Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco, November 1918-July 1919

At the German Armistice, small-scale Allied intervention in Russia (designed to thwart the Germans, save the Czechs, and overthrow the Bolsheviks) had completely failed. But the presence of Allied troops had enabled some White groups to come together, while Allied finance had kept others alive. Now the Great War was over. Were Allied troops to be withdrawn - or reinforced? All would be decided at the coming Peace Conference. But before it even met, Britain had already decided to supply the Whites in South Russia and Siberia, while France had actually launched a military invasion in the Odessa region. The Peace Conference never properly addressed the Russian problem. After President Wilson's final effort to make peace with Moscow had failed, and the Whites had started an advance in Siberia, and French troops, in open mutiny, had abandoned Odessa, the British were left to carry on single-handed. On the main South Russian, Siberian and Baltic fronts, Churchill and Lloyd George now turned the White forces into expendable British pawns in a temporary forward holding operation, designed to contain the Bolshevik inferno within Russia, and burn it out there, and thus give a prostrate Europe time to recover. This medium British intervention (which the Peace Conference had already been carefully warned was doomed to failure) was thus to prolong the Russian civil war, and cause a further 14 million Russian deaths - due not to the hap-hazard fighting, but to starvation, cholera and typhus, in turn due to the ever-growing dislocation within Russia, and its further ruin. Thus were sown the seeds of the Cold War.Kettle, Michael is the author of 'Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco, November 1918-July 1919' with ISBN 9780415082860 and ISBN 0415082862.