Dear Editor

...When these documents were first published in 1918, I realized at first glance that some of thesm were forgeries, but considered others to be authentic...

...With this cheap "spy" theory, I have no more sympathy than does Ambassador Kennan...

...As he has not yet tried, no one has been proved right, but Chamberlin has certainly been proved wrong...

...Actually, as was pointed out to me, the archives were discovered by units of the First U. S. Army...

...QUEMOY I have read William Henry Chamberlin for years, so I can only say that I am astonished by his column, "The Lesson of Quemoy" (NL, December 15...

...Quemoy has not proved eminently defensible for the obvious reason that no attempt has yet been made to take it...

...With regard to the earlier subvention of the Bolsheviks by the Germans, in the summer and early autumn of 1917, before the Bolshevik seizure of power...

...and this item, as I pointed out in my article on this subject in the Journal of Modern History (June, 1956), is one that contains no hint or mention of anything resembling a "German-Bolshevik conspiracy...

...In 1921, I discussed them at some length with Professor Paul Miliukov, the eminent historian and first Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, who had made a careful study of the papers and had also interviewed several people who had important information about the manner in which they were obtained...

...but if so, it generally appeared in the company of much purely fabricated material, and in most instances either the ostensible author or addressee of the document was quite fictitious...

...DEAR EDITOR SISSON PAPERS Much as I dislike to take issue with the historian for whose erudition and authority I have such high respect, I must offer a certain correction to David Shub's review of Dr...

...With regard to the Sisson papers, which concentrate on the period surrounding the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, I fear the difficulties are largely semantic...

...The historical value of what Dr...

...A point of fact in my review which I would like to correct is my statement that "at the end of World War II, British occupation troops discovered . . . the archives of the German Foreign Office...

...Such documents cannot be called genuine...

...I welcome his statement that Imperial funds "did flow" to the Communists in the summer and fall of 1917, and again in the spring of 1918...

...he must also possess a crystal ball...

...Zeman has published lies in the revelation that in the weeks following Mirbach's arrival in Moscow the Germans, reluctantly but feeling they had no choice, did devote funds to the support of the Bolsheviks, whom they believed to be in imminent danger of falling from power and whom they recognized as the only Russian party prepared to support the Brest-Litovsk treaty...

...Miliukov told me that he, too, had concluded that some of the papers were fraudulent, but that others were without a doubt authentic...

...Washington, D. C. JUSTIN BLACKWELDER...

...The persons who forged the Sisson documents probably had access at times to intercepts, usually highly garbled, of communications between the Soviet Government and its representatives at Brest-Litovsk, and some of this material may have been woven into the documents...

...My information came from the usually reliable German daily Die Welt of November 7, 1957, which was the only report of the documents' discovery I had seen until the last few weeks...

...or whether they were simply used by the Germans themselves to promote, through a number of channels, propaganda useful to the Communists in their differences with other parties...

...He points out that, according to a footnote in Zeman's volume, a German official described the Sisson documents in 1921 as having been "partly forged...

...Zeman published on the so-called Sisson papers, which were published by the United States Government in 1918...

...The Sisson documents purported to show a very far-reaching clandestine relationship between the Bolsheviks and the German military authorities in the period between the November revolution in 1917 and the arrival of the new German Ambassador, Count Mirbach, in late April 1918...

...The report was obviously inaccurate...

...The upshot of the Bolshevik triumph was the collapse of Russia's war effort and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, an unconditional surrender to German demands...

...Shub replies: I am grateful to George Kennan for having added his authority as a historian to that of those of us who, for four decades and in the face of manifold Communist denials, have been trying to establish the facts of Imperial German subsidy of Lenin's Bolsheviks...

...and this, he says, means that the "majority of the Sisson documents are genuine...

...The Germans helped Lenin because he (alone among Russian political leaders) demanded peace at any price...

...Their support, the Germans had reason to believe, was decisive in bringing Lenin to power...

...Zeman's documents merely confirm what was long suspected, and more recently substantiated by the German documents, namely, that funds did flow from the Germans into what they, at least, believed to be Communist party coffers...

...I would know of no justification for such a conclusion...

...whether a "majority" are genuine or bogus, I confess, still seems largely a matter of faith...

...His statement should do much to reassure those students who have been repelled by the recent vulgar accounts in a national magazine which pretend that Lenin was a mere German agent...

...It probably cannot be settled definitively until more careful study o? both the hundreds of other documents in the Harz Mountain collection which have not been reproduced in the Zeman book and, even more important, inspection of the relevant documents now immured in Soviet archives...

...Princeton, N. J. GEORGE KENNAN Mr...

...Zeman's citation of an official report by Weisman, German State Commissar for Public Order in 1919, characterizing the documents as "partly" forged, seemed to me to indicate that the question was very much open...

...Shub says that new light is shed by the documents Dr...

...There is no evidence that the Bolsheviks ever took any official cognizance of this support or acknowledged any obligation to the Germans as a result of it...

...This is precisely the period for which the documents published by Dr...

...In only one instance out of 54 is there a real possibility that the text procured by Sisson represented in the main a genuine document...

...The documents do not make it clear whether these sums were actually turned over to responsible officials of the Bolshevik party for such use a3 they might wish to make of them...

...They were, and are, of the belief that Mao had no intention of trying to take Quemoy, however...

...In any case, this was a brief and desperate flurry of activity, and Mirbach's murder in early June evidently put an end to it...

...Zeman do not confirm the output by the Germans of funds for the support of the Bolsheviks...

...As I cannot lay claim to either asset, I would simply mention the fact that people presently very highly placed in the Department of Defense were, and are, quite sure that Quemoy could not, and cannot, be successfully defended if the Chinese Communists were determined to take it...

...To defend that statement Chamberlin would have to be more than a mind reader...

...Z. E. B. Zeman's recent publication of documents from the German Foreign Ministry Archives dealing with the relations between the German Government and the Bolsheviks in the period 1915- 1918 (NL, December 1, 1958...

...In it he says, "Far from being 'indefensible,' as so many would-be military experts asserted, Quemoy has proved eminently defensible and has been the scene of a decisive check to Mao Tse-tung's expansionist ambitions...

...Though impressed, I was not entirely convinced by Ambassador Kennan's 1956 analysis that the papers were "wholly" fraudulent...