“The campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today.”

By Damien Wright

AFTER THREE YEARS of loss and suffering on the Eastern Front, Imperial Russia descended into revolution. In November 1917, Vladimir Lenin‘s Bolsheviks (later known as ‘Soviets’) seized power. The following year, the new regime signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers and brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas II (King George V‘s first cousin) and his children so there could be no return to the old order.

As Russia fractured into loyalist ‘White’ and revolutionary ‘Red’ factions, the British government and its First World War allies found themselves increasingly drawn into the escalating civil war. What began with the landing of a small number of Royal Marines at Murmansk in March 1918 to protect Allied-donated war stores quickly escalated with the government in London actively pursuing an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks on a number of fronts in support of British trained and equipped ‘White Russian’ allies.

By the middle of 1919, Britain’s military intervention hit its peak with forces fighting the Soviets far into the Russian interior in the Baltic, Northern Russia, Siberia, Caspian and Crimea simultaneously. British forces were also drawn into peripheral conflicts against ‘White’ Finnish troops in North Russia and the German ‘Iron Division’ in the Baltic. Despite the award of five Victoria Crosses (including one posthumous) and the loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen whom remain buried in Russia, the campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today.

After the withdrawal of all British forces in mid-1920, the government in London classified official documents related to the campaign. By the time these files were quietly released decades later, there was little public interest. Few people in U.K. today even know that their nation had fought a war against the Soviet Union. Here are 10 essential facts about the British Intervention in Russia.

It was a multinational effort

Britain fought as part of a 150,000-man international campaign to defeat the Bolsheviks. The U.K. contingent fought alongside Americans, Canadians, Australians, French, Italian, Indian and even Japanese. U.S. Army troops in Northern Russia served under British command in Northern Russia.

The fighting raged even as the Great War was ending

Ironically, one of the largest battles of the war was fought by British, Canadian and U.S. troops against the Red Army on Nov. 1918. Just as the guns were falling silent on the Western Front, Allied troops in the village of Tulgas on the Northern Dvina River were fighting off an attack by hundreds of Red troops wearing white smocks as camouflage against the snow. The Reds nearly overran the Allied battery position but were driven off by the Canadian gunners firing over open sights. The defenders did not learn of the Armistice on the Western Front until the following day.

The Allies rushed their weaponry from the Western Front to Russia

Britain sent its most advanced weaponry to fight in Russia from heavy artillery, armour and even poison gas. In fact, the first tanks to capture Stalingrad were from the United Kingdom. In June of 1919, the two Mark Vs of the British Tank Corps took part in the seizure of the city, although at the time it was known as Tsaritsyn.

Both sides had navies

There was fighting at sea as well as on land. Indeed, the first Soviet submarine kill in history was against the Royal Navy ship HMS Vittoria. The destroyer was sunk by torpedoes fired from the sub Pantera in the Eastern Baltic Sea on Aug. 31, 1919. The first submarine to be destroyed by the Soviet Navy was Britain’s HMS L.55. It was sunk by Red Destroyer Azard in the Gulf of Finland on June 9, 1919. All hands were lost.

The war featured its own flying aces

The Royal Air Force and Red Air Force fought dogfights in Russian skies. The communists flew primarily French and British aircraft that had been donated to the Imperial Russian Air Service before the Revolution. Russia’s highest scoring First World War ace, Alexander Kazakov, defected to fly for the RAF but in protest of the announcement of the British withdrawal from North Russia committed suicide by deliberately flying his Sopwith Camel into a British aerodrome on Aug. 1, 1919.

German troops fought the British in the Baltic nearly a year after the Armistice

Since the singing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 the Germans and Bolsheviks remained on neutral terms however the German army continued to fight the British in the Baltic after Berlin’s surrender to the Allies. The German ‘Iron Division’ under General von der Goltz considered the truce to apply only to the Western Front. The Baltic States had large populations of ethnic Germans and large numbers of German troops had been based in Finland and Baltic during the war and after the Russian Revolution. The annexation of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to Germany would be some consolation for the loss of German colonies in the Pacific and Africa. The last British troops to be killed by the German Army during the First World War died nearly a year after the Armistice, nine sailors of cruiser HMS Dragon, targeted by artillery fire from a German shore battery on Oct. 17, 1919.

Hundreds of Allied soldiers became prisoners of the Soviets

British and Allied prisoners-of-war (including U.S., Canadian, French and Italian troops) taken prisoner by the Red Army were held in Moscow. The Bolsheviks separated the bourgeoisie captives from the proletariat ones; enlisted men from the working classes were treated as POWs, officers and were imprisoned as criminals. Most of the Allied prisoners remained incarcerated until their release in a prisoner exchange in 1920, one of their number, Private Thomas Pyle, Royal Marines had been badly wounded on the battlefield and had a leg amputated by Red Army surgeons whilst a prisoner of war.

The campaign served as a bloody footnote to the First World War

Nearly 1,000 British troops who died fighting the Red Army remain buried in Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries in Russia, most of them died after the Armistice of Nov. 11 1918. The last Allied soldiers to be killed in the Great War fell in North Russia in 1919, many months after the Armistice. Swedish-born Sergeant Cail Ivar Erickson of the 1^st Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force was killed in action during an attack on a Red-controlled railway station at Urosozero, Murmansk on April 11, 1919. Captain Allan Brown, 49^th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force attached ‘ELOPE’ Force, North Russia Expeditionary Force was murdered by mutinying White Russian troops near Onega, Arkhangelsk on July 20, 1919.

Britain isn’t the only nation to have forgotten about the Russian Intervention

While the campaign against the Bolsheviks pre-dated the Cold War by 25 years, few I the west remember the conflict. Amazingly, both presidents Nixon and Reagan erroneously stated that the U.S. and Soviet Union had never been at war. Not surprisingly, the Soviets did not forget however. During his 1957 tour of the U.S., Soviet Premier Khrushchev stated, ‘Never have any of our soldiers been on American soil, but your soldiers were on Russian soil. Those are the facts.’

About the Author: Damien Wright is the author of Churchill’s Secret War with Lenin: British and Commonwealth Intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918 to 1920. He traces his lifelong interest in military history back to his early childhood when he was shown a photograph of his Grandfather in Australian Light Horse uniform and allowed to take his medals to school for show and tell. His interest in the British campaigns in Russia were first piqued in his teens when reading a chronological list of Australian recipients of the Victoria Cross which showed two seemingly anomalous decorations for ‘North Russia 1919’ listed separately from the First World War awards. Some further digging revealed both Australian VC recipients, one of whom was a fellow South Australian, had volunteered to serve in the same unit of the British Army. Further research proved difficult, so little had ever been published and the campaign seemingly largely unknown and ignored.