Murmansk soviet sides with the Entente

On 30 June 1918 in Murmansk the Murmansk Regional Soviet met together with the central committee of the local flotilla (Tsentromur), the railwaymen’s committee and delegates from the surrounding districts. According to Russian studies, those assembled resolved not to carry out the instructions of the Council of People’s Commissars and to accept economic and military aid from the Allies. General Frederick Poole, commander of the Allied forces in northern Russia, described it in a report as a large meeting at which it was unanimously resolved that the Murman would not carry out the order of the central Soviet government to expel the Allies from the country. The soviet was to defend Murmansk against the Germans itself and invited the Allies to co-operate. The representatives of the Entente powers agreed. The soviet did not formally cease to be a Soviet body, but in practice it broke with Lenin’s government.

Between Moscow and the Allies

Months of manoeuvring had led to this choice. At the beginning of March, while peace hung in the balance at Brest, Leon Trotsky had instructed the soviet to accept the help of the Allied missions. The chairman of the soviet, Aleksei Yuryev, a ship’s stoker who before the revolution, as an émigré in New York, had worked with the newspaper Novy Mir, for which Trotsky also wrote, then concluded a verbal agreement with the British and French. After the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, however, Moscow, under pressure from Berlin, began to regard the presence of foreign troops in Murmansk as contrary to the treaty. At the beginning of June Lenin and Chicherin demanded that the soviet stop helping the British and French. Yuryev replied with one telegram after another. In one of them, of 15 June, he wrote that a policy hostile to the Allies was impossible in Murmansk. The region depended on supplies of coal and food from the West, and Entente warships lay in the port. On 26 June Lenin sent Yuryev a final telegram: if he still refused to understand Soviet policy, “equally hostile to the English and the Germans”, he would “have only himself to blame”.

The railway in Allied hands

The decision was hastened by events on the Murmansk railway. Moscow was sending detachments of Red Guards north. According to Poole, on 28 June it became clear that the central government intended to remove the Allies by force. General Charles Maynard, who had arrived with reinforcements a few days earlier, set out on 27 June to inspect the line. At Kandalaksha he found a train with about 300 Red Guards who were to travel to Murmansk, and stopped it under the threat of machine guns. On 30 June he reached Kem on the White Sea, where he stopped further transports. Soon afterwards he ordered the disarming of the Red units at Kem, at Kandalaksha and at the stations between them. According to Poole, about 3,000 rifles, a million rounds and 17 machine guns were taken in the process. Maynard in his report gave higher figures: 60 machine guns and nearly 10,000 rifles. In this way, at the turn of June and July, the line from Murmansk to Kem came under Allied control almost without bloodshed.

What came next

Moscow responded quickly. On the night of 1/2 July Yuryev spoke over the telegraph with Lenin and Chicherin, and on 2 July Izvestia announced that the chairman of the Murmansk soviet had gone over to the side of the “Anglo-French imperialists”. Lenin and Trotsky declared him an enemy of the people and outlawed him. On 6 July Poole, the captain of the French cruiser Amiral Aube and the commander of the American cruiser Olympia signed an agreement with the soviet (Maynard in his memoirs gives 7 July). The Allies were to supply arms, food, goods and money, and the soviet was to defend the region against the Germans and retain authority over its internal affairs. Around 7 July the ship HMS Attentive and an Allied detachment occupied Soroka, from which the Reds withdrew south, burning the railway bridges behind them. The Russian North became a base for the Allied intervention, and at the beginning of August Poole’s troops landed at Archangel.