No one in the government had thought to prioritize the delivery of this vast store of goods and, consequently, Vladivostok had become the largest warehouse in the world, with goods clogging up the port and lying unguarded on the fields and beaches for miles around the town. It was a remarkable cornucopia of weapons, together with raw materials and luxury items, such as a thousand cars that had not even been removed from their crates. According to the historian of the American intervention, ‘these supplies, a monument to the inefficiency of the Czarist regime, which had never paid for them, lay strewn along docks and stacked in open fields [and included] a mountain of cotton bales, millions of rounds of ammunition, 37,000 train wheels, enough steel rails to build a third track from Vladivostok to Petrograd and enough barbed wire to fence Siberia.’1 The pièce de résistance was a submarine, presumably for use in patrolling the Sea of Japan. The total was valued, in contemporary money, at between $750 million and $1 billion, a quite staggering sum. Not only was this vast stockpile rotting in the relatively mild but damp climate of Vladivostok, but, worse, the Bolsheviks were beginning to take an interest in it, although they did not yet control Vladivostok.
This Aladdin’s cave played a crucial role in the involvement of the Trans-Siberian during the civil war that followed Russia’s revolution because it became part of the excuse for a series of foreign interventions by armies from, amongst others, Britain, the United States, Japan and France, all of which were characterized by uncertainty about their purpose and considerable dithering. Following the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over from the Provisional Government that had ousted the monarchy in March that year in the initial uprising, within a few months a peace agreement was negotiated with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk in western Russia.2 While the Bolsheviks were able to consolidate their control in most of European Russia, establishing themselves in the further reaches of the nation proved more difficult.
The wider context was that the Allies held on to a vague notion that perhaps with the right intervention, and a bit of luck, the Bolshevik Revolution could be reversed. It was, though, an incoherent idea and no one had worked out a way of achieving this goal. There was little understanding within the governments of these varied nations about the nature or causes of the Russian Revolution and the strength of support it enjoyed among the masses was greatly underestimated. Or more accurately, they did not realize the depth of hatred towards the old tsarist regime. The Siberian intervention was one of several attempts to support the Whites against the Reds. In the north a British-led force, with some American support, was sent to land at Murmansk in the Arctic Circle to safeguard war matériel stockpiled at Archangelsk (where the port is frozen in winter). In the Baltic states, too, there were hopes of an uprising by various anti-Bolshevik elements. Finland, meanwhile, was also fighting for its freedom. On the other hand, in Baku, now the capital the Azerbaijan, the British fought side by side with Armenian revolutionaries in a vain attempt to stop the city falling to the Turks in order to protect the oil supplies. While this made sense locally, it demonstrated the confusion of the period, the British unable to decide who to support, given their main enemy remained (until the November 1918 Armistice) the Germans. British policy was, in fact, a muddle, since the Foreign Office really wanted Soviet Russia to take up arms against Germany, but was simultaneously supporting the most rabid anti-Bolshevik forces, which was hardly the way to achieve this aim. Almost anyone who claimed to be able to build up an army against the Reds soon found themselves flush with British government money.
Therefore, in the three years following the Revolution, Siberia became an uncontrollable maelstrom of political factions, freelance armies and criminal elements. It was the key battleground between White and Red forces in the later stages of the civil war and became the arena for the final struggle for control of Russia.
