Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Iudenich’s efforts might have borne richer fruit had Petrograd been seriously and simultaneously threatened from the north in 1919. But although Allied forces and their Russian and Karelian allies were advancing down the Murmansk–Petrograd railway to Medvezhia Gora (Medvezh′egorsk), on the northern shores of Lake Onega, and then on toward Petrozavodsk by late May 1919; although a Finnish unit had at the same time crossed the border and was closing on the same city by June; and although (also in May–June) British marines (with a small fleet of well-armed monitors and gunboats) undertook offensives up the rivers Vaga and Northern Dvina toward Kotlas, as other interventionist forces (including U.S. detachments) sortied down the railway from Arkhangel′sk toward Vologda, none of this seriously threatened Petrograd or offered succor to Iudenich.79 Indeed, it was not intended to do so. The Finns (in their so-called Aunus Expedition, one of several campaigns known collectively as the Kinship Wars) were seeking to detach southern (Olonets) Karelia from Soviet Russia and knew that such an outcome would hardly be countenanced by the Whites, while the British offensives and the 8,000-strong North Russian Relief force that arrived in May–June 1919 were intended only to push the Bolsheviks back, so as to facilitate the complete withdraw of Allied forces. That withdrawal had been agreed upon in April 1919, got under way in June of that year, and was completed with the evacuation of Arkhangel′sk (26–27 September 1919) and Murmansk (12 October 1919).80

The last chapter of the northern saga of the civil wars closed with the evacuations of Arkhangel′sk and Murmansk by their last, desperate White defenders in early 1920, but it had always been the strangest of the theaters of struggle. It boasted by far the greatest concentration of Allied troops of the intervention (if one discounts the self-serving Japanese presence in the Far East), and White forces in the north were blessed with a capable and experienced commander, General E. K. Miller; yet in this sparsely populated polar wilderness, where many potential peasant conscripts were Karelians and shied away from the Russian incomers (or even sought union with Finland), Miller was all too often the epitome of the general without troops. Although the Whites’ Northern Army would claim a complement of more than 50,000 in late 1919 (that is, after the Allies had departed and the situation was rendered entirely hopeless), Miller’s force rarely mustered more than 5,000–10,000 volunteers, as men were rounded up and pressed into service, received their rations and uniforms, and then routinely disappeared back into the taiga. This necessitated such local innovations as the Slavo-British Legion, which is now chiefly remembered for the wrong reason: as the only unit of the civil wars in which Russian conscripts mutinied against and then killed four of their British officers.81

Had Petrograd fallen to the North-West Army or (more unlikely) the Northern Army, the strategic and morale-boosting effect upon the AFSR would have been incalculable. As it was, however, Trotsky’s successful defense of the Red citadel crushed White dreams.