The Year Episode 7: Bullitt and the Bolsheviks

This month’s podcast is about missed opportunities. Allen Dulles, a privileged young American diplomat who later became the most influential director of the CIA, decides to go on a date rather than meet Lenin the night before he is sent to Russia by the Germans to ferment rebellion. Another upper class young American, William Bullitt, actually negotiated the best terms that anyone would ever get from Communist Russia in its 73 years in existence, terms that could have prevented half of the lands of USSR falling under communist rule, but his superiors played politics with his treaty (the deadline for acceptance of which was on 10th April 1919), and the opportunity was missed. Bullitt would have his revenge on his superiors, and would later, as Ambassador to the USSR in the 1930s see at first hand the nightmarish brutality of the darkest days of Communist Russia.