19
In June Admiral Kemp’s pleas for reinforcements were at last rewarded by the arrival of the 600-strong Syren force under Major General Charles Maynard, bringing British ground forces up to brigade strength on the Kola Peninsula. Early in July Kemp reported to the Admiralty that the Murmansk soviet was in trouble with Moscow for signing the treaty with the British, American and French commanding officers on 6 July, under which they undertook not to interfere in political matters and to supply food and training facilities for locally raised Russian troops. At Archangel, the situation was very different: an armed stand-off with the Red garrison of 800 men defying the expeditionary forces. After Elope force landed there on 2 August with a French colonial battalion from Africa and a battalion of British territorials, a small detachment of Royal Marines and sixty-four US infantrymen, they succeeded in taking over the town and total British strength rose to 8,000 men. Added to this, early in September several thousand more American personnel arrived, plus 1,300 Italians and a mixed force of 1,200 Czechs, Serbs and Poles.
As has often happened since, friction flared up between the British old hands and the Americans, who acted as though they had come to ‘rescue the Limeys’. The American commanding officer in particular resented being placed under British orders and not being taken into Poole’s confidence about the intended role of his men in this theatre of operations. A contributing factor was that many of the ‘American’ volunteers were recent European immigrants with an inadequate command of English!1 If reasonable discipline was kept within these Allied commands, the chaos among the Russian personnel in the Far North was total. On one occasion, some British sailors met 400 disgruntled Russian sailors from Askold and Chesma, who were walking from Murmansk to Petrograd – a total distance of well over 500 miles across difficult terrain – to join the fight against the White forces. Askold was a five-funnel cruiser nicknamed ‘the packet of woodbines’ by British servicemen because all those funnels reminded them of the thin, cheap cigarettes of the time. Named for a legendary Varangian hero, the ship had had a chequered war career, including an explosion in the powder magazine for which four crewmen were sentenced to death.
It was at this time that the success of a Czech column in advancing to within 30 miles of Ekaterinburg, where the royal family was under house arrest in a villa belonging to a wealthy industrialist named Ipatiev, who had had the good sense to remove himself earlier, was the indirect cause of the whole family’s murder. In the night of 16–17 July, on the grounds that the Cheka had exposed a conspiracy to rescue ‘citizen Nikolai Romanov and his family’, they were awoken and made to go into a semi-basement room. There, they were clumsily gunned down with pistols by the local commissar and his acolytes. The ex-Tsar died first, from multiple bullet wounds. His daughters were carrying many jewels sewn into their clothing, which apparently deflected some bullets, so that they had to be finished off with coups de grâce. The bodies were stripped and dumped into a well – some sources say it was a shallow disused mine shaft – later to be retrieved and partially burned before reburial in an unmarked grave. There they remained until 1979 when amateur archaeologists unearthed the remains of two adults and three girls. Identified by Russian, British and American laboratories using mitochondrial DNA techniques, they were reinterred in the St Peter and St Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg. Twenty-nine years later in 2008, another amateur enthusiast discovered nearby the remains of a young boy and a girl, subsequently identified as the missing princess and the tsarevich Alexei.
At the beginning of August, with the aim of preventing the Archangel soviet sending any more materiel south for use by the Red forces in the civil war, but against the advice of the Allied diplomatic representatives in the area, General Poole embarked a miscellaneous force of 100 Royal Marines, some British ground forces, men of the recently arrived French 21st Colonial Infantry Regiment, American marines and some Poles who had got stuck in Murmansk – a total of 1,500 men – to capture the city of Archangel. Transport was by an even stranger collection of ships, including two Russian destroyers crewed by RN personnel. He also had HMS Nairana, a requisitioned merchant ship adapted to launch its deck cargo of five Fairey Campania seaplanes, lifted by crane into and out of the water, and two Sopwith Camels launched from a special ramp on the deck. The flying and servicing personnel all belonged to the newly created Royal Air Force, but most still wore their old uniforms. The first engagement of this shipborne air force was to bomb a small fort at the mouth of the Northern Dvina.
