Bolsheviks demand the withdrawal of Entente troops

On 8 June 1918 the British General Frederick Poole, commander of the Allied forces in northern Russia, was summoned to a meeting of the soviet in Murmansk. There he was read a telegram signed by Vladimir Lenin and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin. In it the Soviet government stated that the Allied occupation of Murmansk violated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and instructed the soviet to warn the Allies to leave the country at once. Poole regarded this in his report as the first sign that Moscow had finally sided with Germany against the Entente. The British chronology of the war records under this date that the Bolshevik government ordered the expeditionary force to leave Russia. According to some sources, Lenin and Chicherin had already sent their demand to the chairman of the soviet, Aleksei Yuryev, on 6 June, while the American naval history states that the demand for the withdrawal of the Allied warships reached Murmansk on 16 June. It appears that there were several telegrams.

Under pressure from Berlin

As late as March the Soviet authorities themselves had encouraged the Murmansk soviet to accept Entente help against the Germans and the Finnish Whites. After the signing of the peace the situation changed. The German ambassador in Moscow put pressure on Lenin’s government, and in mid-May a German submarine appeared in the waters off Norwegian Vardø; it sank several Russian steamers and Norwegian fishing boats and fired on lifeboats carrying survivors. When Lenin protested, he was told, according to the British official history, that the sinkings would stop when the British got out of Murmansk. Chicherin therefore called on the soviet to demand the Allied withdrawal itself. Earlier, in May, he had confined himself to forbidding appeals for help to “one imperialist coalition against the other” and to announcing protests.

At the beginning of June Moscow’s extraordinary commissar Sergei Natsarenus (PL) arrived in Murmansk. He had full powers to conclude an agreement with the Allies, but demanded in return official recognition of the Soviet government, which Poole was not authorised to give. Natsarenus gave unofficial assurances that Moscow would defend the northern ports and send two divisions of Red Guards there, as well as the Czechoslovaks. A few hours later Poole learned that the Czechoslovaks were fighting the Bolsheviks near Penza and that there was no question of their coming north.

The soviet on the Allied side

The members of the soviet told Poole openly that they favoured the Allies and very much wanted them not to leave. They hinted that the order from Moscow might end in Murmansk breaking with the central government. Their choice had practical grounds. It was the Allies, not Moscow, who defended the country against the Finns, as at Pechenga in May, and it was they who fed the population and supplied the fishermen with equipment. The soviet set all this out to Moscow, adding that without troops it could not remove the Allies anyway. Yuryev answered Lenin with several telegrams, and in the last of them, on 15 June, stated that a policy directed against the Allies was impossible for the soviet. British intelligence meanwhile intercepted a telegram from Leon Trotsky instructing the soviet to remove the Allies by force.

The Allies had no intention of giving way. Instead of withdrawing, they strengthened their detachments, and in June further reinforcements arrived in Murmansk from Britain. Chicherin protested several more times, including in notes to the British representative in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, but the dispute between Moscow and Murmansk only deepened. At the end of June the Murmansk soviet finally rejected the instructions of Lenin’s government and threw in its lot with the Entente.