by nationalist ideology, in which only one party, the Republicans, wanted intervention. When the war began in August 1922, the ICRC was reluctant to take action. However, Republican supporters inundated the committee with reports that members of the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) were being incarcerated without cause, tortured and shot without trial. Lia Brazil has shown that Republican women making these requests justified them by invoking the 1921 resolutions. The ICRC decided to act after receiving a request from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, while privately speculating that reports of mistreatment were exaggerated.Footnote 93
ICRC intervention in the Irish Free State was cautious and respected the Irish Free State as the legitimate, established government. The ICRC contacted the British Red Cross (the nominal Red Cross society of the Irish Free State) and Desmond Fitzgerald, the Irish Free State Minister for External Affairs. Both refused to cooperate.Footnote 94 In 1923 the ICRC sent Raymond Schlemmer and Rudolph Haccius to Dublin. At their meeting with Fitzgerald on 17 April, he refused to acknowledge a civil war in the Free State or the ICRC’s right to intervene. To avoid public denunciation, Fitzgerald permitted the delegates to inspect prisoners at selected sites, stipulating that they would not be able to speak with detainees.Footnote 95 These conditions contradicted the principles of neutral inspections established during the Great War. Haccius’ final report concluded that complaints of mistreatment had been exaggerated and that the Irish Free State upheld the 1921 conference principles. The ICRC published a truncated version of this report but did not admit that the delegates had only limited access to prisoners.Footnote 96 Republican supporters attacked ICRC findings and continued to protest Irish Free State abuses.Footnote 97
The ICRC’s reluctant and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to intervene in the Rif War provides a final example of the limited understanding of the appropriate scope of its activity in the wake of 1921. In 1921 Abd el Krim and his forces – Rifians – attacked the Spanish colonial army in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco.Footnote 98 As Pascal Daudin’s and Pablo la Porte’s work has shown, the ICRC ignored the conflict until 1924, after other charitable organisations alerted them to the severe medical needs of Rifian refugees. The International Committee tasked Raymond Schlemmer with investigating the possibilities for a humanitarian intervention. The Spanish Red Cross was operating in the region and rebuffed Schlemmer’s inquiries about international assistance. The International Committee accepted the Spanish Red Cross’ arguments against ICRC involvement and never contacted Abd el Krim or the Moroccan sultan Moulay Youssef. It also never considered organising a Moroccan Red Crescent society: in the ICRC perspective, this was a Spanish affair.
The extension of hostilities to the French protectorate in Morocco and reports of poison gas use caused national Red Cross societies to call for ICRC intervention. To try to circumvent Spanish intransigence, the ICRC President Gustave Ador approached the French Foreign Minister Aristides Briand in September 1925. The only result was a hostile warning from the Spanish ambassador in Paris. The Spanish and French governments and Red Crosses rebuffed subsequent ICRC efforts to intervene.Footnote 99 Ador’s irregular diplomacy resembled the ICRC’s attempts to influence the Genoa Conference, but the response was quite different. The French delegates in 1922 supported ICRC intervention against Soviet Russia. They did not support a similar action against the Spaniards in Morocco, nor did any other European state: where communists were not the aggressors, the ICRC acted reluctantly and alone.
Conclusion
These four examples from 1921–6 illustrate a pattern reflected across ICRC interwar interventions. This pattern demonstrates how the ICRC understood its mandate from 1921 through its experiences during the Russian Civil War. Outside of Soviet Russia, when else did the ICRC intervene? In conflicts involving roughly symmetrical parties, the ICRC was invited by governments or national Red Cross societies to monitor prisons and advocate for the exchange or release of prisoners and civilian hostages. In 1923, ICRC delegates assisted the Greek and Turkish governments in an exchange of prisoners of war and civilian hostages captured during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–2). The International Committee sent two missions to the French-occupied Ruhr (1923–5) at the request of the German Red Cross with the cooperation of French authorities. From 1924 to 1929 the ICRC also sent delegates to both Poland and Lithuania to visit political prisoners and negotiate exchanges.Footnote 100 Finally, when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, both the Republican and Nationalist armies accepted the ICRC’s offer to provide medical care for the wounded, aid civilians and monitor prisoners. (In practice they did not fully cooperate with ICRC delegates.) By June 1938 the ICRC had visited 78,655 prisoners and visits continued until August 1938 on Nationalist territory and through the end of the war on Republican territory.Footnote 101 In all these cases ICRC intervention was welcomed because multiple parties were involved and possessed a reciprocal interest in regulating their enemy. It is no coincidence that Spanish Nationalist cooperation ended once the war turned decisively in their favour.