There was a brief exchange of fire before the garrison legged it ashore. Leaving the French cruiser Amiral Aube to guard the mouth of the Dvina, the remaining force proceeded to Archangel, Poole ordered the town to be bombarded by RN vessels under the nominal command of a loyalist Russian captain called Georgi Chaplin. The town was captured with only a brief exchange of fire. However, the operation changed irrevocably the nature of relations with Russia. When the Allied ground forces moved into the town, they found most of the Bolshevik officials had fled and some citizens greeted their arrival with enthusiasm. The weather by then was torrid, with clouds of mosquitoes emerging from the tundra and finding ample human flesh on which to gorge when seamen deployed ‘ashore’ wore blue shorts with boots and blue puttees – and straw hats with anti-mosquito veils instead of sailors’ caps.
On the Kola Peninsula, although Allied forces controlled the town of Murmansk, a decision was taken to eliminate the menace of Russian crewmen on board several ships anchored in the estuary. The vessels themselves posed little threat to Allied shipping, but the guns could have been used to fire on the town. On 3 August 150 marines from HMS Glory, USS Olympia and the French ship Amiral Aube arrested the sailors on board, after which an anglophile named Nikolai Tchaikovsky formed a short-lived regional government. Askold was re-commissioned as HMS Glory IV and Chesma, which had run aground, was left there to act as a prison hulk if necessary. The local threat was removed but Moscow was under pressure from the Germans to remove all Allied forces from Russian soil. Georgi Tchicherin, son of a tsarist diplomat, had been locked up in Brixton prison for several months on account of his anti-war activities. His release obtained by Trotsky in a swap for some British hostages, Tchicherin replaced him as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, with an understandable bias against Britain, as Bruce Lockhart was to find at his regular meetings with him.
A month after these dramas, expeditionary forces from Archangel had ‘liberated’ territory for 170 miles southwards along the Northern Dvina, supported on the mile-wide reaches of the river by two shallow-draught RN monitors, each armed with one 7.5in gun, one 12-pounder and a 6-pounder, and several captured Russian vessels manned by RN personnel. After a number of confrontations with Bolshevik river craft, floating mines and irregulars sniping from the river banks, the drive south was halted at the regional capital of Dvinskoi Bereznik, to consolidate a position before the rapid approach of winter made both land and riverine travel difficult. A second column had advanced along the railway line but only reached half as far south, due to demolition of vital bridges by the retreating Bolsheviks.
On paper, the Allied position in the Far North looked good, with the arrival of the US contingent that included engineers and medical staff to man a hospital in Archangel. However, their orders from President Wilson restricted them to guarding the Allied material stockpiled and ‘organising the Russians’ self-defence’2 – whatever that might mean. Probably less than half the new arrivals were fit for combat anyway, due to an outbreak of virulent influenza during the voyage. This was probably a manifestation of the ‘Spanish flu’ epidemic that killed – estimates vary wildly – between 30 and 100 million people worldwide in that year and 1919. At any rate, the new arrivals continued dying after disembarking.
In the rapidly cooling weather of mid-September the RN sailors were kitted out again in normal bell-bottom uniform for ratings and fore-and-aft rig for petty officers and chief petty officers. This too rapidly proved inadequate as temperatures plunged, apparently taking the clothing stores by surprise,3 although that year the river froze late, a meteorological quirk taken advantage of by Admiral Vikorist commanding the Bolshevik flotilla on the Northern Dvina, whose naval guns easily outranged the field guns mounted on the improvised British gunboats. The weather too was an enemy with the rapid, although belated, freezing of the river threatening to immobilise any Alled craft that stayed too long before heading north. The geography favoured the Bolsheviks in this theatre of the war, the river freezing later as one went further south.
