Britain’s Russian fiasco: Allied intervention in the Russian civil war

Thomas Dunlop was one of them. His body was lost, but his name appears on a lonely memorial at Archangel. One hundred years on, it’s perhaps appropriate to ask, what was he doing there?

Dunlop’s terrible fate was partly the result of what today’s military might call ‘mission creep’. At first, Britain’s primary motivation in its dealings with Russia was to keep it in the First World War: to prop up a leading ally in the fight against the Central Powers. Yet, by 1917, that strategy was unravelling.

The British often found that the White Russian troops they were fighting alongside hated each other more than the Bolsheviks

Russia’s tsarist autocracy had been tottering for decades. In 1917 it finally broke under the pressure of a world war for which it was ill-equipped to fight, and growing demands for greater freedom by a resentful and hungry population. Tsar Nicholas II’s regime collapsed in March, to be replaced by a Provisional Government. The new administration, however, failed to extricate Russia from the war, and paid the price when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the capital, Petrograd, on 7 November 1917. Less than three weeks after the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin began negotiations with the Germans, which ended with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918.

But no sooner had Russia quit one conflict than it entered another. Counterrevolutionary armies and alternative governments, known collectively as ‘White Russians’, now began to form all over the country. They were soon posing a serious threat to Bolshevik authority. By July 1918, Nicholas II and his family had been executed, and Russia had disintegrated into a chaotic civil war.

Russia’s collapse was a catastrophe for the Allies, as it offered Germany an opportunity to transfer millions of troops to the west. Allied policy makers also feared that Germany might gain access to Russian oil and grain, and that German troops might seize nearly a million tonnes of armaments, munitions and other stores, now piled in great heaps on the dockside at Archangel and Murmansk in northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Siberia.

In a desperate attempt to forestall this nightmare scenario, the Allies decided to hurl troops from Britain, France, the United States and a dozen other countries into the middle of the bloody maelstrom that Russia had become. Most had little idea what they were doing. Among them was 18-year-old Bob Vincent of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment who, despite serving in southern Russia for nearly a year, later wrote that he “never really met any Russians at all or had any idea why I was there”. If Vincent failed to grasp what he was fighting for, he was far from alone. But that fact didn’t stop the British government despatching troops to combat zones across the massive Russian landmass – most notably in the north.

One of the most significant deployments came in August 1918 when Allied troops landed at Archangel in support of the White Russian ‘Northern Regional Government’. Over time the British-led force expanded to include US, Canadian and French troops, and pushed south along the Dvina and other rivers to secure the railways. Supported by aircraft and the Royal Navy’s improvised Dvina River Flotilla, the Allied Expeditionary Force made unexpectedly good progress against the Bolsheviks, but many of its soldiers were old or unfit and they were dreadfully exposed. Their Russian allies were unreliable, and winter was approaching.

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Elsewhere British warships operated against the Bolshevik Baltic Fleet, losing more than 100 sailors and several warships in the process. The Royal Navy also scored the intervention's most unlikely success, when Lieutenant Augustus Agar's tiny torpedo-armed coastal motor boats penetrated the heavily defended Bolshevik naval base at Kronstadt twice, sinking the cruiser Oleg and a submarine depot ship, and claiming two battleships damaged. Agar was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Smaller British expeditionary forces and ‘military missions’ were sent into Siberia, the Caspian and the Caucasus. In the latter, ‘Dunsterforce’, a few hundred soldiers and some armoured cars under the command of Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, worked with local nationalists and other counterrevolutionaries – but found that they often hated each other more than the Bolsheviks.

Siberian landgrab

The underlying politics of the international intervention was incredibly complex. Britain and France actively supported attempts to overthrow the Bolsheviks, with President Woodrow Wilson of the United States in reluctant support, against the advice of his own War Department. Yet by far the largest intervention force was the 70,000-strong Japanese one, and their crusade was anything but ideological. The Japanese government had an eye on seizing territory in Siberia, and the behaviour of their troops, according to one British Foreign Office memorandum, “was… that of a people who intend to annex what they have occupied”. They cared little about keeping Russia in the war or who governed it afterwards.

Even within the British government, there were hawks and doves. Prime Minister David Lloyd George wanted to keep Russia fighting, but was perfectly happy to work with the Bolsheviks if necessary, telling his war cabinet in early 1918 that “it was of no concern to the British government what socialist experiment or what form of government the Bolsheviks were trying to establish in Russia”.

