James Nelson - The Polar Bear Expedition

Not so the British and, to a lesser degree, the French. On May 26, the British war cabinet approved sending 1,000 troops to the Murmansk area to protect it from any German designs, and also agreed to send another contingent of 560 men east from Murmansk to Archangel in the summer.

This force, it was hoped, would be able to connect with and train locals in northern Russia who were opposed to the Bolsheviks—and also, it was further hoped, link up with a large army of veteran soldiers who were then fighting their way east and through Bolshevik opposition along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Known as the “Czech Legion,” these 40,000 to 70,000 men had mostly begun the war as conscripts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany’s main ally. They were well-trained and able fighters, but ethnically related more to their Slavic cousins the Russians. In dribs and drabs, or sometimes as entire units, they had managed to surrender to the Russians and so wound up fighting in the Russian Army.

Though the Czechs at that time had no country but were simply part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, back home Czech nationalist leaders Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes were pressing for the creation of an independent republic and had successfully persuaded the Provisional Government for the creation of a “Czech Corps” within the Russian Army.

When the armistice between Russia and Germany was signed, however, the Czechs, like their Russian cousins, were put out of the war. Masaryk suggested to the Allies that the corps be moved to the Western Front—and the suggestion was approved. Now the problem became one of how to move this well-organized force of men from the Ukraine to Vladivostok, and thence to France.

The Bolsheviks initially approved of the movement, and before long trains crammed with the still well-armed Czech Legionnaires were rolling east toward Siberia. But as they did, British and French military minds began to consider whether some, or most, of this seasoned group of fighters could be turned around and help with the intervention in the north of Russia—and with a re-creation of the Eastern Front.

As the Czechs rolled on, they ran into local Bolsheviks who demanded payment, usually in the form of weapons. Germany, too, demanded that the Bolsheviks prohibit the Czech movement, wanting to keep them away from the Western Front.

In May 1918 an incident occurred that led to the Czechs turning against the Reds when a legionnaire was killed in the city of Chelyabinsk by a piece of heavy iron that had been thrown by a Hungarian former prisoner who was headed west. The offender was quickly dragged from his train and hanged by the Czechs, which led to a series of recriminations. Finally, the Czechs stormed the train station and then the local armory.

A few days later, the Czechs were ordered to disarm; they instead gathered together and pronounced themselves the Congress of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army. They also split their force, with one contingent continuing eastward across Siberia toward the Asia-Pacific port of Vladivostok while the other turned north toward Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, where its advance that July would lead the Bolsheviks to execute the deposed former czar Nicholas and his family out of fears the Romanovs might be rescued from their exile and returned to power.

In the United States, this “lost legion” of Czechs became the object of intense interest in the newspapers; “Czech Successes Alarm Soviets,” the Detroit Free Press reported on June 25, 1918. “Czechs Capture Kazan Control Lower Volga,” the New York Times relayed on July 16. President Wilson himself had much interest and sympathy for the plight of the Czechs, who were scattered along the Trans-Siberian railroad from Vladivostok in the east to the Ural Mountains to the west.

The situation with the Czechs slowly caused Wilson to reconsider the continuing Allied pleas for help in the intervention, and while the president and many of his advisors never bought the idea that recreating an Eastern Front was feasible, Wilson saw in the Czechs a possible justification for the United States to intervene militarily, both in far eastern Siberia and in north Russia: the guarding of Allied stores, and the rescue of the Czechs.

Anti-Bolshevists in Siberia assured the president that American intervention in Russia’s vast Asia-Pacific region would be welcome, and one official—Charles Turner Williams, who had spent time in Russia—told Wilson that an armed intervention by American and Japanese soldiers there would “result in bringing to the cause of the allies thousands of Russian soldiers, officer[s] and leaders who are only waiting for some such display of force to take sides against the present impossible Bolsheviki.”

In European Russia’s north, as well, there were pleas for intervention. America’s ambassador to Russia, David Francis, was rabidly anti-Red, and had warned after the November 1917 Revolution that any Bolshevik success would be “a menace to all orderly governments, ours not excepted.” Sending American troops, he said, would provide support to “millions of sensible Russians” who “only need encouragement to organize” against the Bolsheviks.

“Russia is awaking from the orgy or dream of the last seven months realizing this fallacy Bolshevism and the failure Lenin’s ‘experiment in government’ to use his own words,” Francis wrote in a cable to the secretary of state on June 22, 1918.

“Workmen and peasants have turned against [the] Soviet government as they see paralysis of industry and are facing famine. Weakness of Soviet government is demonstrated by the success of Czecho-Slovaks who have overcome whatever resistance offered and have been welcomed by every city because they have carefully abstained from interference in internal affairs while overturning unpopular local Soviets and installing whatever government citizens desired.”

With those words Francis pushed aside the exact opposite argument that the vice consul in Archangel, Felix Cole, had made in a long cable to the ambassador on June 1. Cole had had his ear to the ground in the north of Russia since 1916, and he saw nothing but peril in intervening. “Intervention cannot reckon on active support from Russians,” Cole wrote. “All the fight is out of Russia.”

The average Russian, Cole added, supported the Bolsheviks, and an intervention would only alienate them. And he pointed to history—one had to look no further than Napoleon Bonaparte’s disastrous experience in Russia one hundred years before—as another sound reason to stay away.

Napoleon during the latter half of 1812 crossed into Russia with an army estimated to have contained between 500,000 and almost 700,000 men. Most of this “Grande Armée” reached Moscow in September 1812 only to find it deserted and stripped of food and other supplies; leaving Moscow in October, the force retraced its steps over the same route it had picked clean on its five-hundred-mile advance. “General Winter” soon added temperatures of twenty below and colder to the misery of the troops. Estimates vary wildly, but it’s safe to say that only 40,000 to 70,000 men survived the round-trip.

“Every foreign invasion that has gone deep into Russia has been swallowed up,” Cole wrote. “The Germans know this and have only taken the nearest and most fruitful regions, avoiding the unproductive north.” Cole would add, presciently, “If we intervene, going farther into Russia as we succeed, we shall be swallowed up.”

Cole also said that any intervention would, in effect, put the United States on the wrong side of history, writing that the U.S. “shall have sold our birthright in Russia for a mess of pottage. The birthright is the future friendship and economic cooperation with a great and free democracy controlling untold riches. The pottage will be the recovery of a few thousand tons of materials [ sic ] that we once gave to Russia after deciding we could ourselves do without them.”