Even with the increased numbers of western forces, Bruce Lockhart wrote later:
We (the British) had committed the unbelievable folly of landing at Archangel with fewer than twelve hundred men [sic]. It was a blunder comparable with the worst mistakes of the Crimean War. The weakness of our landing force in the North resulted in the loss of the Volga line and in the temporary collapse of the anti-Bolshevik movement in European Russia. In the absence of a strong lead from the Allies, the various counter-revolutionary groups began to quarrel and bicker among themselves. The accuracy of my dictum that the support we would receive from the Russians would be in direct proportion to the number of troops we sent, was speedily proved. The broad masses of the Russian people remained completely unmoved.
The consequences of this ill-considered venture were to be disastrous both to our prestige and to the fortunes of those Russians who supported us. It raised hopes which could not be fulfilled. It intensified the civil war and sent thousands of Russians to their deaths. Indirectly, it was responsible for the Terror.4
If that is a brief rendering of Bruce Lockhart’s personal analysis, few people were better placed to analyse the confusing events of the time. In Soviet history, the Red Terror was triggered by a mentally unstable Socialist Revolutionary calling herself Dora Kaplan,5 who had been in an ultra-hard labour camp and a prison for attempted assassination under the tsarist regime, where abuse she suffered included being flogged naked. On 30 August 1918, she allegedly accosted Lenin as he emerged from a meeting and fired three shots from a Browning automatic pistol. One bullet missed him but the others lodged in his chest and neck.
The injuries are not disputed, but some historians believe that Kaplan, whose eyesight had been seriously harmed by her mistreatment in prison, could not have been the would-be assassin – and go on to name several other candidates for this honour! Be that as it may, Lenin was transported back to the Kremlin, where surgeons could not remove the bullets, for which he needed to be taken to a hospital. Having been robbed in the streets of even his automatic pistol, he refused to go there, convinced that he would be murdered if he did so. The bullet in his neck contributed to his subsequent health problems and early death in January 1924. Kaplan was long dead by then, having been executed by a Cheka firing squad four days after the attack with what one might call unseemly haste to prevent any investigation of her guilt or innocence. The attack – whoever organised it – gave Lenin the ‘justification’ for launching a purge on the Socialist Revolutionaries, deemed collectively guilty. More than 800 were executed in the next weeks and thousands more during the ensuing Terror.
One surprising victim of the Terror was Bruce Lockhart, who had diplomatic status and was personally known to all the Bolshevik leaders. To put pressure on him, his Russian mistress named Moura was arrested first and his apartment ransacked. Then he read in the Bolshevik press that he and other Westerners were accused of conspiring in the zagovor Lokkarta – the Lockhart plot – to murder Lenin, sabotage strategic targets and reduce the populations of Moscow and Petrograd to starvation. It was a classic case of the technique use by the Soviet authorities for the next seventy years. Lockhart had indeed had many meetings with a shady character from Odessa who was known to his British controllers as Sidney Reilly, but whose real name was Rosenblum. Whether he was a British spy or an agent provocateur secretly working for the Bolsheviks, or a double agent, was never established.
Lockhart presented himself at the Cheka headquarters at No. 11 Lubyanka – formerly the head office of the All-Russian Insurance Company – and demanded to see Yakov Peters, Dzherzhinsky’s deputy. He asked for Moura to be released on the grounds that Peters knew there was no such plot and, if there had been, she would have known nothing of it. Peters made a noncommittal reply before saying that it was very convenient to have Lockhart in his office because he had a warrant for his arrest. The other French and British conspirators, he said, were already under lock and key.6
For five days, Lockhart was subjected to nightly interrogation by Peters, but no physical maltreatment, although his state of mind can be imagined when he saw groups of tsarist politicians and intellectuals being herded into vans taking them to their execution as ‘reprisal’ for the failed assassination. Lockhart was then sent to the Kremlin, from where no political prisoner had emerged alive, and there lodged in the small suite of one of the ladies-in-waiting. His cell-mate was a Lett who had ‘revealed the Lockhart plot’ to the Cheka, and was there as a stool pigeon. Lockhart refused to speak to him, but did learn from a copy of Izvestiya that the Allied governments had protested strongly at the way their diplomats were being treated.
