Jul 21, 2020
USS BROOKLYN (CA-3) at Peter the Great Bay, looking from Vladivostok, Siberia, 10 March 1918. She was the flagship for the Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet at the time.
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Nepal
seen from Panama
seen from Singapore
seen from Thailand
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Ireland
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from Martinique
seen from United States
USS BROOKLYN (CA-3) at Peter the Great Bay, looking from Vladivostok, Siberia, 10 March 1918. She was the flagship for the Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet at the time.
Reds Massacre Japanese at Nikolayevsk
Nikolayevsk, pictured after the massacre.
May 25 1920, Nikolayevsk-on-Amur--While the Red Army in Siberia had largely halted at Irkutsk (a spring offensive against Chita was repulsed), the White and Japanese forces in the area still had to deal with the threat of Red partisans. In February, Red partisans surrounded the town of Nikolayevsk, at the mouth of the Amur river. The town’s defenders were heavily outnumbered, and an agreement was soon reached that the Reds could occupy the town while the Japanese garrison would remain in place.
Tensions grew between the Reds and the Japanese, however, and fighting broke out again in March after the Japanese refused a demand to disarm; most of the Japanese garrison was killed, and the rest taken prisoner. The Japanese sent an expedition in May towards the city; knowing he could not fight them off, the Red commander evacuated his forces, destroyed much of the town, and killed around 700 Japanese PoWs and civilian captives on and around May 25, along with many Russian civilians he suspected of being sympathetic to the Whites.
The Japanese were understandably outraged, and used the incident as justification for their continued occupation of northern Sakhalin (which they had occupied the month before); they would continue to occupy it until 1925. The Soviet government, in an attempt to defuse tensions, had the Red commander responsible executed in July.
Sources include: Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War; Randal Gray, Chronicle of the First World War.
AEF Hospital Car Number 1 at Khabarovsk, Russia
National Museum of the U.S. Navy - LOT 3029-5 (6789)
March 6, 1918 - Allied Intervention in Russia Begins as Royal Marines Land at Murmansk
Pictured - Troops of the Slavo-British Legion, a White Russian force raised by the British in Murmasnk.
In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks portrayed the Allied intervention in Russia as a concentrated effort by world capitalism to smash the Red revolution in the bud. This is still probably the dominant interpretation most people think of when they think of the Russian Civil War, however it is not what actually happened at all.
The first Allied troops to land in Russia landed at Murmasnk on March 6, 1918. They were Royal Marines, invited by the local soviet, an action approved by Vladimir Lenin. The idea was to support the Red Army against the Germans; unfortunately the support arrived too late. Russia had surrendered at Brest-Litvosk two days earlier. Yet it was the beginning of the Allied Intervention in Russia, which began on a small-scale to fight the Germans and eventually became a massive effort against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War.
Wrangel Launches Offensive From Crimea
Pyotr Wrangel, commander of White forces in Crimea.
June 7 1920, Perekop--What remained of White forces in South Russia were penned up in the Crimean Peninsula under the command of Baron Wrangel. The Soviets were concentrating on the threat from Poland, and they were also attempting to normalize relations with the British, who backed Wrangel; one of the British conditions for further negotiations was to leave Wrangel alone for the time being.
On June 7, Wrangel went on the offensive, pushing north from the Perekop isthmus and simultaneously landed troops on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. Within a week, his forces had reached the Dnepr, securing most of modern-day Kherson Oblast and doubling the territory under Wrangel’s control. While Wrangel at many points throughout 1920 hoped to link up with the Poles, the lower Dnepr was far from Kiev; the Whites and the Poles were never closer than 250 miles from each other.
In late June, the Soviet cavalry in the area launched a counteroffensive from the northeast soon after, but found themselves encircled. The horses captured from the Soviets greatly boosted the White cavalry, who had not been able to evacuate a large number of horses from Novorossiysk. The Soviets, continuing to concentrate on the war with Poland, would not launch another attack against Wrangel until August.
The offensive did have serious consequences for Wrangel’s foreign support, however. The British, who had helped prevent a Soviet attack on Crimea in the spring, withdrew all support within days of the attack. The French, major backers of Poland, stepped in instead, but offered very little in tangible assistance.