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In contrast Winston Churchill, Lloyd George’s war minister after January 1919, was a zealous ideological crusader against Bolshevism, who declaimed in a speech in Dundee that “civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims”. Churchill even argued for rebuilding the defeated German army as a bulwark against Bolshevism. These internal contradictions were reflected on the ground, to the detriment of military cohesion. At one point, the British were operating in a notional partnership with the Bolshevik administration in Murmansk (which sought Allied help in facing down the threat of a Finnish attack) while fighting against Bolshevik forces elsewhere in the country.

By the time Churchill had become war minister, of course, the First World War had ended, and the only comprehensible motive for intervention had disappeared. A war-weary British population now started to question exactly why British soldiers were still fighting and dying in Russia. With democratic socialism gaining traction, many people opposed making war on communists to restore tyranny. In January 1919, the Daily Express reflected popular opinion when it paraphrased Bismarck, writing that "the frozen plains of eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier".

With democratic socialism gaining traction, many Britons opposed making war on communists to restore tyranny

British opposition coalesced around the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign, which was launched by prominent socialists in January 1919. The Socialist Labour party politician William Paul, a founding member of the movement’s National Committee, summed up its motives when he wrote that “the sheer savagery of these [White Russian] usurpers has only had the effect of driving honest moderate socialists and non-Bolshevik elements into the camp of Lenin and Trotsky”.

The communist firebrand Harry Pollitt described how the ‘Hands off Russia’ message was promoted in London’s East End by a now-forgotten evangelist, “Mrs Walker”, who roamed the streets “talking to groups of women, telling them about Russia, how we must help them, and asking them to tell their husbands to keep their eyes skinned to see that no munitions went to help those who were trying to crush the Russian Revolution”.

'Hands Off Russia' scored its most celebrated success on 10 May 1920, when dockers in London stopped loading a ship, the Jolly George, when they discovered it was carrying munitions bound for Poland, the latest British anti-Bolshevik proxy. By now, government enthusiasm for intervention had waned and the cargo was unloaded. 'Hands off Russia' went on to provide a strong nucleus for the Communist party of Great Britain when it was founded a few weeks later.

With the fighting against Germany over, opposition to a new war that nobody understood spread to the troops in the field. One Royal Engineer serving in north Russia wrote that it was “simply scandalous… to be fighting now and under such conditions when there is peace on other fronts”. Meanwhile, Major EM Allfrey of the Royal Fusiliers recorded a rumour in his diary on 2 July 1919 that “the coal miners have threatened that unless the British force in Russia is home within 40 days, they will all come out on strike… in other words, they too are Bolsheviks”.

Brutal little battles

Many members of the British forces found themselves living in squalid conditions, fighting unacknowledged but brutal little battles against a determined and ferocious enemy. There were too few troops, and many were second-rate and desperate to get home; even the Royal Marines embarrassingly experienced a mutiny in Russia.

The White Russian troops were even more prone to mutiny and desertion; many were also Bolshevik sympathisers. Lieutenant Brian Horrocks of the Middlesex Regiment trained some of them: “The filthiest and most unkempt mass of humanity I have ever seen in my life… the dregs from all the call-up depots in Siberia.” There was almost no chance of unifying them into an effective opposition. One regiment of British-trained White Russians went over to the Bolsheviks en masse on 21 July 1919, arresting their commanding officer, a Colonel Laurie, and the other British officers. “At the British offices the day was passing in its usual way,” recalled one of the ring leaders, Viktor Schetinin. “We rushed in and… pointed our rifles at the colonel. He was so surprised he just sat there as if he was nailed to the chair…”

By now, it was rapidly becoming evident that the British-led force was too small and its Russian allies too unenthusiastic for the intervention to end in anything but failure. In fact that had been the case since at least the spring of 1919 when the British commander-in-chief Brigadier-General Edmund Ironside, who had led his multinational army in the north with skill in the face of a ferocious enemy, decided to carry out one last offensive to buy time to withdraw. To help him, strong reinforcements – the British North Russian Relief Force – arrived in May largely at Churchill's instigation, commanded by General Sir Henry Rawlinson. The British launched a series of attacks then retreated, fighting all the way. "As we fought our way up the river," recalled Lieutenant-Commander Kenneth Michell of the monitor HMS M.33, "the Bolshies… drifted down all sorts of mines, frequently covered by brushwood".

On 26–27 September the British evacuated Archangel, and Murmansk two weeks later. By the spring of 1920 the British and most other Allied contingents had departed Russia altogether. Only the Japanese force remained, finally withdrawing in 1925.

