The British Intervention in South Russia 1918-1920
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THE BRITISH INTERVENTION IN SOUTH RUSSIA 1918-1920 Lauri Kopisto Academic Dissertation To be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, in Auditorium XII, on 29th of April, 2011 at 12 o’clock. 2 The British Intervention in South Russia 1918-1920 © Lauri Kopisto Cover illustration: British Mark V tank ‘General Drozdovskii’ of the Volunteer Army, South Russia August 1919 (the State Museum of the Russian Political History, St. Petersburg). ISBN 978-952-10-6922-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-952-10-6923-9 (pdf) ISSN 0357-9549 Unigrafia Helsinki 2011 Historical Studies from the University of Helsinki XXIV Historiallisia tutkimuksia Helsingin yliopistosta XXIV Historiska studier från Helsingfors universitetet XXIV 3 CONTENTS Abstract 5 Acknowledgements 6 Abbreviations 8 Introduction 9 1. Geopolitical Area of South Russia and the Caucasus 1.1. The Rivalry of the Empires 25 1.2. The Strategic Periphery 28 1.3. The Problem of Nationalities 33 2. The Great War and the Revolution 2.1. The Collapse of the Eastern Front 38 2.2. Disintegration of the Russian Empire 44 2.3. First Moves towards the Intervention 48 3. Britain and the Russian Question after the Armistice 3.1. The Lines of Policy 57 3.2. Lloyd George and the Prinkipo Proposal 62 3.3. Churchill’s Crusade 66 4. Beginning of the Intervention 4.1. The Arrival of the British and the Establishment of the Armed Forces of South Russia 71 4.2. The Start of Military Aid to Denikin 77 4.3. Political Difficulties 80 4 5. Denikin’s War 5.1. The March to Moscow 85 5.2. Nature of Warfare 89 5.3. Concentrating the Aid on Denikin 100 6. Arming the Counter-Revolution 6.1. Supplying the White Army with British Weapons and Equipment 106 6.2. Training 112 6.3 Churchill’s Private Warriors 115 6.4. 47th Squadron RAF 120 7. Awkward Brothers in Arms 7.1. The Adventurers, the Businessmen and the Profession 126 7.2. Relations with the Russians 131 7.3. The Country of Murder and Loot 138 8. End of the Intervention 8.1. Turn of the Tide 148 8.2. New British Policy Lines 154 8.3 Denikin’s Defeat 161 8.4 Wrangel and the British 171 9. Conclusion 179 Appendix 1. General Holman’s order, July 1919 190 Appendix 2. British matériel issued to the White forces in South Russia 191 Appendix 3 Map: Russia 1919 194 Sources and Bibliography 195 5 Abstract The British Intervention in South Russia 1918-1920 Soon after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a three-year civil war broke out in Russia. As in many other civil wars, foreign powers intervened in the conflict. Britain played a leading role in this intervention and had a significant effect on the course of the war. Without this intervention on the White side, the superiority of numbers in manpower and weaponry of the Bolsheviks would have quickly overwhelmed their opponents. The aim of this dissertation is to explain the nature and role of the British intervention on the southern, and most decisive, front of the Civil War. The political decision making in London is studied as a background, but the focus of the dissertation is on the actual implementation of the British policy in Russia. The British military mission arrived in South Russia in late 1918, and started to provide General Denikin’s White army with ample supplies. General Denikin would have not been able to build his army of more than 200,000 men or to make his operation against Moscow without the British matériel. The British mission also organized the training and equipping of the Russian troops with British weapons. This made the material aid much more effective. Many of the British instructors took part in fighting the Bolsheviks despite the orders of their government. The study is based on primary sources produced by British departments of state and members of the British mission and military units in South Russia. Primary sources from the Whites, including the personal collections of several key figures of the White movement and official records of the Armed Forces of South Russia are also used to give a balanced picture of the course of events. It is possible to draw some general conclusions from the White movement and reasons for their defeat from the study of the British intervention. In purely material terms the British aid placed Denikin’s army in a far more favourable position than the Bolsheviks in 1919, but other military defects in the White army were numerous. The White commanders were unimaginative, their military thinking was obsolete, and they were incapable of organizing the logistics of their army. There were also fundamental defects in the morale of the White troops. In addition to all political mistakes of Denikin’s movement and a general inability to adjust to the complex situation in Revolutionary Russia, the Whites suffered a clear military defeat. In South Russia the Whites were defeated not because of the lack of British aid, but rather in spite of it. