Allied intervention in Russia, 1918-19

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.

Anti-Bolshevism and fear of Germany

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.