The Russian civil war came to an end in 1922. But the legacy of suspicion caused by the Allies’ military support for the Whites, and their associated spying and sabotage in Moscow and Petrograd, lasted long after the last soldier had left. This might help explain Stalin’s difficult relationship with Churchill during the Second World War, and even the well-documented grudging reception received by Allied convoys to the Soviet Union. After all, the last time some Murmansk citizens had seen western ships in their harbours, the same countries had been trying to destroy the revolution, not defend it.

For James and Jane Dunlop of Newton Heath, however, undoubtedly the most significant consequence of this ill-judged decision was to condemn their son Thomas and hundreds of men like him to a lonely death in the snow.

6 lessons from the Allies' failed intervention in Russia's civil war

Nick Hewitt examines six lessons that can be learned from the Allies' failed intervention and argues that the case has much to teach today’s policy-makers

After Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Russia on 7 November 1917, toppling Alexander Kerensky’s short-lived Provisional Government, the country descended into chaos and civil war as a wave of counter-revolutionary movements sprang up, from Siberia to Ukraine and from the Black Sea to the far north.

Faced with this anarchy, Russia’s former Allies in the First World War opted to intervene on behalf of the counter-revolutionaries, collectively known as ‘White Russians’. The Allied intervention utterly failed, costing a fortune in blood and treasure which the exhausted Allies, Britain and France in particular, could ill afford, and leaving a legacy of bad feeling between Russia and the west that arguably still persists today.

Disjointed and incoherent strategy

Different nations had different goals: from simply maintaining a fighting front against the Germans and keeping essential war material out of Bolshevik hands; through ‘regime change’ or the restoration of the Tsarist autocracy; to defending existing colonial possessions or seeking territorial concessions. Even within individual countries, policy makers often failed to agree; in Britain, Prime Minster David Lloyd George was ambivalent at best, but Winston Churchill, his War Minister, was a committed, almost fanatical interventionist. In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson opposed intervention, but also authorised the deployment of US troops.

The development the Allies feared the most – and the only goal which united them all – was a separate Russian peace treaty with Germany. But when this actually happened on 3 March 1918, leaving the Germans free to move thousands of troops west to attempt a knockout blow against Britain and France, the resulting German spring offensive made no difference whatsoever to the eventual outcome of the war. Once Germany had been defeated, the only goal which made any kind of sense became redundant.

Inadequate resources

The Allied commitment was never properly resourced. If the Germans had failed to conquer a disintegrating Russian empire with more than a million men, the Allies were never going to defeat the Bolsheviks and occupy such a vast country with a few scattered penny-packets of troops. The largest deployment, in Siberia, was no more than 100,000 strong, most of which were Japanese soldiers making a blatant land grab on behalf of their government. Of all the foreign interventions into the Russian civil war, the one from Japan was by far the largest, growing to 70,000 troops.

Weak, corrupt or unpopular local forces

The assumption was that few troops would be needed because the Allies could rely on local anti-Bolshevik forces, but the Allies made no real effort to understand the disparate groups of ethnic nationalists, democrats, Romanov loyalists, proto-dictators and downright bandits with whom they were often reluctantly associated. In reality, the Allies’ Russian ‘partners’ were motivated by everything from loyalty to the late Tsar, to ethnic self-determination, or simple greed and lust for power – and often loathed each other even more than the Bolsheviks.

Failure to understand the local politics

Perhaps most importantly, the Allies failed to understand that the Russian people had largely already made their choice. However misguided hindsight may tell us it turned out to be, a sizeable proportion of those Russians who actually cared enough to be politically active wanted a Bolshevik government and had no interest in a government run by former Tsarist generals and functionaries, or one imposed by foreign powers.

No domestic support

The Allied people were sick of war, and in an era when democratic socialism was gaining traction across Europe, making war on communists to restore a Tsarist tyranny did not sit well. In Britain, opposition coalesced around a movement called the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign which, although it had little direct impact on government policy during the intervention, gained support afterwards.

No consideration of consequences

The legacy of suspicion and resentment of the west brought about by nearly three years of overt support for the White Russians lasted for decades after the last Allied soldier had left. Historians have argued that the nature of Soviet Russia made this inevitable, and this may well be the case – but the arrival of thousands of Allied soldiers apparently motivated by a desire to roll back the clock on the revolution surely cannot have helped.

LISTEN: Lucy Ash tells the story of When Britain Invaded Russia in 1918 for BBC Radio 4

This article was first published in the March 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine and has since been updated