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a great debt of gratitude to many people for their help in the process of completing this study. First of all, I would like to thank my academic mentor, Professor Emeritus Erkki Kouri, who initially advised me to continue my research on the British intervention after I had completed my undergraduate studies at Helsinki. Throughout this long and at times very trying process, he has provided me with his uncompromising support and encouragement. It would have been difficult to accomplish this task without his help. I am also grateful to Professor Orlando Figes for supervising my studies at Cambridge. I feel honored to have benefited from his advice and insight into the Russian Revolution and Civil War. My warmest thanks go to Professor Markku Peltonen for his most invaluable help at the final stages of the project. I am also thankful for the preliminary examiners of this dissertation, Professor Kalervo Hovi and Docent Kari Alenius, for their valuable and supportive comments. John Calton, whom I wish to thank most warmly, corrected the language of the main chapters of the manuscript of this study. Many institutions have helped me in the research for this dissertation. I should like to thank the Finnish Academy, the Finnish Cultural Fund, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, the Niilo Helander Foundation and St. Edmund’s College of the University of Cambridge for their financial support. I would also like to thank the staff of the many archives and libraries, especially the Imperial War Museum in London, the Churchill Archives in Cambridge and the Hoover Institution in Stanford, at which I completed my research. 7 Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my family and friends. To my mother Sirkka Kopisto and my late father Aarne Kopisto go the warmest thanks for all their support and advice. Above all, I would like to thank my wife Elina, and our children Mikko, Anni and Tomi for their love, understanding and inspiration. Helsinki, 13 March 2011 8 ABBREVIATIONS ADM Admiralty AFSR Armed Forces of South Russia (Vooruzhennye sily Iuga Rossii) BEF British Expeditionary Force BMM British Military Mission CAB Cabinet Office papers CCAC Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge CHAR Chartwell Collection, (Papers of Winston Churchill) CIGS Chief of the Imperial General Staff FO Foreign Office GS General Staff HIA Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University HQ Headquarters IWM Imperial War Museum, London LHC Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London NA National Archives, London NCO Non-commissioned officer (all grades of corporals and sergeants) PLA Peter Liddle Archive, Leeds University WO War Office 9 INTRODUCTION 1. Perspective Soon after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a three-year civil war broke out in Russia. The initial phase of the war lasted for one year, and it was distinguished by rapidly shifting front lines and sporadic engagements by small units. In this ‘Railway War’ trainloads of Bolshevik revolutionaries travelled long distances from the industrial cities to root out centres of opposition in the periphery of the vast country. It began in the winter of 1917-18 with the formation of the anti- Bolshevik Volunteer Army by Generals Alekseev and Kornilov in the Don Cossack region, thus creating the southern front of the war. Half a year later this was followed by the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion on the mid-Volga and Siberia, which assisted the formation of two anti- Bolshevik governments, each with its own army, the Komuch in Samara and the Siberian Government in Omsk. The Red Army of Lenin’s Bolshevik government was properly formed to replace the irregular Red Guard partisan units only at the end of this phase in the fall of 1918. The second and decisive stage of the Civil War lasted from March to December 1919. First, the White armies of Admiral Kolchak in Siberia and General Denikin in South Russia advanced resolutely toward Moscow. In the North-west General Iudenich attacked Petrograd. As in many other civil wars, foreign powers intervened in the conflict. Britain played a leading role in this intervention and had a significant effect on the course of the war. Without this foreign intervention on the White side, the superiority of numbers in manpower and weaponry of the Bolsheviks would have quickly overwhelmed their opponents. The whole picture of the Civil War would obviously have been different in that the large-scale field operations between the Whites 10 and the Reds would not have taken place. Neither of the two most important White commanders, Kolchak nor Denikin, would have been able to build up their armies and to launch their offensives without Allied war supplies in 1919.