Allies in Archangel

On 2 August 1918 Bolshevik rule collapsed in Archangel, the main port of northern Russia. At dawn an anti-Bolshevik coup, weeks in preparation, broke out, and a few hours later Allied ships carrying the troops of General Frederick Poole sailed into the city. The day before, the Allied squadron had taken Mudyug Island, which guarded the entrance to the port. The British chronology of the war records under 2 August a “pro-Entente revolution at Archangel” and the entry of Entente troops into the city. Archangel became the main base of the Allied intervention in northern Russia.

The coup

The plot was prepared by Georgy Chaplin, a captain of the tsarist navy who during the war had served for several months as a liaison officer on British submarines in the Baltic. After the Bolsheviks seized power he hid in Petrograd and smuggled officers to the White armies in the south, and in June he came to Archangel. The British gave him a passport and a Royal Navy uniform, and in the city he passed as “Commander Thomson” of the British naval mission. The conspirators kept in touch with Poole in Murmansk. At the end of July the Bolsheviks were arresting members of the organisation more and more often. On 30 July a ship arrived at Kandalaksha from Archangel carrying the staff of the Allied embassies, which had earlier moved to Vologda. The diplomats brought word that the rising could not be put off any longer, and Poole brought the expedition forward.

When on 1 August it became clear that Allied ships were at the mouth of the Dvina, the Bolshevik authorities decided to abandon the city. They ordered two icebreakers to be scuttled in the fairway to block the squadron’s way, and began withdrawing during the night. According to Poole’s report the revolution broke out at 4 a.m. on 2 August and “was entirely successful”. Chaplin’s detachments, made up mainly of officers, took the city almost without a fight. The Reds, although more numerous than the entire Allied landing force, withdrew up the Dvina and along the railway south towards Vologda. Before that, however, they had managed to carry off into the interior a large part of the huge stocks of weapons and equipment that the Allies had delivered to Russia through Archangel and that the intervention was meant to save from the Germans.

Chaikovsky’s government

That same day, while isolated shots could still be heard in the streets, members of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia (PL), an anti-Bolshevik organisation of socialists and liberals, met in the provincial government building. They proclaimed the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region. At its head stood Nikolai Chaikovsky, a 67-year-old veteran of the Narodnik movement, who had lived for decades in exile in England and the United States and after the revolution belonged to the Popular Socialists. Most members of the administration were Socialist Revolutionaries, many of them deputies to the Constituent Assembly dispersed by the Bolsheviks. Chaplin became commander of the region’s armed forces.

According to Poole, the new government “cordially invited” the Allies to help and declared itself pro-Allied, anti-German and unwilling to recognise the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. On 2 August the administration issued proclamations to the inhabitants and its first decrees. It promised to restore town and zemstvo self-government elected by universal suffrage and to defend the region and all of Russia against the Germans alongside the Allies. A delegation led by Chaikovsky went out to greet the landing force.

The Allies enter

On the morning of 2 August the squadron, led by the cruiser Attentive, squeezed between the scuttled icebreakers and sailed upriver, landing small French detachments at key points on the way. As the British official history of the naval war records, the whole waterfront was black with cheering people, and when Poole and Rear-Admiral Thomas Kemp went ashore they were greeted with enthusiasm. The red flags disappeared, replaced by Russian tricolours and naval ensigns with the St Andrew’s cross.

The Allied forces, however, were modest. The whole landing force that had set out from Murmansk numbered, according to General Charles Maynard, about 1,500 men: officers and NCOs of the British “Elope” training mission, a French colonial infantry battalion, a hundred British Royal Marines, small detachments of Poles and of volunteers from the Slavo-British Legion then being formed, and American sailors from the cruiser Olympia. Until the transports with the rest of the troops arrived, the Allied position was precarious. As early as 3 August a Red detachment came up by rail to Bakaritsa on the opposite bank of the Dvina, where the supply depots stood. It was driven off by the fire of Attentive and a landing party of sailors, supported by the French and Russian volunteers.

What came next

Poole did not intend to stop at Archangel. He wanted to advance up the Dvina and along the railway towards Vologda to link up with the Czechoslovaks fighting on the Volga. He had far too few troops for this, and the promised reinforcements arrived slowly. The American 339th Infantry Regiment reached Archangel only on 4 September. Friction also soon arose between the general, who ruled the city as if it were conquered territory, and Chaikovsky’s socialist government. At the beginning of September Chaplin, hostile to the socialists, abducted members of the government, which was restored only under pressure from Allied diplomats. Moscow regarded the landing as open aggression. In northern Russia a war began that would last for more than a year after the fighting in the west had ended.