Fighting Soviet Russia¶
Core Argument¶
The Japanese landing at Vladivostok in April 1918 inaugurated a period of acute strategic uncertainty for the fledgling Soviet state. Trotsky halted the movement of Czechoslovak echelons, explaining this was not a hostile act but a necessary response to the new Far Eastern situation. He proposed that the Czechoslovak National Council urge Britain and France to declare readiness for transport via Archangel and Murmansk, with the Soviet government committing to arrange passage. No such notification came; Lockhart, the British plenipotentiary, cited acute tonnage shortages. The question remained unresolved not through Soviet obstruction but through the silence of the Western powers.
The capture of Kazan in September 1918 revealed the true character of foreign intervention. Imperialism landed two to three thousand British and French troops at Murmansk and Archangel, expecting mass support from the Russian bourgeoisie, but encountered determined resistance from the hungry proletariat. After this rebuff, the bourgeois press in Britain and France themselves called the northern undertaking an adventure. The murder of the twenty-six Baku commissars—Shaumyan, Japaridze and their comrades—at a Transcaspian station was ordered by British military authorities, with Reginald Teague-Jones as direct organiser and General Thompson fully cognisant. The Georgian Menshevik government, in collusion with Thompson, facilitated the escape of the perpetrator Druzhkin, refusing to sign a declaration testifying to British criminal conduct and even preventing telegraphic exposure of the British role. The petty-bourgeois parties were never neutral; their professed neutrality was merely a critical point in the movement between supporting the proletariat and supporting tsarist generals.
By late September, the Northern Front was secure, and Churchill began speaking of withdrawal. Two roads were possible: reinforcing with White Guards or evacuation before winter. Lloyd George and Wilson began to realise the intervention was a mistake. French troops in Odessa demanded repatriation; black colonial troops were withdrawn. General Walker ordered the Georgian government to imprison Bolsheviks entering Georgia, then ordered their entrance prevented entirely, throwing them back to Denikin's executioners.
Churchill's boast of fourteen states fighting Russia was mere propaganda for the petty-bourgeois rabble; Kolchak would have preferred fourteen divisions. Soviet policy harboured no ambitions of conquest, and orders were given not to cross the frontiers of seceded states, though attacks on Petrograd would not go unpunished. With Kolchak pushed back and Denikin halted, attention could turn to the Western Front. A letter to the Central Committee argued that while a policy of concession was correct in the West, resolute action was needed in the East to pre-empt Britain forming a chain of hostile states. An order to the Red Army distinguished two Britains: the Britain of profit, violence and corruption fighting against them, and the Britain of labour and international solidarity behind them.
By February 1920, the Entente had changed its attitude. A memorandum stated the Allied powers would not advise border states to continue war against Soviet Russia, though they refused diplomatic relations until Bolshevik 'outrages' ended. Lloyd George now declared that Soviet power could not be crushed by force, effectively dethroning both Kolchak and Denikin. This watershed in British policy was reflected in the behaviour of the small western states, which intended no good but were incapable of great harm.