By contrast, the ICRC received little support to access political prisoners in Nationalist and Fascist regimes. From 1924 to 1939, the ICRC responded to calls to intervene in five other countries: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1924–5), Italy under Benito Mussolini (1931), Austria after fighting between socialist and Austrofascist forces (February Uprising, 1934), Albania under Zog I (1935) and Germany under Adolf Hitler (1935 and 1936). In these cases national Red Cross societies in country allowed ICRC visits but ensured positive reports.Footnote 102 Opponents of these regimes criticised ICRC reports, and historians since have argued that these visits produced pro-government propaganda rather than humanitarian protection.Footnote 103 Yet such visits technically followed the procedure envisioned by the 1921 conference because the resolutions embedded the Red Cross’ traditional deference to state authority in the ‘new’ principles of intervention in civil wars, unless the ICRC decided that nationalist actors demonstrated ‘ill will’. National Red Cross societies had primary responsibility for internal conflicts, and intervention required governmental permission. Interwar national societies continued their traditional policy of supporting their states and strengthened their ties to Fascist governments. The ICRC never declared that any of these societies demonstrated ‘ill will’, despite their loyal support for repressive governments.
The constraints imposed by a lack of reciprocity became more noticeable as the post-1917 socialist revolutions settled into a new political order. In the 1930s the ICRC encountered more one-government situations and fewer in which multiple parties invited intervention. During the 1930s there was also a generational shift within the ICRC that correlated with a more conservative approach. Gustave Ador, the ICRC president who had authorised the committee’s irregular diplomacy at Genoa in 1922 and who had approached the French in 1925, died in 1928. Edouard Frick was one of the most influential early advocates for ICRC civil war work and he began work with the League of Nation’s High Commissioner for Russian Refugees in 1921. Lodygensky also played a crucial role in shaping the 1921 resolutions, but his influence diminished after the official recognition of the Moscow Russian Red Cross. Many ICRC delegates from the 1920s gained internal conflict experience. Haccius served in both Hungary and the Irish Free State. Schlemmer was involved in both the Irish Free State and the Rif War. Wehrlin worked in Upper Silesia and Moscow. Cramer visited political prisoners in both Upper Silesia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Cuénod served in Upper Silesia, Greece and Turkey and the German Ruhr. By the 1930s, the International Committee had lost most of those with substantial internal conflict experience. One of the few individuals with civil war experience who bridged the 1920s and 1930s was Renée-Marguerite Frick-Cramer, the first female member of the ICRC and Edouard Frick’s wife. She continued to be one of the most forceful voices advocating for rights and protections of political prisoners.Footnote 104
In conclusion, in 1921, the international Red Cross movement adopted principles regarding Red Cross intervention in civil wars based on what it learned during the Russian Civil War. The text of the Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross resolutions technically expanded the scope of ICRC practice to a diverse set of internal conflicts and encouraged advocacy of rights and protections for civil war victims. However, the conference debates make clear that the resolutions were specifically formulated to contest past and future communist revolutions. Broad-based support for these resolutions – indicated by the applause, votes and multiple national Red Cross society statements in 1921 – was because of anti-Bolshevism.
The disconnect between text and context created ambiguity in interwar ICRC interventions. Though the text of the 1921 resolutions did not make ideological or functional distinctions among civil wars, revolutions or other internal conflicts, these distinctions mattered in practice. Ideologically, broad support for ICRC interventions was only present in the case of Soviet Russia, which was delegates’ intended target in 1921. Functionally, the Red Cross had the most opportunity to bring humanitarian relief and advocate for prisoners in conflicts that resembled the early Russian Civil War: roughly symmetrical conflicts with at least two armies contesting territory. This was also a lesson of the Russian Civil War, but one ignored by delegates in 1921. The open-ended language of the resolutions hid a much more direct historical context that restricted its viable application.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777325000669.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
