Murmansk in the First World War

Murmansk is a child of this war. The port on the Kola Bay, on the coast of the Barents Sea, was built from scratch in 1915–1916, when Russia had been cut off from its allies, and the Murmansk railway linked it with Petrograd. In the last period of the war in the east it received supplies from the West, because unlike Arkhangelsk it did not freeze in winter. In 1918 it became the first base of the Allied intervention in northern Russia, which lasted until the autumn of 1919.

A port that does not freeze (1914–1916)

From the autumn of 1914 the German fleet closed the Baltic route to Russia, and Turkey the route through the Black Sea straits. Arkhangelsk on the White Sea was icebound for about half the year, and Vladivostok lay at the other end of the country, on the overloaded Trans-Siberian Railway. The shores of the Kola Peninsula, by contrast, warmed by a warm sea current, do not freeze even in midwinter. In December 1914 the Council of Ministers decided to lay a line there from Petrozavodsk, and on 1 January 1915 Tsar Nicholas II gave his approval.

More than a thousand kilometres of track were laid through the forests, rocks and bogs of Karelia in about a year and a half. Hired peasants, Chinese and Finns worked on it, and the hardest labour fell to prisoners from the Austro-Hungarian and German armies: more than 40,000 according to Russian sources, about 60,000 according to the German historian Georg Wurzer. Russian figures speak of more than 600 deaths in the small hospitals along the line, while Wurzer estimates that as many as 25,000 prisoners may have died. At the end of the line, on the Semyonovsky Bay, a port settlement grew up in 1915. On 4 October 1916 the town of Romanov-on-Murman was formally founded there, the last town founded in the Russian Empire. In April 1917, after the fall of the monarchy, it was renamed Murmansk.

A gateway for supplies (1916–1917)

The railway was declared open in December 1916, but it was a makeshift: a single track, wooden bridges and trains running at 11–12 km/h. The Russian government expected 380,000 tons of ammunition and other cargo to pass through Murmansk over the winter, which the British doubted. From March 1917 at least 200 wagons a day were dispatched from here. Allied delegations to the Petrograd conference also came to the new port by sea around Scandinavia. In the winter of 1917 the British squadron of Rear Admiral Thomas Kemp was stationed at Murmansk. For the Russian front, however, the port and the railway came too late.

The Allies in Murmansk (1918)

After the revolution huge stocks of war material delivered by the Allies lay in the port. On 1 March 1918, while the fate of the peace hung in the balance at Brest, Leon Trotsky instructed the local soviet to accept “all assistance from the Allied missions”, and on 6 March British marines came ashore from the battleship Glory. After the peace of Brest-Litovsk and the German landing in Finland, it was feared that the Germans or the Finnish Whites would seize the railway and the port and set up a submarine base here. In May sailors from the cruiser Cochrane defended Pechenga against Finnish volunteers, and on 24 May General Frederick Poole arrived on the American cruiser Olympia and took command of the Allied forces in northern Russia.

In the summer Murmansk found itself between Moscow and the Allies. Under pressure from Berlin, Lenin’s government demanded the withdrawal of the foreign troops, but the region depended on coal and food from the West. On 23 June General Charles Maynard’s reinforcements arrived, and he soon disarmed the Red Guard detachments travelling north by rail. On 30 June the soviet broke with Moscow, and at the beginning of July it concluded an agreement with the representatives of Britain, the United States and France. The Allies promised food and aid, and the soviet kept authority over the region’s internal affairs.

People who could not stay in Russia left it through Murmansk. In June 1918 Alexander Kerensky passed through on his way to London with the papers of a Serbian officer. General Józef Haller arrived here on 26 June after the Battle of Kaniów, and at the beginning of July sailed via Scotland to France. Troops, on the other hand, kept arriving: on 26 July a French colonial infantry battalion, and on 2 September an Italian expeditionary corps. On the night of 30–31 July Poole’s expedition sailed from here and on 2 August entered Arkhangelsk.

The end of the intervention (1918–1919)

From Murmansk the Allies guarded the railway as far as the White Sea. At the beginning of October 1918 Red Finns of the Murmansk Legion, armed and trained by the British, routed at Lake Pyaozero the last detachment of White Finns. The armistice with Germany did not end the fighting here, because the Allied troops were by then facing the Bolsheviks. In the first week of March 1919 the British War Cabinet decided that Arkhangelsk and Murmansk were to be evacuated before the next winter. After the evacuation of Arkhangelsk, the last British troops sailed from Murmansk on 12 October 1919.