Lockhart continued to badger Peters about the unfortunate Moura until she was released and allowed to send him food parcels, his personal effects and books to read. Although allowed exercise in the Kremlin grounds, he was informed that he and the other ‘conspirators’ would be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal, chaired by Public Prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko. A Pole acting as sentry during an exercise period told Lockhart in a friendly way that the guards were betting two-to-one he would be shot because a French diplomat named René Marchand had converted to Bolshevism and furnished the Cheka with ‘proof’ that the diplomats had planned sabotage, which would be used in the show trial – after which they would all be executed. Marchand later returned to France as a Communist activist. Among the other VIP prisoners in the Kremlin was General Brusilov, who ‘looked ill, haggard and very old’ and walked with a cane because of a leg injury. Another VIP was Maria Spiridonova, a Socialist Revolutionary who had been condemned to death already once for her part in the 1905 revolution and was now locked up for daring to criticise Lenin’s policies. Although only in her early thirties, she ‘looked ill and nervous, with great dark lines under her eyes. She was clumsily and carelessly dressed’.7
A more cheerful note entered Lockhart’s conversations with his chekisti interrogators as Lenin began to recover, with them taking soundings as to whether Lockhart could arrange a deal to get rid of the Czechs and other interventionists in return for the Cheka allowing the alleged conspirators to leave Russia. In the event, a different deal was arranged, under which the hostages were expelled in return for the repatriation of Maxim Litvinov and other Bolshevik sympathisers in British gaols. Leaving the Kremlin under house arrest a day before his scheduled expulsion from Russia, Lockhart bade farewell to Moura, politely declined a Cheka offer of compensation for his belongings that had been stolen when the apartment was searched – and waited. Even the train taking the ‘conspirators’ to the Finnish frontier was late and the diplomats had to stay in it within sight of the border for three days until Litvinov and the others arrived from Britain for simultaneous exchange.8 Back in London, Lockhart found himself an embarrassment. Although Churchill continued to make bellicose speeches, the Hands Off Russia movement was growing in strength and few soldiers wished to prolong their time in uniform. Although Foreign Office officials were relieved to have procured his release, there was so little interest in his account of the situation in Russia that he feared he would never obtain another posting.
In the Far North, General Poole had grandiose ideas for his forces that eventually totalled 20,000 men, hoping to drive south and link up with the Czech Legion and facilitate its withdrawal through Murmansk to take up arms again on the Western Front. This caused cold feet in the War Office, worried by protests from Washington about Poole’s patrician attitude to the US forces in his command. Ordered home – as he thought for a spell of leave – he was replaced by a giant of a man by any standards. Major General Edmund Ironside stood 6ft 4ins in his stockinged feet and weighed 20 stone. Although given to understand on leaving Britain that he would serve as Poole’s chief of staff, he found himself on arrival the senior Allied officer in theatre and rose to the occasion. An accomplished linguist, he was able to swear fluently in Russian, which stood him in good stead, impressing the small numbers of local Russians who were volunteering to fight against the Reds. He also had diplomatic skills entirely lacking in his predecessor that swiftly reduced the animosity between the British and American contingents.
With winter approaching, he put in hand a crash programme of preparations for sub-zero weather with no sunlight for several months, which included stockpiling of food and materiel and the requisition of 900 sledges, to be drawn by mules, reindeer and dogs. That he was right to do so was borne out on 11 November – the very day that the guns on the Western Front fell silent at 1100hrs local time – when a concerted Bolshevik attack of riverine and ground forces came in along the line of the Dvina after the withdrawal of the Allied gunboats, to avoid them being frozen in for the winter. Although eventually beaten off, this attack was tantamount to a declaration of war by the Bolshevik leadership. The position of the Allied forces in the Far North was anomalous in that the Allies were not at war with Russia, yet occupying Russian territory by armed force. Nor were the rank-and-file, or even the officers, happy about spending another winter in temperatures far below zero, instead of being sent home and demobilised. Perhaps the more politically conscious officers realised that they had crossed a line in the sand: they had ostensibly been sent to Northern Russia to safeguard the stocks of materiel in Archangel and prevent it being handed over to the Germans. With Germany having surrendered, what were they doing there?
