Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

75. Including the audacious raid on the Baltic Fleet at Kronshtadt mounted by Captain Augustus Agar in August 1919, which saw the sinking of the battleship Andrei Pervozvannyi. See Augustus Agar, Baltic Episode: A Classic of Secret Service in Russian Waters (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963); and Harry Ferguson, Operation Kronstadt (London: Hutchinson, 2008).

76. If the Whites had actually been able to hear the Kremlin bells, they would have been enraged: in 1918, those in the Spasskaia tower, which had formerly pealed “God Save the Tsar,” had been reset to play “The Internationale.”

77. On Iudenich’s advance and defeat, see Karsten Brüggermann, Die Gründung der Republik Estland und das Ende des “Einem und unteilbaren Rußland”: Die Petrograder Front des Russischen Bürgerkrieges, 1918–1920 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004); N. A. Kornatovskii, Bor′ba za Krasnyi Petrograd, 1919 (Leningrad: Izd-vo “Krasnoi gazety,” 1929); and A. V. Smolin, Beloe dvizhenie na severo-zapade rossii, 1918–1920 gg. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999). White views critical of Iudenich’s generalship include the memoirs of the man he ousted as commander of the North-West Army: A. P. Rodziainko, Vospominaniia o Severo-Zapadnoi Armii (Berlin: Presse, 1920); and Hilja Kukk, “The Failure of Iudenich’s North-western Army in 1919: A Dissenting White Russian View, Journal of Baltic Studies 12, no. 4 (1981): 362–83. The latter cites the debilitating internecine rivalries that bedeviled a force top-heavy with tsarist generals, but crucial to the North-West Army’s failure were local variants of the atamanshchina, which more famously damaged White efforts elsewhere: Colonel Bermondt-Avalov, as we have seen, crowned a long career of insubordination by refusing to divert his Germanophile Western Volunteer Army from its efforts to conquer Latvia to join the advance on Petrograd, while as the advance collapsed, the equally ungovernable General S. N. Bułak-Bałachowicz attempted a coup against Iudenich at Tallinn. On Bułak-Bałachowicz, see Richard B. Spence, “Useful Brigand: ‘Ataman’ S. N. Bulak-Balakhovich, 1917–1921,” Revolutionary Russia 11, no. 1 (1998): 17–36. An additional factor was that the Finns remained neutral. Had General Mannerheim not been defeated by Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg in independent Finland’s first presidential election in July 1919, this might not have been the case.

78. The Bolshevik Central Committee had agreed as early as 11 September 1919 that formal peace terms should be proposed to Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania. See Alfred E. Senn, “The Bolsheviks’ Acceptance of Baltic Independence, 1919,” Journal of Baltic Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 145–50.

79. Equally, that on 21 March 1919 a North Russian patrol under Captain Alashev encountered units affiliated with Admiral Kolchak’s Northern Army at the unfeasibly remote village of Ust′-kozhva, near Pechora (about 750 miles north of Ekaterinburg), did not presage the union between the Whites in Siberia and those in the North, of which General Knox and others had long had dreamed.

80. British forces were withdrawn at the same time from Transcaucasia (19–20 October 1919), leaving only a token contingent at Batumi. A month later, on 29 November 1919, the Soviet diplomat M. M. Litvinov met the British representative James O’Grady in Denmark, initiating the discussions (buttressed by an agreement on 20 January 1920 by the Allied powers to lift their economic blockade of Soviet Russia) that would lead, through an agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war (the Copenhagen Agreement, 12 February 1920), to the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of 16 March 1921 and, in due course, to London’s full recognition of the Soviet government on 1 February 1924.

81. They killed four Russian officers, too. See Christopher Dobson and John Miller, The Day We Almost Bombed Moscow: The Allied War in Russia, 1918–1920 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986), 210–12. On events in North Russia, see sources cited in note 46.

82. “Proletarians, To Horse!” (11 September 1919), in Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 2, 1919, 412–14.