Even before the October Revolution the Allies had taken an interest in the region and, in particular, the functioning of the railway. The Americans (with the agreement of the Kerensky regime) had sent a specially created 300-strong force of experienced railway engineers to oversee operations on the railway and ensure it did not collapse. They landed in Vladivostok and concluded, after an inspection, that the line was the only viable link to Europe, although they recognized the difficulties being caused by the bottleneck at Tomsk. In order to support operations, they broke up into fourteen units – scattered along both the Chinese Eastern Railway and the main Trans-Siberian – to help the operations of the railway, but did not act in a military role. Once the Brest-Litovsk Treaty had been signed in March, the Allies were intent on persuading the Americans to send a military force to Siberia. The idea was that if America were prepared to commit itself to a military assault, nearby Japan – which had supported the Allies during the conflict, but had been involved in very little military engagement – would be able to provide considerable numbers of troops. To encourage the idea of intervention, rumours emanated from secret-service sources that there were large numbers of German and Austrian prisoners who had been enlisted in support of the Bolsheviks. R. H. Bruce Lockhart, the British diplomat who headed the mission to the Bolshevik regime during the civil war, observed in his memoirs that ‘according to the reports it [the British secret service] received, Siberia was teeming with German regiments composed of war prisoners who had been armed by the Bolsheviks. They were in control of a vast area.’3 This was another case of British intelligence providing a dodgy dossier. The assistant despatched by Bruce Lockhart to investigate informed him after a six-week tour of Siberia that there was no sign of any German army, a finding that the British government did not welcome since it destroyed a potential pretext for intervention.
The American President, Woodrow Wilson, who had only agreed to send troops to the Western Front in 1917 after considerable provocation from the Germans with the sinking of several US merchant ships based on a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, was reluctant to become embroiled in a second front, despite the fact that ‘allied pressure on Wilson to intervene was strong and continuous’.4 Then came one of those seemingly insignificant incidents that change the course of history: a minor fracas between Czech and Hungarian soldiers at Chelyabinsk at the foot of the Urals led to American involvement in Siberia, the only time in history that US troops have set foot on Russian soil.
A group of 70,000 Czech soldiers had found themselves stranded in Siberia by the Revolution. Czechoslovakia was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and most of the men had been captured in combat alongside the Austrian forces against the Russians. They were, in truth, reluctant fighters against the Russians and, in fact, after the Revolution the Czechs were quickly made part of the Russian army, fighting enthusiastically and successfully for Kerensky’s Provisional Government in July 1917 at Zborov in Ukraine against their former masters in order to further their ultimate cause of an independent Czechoslovakia.
However, when the Bolshevik regime signed the armistice with the Germans, the very effective and well-regarded Czechs found themselves in a difficult position. They did not want to make peace with the Germans and consequently pledged loyalty to the French, who were still fighting on the Western Front and took on the name Legion, a tribute to the famous French Foreign Legion. Although Stalin, then boasting the grand title of People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs, offered them free safe passage back to the West, the Czechs were understandably concerned that they would end up in German hands and be massacred as traitors, since they were effectively deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army which had fought alongside the Germans. The only option was to return the long way round, travelling by train to Vladivostok, followed by a boat journey halfway across the world. They had obtained the agreement of the Soviet authorities to do this, but gradually the trust between the Czechs and the Bolsheviks broke down, and, as Orlando Figes, author of an epic history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, suggests, ‘Had this agreement been adhered to by both sides, the civil wa
r would have taken a very different course.’5
Clearly, given the poor state of the heavily used railway, this huge movement of Czech troops would have taken several weeks, but the vanguard was already well on the way to Vladivostok when the Legion’s progress was halted as a result of the incident at Chelyabinsk Station on 17 May 1918. A group of Czech Legionnaires happened to arrive at the station at the same time as a trainload of Hungarian prisoners, who were being returned to their homeland by the more direct westerly route. Although both countries were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the two nationalities had traditionally been antagonistic, in the way that neighbours often are, but all passed off relatively smoothly with a bit of banter until the Hungarian train was moving off. A foolish hothead hurled a heavy piece of cast iron from a broken stove at a group of Czech soldiers and one fell injured, bleeding from his head.6 The Czechs chased after the slow-moving train, forced the driver to stop it and, after having persuaded the Hungarians to identify the culprit through threats of violence, killed him in retaliation.
The train carrying the Hungarians was then allowed to leave, but there then followed a playground-style tit-for-tat escalation between the Russians and the Czechs that led to three years of chaotic and bloody conflict and could ultimately have altered the result of both the civil war and the Revolution. Local Soviet officials arrived with a detachment of Red Army soldiers, who promptly arrested several of the Legionnaires and whisked them off to the town prison. An officer and several men who went as a delegation to find out their fate were also thrown into jail. The Czechs were having none of it and two battalions marched into Chelyabinsk, taking over the town until the prisoners were released. The Czechs helped themselves to arms and ammunition and withdrew.
