Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War was born from a single panicked calculation: that the weapons the Allies had shipped to Russia might end up in German hands. When the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on the 3rd of March 1918, pulling Russia out of World War I, the Allied Powers felt something close to betrayal. Overnight, a military partnership curdled into something far more complicated.

  What followed was a sprawling, multi-year set of military expeditions across some of the most remote territory on earth. British troops waded ashore at Murmansk. American soldiers shipped out from the Philippines. Japanese forces poured across the China-Russia border. The Italians sent Alpini troops. France landed in Odessa. At its peak, soldiers from more than a dozen nations were scattered across a vast arc from the Baltic coast to the deserts of Transcaspia.

  But who were these forces fighting for, and why? Their objectives kept shifting beneath their feet. First they came to protect supplies. Then to rescue trapped allies. Then to prop up the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. And throughout it all, as the historian Robert Maddox would later put it, the intervention's most immediate effect was to prolong a bloody civil war, costing thousands of additional lives.

• 2. The Road to Intervention

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  Russia's collapse as an Allied partner began long before the Bolsheviks took power. The February Revolution of March 1917 toppled Tsar Nicholas II and installed a Provisional Government that pledged to keep fighting Germany on the Eastern Front. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who had hesitated to align America with a despotic tsar, now dropped his reservations and began providing economic and technical support to Alexander Kerensky's new government.

  The support came too late. The Kerensky offensive was defeated by a German and Austro-Hungarian counterattack, the Eastern Front collapsed, and the Russian Army stood on the verge of mass mutiny. Kerensky replaced his Commander-in-Chief, bringing in Lavr Kornilov, who then attempted to establish a military dictatorship by staging a coup. Behind Kornilov stood British interests: Kerensky publicly accused Brigadier-General Alfred Knox, the British military attaché in Petrograd, of producing pro-Kornilov propaganda. Kerensky also claimed that Lord Milner, a member of the British War Cabinet, wrote a letter expressing support for Kornilov. A British armoured-car squadron commanded by Oliver Locker-Lampson, dressed in Russian uniforms, participated in that failed coup.

  When the October Revolution overthrew Kerensky's government, British and French strategists had already been drawing lines on maps. According to historian William Henry Chamberlin, an Anglo-French convention concluded in Paris on the 23rd of December 1917 carved Russia into spheres of influence: Britain would control the Cossack regions, the Caucasus, Armenia, Georgia and Kurdistan; France would take Bessarabia, Ukraine and Crimea. The economic logic was transparent. British investment predominated in Caucasian oil fields; French investors were more interested in Ukraine's coal and iron mines.

• 3. The Scale of the Force

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  By January 1919, the British presence in the Caucasus alone had grown to 40,000 troops, the largest of all their intervention contingents in Russia. That figure alone gives a sense of how far the initial limited expedition had expanded.

  Across all theatres, the numbers were staggering in their variety. Romania contributed 50,000 troops of the 6th Romanian Corps under General Ioan Istrate in Bessarabia. Japan ultimately deployed more than 70,000 soldiers in the east, far beyond the roughly 7,000 originally expected. Greece sent 23,351 troops, who withdrew after three months. The United States fielded 13,000 Americans split between the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions. Fourteen thousand British troops served in North Russia alone. Canada sent 4,192 soldiers to Siberia and another 600 to Arkhangelsk. The Chinese Beiyang government sent 2,300 troops to Vladivostok, partly to protect Chinese merchants there. Even Australia contributed, with 150 soldiers mostly in the Arkhangelsk region.

  The Italian contingent had an unusual origin story. The Italians created a special 'Corpo di Spedizione' combining Alpini troops sent from Italy with ex-prisoners-of-war of Italian ethnicity from the former Austro-Hungarian army, recruited into the Italian Legione Redenta. They were initially based in the Italian Concession in Tientsin and numbered about 2,500. The British Siberian force, meanwhile, had the distinction of being commanded by Labour Party MP and trade union leader Lieutenant Colonel John Ward.

• 4. Fighting in the North

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  On the 4th of March 1918, 170 British troops arrived at Murmansk, the day after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. Their first military engagement came on the 2nd of May, and it was disorienting: British marines fought alongside Red Guards against a party of White Finns who had captured the Russian town of Pechenga. In its first action, the Allied force had actually fought on the Bolshevik side.

  The situation reversed itself by August. On the 2nd of August 1918, Tsarist Captain Georgi Chaplin staged a coup against the local Soviet government at Arkhangelsk, with General Poole coordinating the operation from the Allied side. Allied warships sailed in from the White Sea, and 1,500 French and British troops occupied the city. Chaplin and the popular revolutionary Nikolai Tchaikovsky then established the Northern Region Government.

  Four months later, the Allied gains had shrunk by 30-50 km along the Northern Dvina and Lake Onega area as Bolshevik attacks grew more sustained. The news of the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, which many British troops expected would mean an immediate withdrawal, brought no such relief. Instead they faced further fighting and a new unsettling weapon: on the 27th of January 1919, word reached Arkhangelsk that the Bolsheviks had fired poison gas shells at British positions on the Arkhangelsk-Vologda railway. The Bolsheviks used poison gas on at least two occasions in North Russia, though its effectiveness was limited.

  Mutiny became a recurring problem on both sides. On the 11th of December 1918, the first time White Russian troops were sent into combat in the North Russian campaign, they mutinied. Their ringleaders were shot on the orders of General Ironside. The Allied forces suffered their own breakdowns: the British Yorkshire Regiment and Royal Marines rebelled at points, as did American and Canadian forces. In April 1919, a 500-man North Russian Relief Force was recruited in Britain for what was publicly described as a purely defensive mission. In June, plans were quietly made to use them in an offensive aimed at capturing the key city of Kotlas and linking up with Kolchak's White forces in Siberia. The offensive was cancelled when Kolchak's forces were pushed back rapidly.

