Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

All this time the Whites pleaded with the Allies to strengthen their military presence in north Russia, southern Ukraine and mid-Siberia. But French commanders in Ukraine fretted about the worsening situation for their troops. General Philippe Henri d’Anselme had never had confidence in France’s expedition and in April decided that evacuation was the only option. His troops were demoralized: few wanted to fight the Red Army and military discipline was breaking down. 3He sent a telegram to Clemenceau saying that it no longer made sense to talk of France’s ‘army of the East’. The longer the troops stayed by the Black Sea, the graver the discontent among them. D’Anselme proposed instead that the French should train and equip the Romanian army, lending it an officer cadre. The Allies should also send food to Romania so that the Romanian people would be sufficiently well fed to provide useful soldiers. 4Clemenceau, who was equally anti-Soviet and anti-German, was not pleased, but he was unable to act against the advice from generals on the spot. French military withdrawal was only a matter of time.

Lloyd George was also contemplating the withdrawal of the British expedition from northern Russia. Never having been an enthusiastic interventionist, he had concluded that the time had come to evacuate Archangel and Murmansk. The British labour movement was united against sending troops there and the Hands Off Russia campaign gathered strength on the political left. 5The troops themselves yearned to be demobbed; any orders for eastward deployment would almost certainly lead to mutinies. And many businessmen wanted to re-enter Russian markets.

Churchill, however, stood out from the national consensus and continued to favour increased support for the Whites and to oppose any resumption of trade with the areas of Russia under Soviet rule. When he made a fuss in the cabinet, Lloyd George wrote a gentle reprimand:

I wonder whether it is any use my making one last effort to induce you to throw off this obsession which, if you forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance. I again ask you to let Russia be, at any rate for a few days, and to concentrate on the quite unjustifiable expenditure in France, at home and in the East, incurred by both the War Office and the Air Department. 6

The Prime Minister’s mind was on British economic recovery since he saw that the country’s finances could not withstand another war. But he left the expedition where it was for some months. Apart from anything else, the outcome of the Civil War in Russia was in the balance and Lloyd George had no wish to undermine the chances of the Whites. Most Liberal and nearly all Conservative MPs supported the presence of the United Kingdom’s troops in Russia as did the two great newspaper proprietors, Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere.

A sprinkling of parliamentarians challenged this orthodoxy. Labour MPs, many of them having been elected for the first time and not yet experienced in the ways of the House, were quiet on the Russian question; but a small group of independent voices — Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, Commander J. M. Kenworthy and Cecil Malone (who chose not to use his rank after leaving the forces) — criticized the government’s policy; they were favourably reported in the Manchester Guardian , the new Labour Daily Herald and Lord Beaver- brook’s Daily Express . 7Churchill ignored the press criticisms of him until the Daily Express printed a letter from Lieutenant Colonel Sherwood Kelly on 6 September 1919 alleging that the Secretary for War had misled the country about British army operations in Russia. 8Kelly, a holder of the Victoria Cross, had returned from service in Archangel disgusted by what he saw as governmental duplicity. The expedition had been told that its purpose was limited to protecting British military stores. Kelly accused Churchill and fellow ministers of deceitfully organizing a covert offensive to overthrow Sovnarkom. Obliged to defend both himself and the cabinet against charges of deceit, Churchill denied pursuing a policy of invasion. 9

The Americans, like Lloyd George, wanted to help the Whites without actually sending their troops to fight alongside them. This had to be undertaken with discretion. The American labour movement was agitating for official recognition of Soviet Russia and a growing business lobby wanted the US to penetrate the Russian market while foreign affairs were moving towards isolationism. Senator Hiram Johnson from California asked why American boys were being shot in Russia. President Wilson and Secretary Lansing let the British and French take any blame for action against Soviet Russia while licensing their own confidential assistance to anti-Bolshevik forces. In Siberia the Cossack ‘strongman’ Semënov, whose army was notorious for its arbitrary violence, nonetheless received US finance and supplies. And when Semënov was defeated by the Reds, the Americans turned to Admiral Kolchak, whose officers were only a little less brutal. After Kolchak went the way of Semënov, Wilson rose from his sick bed to approve help for the White general Nikolai Yudenich, who in autumn 1919 led his North-Western Army in an offensive against Petrograd. 10The Whites had to agree to pay for the supplies they needed. They could not very well object. They understood that if they wanted to have their country back, they had to meet the going price.

Yet Kolchak was exceptional among the White commanders in possessing a large supply of gold bullion; and even he could hardly carry out physical transactions from the middle of Siberia. The Whites found a way round the problem by drawing on funds registered abroad in the Provisional Government’s name. They had the blessing of the unofficial Russian Foreign Delegation which formed itself in Paris to press for support against the Bolsheviks and included ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Sazonov and ex-Ambassador Vasili Maklakov. Boris Savinkov, who had left Russia after the suppression of his July revolt, joined them at the end of 1918; he was followed from Archangel a year later by Nikolai Chaikovski. 11The former diplomats in the Allied countries — Sergei Sazonov, Boris Bakhmetev and Vasili Maklakov — made the Provisional Government’s accounts available to the White armies, holding their noses as they did so. Sazonov and his friends had no illusions about the reactionary inclinations of the White officer corps, and they complained frequently about the political ineptitude of its commanders. But the Whites embodied Russia’s sole chance of eliminating Bolshevism and the diplomats could not risk letting them lose the Civil War because nobody would disburse the money to pay for arms.

The Allied governments favoured this financial solution knowing that Russian accounts held in western Europe and the US were in healthy balance. Predictably there was some reluctance about this in France, but Clemenceau restricted himself to a strong public reminder that French loans to previous Russian governments should be honoured; he also refrained from any raid on the funds controlled by former Ambassador Maklakov after he received them from the Germans at the end of the Great War. 12The situation was still easier for former Ambassador Bakhmetev in America, where in December 1918 he had $8,000 million at his disposal. 13He also exercised authority over the military supplies bought by Nicholas II’s administration which were still awaiting dispatch from the US. 14Bakhmetev began to make fresh purchases, informing General Yudenich that three thousand rifles had been bought from the US War Ministry for his use. 15Yudenich had realized that if he ever succeeded in occupying Petrograd, its citizens were likely to be suffering from starvation; he therefore pressed for food as well as guns and consented to Herbert Hoover commissioning six ships to sail to Tallinn with food supplies. Hoover made Yudenich sign a financial guarantee; and he suggested that, if Yudenich could not hand over the funds, he should apply to Sazonov for funding from the Russian governmental accounts held in Paris. 16