This would have been the end of the episode, but for Bolshevik pride and arrogance. The Reds were now infuriated and an order was issued by the ever bellicose Leon Trotsky, the commander of the Red Army, that all Czech units along the Trans-Siberian be detained and that the Czech legions be broken up and placed in units of the Red Army. Any Czech soldier found armed on the railway was to be shot. This was the classic mistake of a tyro military commander giving orders that were impossible to carry out. While the Bolsheviks had taken over the towns along the Trans-Siberian, with the exception of Vladivostok, their tenure was weak, given the sheer logistics of controlling the vast region of Siberia and the fact that the Red Army at this stage was still an untrained and ill-disciplined militia principally made up of local workers sympathetic to Bolshevik ideals. Rural Siberia, in any case, where there had been no serfs or arrogant aristocratic landowners, was not fertile ground for revolutionary fervour. The weak Soviets – the local communist committees who controlled the towns – were no match for the much better-organized Czechs, who spread out rapidly along the Trans-Siberian, helped by their control of the telegraph system to communicate between stations. Using improvised armoured trains to great effect, they sped along the line, taking over towns from the Bolsheviks mostly with consummate ease. When Lenin, in retaliation, sent an armoured train, hauled by a famous armoured locomotive called Zaamurets, to fight the Czechs in July 1918, it was quickly captured and the Legionnaires used it extensively to control and then patrol the line. Within a few weeks of the Chelyabinsk incident, the Czechs, fighting alongside the anti-Bolshevik Whites, who suddenly found themselves with effective allies, had overcome Bolshevik resistance throughout the Western section of the Trans-Siberian and, indeed, much of western Siberia.
The Czech takeover of the line caused what one historian of the Intervention called ‘a world-wide sensation’7 and President Wilson came under further sustained pressure from the Allies to intervene, since the summer of 1918 was a low point in the war. The Germans had broken through the Western Front with their Spring Offensive in March, resulting in the first significant breach of the lines since 1914, and, consequently, reopening a front in the East to make up for the collapse of Russian resistance was a tempting prospect for the allies. According to the author of a book on the Americans’ Siberian adventure, ‘In Wilson’s mind, the re-creation of an Eastern Front by Russian forces, even on a relatively modest scale, would not only revive Allied morale . . . but would compel the Germans to retain crucial divisions in the East, which might well be the difference between victory and defeat in the war.’8 There was, too, little downside, since the diversion to the east of a few thousand soldiers would make little difference to the millions on the Western Front. The Allies hoped the Czech success could be part of the wider movement of anti-Bolshevik forces in Ukraine, the Caucusus and the Arctic that would overthrow the Bolsheviks and consequently get Russia back in the war against the Germans. Overhanging all this, there was what Peter Fleming (brother of James Bond author Ian and author of a history of the intervention) called ‘a nebulous project which envisaged the creation, somewhere in South Russia, of a sort of bastion or bridgehead upon which would converge, or round which would coalesce, the Rumanian Army, the Ukrainians, the Transcaucasians and anyone else who might be supposed to [be] our friends in Russia’.9
By mid-June the Czechs had started arriving at Vladivostok, although there were no ships to take them back home, and now, with the support of local counter-revolutionary forces, they controlled virtually all 3,000 miles of the railway from Penza to Irkutsk, while the Bolsheviks held the Amur and Ussuri sections. Throughout the fighting the Czechs suffered very few casualties and had been victorious in every town where they launched a major assault. They had shown themselves to be a formidable force, but clearly, spread out over such a vast area, they could not hope to remain dominant. They needed help and support, but the Allies were confused about precisely how they should get involved.