Sources include: Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War
British Leave Batum
British soldiers in Batum, likely in December 1918.
July 9 1920, Batum [Batumi]--The British arrived in the Black Sea port of Batum in December 1918, as they had in Baku and various other sites in the Caucasus. While the British had pulled out of most of the Caucasus in 1919, they remained in Batum, initially because it was unclear who control of the city would pass to. The Ottomans certainly wanted it (and it had been awarded to them by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), but the British were unlikely to hand it over to a defeated enemy with whom a peace had yet to be signed. Georgia lay claim to it as well, but most of Batum’s inhabitants were Muslim, not Georgian Orthodox. Azerbaijan laid claim to it on that basis, and even Armenia desired it as a Black Sea port. The Foreign Office also wanted to keep a British presence in the Caucasus to prevent Soviet encroachment on Persia, even if the Army thought it was spread too thin after the war and wanted little to do with it.
Curzon proposed that Batum be made a Free State under the auspices of the League of Nations (like Danzig), with Britain in overall command of military affairs. Support for this at the various peace conferences was limited, especially from the Italians, though the French did send a battalion to reinforce the British. Furthermore, it was thought the borders of Armenia would be extensive enough to give them a Black Sea port at Trebizond [Trabzon], so there was little need for Batum to be a Free State. In the meantime, Georgian troops occupied Batum’s outlying areas in March, and Soviet forces began to threaten Georgia. On June 11, the Cabinet decided to hand Batum over to the Georgian government, on condition that Azerbaijan (which was already under Soviet control) and Armenia would have free use of the railways to the port.
On July 7, Batum was formally handed over to Georgia, and the last British and French troops left on July 9. This brought to a close the last British intervention within Russia’s former borders.
Sources include: John D. Rose, Batum as Domino.
“Curzon Line” Proposed as Poland’s Eastern Frontier
The Curzon Line and the eventual Polish frontiers established in 1921 and 1947.
July 12 1920, London--As the war in Poland escalated with the continuing Soviet offensive, the Allies, for their part, mainly wanted a quick peace. The British especially had abandoned their designs for extensive intervention in Russia, and had had little patience for Piłsudski’s eastern designs. On July 12, British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon sent a telegram to Moscow proposing a ceasefire upon a line drawn up late the previous year in Paris; this would come to be known as the “Curzon Line.” At the same time, they sent a mission to Poland under French General Weygand; it included no troops, but it was hoped that Weygand could replace the troublesome Piłsudski. This of course did not come to pass, but Piłsudski made Weygand his assistant chief of staff in an effort to smooth over relations with the Allies.
On July 17, the Soviets rejected the Allied offer. A ceasefire would just give the Poles time to recover, and the Allies were, in their view, still clearly committed to counterrevolution in Russia; after all, Wrangel’s forces in the Crimea were backed by the French. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks were still hopeful that the capture of Poland would to the spread of revolution further west; the Kapp Putsch in Germany was compared to the Kornilov Affair in Russia, the last gasp of reaction before the ultimate revolution.
The Soviet-Polish frontier would ultimately end up much further east than the Curzon Line, but it formed the basis for inter-Allied negotiations in World War II, and closely corresponds to the Soviet-Polish border settled after that war, which remains to this day between Poland and the former Soviet states of Belarus and Ukraine.
Sources include: Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920; Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War.
Reds Take Murmansk
March 13 1920, Murmansk--Throughout early 1920, the Reds continued their victories in the Russian Civil War. There had been a longstanding White presence in northern Russia, backed by the Allies; however, the last Allied forces had pulled out in October, leaving only small White forces with limited population or resources to draw upon. On February 21, the Reds entered Archangelsk. Around the same time, a Bolshevik-aligned group seized power in Murmansk, stranding the last contingent of White forces on the Murmansk railway around 400 miles to the south. Those units collapsed or crossed the border into neighboring Finland. The Red Army entered Murmansk on March 13, ending the Russian Civil War in the north.
Sources include: Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War