The collapse of the Russian empire and the subsequent Bolshevik revolution in 1917 seriously compromised the Allied war effort. The situation was exacerbated by the signing in March 1918 of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, an agreement that stripped from Russia the last vestiges of its European power and gave Germany a free hand to pursue its imperial ambitions in the East.

German troops quickly occupied the former tsarist Baltic territories of Belorussia, Transcaucasia and the Ukraine. In the meantime, from late 1917 onwards, anti-Bolshevik agitators began to form a volunteer army that would form the basis of 'White' opposition to the newly installed Communist government.

Allied intervention in the Russian civil war was not the product of either fervent anti-Bolshevism or a grand military plan. Western politicians such as Winston Churchill, the British war secretary and a leading supporter of the 'White' military cause, were certainly ideologically predisposed to support a crusade against the Bolshevik 'menace'. But other, more important figures such as the British prime minister David Lloyd George and the American president Woodrow Wilson were extremely reluctant to become embroiled in a fratricidal Russian conflict for the sake of anti-Communist and 'democratic' principles. The threat of German pre-eminence in the region was, at least until the signing of the armistice in November 1918, a far more compelling reason to provide the 'Whites' with military aid.

Such equivocal attitudes helped to account for the piecemeal deployment of Allied troops in Russia during 1918. Some 30,000 men, almost half of them British, were stationed at the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel under General Edmund Ironside. A similar number of men were under arms in the Caucasus and southern Russia, where General Denikin was recognised as the leading 'White' general.

Finally, there were the heterogeneous forces available in Siberia to another leading 'White' officer, Admiral Kolchak. These included the 70,000 men from the Czech Legion, whose conflict with the Bolsheviks precipitated civil war in May 1918, as well as smaller numbers of British, American, French and Japanese troops.

The 'Whites' valued this support highly, believing that it held the key to the defeat of the Bolsheviks. In reality, the Allied commitment to their cause was muddled and half-hearted. The strapped war economies of Britain and France provided minimal levels of financial and military support. During the first few months of aid, for example, Denikin's forces in southern Russia received from its Western allies just a few hundred khaki uniforms and some tins of jam.

General Knox

Trans-Siberian railway

In Siberia and elsewhere, the Allied powers dispatched a sufficient number of troops to maintain a show of interest in Russia's fate, but not enough to give the 'Whites' a real chance of victory. Soviet propaganda, nonetheless, portrayed Allied intervention as a conspiracy of international capitalism.

Vladivostok

One of the last decisions made at the Paris peace conference was to withdraw all Allied forces from Russia. By the autumn of 1919, this operation was largely complete. The path to victory in the Russian civil war, which lasted until 1921 at the cost of 1.2 million lives, now lay open to the Bolsheviks.