Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

It began on 4 March 1918, when 170 British troops landed at Murmansk at the request of the Murmansk Soviet to guard against the Germans. On 2 August, after Captain Chaplin overthrew the local soviet in Arkhangelsk, 1,500 British and French troops occupied the city and Nikolai Chaikovsky's Northern Region government was formed. The United States sent 5,000 men of the North Russia expedition to Arkhangelsk and 8,000 to Vladivostok, and Japan brought more than 70,000 into Siberia and the Maritime Province (the Japanese intervention in Siberia). On 18 December 1918 French troops landed at Odessa and Sevastopol, but under pressure from Hryhoriv's forces and amid a mutiny of French sailors in the Black Sea they left in April 1919. The British held Baku with Dunsterforce and Transcaspia with Malleson's force, and their Baltic squadron raided Kronstadt in support of Estonia and Yudenich. The English source lists among the forces 14,378 British troops in North Russia, 40,000 British in the Caucasus, and 15,000 French and 23,351 Greeks in South Russia.

The Allies had divided aims and were war-weary, and they faced the trade unions' "Hands off Russia" campaign and mutinies and refusals among their own troops. The last Allied troops left Arkhangelsk on 27 September 1919 and Murmansk on 12 October, and in Siberia the Western Allies withdrew in 1920 along with the evacuation of the Czechoslovak Legion. In My Life Trotsky wrote: "Throughout 1918 the Entente forced civil war on us, supposedly for the sake of victory over Wilhelm. But now it was 1919, and Germany had long been beaten. Yet the Entente went on spending hundreds of millions to sow death, hunger and epidemics in the country of the revolution." The English source judges that the West was in fact reluctant to intervene and that the foreign presence made the Whites look like "puppets", which helped Bolshevik propaganda. Soviet historiography spoke of an intervention by "fourteen states", but the Russian source notes that the number is conventional and counts Finland, Poland and the British dominions. A society for the victims of the intervention founded in 1924 had by 1927 collected reports of 111,730 deaths for which the interventionists were held responsible.