World War One: Russia from March to July 1918

Since March 21, 1918, the world's attention was focused on the Western Front, where Germany was advancing against the French and British, and this overshadowed Japan landing 500 Japanese marines at Vladivostok in April. Japan's pretext was that they were protecting Japanese persons living in Vladivostok, following a report that some Russians in Bolshevik uniforms had robbed a Japanese store and killed a clerk. The British followed suit and landed fifty marines at Vladivostok, to guard, they said, the British consulate and save British property. The Japanese and British marines met no resistance, there being no substantial Bolshevik force there.

Lenin believed that the forces from the United States would soon join the Japanese and British in Vladivostok. He spoke of policy in the United States being controlled by "finance capital," and finance capital, he said, wanted "control of Siberia."

Nevertheless, Lenin hoped for good relations with the United States. The amateur diplomat, Raymond Robins, was returning there, and Lenin sent a message with him expressing hope for trade with the United States, and he wrote of the Soviet Union as a good opportunity for American investors. He offered the same for Britain. He was hoping that competition from the United States and Britain would put a check on Japanese expansion from Vladivostok.

In Finland, meanwhile, a civil war was raging between the pro-Bolshevik regime and an army of conservatives. Obliged to stay out of Finnish affairs by the Brest-Litovsk agreement, Moscow sent no help to their comrades in Finland, while the Germans were aiding the conservatives, German units having landed in Finland early April. The conservative Finns were better organized and better led that the Finnish Red Army, and, on April 6, the army of conservatives crushed the Red Army. And German units overran the Finnish capital, Helsinki, on April 13.

In April, about 150 miles south of Rostov, near the Black Sea, anti-Bolshevik forces tried to take the town of Ekaterinodar, recently conquered by the Bolsheviks. There, Kornilov was killed by Bolshevik artillery. His friends buried him. Then the jubilant and victorious Bolshevik soldiers dug up his body, dragged it to the town square and burned it on a heap of rubbish. And with Kornilov dead and his forces defeated, Lenin expressed his belief that the civil war was ended.

The civil war seemed ended, but Russia's former empire was still disintegrating. In April, Bessarabia declared its independence. And in April, the Germans pushed from the Ukraine into the Crimea. With the withdrawal of the Germans from the Ukraine, bands of Ukrainian nationalists and various outlaws began a campaign of terror in the Ukraine, seeking plunder and extorting money. These were largely Eastern Orthodox Christians attacking Jews, and they left the Jewish population destitute, while the Eastern Orthodox Church, with some few exceptions, remained silent about the attacks against the Jews.

The Ottoman Empire did not accept the treaty that its ally, Germany, had made with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, the empire planning to takeover all territories that it had lost to Russia in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman leader, Enver Pasha, began the drive eastward that he had long been looking forward to. His forces seized the city of Batum, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea -- while other Turk forces, under a German commander, Liman von Sanders, were trying to hold off British advances northward in Palestine.

Matters looked dim for the Bolsheviks in Ottoman lands that had once been a part of the Russian Empire. The Islamic Tatar people looked forward to the coming of the Ottomans. The Kirghiz, a Turkish people, were in the midst of a revolt against the Russians and were outraged by Bolshevik intrusions. The Armenians who had been ruled by the tsar were left to look out for themselves, and they declared their independence in May. Also in the Caucasus, the Tatars of Azerbaijan declared their independence. The Georgians, under a moderate socialist government, declared their independence. Bessarabia, populated largely by Romanians, left the Soviet camp and became a part of Romania. And troops from the Central Powers reached Rostov on May 8.

And in May the Bolsheviks lost control of Siberia. This had origins with the presence of Czechs and Slovaks in Russia -- most of them former soldiers for Austria-Hungary who had been taken as prisoners of war. These Czechs and Slovaks were eager to defeat Austria-Hungary in order to win independence from Habsburg rule, and in an agreement with the Allied powers, 6,000 of them were being shipped across the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, on their way to join the fighting against Austria and Germany. On May 14, at the rail town of Cheliabinsk, in the Urals, Austrian or Hungarian prisoners of war being transported in the opposite direction called the Czechs and Slovaks traitors and threw stones at them. A Czech was killed. A brawl followed between the two sides and Czechs grabbed their weapons and sought the man who had killed the Czech.

The Bolsheviks saw the majority of the Czechs and Slovaks as bourgeois nationalists and hostile to their revolution. Trotsky was now War Commissar in charge of the Red Army, and his commissariat was alarmed by Czechs and Slovaks taking command with rifles. Rather than just leave the Czechs and Slovaks alone, they issued an order to disarm them and force them into Red Army units or labor battalions. It proved to be a mistake -- an overreaction. The Czechs resisted and decided to force their way east to their destination: Vladivostok. The Bolsheviks saw their position in Siberia threatened, and on May 25, Trotsky ordered that any Czech or Slovak found armed was to be shot on the spot." Because the Bolshevik hold on Serbia was weak, the Czechoslovakians were able to take over several towns along the Trans-Siberian railway. Those Czechoslovakians already in Vladivostok were disturbed by their fellow countrymen having to fight their way east, and they took over Vladivostok. Anti-Bolshevik Russians, who had been outnumbered by what few forces the Bolsheviks had in Siberia, were now encouraged, and, led by former army officers, they rose against the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky put one of his able commanders, Muraviev, in charge of the eastern front, and Muraviev deserted, taking his pay chest and a thousand men with him, fleeing to Simbirsk, on the Volga River, where Muraviev announced the suspension of fighting against the Czechoslovakians and a renewal of hostilities against Germany.

Forces in Siberia loyal to the Bolsheviks were forced to withdraw westward. By late June, the Soviets regime was worried about the Japanese advancing along the Trans-Siberian railway, and the Bolsheviks were worried about the arrival of 600 British reinforcements landing at Murmansk, where some French troops had also landed. The Soviet attitude toward the Allied powers passed from distrust to hostility. Trotsky sent armed detachments toward Murmansk, and Allied troops moved south to intercept them. The two sides fought skirmishes, and the Allied troops established a defensive line about 300 miles down the rail line from Murmansk.

Preparing itself for more warfare, the Soviet government on June 28 instituted what became known as War Communism. All major branches of industry were nationalized, and industry came under military discipline. The distribution of materials and all trade were to be centrally organized. Trade union independence was ended, the Bolsheviks arguing that the working class was the government and therefore not in need of independent unions. And the Bolsheviks continued their attempt to crush whatever moves against their regime they could. They arrested anyone they suspected of counter-revolution, including some grand dukes, and they expelled all Mensheviks and moderate Socialist Revolutionaries from the Soviets.

In July, Wilson sent an American force to Vladivostok to help with the withdrawal of Czechs and Slovaks from Russia. And in July, a conspiracy began among former allies of the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs, who were unhappy about the Brest-Litovsk treaty and wanted to renew Russia's war against Germany. To these leftists the German ambassador to Moscow, Mirbach, was a symbol of German imperialism and oppression. Two Left SRs entered Mirbach's office posing as Chekists and murdered him. The conspirators had a force of 1,500 men, three armored cars and sixty machine guns, and they seized the Moscow telephone exchange and announced that they had taken power. A few anarchists and sailors from the Black Sea joined the rising. Some armed detachments in Moscow went over to the side of the insurgents. Some others remained neutral. The Kremlin was vulnerable, and there Lenin placed hope for the life of his regime in the commander of ten Latvian regiments -- 18,000 men. The insurgents gave the commander of the Latvian regiments time to gather his forces. The Latvians defeated the insurgents, and within a week of their victory the Latvians began executing those insurgents that had been taken prisoner.

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Russia: March to July, 1918