Following the occupation of Archangel, a second Allied force, commanded by British Major General C. C. M. Maynard, landed in Murmansk, which had had a small British contingent since June. Maynard’s force in time grew to 15,000 men, of which 11,000 were Allied troops and the remainder Russians and others. According to Noulens, the Archangel-Murmansk expeditionary force (then 23,500 men strong) nearly sufficed to reactivate the Eastern Front, a task which in the opinion of the Western military mission required 30,000 men.191
Unfortunately for the Allies, by the time they had finally deployed sufficient troops in the north, and this happened only in September, the Czech Legion ceased to exist as a viable offensive force.
As we have seen, the Czechoslovaks originally resorted to arms to ensure unimpeded passage to Vladivostok. In June, however, their mission changed because the Allied command came to regard them as the vanguard of the projected Allied army on the reactivated Eastern Front.192 In a message to the Czechoslovak troops on June 7, General Čeček thus defined their mission:
Let it be known to all our brothers that on the basis of the decision of the Congress of the [Czechoslovak] Corps, in agreement with our National Council and by arrangement with all the Allies, our corps is designated as the vanguard of the forces of the Entente, and that the instructions issued by the staff of the Army Corps have as their sole purpose creating an anti-German front in Russia jointly with the entire Russian nation and our allies.193
In accord with these plans, in early July, the Czechoslovak commanders assigned their troops missions for which they had neither the capability nor the motivation.
To establish a front against the Germans, the Czechoslovaks had to redeploy from a horizontal line, running from west to east, to a diagonal one, running from north to south, along the Volga and the Urals.194 Accordingly, the Czechoslovak forces still in western Siberia, some 10,000–20,000 strong, launched offensive operations to the north and south of Samara. On July 5, they captured Ufa, on July 21, Simbirsk, and on August 6, Kazan. The assault on Kazan marked the high point of their operations in Russia. After they had compelled a severely depleted 5th Latvian Regiment of 400 men defending the city to retreat, the Czechs captured a gold hoard of 650 million rubles of the Imperial Russian Treasury, evacuated there by the Bolsheviks in February. It enabled them to conduct large-scale military campaigns without resorting to taxation or forced food extractions.
The Czechoslovaks fought with vigor and skill. But they were meant to be only the vanguard—the vanguard of what? The Allies did not stir to help, although they were generous enough with instructions and advice. Nor were anti-Bolshevik Russians more helpful. Prodded by the Allies, the Czechoslovaks tried to unite the Russian political groupings in the Volga region and Siberia, but this proved a hopeless undertaking. On July 15, representatives of Komuch and the Omsk government conferring in Cheliabinsk failed to reach agreement. Disagreements also racked a second Russian political conference held on August 23–25. The squabbling of the Russians exasperated the Czechs.
Komuch attempted to raise an army to fight alongside the Czechoslovaks and the other Allies, but it had only limited success. On July 8, it announced the formation of a volunteer People’s Army (Narodnaia Armiia) under the overall command of General Čeček. But as the Bolsheviks had also found out, a Russian army could not be created on a voluntary basis. Especially galling was Komuch’s experience with the peasants, who, although violently anti-Communist, refused to enlist on the grounds that the Revolution had freed them of all obligations to the state. After inducting 3,000 volunteers, Komuch went over to conscription and in the course of August recruited 50,000–60,000 men, of whom only 30,000 had weapons and only 10,000 were trained for combat.195 The military historian General N. N. Golovin estimates that at the beginning of September the pro-Allied contingent in western Siberia consisted of 20,000 Czechoslovaks, 15,000 Ural and Orenburg Cossacks, 5,000 factory workers, and 15,000 troops of the People’s Army.196 This multinational force had no central command and no political leadership.
In the meantime, Trotsky was energetically building up forces in the east. The Kaiser’s pledge of late June not to imperil Soviet Russia allowed him to shift Latvian regiments from the west to the Urals, where they were the first to engage the Czechoslovaks. He then proceeded to press into the Red Army thousands of former tsarist officers and hundreds of thousands of conscripts. He reintroduced and freely applied the death penalty for desertion. The Red Army’s first successes against the Czechoslovaks were won by the Latvians, who on September 7 retook Kazan and five days later Simbirsk. The news of these victories brought jubilation to the Kremlin: for the Bolsheviks they marked a psychological turning of the tide.
But all this lay in the future. On August 1, when the Kremlin received news of Allied landings in Archangel, the situation looked hopeless. In the east, the Czechoslovaks were capturing city after city and had full control of the middle Volga region. In the south, Denikin’s Volunteer Army, headed by the Don Cossacks under General Krasnov, was advancing on Tsaritsyn, capture of which would allow it to link up with the Czechoslovaks and create an uninterrupted anti-Bolshevik front from the middle Volga to the Don. And now a sizable Anglo-American force was assembling in the north, apparently to launch an offensive into the interior of Russia.
The Bolsheviks saw only one way out of their plight and that was German military intervention. This they decided to request on August i, the day after Helfferich had given Chicherin undertakings of continued German support. The meeting at which this decision was made is described in Communist sources as a session of the Sovnarkom, but as there exists no record of a meeting of the cabinet on that day, it is virtually certain it was made personally by Lenin, probably in consultation with Chicherin. The Russians were to propose to the Germans joint military action against Allied and pro-Allied forces: the Red Army, composed at this time essentially of Latvian units, would take up positions to the northeast of Moscow to defend it from the anticipated Allied assault, while the German Army would advance from Finland against the Anglo-American expeditionary force and from the Ukraine against the Volunteer Army. This decision is known to us mainly from the memoirs of Helfferich, who late on August 1 received another unexpected visit from Chicherin. The Commissar of Foreign Affairs told him that he had come directly from a meeting of the cabinet to request, on its behalf, German military intervention.* According to Helfferich, Chicherin said: