Nor did Riezler have better luck with his proposal to win the neutrality of the Latvians with promises of amnesty and repatriation. This plan was scuttled by, of all people, Ludendorff, who feared “contaminating” Latvia with Bolshevik propaganda. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Admiral Paul von Hintze, who succeeded Kühlmann and was even more committed to collaboration with Lenin, needed to hear no more: he instructed the Moscow Embassy to suspend talks with the Latvians.181
To be prepared in the event of a Bolshevik collapse, the Foreign Office worked out its own contingency plans. If pro-Allied SRs seized power in Russia, the German army would strike from Finland, seize Murmansk and Archangel, and occupy Petrograd as well as Vologda. In other words, if the pessimists proved correct, rather than deliver the Bolsheviks a coup de grace and replace them with other Russians, Germany would march in and presumably restore them to power.182
Helfferich arrived in Moscow determined to implement the pro-Bolshevik policy of his government. But he quickly discovered that the embassy staff opposed it almost to a man. The briefings which he received on the evening of his arrival and such limited personal observations as he was able to make caused him to change his mind. On the afternoon of July 31, on his only venture outside the heavily guarded embassy compound during his brief stay in Moscow, he paid a visit to Chicherin to protest the murder by Left SRs of Field Marshal Eichhorn in the Ukraine and the continuing Left SR threats to embassy personnel. At the same time he assured him that the German Government intended to continue its support. He later learned that a few hours after his conversation with Chicherin, a meeting took place in the Kremlin at which Lenin told his associates that their cause was “temporarily” lost and that it had become necessary to evacuate Moscow. While this meeting was in progress, Chicherin arrived to say that Helfferich had just assured him of German backing.*
The mood in the Kremlin was already desperate enough when on August 1 it received news that a British naval force had opened fire on Archangel. This shelling marked the beginning of large-scale Allied intervention in Russia. Moscow, which had much less reliable intelligence on Allied intentions than on those of Germany, was certain the Allies intended to advance on Moscow. It now completely lost its head and flung itself into German arms.
It will be recalled that in March 1918 the Allies had discussed with the Bolshevik Government the landing of troops on Russian soil in the north (Murmansk and Archangel) and the Far East (Vladivostok) to protect these ports from the Germans as well as to secure bases for the projected Allied force in Russia. In return, they were to help organize and train the Red Army. The Allies, however, were slow to act. They did land token detachments in the three port cities and they assigned a few officers to Trotsky’s Commissariat of War, but they had no large forces to spare at a time when the full brunt of the German offensive was upon them. The United States alone had the necessary manpower, but Woodrow Wilson opposed involvement in Russia, and as long as this was the case, nothing could be done.
The prospect of reactivating the Eastern Front improved substantially at the beginning of June when Wilson, impressed by the Czechoslovak uprising, experienced a change of heart. Feeling that the United States had a moral obligation to help the Czechs and Slovaks repatriate, he yielded to British entreaties and agreed to provide troops for the Murmansk-Archangel expedition as well as for Vladivostok. American forces assigned to the operation were under strict orders not to interfere in internal Russian affairs.183
When it learned of Washington’s decision (June 3), the Supreme Allied Council at Versailles ordered the dispatch of an Allied expeditionary force to Archangel under the command of the British general F. C. Poole. Poole’s instructions were to defend the port city, make contact with the Czech Legion and with its help take control of the railway south of Archangel, and organize a pro-Allied army. Nothing was said of fighting the Bolsheviks: Poole’s troops were told, “We do not meddle in internal affairs.”184
These Allied decisions have been subsequently criticized on the grounds that no serious German threat existed to the northern Russian ports and that in any event German forces in Finland capable of such action were withdrawn in early August and sent to the Western Front. The implication of these criticisms is that the true reason for the expeditions to northern Russia was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.185 The charge cannot be sustained. It is known from German archives that the German High Command was indeed considering operations against the ports, either with its own troops or jointly with Finnish and Bolshevik forces. Such an operation made very good sense because control of Murmansk and Archangel would have enabled Germany to deny the Allies access to Russia and thus frustrated plans to reactivate the Eastern Front. Berlin opened negotiations to this end in late May 1918 with Ioffe. These talks eventually broke down, partly because of the inability of the Bolsheviks and Finns to agree on the terms of collaboration and partly because the Germans insisted on occupying Petrograd as a base of operations, to which the Russians would not consent.186 But the Allies could not have foreseen this, any more than they could have known in June that two months later the Germans would withdraw troops from Finland. There is no evidence to indicate that in sending troops to Russia in 1918 the Allies intended to overthrow the Bolshevik Government. The British, who played a key role in the operation, expressed, both publicly and privately, complete lack of concern about the nature of the government administering Russia. Prime Minister David Lloyd George put the matter bluntly at the meeting of the War Cabinet on July 22, 1918, when he declared that it was none of Britain’s business what sort of a government the Russians set up: a republic, a Bolshevik state, or a monarchy.187 The indications are that President Wilson shared this view.
The Allied expeditionary force, initially 8,500 troops, 4,800 of them Americans, landed at Archangel on August 1–2. On August 10, General Poole received instructions “to cooperate in restoring Russia with the object of resisting German influence and penetration” and to help the Russians “take the field side by side with their Allies” for the recovery of their country.188 He was further instructed to establish communications with the Czech Legion, so as to jointly secure railroads leading to the east and organize an armed force to fight the Germans.189 While the language of these instructions could be interpreted to mean broader, more ambitious objectives than those stated in the June 3 directive, they provide no basis for the claim that the “future of the North Russian expedition would be in fighting the Bolsheviks, not the Germans.”190 At the time, the Bolsheviks appeared as, and indeed in considerable measure were, partners of the Germans: they took money from them, and more than once told the Germans that only the state of Russian public opinion prevented them from signing with them a formal alliance. The British and French, through their agents in Moscow, were informed of the role which the German Embassy played in keeping the Bolsheviks afloat. To disassociate—let alone contrast—Allied actions in 1918 against the Bolsheviks from those against the Germans, therefore, is to misunderstand both the perceptions and the mood of the time. If Poole’s mission were to fight the Bolsheviks, he certainly would have been given unequivocal instructions to this effect and he would have established communication with opposition groups in Moscow. Of this, there is no evidence. The evidence which does exist indicates, on the contrary, that the task of the Allied expeditionary force in the north was to open a new front against the Germans in cooperation with the Czechoslovaks, the Japanese, and such Russians as were willing to join. It was a military operation intimately connected with the final stages of the World War.