Despite this chaotic situation, the railway still operated, with the Reds and the Whites surprisingly cooperating to allow railway staff to go about their jobs normally. The Czechs’ success, however, had one highly significant side effect that was to send shockwaves around the world. Their proximity to Yekaterinburg, where the tsar was being held, had prompted the local Bolsheviks, under the orders of Lenin, to murder the royal family and their retainers on 17 July, although this might have been just a useful pretext for the execution of the family.
Wilson, after much procrastination, eventually acquiesced to despatching a force of 8,500 men. An aide-memoire to the commanding officer, Major General William S. Graves, offered three reasons for the intervention: to help the Czechs evacuate from Siberia, to guard and recover the supplies sent by the Allies to Vladivostok and to ‘help the Russians organize their new government’. This last reason needed further elaboration to explain what government was to be helped, because, at the time, the Whites had various headquarters around Russia where they were still fighting, while the Reds were established in Moscow, their new capital. However, no such clarification was offered. Not surprisingly, the man handing the memo to Graves, the Secretary of State for War, Newton Baker, warned him: ‘Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite.’10
The British, French and Italians all sent small contingents, but the Americans’ main partner in the intervention was Japan, which promised to send a similar number of men in response to a specific invitation by Wilson sent to Tokyo, but soon built up a far greater force, reaching 72,000 at its peak in eastern Siberia and Manchuria. Their machinations were complex and quite uncertain, too, given there was considerable public reluctance to get involved. Up to this point the Japanese had enjoyed an excellent war at little cost, either financially or in terms of casualties. They had joined early, in 1914, on the side of the Allies, but had despatched few men, losing a mere 1,000 in battle, and had benefitted economically from taking over the German colonies in Asia and the Pacific. Now it seemed they might become embroiled in a far bloodier conflict, which domestically elicited widespread opposition. However, there were huge potential advantages in intervention, given Japan’s longstanding designs on establishing itself as the dominant power in the Far East, as it would ena
ble the Japanese to consolidate their control of the Chinese Eastern Railway and consequently northern Manchuria. The Japanese were not interested in the fate of the Czechs or in staying permanently in Siberia, but they did have vague, long-term designs on Mongolia. They agreed with the Americans not to go any further west than Irkutsk, but there remained continued mistrust between the providers of the two biggest forces during the whole of the Siberian intervention.
The Japanese rather betrayed their unstated motive through their strong support for the worst elements fighting in Siberia: the freelance armies led by violent Cossack officers, whom they showered with money, arms and practical support. The two most significant, and bloodthirsty, were led respectively by self-styled generals, Gregori Semyonov and Ivan Kalmykov, who seemed to be in an ugly contest to demonstrate which was the most reprehensible. Semyonov, with his huge head and his brilliant eyes, was described as a ‘Heathcliff of the steppes’ by Peter Fleming, but was called a ‘murderer, robber and dissolute scoundrel’ by Graves. Semyonov fancied himself as a bit of a Napoleon, always carrying in his pocket the great French general’s book on warfare, Maxims, though it was unclear whether he ever read it, and tucking his arm, ridiculously, into his jacket in true Bonaparte style. As the civil war unfolded, Semyonov managed to raise an army of around 2,000 local Cossacks and other mercenaries, and briefly grabbed a section of the Trans-Siberian, the junction with the Chinese Eastern Railway, and based himself at Manchouli, the border town. He was rewarded for his efforts with £10,000 of British money from the Foreign Office, which was eager to support any potential uprising against the Bolsheviks, but soon realized that they were supporting a bloodthirsty bandit. The Japanese, however, were not so picky and Semyonov benefitted enormously from their largesse, since ‘the chaos he created in eastern Siberia suited the Japanese, whose intention was to prevent Russia from uniting under any government that might restore its place as a rival to Japan in the Far East’.11 This highlighted the difference with the British, who did want to see a strong Russian force come together in Siberia in order to fight the Bolsheviks. The French, meanwhile, still dreamed of creating an Eastern Front to divert German resources away from the Western battle zone. Figes sums up the confusion among the Allies in one neat sentence: ‘None of the Western powers knew what their aims were in Siberia; but neither did any of them want to be left out.’12
To the Edge of the World Page 19