Toward Kolchak and Denikin the attitude of the Supreme Council varied considerably.  It was currently reported in Paris that the Admiral had had the misfortune to arouse the displeasure of the two Conference chiefs by some casual manifestation of a frame of mind which was resented, perhaps a movement of independence, to which distance or the medium of transmission imparted a flavor of disrespect.  Anyhow, the Russian leader was for some time under a cloud, which darkened the prospects of his cause.  And as for Denikin, he appeared to the other great delegate as a self-advertising braggart.

These mental portraits were retouched as the fortune of war favored the pair.  And their cause benefited correspondingly.  To this improvement influences at work in London contributed materially.  For the anti-Bolshevist currents which made themselves felt in certain state departments in that capital, where there were several irreconcilable policies, were powerful and constant.  By the month of May the Conference had turned half-heartedly from Lenin and Trotzky to Kolchak and Denikin, but its mode of negotiating bore the mark peculiar to the diplomacy of the new era of “open covenants openly arrived at.”  The delegates in Paris communicated with the two leaders in Russia “over the heads” and without the knowledge of their authorized representatives in Paris, just as they had issued peremptory orders to “the Rumanian government at Bucharest” over the heads of its chiefs, who were actually in the French capital.

The proximate motives that determined several important decisions of the Secret Council, although of no political moment, are of sufficient psychological interest to warrant mention.  They shed a light on the concreteness, directness, and simplicity of the workings of the statesmen’s minds when engaged in transacting international business.  For example, the particular moment for the recognition of new communities as states was fixed by wholly extrinsical circumstances.  A food-distributer, for instance, or the Secretary of a Treasury, wanted a receipt for expenditure abroad from the people that benefited by it.  As a document of this character presupposes the existence of a state and a government, the official dispenser of food or money was loath to go to the aid of any nation which was not a state or which lacked a properly constituted government.  Hence, in some cases the Conference had to create both on the spur of the moment.  Thus the reason why Finland’s independence received the hall-mark of the Powers when it did was because the United States government was generously preparing to give aid to the Finns and had to get in return proper receipts signed by competent authorities representing the state.[270] Had it not been for this immediate need of valid receipts, the act of recognition might have been postponed in the same way as was the marking off of the frontiers.  And like considerations led to like results in other cases.  Czechoslovakia’s independence was formally recognized for the same reason, as one of its leading men frankly admitted.