  On the 20th of July 1919, 3,000 White troops in the city of Onega mutinied and handed the city to the Bolsheviks. Onega was the only overland route between the Murmansk and Arkhangel theatres, making the loss a serious strategic blow. In a subsequent attempt to retake the city, British officers had to force White Russian detachments to land at gunpoint, since they flatly refused to fight. One Allied ship saw five Bolshevik prisoners temporarily subdue 200 White Russians on board and seize control of the vessel.

  The last Allied troops departed Arkhangelsk on the morning of the 27th of September 1919. Murmansk was abandoned on the 12th of October. The final British fatality in Northern Russia was a private from Ormesby, Yorkshire, who died of wounds on the 26th of September.

• 5. Japan's Separate War

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  Japan's role in the Allied intervention was always something other than what the Allies envisioned. The Japanese had already landed marines in Vladivostok in January 1918, months before the formal joint intervention began. They were expected to contribute around 7,000 troops to the expedition. They eventually deployed more than 70,000.

  The Imperial Japanese Army General Staff saw the chaos in Russia as an opportunity to settle what they called Japan's 'northern problem'. They desired the establishment of a buffer state in Siberia. The government was also intensely hostile to communism. Their objectives, in other words, were fundamentally different from the stated Allied rationale.

  By November 1918, the Japanese occupied all ports and major towns in the Russian Maritime Provinces and Siberia east of the city of Chita. When the European Allied powers moved westward to try to re-establish an Eastern Front beyond the Urals, Japan refused to proceed west of Lake Baikal. The Americans, suspicious of Japanese intentions, also stayed behind to keep watch. The deployment of such a large force for what was supposed to be a rescue operation made the other Allied Powers openly wary of Japanese ambitions.

  When the western Allied powers ended the Siberian intervention in 1920, Japan stayed. Its military remained in the Maritime Provinces of the Russian Far East until 1922. Japan also continued to occupy the northern half of Sakhalin until 1925, finally withdrawing after the signing of the Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention in Beijing, in which Japan agreed to leave in exchange for the Soviet Union honoring the provisions of the Treaty of Portsmouth.

• 6. Baku and the Caucasus

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  Dunsterforce, the Allied military mission that deployed to the Caucasus in 1917, numbered under 1,000 Australian, British and Canadian troops. Named after its commander General Lionel Dunsterville, it deployed from Hamadan some 350 km across Qajar Persia. Its initial mission was to gather intelligence, train local forces and counter German propaganda. What it ended up doing was defending an oil city against the Ottoman Empire.

  The British landed in Baku on the 17th of August 1918 with a force of 1,200 men. Dunsterforce had initially been delayed by 3,000 Russian Bolshevik troops at Enzeli before proceeding by ship across the Caspian Sea. The force endured a siege through September. The British held out for the first two weeks of the month, inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy. A final Turkish attack on the 14th of September lasted until sunset, and the British withdrew that night on three waiting ships. The battle for Baku cost approximately 200 British casualties, including 95 dead.

  The Ottoman defeat in World War I changed everything. Having withdrawn from the Caucasus borders in mid-November 1918, General William Thomson arrived in Baku on the 17th of November with 1,600 troops and implemented martial law in the capital of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. British forces also occupied the Georgian cities of Tiflis and Batum, along with the full length of the Baku-Batum railway, to protect the strategic line connecting the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By January 1919 the British presence in the Caucasus stood at 40,000 troops. The last British forces left Baku on the 24th of August 1919.

• 7. Why It Failed, and What It Left Behind

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  Winston Churchill was the loudest Allied voice in favour of the intervention. A vehement anti-socialist, he saw Bolshevism as socialism's worst form and tried to gain Allied support on ideological grounds. But he was very much in the minority. Most Allied governments intervened for practical rather than ideological reasons, and most wanted out as soon as possible.

  The Allied forces were undermined by contradictions they could never resolve. They disliked the Whites, who were seen as a small group of conservative nationalists with no plans for reform. Government ministers were influenced by anti-White public opinion being mobilised by trade unions. The multiple White mutinies demoralised Allied soldiers. Divided objectives, and deep war-weariness after World War I, eroded the will to fight. According to historian John Bradley, the intervention's habit of treating White generals as servile satellites with little independence gave them a reputation as undignified puppets, driving former Imperial military leaders to join the Bolsheviks instead.

  Historians have argued about the intervention's consequences ever since. Frederick L. Schuman, writing in 1957, argued that the expedition's consequences were to poison East-West relations permanently and contribute significantly to the origins of both World War II and the Cold War. William Appleman Williams went further, arguing that the intervention made Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor possible because the lack of a meaningful relationship between America and the Soviet Union had significantly decreased Japan's risks. Historian John M. Thompson offered a contrasting view: while the intervention failed to stop the Bolshevik revolution, it so thoroughly engaged the forces of revolutionary expansionism that war-torn countries in eastern and central Europe were able to recover enough balance to withstand Bolshevism.

  Sheldon M. Stern, by contrast, rejected the idea that the Cold War can be traced back to the Allied intervention at all, arguing that the American famine relief effort of 1921-1923 outweighed the US role in the coalition. Robert Maddox's summary remains the most direct: the intervention's immediate effect was to prolong a bloody civil war, costing thousands of additional lives and inflicting enormous destruction on an already battered society. For Soviet leaders, the episode became enduring proof that Western powers would move to destroy the Soviet government whenever the opportunity arose.