*Probate* Michael Kettle - Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco

At the German Armistice (with which the second volume in this series ended), smallscale 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 withdrawnor 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 Wilsons 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 deathsdue not to the haphazard 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.

But in North Russia (considered the special British sphere), Churchill was no more successful than the French. He insisted that, to avoid another Odessa debacle at Archangel, more British troops must be sent out to link up with the White forces coming from Siberia. But as he omitted to inform the Admiralty of changed British plans in North Russia, too few river boats had been sent down the Dvina river to support them. As the Peace Conference ended, the Siberians were in retreat, the river ran dry, local North Russian troops mutinied, and Churchills operation ended in fiasco.

This book (written on a panoramic basis, not front by front) is designed, by including detailed documents from both sides, to give the reader an idea of what the leadership on both sides had to face, as the Russian kaleidoscope constantly changed; and demonstrates how Churchill (bent on restoring a Russia that had never existed) was completely out-generaled by Trotsky.

Michael Kettle has had access to British Government papers never before seen by historians, including the last unpublished papers of Winston Churchill, and many hitherto unseen French documents in the British archives.

RUSSIA AND THE ALLIES 191720

Michael Kettle

Volume 1
THE ALLIES AND THE RUSSIAN COLLAPSE
March 1917March 1918

Volume 2
THE ROAD TO INTERVENTION
MarchNovember 1918

RUSSIA AND THE ALLIES 19171920 VOLUME THREE

CHURCHILL AND THE ARCHANGEL FIASCO

November 1918July 1919

Michael Kettle

First published 1992
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

1992 Michael Kettle

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Kettle, Michael
Churchill and the Archangel fiasco.
I. Title
327. 41047

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kettle, Michael.
Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco/Michael Kettle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. Soviet UnionHistoryAllied intervention, 19181920.
2. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 18741965. 3. Great Britain
Foreign relationsSoviet Union. 4. Soviet UnionForeign
relationsGreat Britain. 5. Great BritainForeign relations
19101936.
I. Title.
DK265.42.G7K48 1992
327.4104709041dc20 914809

ISBN 0-203-99095-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-08286-2 (Print Edition)

For
CLARE & ANDREW

I was sent forth from the Power.
Look upon me. Be on your guard!

For I am the first and the last,
I am the honoured one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the barren one,
and many are her sons.

I am the silence that is incomprehensible.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold.
I am the utterance of my name.

For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.

I am the one whom they call Life,
and you have called Death.
I am the one whom they call Law,
and you have called Lawlessness.
I, I am godless,
and I am one whose God is great.
I am peace and war.
I am the union and the dissolution.

Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness,
I am she who cries out.
I am the hearing that is attainable to everyone;
I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the name of the sound,
and the sound of the name.

The Thunder, Perfect Mind