The American personnel were even more vociferous in criticising their orders. If the war was over, why were they still in uniform? They were not the only ones wondering that. On 29 October a mutiny occurred in the locally recruited 1st Archangel Regiment. Their officers having removed themselves, General Ironside persuaded two other Russian officers to talk the men round. The ploy succeeded but, when ordered to the front, the regiment again refused to obey orders. US troops attacked their barracks with light mortars, rifle and machine gun fire. The mutineers surrendered but thirteen ringleaders were executed by a firing squad made up of their comrades. Ironside, who was far from being a mindless martinet, saw this incident as a sea change in the relations with the Russian White forces he was supposed to be commanding.
On 19 January 1919 a determined attack by a force of about 1,000 Reds with supporting artillery was launched against Shenkursk, an American-held outpost on the railway line some 180 miles south of Archangel. After forty-eight hours of desperate fighting, the Americans withdrew to avoid being outflanked. Although not a strategic disaster, the local defeat did serve to discourage Ironside’s Russian allies, understandably fearful of reprisals by the Reds after the eventual departure of the Allied forces. The situation was exacerbated by the poor relations between the loyalist officers and their troops. To cap Ironside’s other problems, a newly arrived battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment mutinied at Onega, 50 miles west of Archangel.9
He ordered the execution of two ex-Pay Corps sergeants, thought to be the ringleaders, who had spent the war in ‘a cushy billet’ in Britain and could not believe the conditions under which they were now serving. But King George V had decreed that no further executions of British personnel were to be carried out, since the period of hostilities against the Central Powers had ended and thousands of organised workers in Britain vehemently disapproved of the British intervention. The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment but more and more of the officers and men – a good number of whom had been wounded on the Western Front or were otherwise not 100 per cent fit – were asking openly what they were supposed to be doing in Russia. At home there was increasing unrest at the undeclared war being fought against the forces of a former Allied country and several influential newspapers were printing hostile articles. Even Winston Churchill, the ebullient Minister for War and the Air, was unable to force his colleagues in Lloyd George’s Cabinet to enthuse over his plans for a new war against Lenin’s ‘godless hordes’. The ironic song of the men in the trenches said it all: ‘We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here.’
Rear Admiral John Green had replaced Kemp in November 1918 with a brief that left it unclear whether he was there to cover and assist in the evacuation of the Allied forces, or pursue an aggressive policy. On 5 February 1919, he was informed by the War Cabinet that his ships were ‘for active defence, in cooperation with the army, and only as far as positions then occupied by the military forces on the rivers’.10 That geographical limitation went all the way to Ironside’s southernmost line, some 200 miles from Archangel. The heterogeneous force of which he was commander eventually included twenty-two vessels, not all of which could be sent up-river because they were not sufficiently shallow-draught to be risked in summer on the Northern Dvina, which dried up into a succession of pools and sandbanks, and would have left them sitting ducks for Bolshevik guns on the banks. A strange convoy left Rosyth bound for Archangel on 4 May 1919 to make up the numbers, but got stuck in the ice of the White Sea for six days and had to be rescued by two Russian ice-breakers in foul weather.
The War Cabinet at last clarified the role of the British North Russian Expeditionary Force. It was to be withdrawn, but Churchill was authorised to make the necessary arrangements to cover the evacuation and sent two more brigades strictly for this purpose and not for sustained operations in Russia. The shape of things to come was apparent at the end of April, when the Dvina was still frozen over at Archangel and the ships there immobilised. Inevitably rumours about the impending Allied withdrawal circulated among the local Russian troops. The grandly titled 3rd North Russian Rifle Regiment was holding back a Bolshevik advance 80 miles up-river from Archangel when 300 men understandably decided to change sides, rather than risk death or worse when taken prisoner by the Reds after the Allies had left. These mutineers shot their officers and turned their weapons on their comrades of yesterday, who fled north under cover of a bombardment from Canadian gunners across the river and the shallow-draught monitor M23, which was the first RN vessel to reach so far south that year. But the crews of the riverine flotilla were not all Jolly Jack Tars by far. Bad food, the heat, the uncertainty of engaging an enemy who was free to roam and keep under cover while they were exposed on the open water led to a mutiny on HMS Cicala, which was put down by the senior naval officer present ordering the other vessels to train their guns on Cicala. Mutiny over, the ringleaders were court-martialled locally and sent back to Britain for punishment.
Given all the disadvantages of service in North Russia and the possibility of being killed far from home in a war that did not exist, it is amazing that there were any volunteers. However, the worse things got for the German forces in the Second World War, the more volunteers from France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia opted to join the Waffen-SS. The romance of a lost cause, it is called. And if ever a cause was lost, the north Russian intervention certainly was. Yet, something like 300 Australian veterans of Gallipoli, plus some New Zealanders, Canadians and South Africans did volunteer on their own accounts, their governments refusing to be involved. Perhaps the alternative was queuing up for dole at home? Formed into two brigades named after the commanders, St George Grogan and Sadlier-Jackson, they arrived in theatre in early June, facilitating the withdrawal of the American Northern Russia Expeditionary Force, all of whom were gone by mid-June, as was the Canadian contingent.
About 140 miles south of Archangel, at the confluence of the Varga and Dvina rivers, a motley air force was assembled after tsarist aviator Major Aleksandr Kazakov discovered dismantled Sopwith Strutters and Nieuports still in crates dumped at Bakaritsa, where they had been overlooked by the retreating Bolsheviks. Kazakov’s multinational air force eventually comprised four DH4 bombers, Camels, Snipes and the Sopwiths flown by Russian, British and Canadian pilots – who were advised to carry a pistol and shoot themselves if forced to land behind the Bolshevik lines, where they were likely otherwise to be killed more unpleasantly.11
Incredibly, since the intervention was supposed to be winding down, a new aircraft carrier HMS Argus arrived with seventeen float-planes and RAF ground crew. Towards the end of August, after the first rains the water level in the river began to rise and a new hazard became apparent. The Russian watchmen on an ammunition barge were cooking their supper on an open stove which overturned and set fire to the vessel. With more courage than sense, the CO of the river boat Glowworm went alongside with a firefighting team to extinguish the flames. The barge blew up, killing four officers and seventeen men, and injuring many more.
On 27 September forty-five ships crammed with personnel, 4,500 Russians at risk for having collaborated with the expeditionary forces and stores considered too important to leave behind sailed from Archangel in a half-gale, winter’s way of announcing its approach. The role of rearguard was played by HMS Fox, stationed offshore with its guns trained on the town in case of any last-minute trouble. How right those Russians were to leave was demonstated in February 1920 when the Red Army walked into Archangel and Murmansk and the optimistic stay-behinds had to pay the price of optimism. Captain Georgi Chaplin was there almost to the last day. On 17 February 1920 General Yevgeny Miller tried to negotiate terms with the Reds. Their reply was Nyet! Miller, his staff, some Russian army and navy officers and a few local VIPs left on Chaplin’s ice-breaker, which dropped them off in Norway five days later. Miller, like so many other tsarist officers with fluent French, decided to live in Paris where he was kidnapped and murdered by an NKVD hit team in September 1937.
NOTES
1. Neiberg and Jordan, p. 174.
2. Wilson, pp. 33–4.
3. Ibid, pp. 35–6.
4. Lockhart, p. 311 (abridged).
5. Real name Feiga Haimovna Roytblat.
6. Lockhart, pp. 324–5.
7. Ibid, pp. 334–5.
8. Ibid, p. 330–46.
9. Neiberg and Jordan, p. 178.
10. Wilson, p. 42.
11. Ibid, p. 47.